 Welcome to Jalassette News. Take your top stories in Cryptocurrency Jalassets, break them down to bite-sized pieces. So today, this is the interview that we've all been waiting for. Steve Erlich from the CEO of Voyager. Thanks for coming on. I've also got Alex Massioli. He is the head of institutional services for Bequant and also founder of Trade the Chain. So first of all, Steve and Alex, thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here again. Great. You're welcome. Let's get into it. So this thing happened. It was called Voyager and it went down on Friday and Saturday. And there's been a lot of different activity and people came to me and said, hey, Rob, you told us that this was not going to happen. They're not like Coinbase and Coinbase goes down all the time. And now you're saying that Voyager was not going to go down and here it went down. We missed a lot of opportunities. There's a lot of different things. Now, I will just start like with this. I like Steve. I like you, Steve. I like Voyager. I appreciate that. I like Alex, but nobody gets a free pass on the show. So let's break into it. Tell us what happened and how we're going to move forward. Yeah. At first, I think I've been doing this a long time, 26 years in electronic brokerage. I was at E-Trade 99 and I saw the exchanges go down. New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, I saw everything go down. Look, what happened was we got inundated with nothing I've ever seen before. And I've spoken to ex-CEOs of E-Trade, CEOs of other online places and banks. Nobody has ever seen 100 accounts a minute, 180,000 downloads in a shorter period of time. Nobody's ever seen that. They're built and I know there's a lot of people that say, well, just throw more database, throw more CPU at it. It doesn't work that way. The system itself was built for scale, but that scale was something that was unforeseen and we are now changing and we've rebuilt our systems and the team that did the work basically took a system and rebuilt it in 15 hours, give or take, over that, make sure that we can handle all the customers. But it happened and we were down and at the same token, it was really unprecedented and I think the market seen that too. I mean, we also said we did 250,000 downloads in a 72-hour period and where we are, it's unforeseen. I mean, it's unprecedented, unforeseen. We're excited about our growth, but we want to make sure that on a go forward basis here as we're scaling it out. I've been in as you guys know, like, did you get any sleep? Yeah, I got very little. We've been going back and forth with Oscar Salazar, Oscar actually helped scale Uber way back in the days and they had the same problems. So we've been in contact all weekend long, bringing more, making sure that we change some of the things we do to continue up and support our customers. Great. Okay, so let me follow up with this. So we know that there was a problem, there was an issue. It's not just about adding servers. There's a lot of different aspects to it. So moving forward, going into the future, I don't want to, nobody wants to hear the same song and dance that Coinbase is doing all the time like, hey, you know what, we're going to fix it and then it never gets fixed. So what are we doing here to make this thing right? Yeah, I mean, no one could have a better team around us than we do and bring an Oscar in and extra resources that he's brought in to help us here and to continue to just keep scaling the business. We're working on scaling the platform to minimum 10 million users up to 100 million users at one time. That's what we're working on. And I know I told, since you guys earlier today, I remember back in the E-Trade day, I was talking to Jared Lillian last night about this, is they built an infrastructure in Alpharetta, Georgia that powered the entire city of Alpharetta and they still went down. So we look at it as like we got to keep scaling this, bringing more resources in, working towards making this so 100 million people can get on our app throughout the globe. And that's what we're shooting for. That's what we're working towards. We'll continue to do that, but it doesn't get done by throwing another server out. The microservices that have to get done, there's pricing engines, there's OMSs, there's databases, there's so many different components that's so different than a website. When it just takes emails in, there's so many different pieces and we're building into that. So we're going to continue. We're going to continue adding customers on a very judicious manner to make sure that we can support all the customers with the void that they're used to seeing and just take us a little time as we onboard all these customers. Great. And last thing before we get to Alex's questions, speaking of customers, especially ones that are just coming in right now, I'm going to show my screen real quick. So this was from James. And James asked a pretty important question. He says this, well, he makes a statement and a question, use caution with Voyager. People are saying that they cannot access their funds and their active accounts. Voyager is placing active accounts on the waitlist. I don't know if it's true, but the company's not making daily reassurance statements regarding their waitlist issues. I can testify for sure that I've been waitlisted for the past four days and