The Bitcoin Truth Wall Street Doesn't Want You to Hear | Nancy Beaton

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**Nancy Beaton** (1:00)
People will come to expect the benefits that blockchain gives them. It gives them full ownership of their assets. It gives them better access to their assets. It gives them 24-7 access to their assets. I mean, nobody's interested in waiting around all weekend. I can send things borderlessly.

**Anthony Pompliano** (1:18)
What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great conversation with Nancy Beaton. She is the president of Retail Uphold, and we're going to get down and dirty. I play devil's advocate. I tell her, here's all the things the critics are saying about the crypto industry, and she fires back. What does she agree with? What does she disagree with? And where does she think that the critics actually have something to say? This conversation is going to open your eyes to how somebody on the ground in the trenches is seeing the crypto industry develop, what tools, what products, what assets are actually becoming popular, and what do the people want? They constantly talk to their users, and it's pretty interesting to hear the insights that she has. Here's my conversation with Nancy Beaton.
All right, Nancy, what I want to do today is I want to play devil's advocate. I want to basically tell you everything I hear the critics saying about the crypto industry, and then you kind of respond. Like, what do you agree with them? Where do you think they're right? And then where do you think there's getting it dead wrong? And maybe the first thing is this idea of crypto being outside of the legacy financial system. I was really excited about Bitcoin being outside of the system. I think a lot of the other assets, that's a big promise.
Now, though, I see like BlackRock and Fidelity and a bunch of large Wall Street firms, they're in the game and they're kind of pulling these assets this industry into the legacy financial system. So is crypto still outside of the system and like doesn't matter if it is or not?

**Nancy Beaton** (2:32)
You know, I think crypto has become and digital assets have become a part of people's portfolios.
So I think customer demand is what is prompting people to bring digital assets into the fold and give people access to digital assets. And I think those of us who've been in this space for a while and those who have amassed a portfolio of digital assets are now saying, I want to be able to do more with those. So I think you're going to see more and more convergence between digital assets and crypto as we traditionally know it, and it being a part of your total financial portfolio.

**Anthony Pompliano** (3:11)
So basically what you're saying is they're having to bend the knee because the crypto people, they've got money, they want to do things and you have to choose, are you going to serve this whole group of people or are you going to ignore them?

**Nancy Beaton** (3:23)
I think there's a couple of things. I think on the retail side, I think there's customer demand. Consumers want their money to move like emails. They want it to be borderless, they want it to be frictionless, they want it to be cheaper. They don't want to wait over the weekend to get a deposit into their account. They're used to that in crypto and now they're putting those expectations on traditional means of equities or other financial instruments as well. I think they're also amassing digital assets and they're looking to do more with those assets, right? They want to borrow against them, they want to be able to lend them out, they want to be able to earn on the asset portfolio that they've been building over these years. I think on the enterprise side, I think there's a need to meet this customer demand. So I think you do see more banks, more fintechs, more people in the financial space looking to kind of plug and play offerings into their already established applications, services, portfolios that they give to their end customers.