Why ShapeShift's Erik Voorhees Thinks Toxic Bitcoin Maximalism Is B******t

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto over six years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes, was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the July 27th, 2021 episode of Unchained. My book, The Cryptopians, Idealism, Greed, Lies and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or any of your favorite bookstores. Go to bit.ly slash cryptopians. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash C-R-Y P-T-O P-I-A-N-S and pre-order today.
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**SPEAKER_2** (2:11)
Hey, how's it going?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:13)
Great. Nice to have you.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:15)
Yeah, very glad to be here.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:16)
ShapeShift recently announced that it's becoming decentralized, and I believe it's the first crypto company to make that transition. What did ShapeShift used to look like and what will it look like going forward?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:28)
Yeah, so we are a normal today centralized company. We have 66 employees.
We have an office. We have VC investors, and we've been around since 2014, so about seven years. And we have decided that we are going to start dismantling the entire corporate structure and open sourcing all of our code and moving to a decentralized DAO type organizational format instead of a centralized corporate organizational format.
So there are certainly a number of decentralized projects within crypto. So we're certainly not the first of that. But I think we are the first established company that has just decided to no longer be an established company and completely decentralized itself to whatever degree we can.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:21)
And why did you decide to make this transition?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:23)
A few reasons.
One is just that the strategic landscape of cryptocurrency, in my opinion, is clearly moving toward decentralized applications and will move away from centralized ones. The reason for this is various frictions that centralized entities have to deal with that decentralized ones don't. There's sort of an ideological reason to do this, which is just that Bitcoin's ethos is one of decentralization, immutability, openness, borderlessness, open source at a base layer. And to the degree that we can be in alignment with that, I think that is better for our customers, better for the brand, and ultimately better for the entire cryptocurrency industry. The more companies that are in line with that ethos, the better.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:21)
And so ShapeShift as one of the oldest companies in the space, and also you as an entrepreneur and one of the longest serving entrepreneurs in the space, both of you have been through a lot when it comes to the different cycles in the industry, and also when it comes to regulation, banking, and all these other issues. So what does that transition signify for you?

**SPEAKER_2** (4:46)
For me, it signifies a development in cryptocurrency in which it's actually possible to decentralize an organization.
This was not something I understood or thought possible even a year ago. And the tools that are built by various decentralized projects have gotten very advanced and they're developing rapidly. Years ago, we had to beg banks for bank accounts. And we were always on the precipice of having one bank account closed and having to open another one. And it was that's always a stressful thing. And we were beholden to that system. And we're at the point now where we don't need banks at all, like not at all. If we need stability, we hold stable coins. If we don't need stability, we hold Bitcoin and Ethereum.