there are many hundreds of Reddit customers saying that they also waitlisted for five. U.S. citizen with U.S. bank, social security number, etc., U.S. phone number. There's no reason on my end that they would not set up my account. Very hard to believe that an exchange that wants to take part of the market from Coinbase is so unprepared on an infrastructure level. These guys look shady as hell. All right. So scroll up to the beginning there. So I want to, mind please, when he says people are saying that they cannot access their funds. Not true. Anyone who has a penny in their account has access to their account. So that's just an unfair untrue statement. It's being moved and pending to come in. Once it hits your account, you come straight off the waitlist. Far as the rest on the waitlist, we're looking at it, analyzing data like I haven't slept in days, literally three to four hours a day over the last four days, five days. We're looking at the data. We're trying to make sure that the usage of the system and we'll start bringing the link off the waitlist and keep adding a mean so they can trade and they can trade freely without any worries about the system going down. So to that email, sorry for your delay in opening a voyage account. Be patient. You will be on the platform soon. But no one who's got a dollar in their account or a penny in their account doesn't have access to their account. Okay. And then Alex, before we get to your questions, let me just say this. There are no CEOs coming on this show to explain when things go down. It just doesn't happen. I'm not going to see Brian come up here and go, hey, sorry, no, we messed up. So just remember always invest in people. So Steve, thanks for coming on answering the hard questions and not dodging them like some people might have done. So I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. I mean, again, as always, thank you. Yeah, no, I mean, first of all, let me just say a lot of people have been covering Voyager a lot for the last week hard. And to Rob's point, it is about the people. And so I cover Voyager. I'm a fan of Voyager because of the team that Steve has built and Steve and I have an additional side. He has gone through and led many teams through those 20 some odd years that he spoke about and problems. Everybody can play the armchair chair quarterback, but you have nobody better suited to be in charge of problems like this. And Steve, one of the two questions I have for you, Steve, one is going back to the wait list. Some people are asking about how long is that wait list taking to go through? In other words, you know, let's say you have 50,000 people, are you doing 10 a day doing 20 a day? How long is that that process taking? Well, first, thank you for the kind words. I always appreciate that. I think, as you noted, it takes a village takes a list. I'm really proud of my team and the way we reacted during this. It might not be what everything wanted. Best we could in the situation and scaling the team out. And I have seen this. I mean, E-Trade, Lightspeed, this stuff happens. I've seen, as you and I spoke about, I mentioned earlier, NYS, NASDAQ, ETN, everybody went down. And that happened last week, right? E-Trade, Ameritrade went down. How could that possibly be? This would, you know, $20 billion companies go down. So on the wait list, look, I think there's, we're hopeful to get it all cleared over the near future. We want everybody on our platform. So we're not incentivized to keep people on the wait list. We're incentivized to make sure that we get them off the wait list as fast as we can to experience Voyager, use our platform. We make no money by having someone sit on the wait list. It's like, you know, it's at a restaurant. You know, if you only use five tables and you got 50 of them, oh, that's New York City these days. But besides that, you know, if you got, if you only use in five and you're keeping everyone out outdoors, that doesn't make any sense. Now we just want to make sure when we bring everybody in, they can have a great experience. So we're going to do it as fast as we can. All I can ask people is to have some patience. We love every one of our customers and we want every one of them to be using our platform. I mean, Steve and the team wants to take your money. They just have to do it in an orderly fashion. I don't want you to make money though. I don't want your money to come in. I want you to earn profits on trading and I want you to create wealth. That's our story. It's plain and simple. There's nothing more to it. You don't make money as a retail broker by taking money from your customers. We're not, you know, we're not Harris or the golden nugget or, you know, that's not our game. Our game is to create wealth and that's what we're trying to do for customers. We just want to do it in a really effective manner and make sure all customers have a great experience. Sure. The next question comes off the heels of all of a sudden, Voyager having this go down issue, nobody experiencing it with Voyager before. And it has to do with insurance. So people are saying, now listen, when is Voyager going to get insurance for the assets that they managed? Do they need insurance? Where's my security come from? You and I spoke before the show that you already do this in essence. It's just it's offset to elsewhere. Correct. That's part of the model we built was that, look, I knew when we set up the Voyager model that, you know, with the business we had, the team we had focused on one thing and we focused on trading. Then we added the interest piece and the investing of that side. And we said, look, we're not going to be the ones that build out the self-custody solution. It's expensive. It's being, you know, it's fairly cheap to kind of get, you know, custody services at multiple places these days. It's not overly expensive. And, you know, those people that do that are really good at it. And, you know, we have partners with, you know, we're partners with Fireblocks and BitGo and some other sort of Galaxy and some of these others that do custody for us. And, you know, we leave that to them, you know, and so therefore we get coverage on insurance on the assets we hold with them through their policies, which is the great way. Ledger is another one of our partners. And so we've always taken that approach that we're not going to build up our own HSMs and build on our own, you know, key sharding and all that stuff. That's not who we are. Leave that to the guys that have built those infrastructures. We'll level off their infrastructures, their insurance policies. At the same time, we are looking to add additional insurance on top of all that. It's not the easiest thing in the world. It's still crypto. It takes a long time, as you and I were talking about, you know, before the show, too. We're working towards it. You know, it'll just take some time. It's from a company perspective to deliver it where we are today with the market cap we have today to where we were six months ago. We're an easier company for people to insure as well. So we're looking at all those things. And lastly, I will just say that, you know, I gave, I gave, when I went out into the community, when this happened, I gave everybody the opportunity to throw up some questions when Rob graciously invited me to be here. So if I haven't asked a question or a hard enough question, that's because somebody didn't, nobody delivered it to me. So that's on them. The second thing is, is that, you know, Rob is right when, when other exchanges go down, those CEOs don't hop on YouTube with, with people and explain it. So I want to give you all the credit for that. And I want to say I'm glad if we were going to go dark together, Steve, I'm glad we went dark together. I appreciate that. That's kind of funny. I appreciate that. I hope we don't go dark ever again. And we never have to do it again. So that's my goal. That's a team's goal. And that's, that's what we shoot for. And, you know, you know, but I'm not going to be sorry for bringing on 180,000 downloads or 250,000 downloads in the 72 hour period and, and building our business to where it is today. We've got more to come, more product to come, more international expansion to come. All those things are coming. But we do it in a really judicious manner. And we just grew so fast, unprecedented, like I said, from conversations with CEOs of other financial services companies that we're excited about where we're headed for the rest of 21. I'm good. But one more time, Rob. I'm sorry, Rob's going to never have me back. What you just said is so important that people understand. You just compressed about two to three months of Voyager growth into two to three days. People need to understand that when we come out of what just happened, the situation, Voyager's a different company. You know, I use an analogy I've used in this one. Basically, you know, I'm a sports fan, huge sports fan. Everybody left giant stadium capacity about 100,000, or maybe even take Michigan Stadium, you know, the big house, 110,000, and they were all going into one bar across the street all at the same time. You know, I'm not sure the bar across the street can kind of even Zinghamans in Michigan couldn't handle it. So I think, you know, that's effectively what happened. You're right, we took two or three months of growth and compressed it into two or three days. I know there's unhappy people, but we will make you happy. I can tell you that we will make you happy. You'll like our service. You'll like our product. Just give us a chance. Yeah, it only makes sense. It's everything you've always said. It's the same. Me and you have the same philosophy. Just make sure that your customers are happy and then do everything for them. And it kind of works itself out. And that's what I see is actually going to happen. Yeah, we're excited about our future and we're excited about all the new customers that have come to us. Every one of them, as I told you, is important to us. You know, there's no levels of importance. They're all important to us. And so we're excited about that. We're excited about some announcements coming up in the future here, you know, and where we're going as a company. And having you guys, you know, I appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to come talk to everybody here. Love your shows. Love being on your shows. And then, again, I really truly appreciate you giving me the opportunity. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, Steve. I know you're busy. I know you've got a lot of things to do to make things perfect. So we're not going to keep you. But thanks for coming on both of you guys, Alex and Steve. Thanks, guys. All right. Thanks, y'all.