 All right. Thank you, everyone, for being here. So, as mentioned, my name is Kia Kokolacheva. I'm a reporter with Axios, and I'm based in San Francisco. And I'm so excited to be here with Nick Carey, who's the co-founder of Blockchain.com. So, to kick us off, what is Blockchain.com? And then why did you guys start that company? Yeah, thanks, Kia. It's absolutely wonderful to be back at Slush. I want to say thank you to all the volunteers that donate such precious time to make this such an incredible event. It really is a world-class one and one of the best that I attend. So, thank you for inviting me. So, Blockchain.com is a 10-year-old company. We were founded in Northern England with a simple mission of helping people learn how to use digital currencies and digital assets more simply. And the first product we ever built was something called Blockchain.info. No one ever, ever heard about this kind of stuff before, so we sort of created some of the original taxonomy, vocabulary, and tool sets to help people understand whether or not there was real economic activity happening. Basically, a website for statistical nerds. What we learned was, if Bitcoin was ever going to get easier to use, it was going to have to have better interfaces. And so, we got to building a wallet. There are a lot of different ways you can build technologies. We made some important security decisions in the early days, most importantly, to build a self-custodial wallet. And so, that wallet became very popular, and there have been over 85 million people that have installed that. We have 40 million verified users in over 200 countries. And that continues to really be the key product that we offer in the market today. And that wallet is basically a passport in the future of financial services that everyone in our ecosystem is working to build. So, what are your products today? You've moved beyond the original website. Yeah, so really, blockchain.com is essentially a financial services firm for the future of the internet. And what that looks like is we have a retail offering. So, wallet provider, basically, that makes it possible for anybody in the world to send, receive, secure, trade, and exchange digital forms of wealth. Sometimes those are cryptocurrencies. Sometimes they're stable coins. It's also basically a neobank. And you can swap between those assets and hold them on your wallet as a self-custodian. This is a critical thing we're going to discuss in this conversation today because as we've learned in the recent weeks, when you centralize a lot of risk and you put one person in control of these systems, there are a lot of problems that can result. The other side of our business is an institutional offering. We have over 2,000 institutional clients. We offer an exchange over-the-counter trading and much more. That's been a very successful business over the past few years. And we continue to onboard clients at an increasing rate, especially in the past two weeks. Eleven years in. How do you feel about the name blockchain.com? Yeah, so when we got started, no one had ever used that vocabulary word. And I have a kind of constant argument with the branding folks about whether or not that creates branding confusion. The blockchain and blockchain technology is kind of synonymous with our work. We hope that we can be the entry point for people as they discover this interesting new technology and the capabilities. And we hope to basically bring people on that journey. So I'm very happy with it. It's an incredible top of funnel for us. It gives us a bunch of advantages and SEO and much more as we take customers on this journey into the future of money. So as you alluded a second ago, obviously big news in the crypto world for the past week and a half, we've been watching the crypto exchange FTX kind of have a whole collapse. Were you surprised? Like what is going through your mind in the past week and a half? So if you haven't been paying attention, it's been a topic of conversation in almost every panel here at Slush and it's dominated the tech news the past two weeks. The second largest exchange in cryptocurrency declared that they were insolvent, have entered into bankruptcy. And without exaggeration, it's been a very long year the last two weeks. I think the overwhelming feeling for most people that have been working in this sector for 10 years is extraordinary disappointment. We have watched this type of thing happen before though. Famously in 2014, there was a company called Mt. Gox and at the time they had almost all of the trading volume in the world and most of the liquid Bitcoin on the planet was in this one venue. And the venue stopped withdrawals. No one could get in touch with the founder. It was a very frightening time. But the market is resilient and it's changed a lot since then. Unfortunately, we continue to seem to have this problem where people do not learn the right lesson. The whole point of crypto was for people to self-cussity assets so they can send, receive, secure and protect exchange their wealth and interact with people without counterparties, without centralized custodians or third parties. And unfortunately, it continues to happen where centralized entities build business models on top of an entire protocol system whose purpose is to decentralize and disintermediate trust. So unfortunately, we are now learning a lesson again and I'm very sorry for all of the customers at Trusted FTX and it's just an incredible disappointment to watch unfold again. But I'm hopeful that in the crucible of this moment we can reflect on what was the whole purpose of crypto? Why did we all get involved in this in the first place? And ultimately, I think we'll have this catharsis and building will happen again that will enable people to remember why we're doing this in the first place which is to disintermediate trust and put users firmly back in control of their money. And I think that we're already seeing in the last week a change in consumer behavior. At blockchain.com specifically, during the first week of the FTX collapse we saw 3.5 times more funds move from custodial systems back into self-hosted wallets. This week it's been 82% increase. So also reported by some of our contemporaries, hardware wallet sales are way up. People are learning the lesson of holding on to the custody of their wealth is so important. That's the whole point of crypto again. So I think in summary, grave disappointment about that collapse and hopefully the legal process will bring some justice to those that were harmed and we'll see some positive outcomes at least on the learning side for why crypto exists in the first place. That's interesting you mentioned that because two of the sort of defenses, not defenses, but two of the sort of big arguments I've been seeing from pro-crypto people in the aftermath of this is, well, one, this isn't real crypto. This is a financial services exchange. This is not real crypto. So of course this is a mess now. And then the other side has been saying, well, it's a mess because it's not been under the regulations of the US which, you know, you could probably argue that we have good enough regulations for things like exchanges. Sounds like you are in the first team of this isn't even really crypto. I think both camps are probably right to a certain extent. FTX had a very incestuous relationship with a sister firm that was a trading shop and what we're learning in the bankruptcy filings is details unravel that they actually didn't even hold that much Bitcoin or Ethereum. They were mostly selling FTT which was their proprietary token. It's extraordinarily frustrating to look under the covers and discover these things but they were an offshore business. They had 200,000 monthly active users primarily outside of the United States. They commanded a lot of attention in North America because they were buying up a significant amount of brand awareness but at the end of the day, you know, their tagline was built for traders by traders. This was not a retail product and they were putting themselves in the market like they were some easy place to get access to these sophisticated financial instruments. Their product was complicated, it was offshore, it was not regulated despite the fact that their founder and CEO claimed that it was and so unfortunately it's the red flags are numerous. There's some important lessons coming out of this but ultimately like the winners in this, you know, future state are folks that have concentrated on the true purpose of crypto. Non-custodial, I think DeFi is going to be a big winner and I think onshore regulated firms are going to be big winners. So at blockchain.com I think we're very well positioned for the future on this but ultimately this is a, you know, a real seminal moment for the industry. Have you guys, what's been the introspection? Have you guys been introspecting and kind of looking at yourselves and asking yourselves some questions? So for us, I mean one of the things you deal with when there's a crisis of any kind whether that's in your market or your business is keeping your team concentrated on building and reminding them why we do this work. At blockchain.com we've been at this for 10 years. We really want to build a better financial future that empowers more people to have control over their money. We want to build a world where there's more economic freedom. We want to build tools that make it possible for unbanked and people that are underserved to have access to a financial system that is accessible by anyone equally. And so when you get back to your roots, you get back to the core of why you got started in the first place those deep reservoirs or motivation are still there. But we have a lot of new teammates. We hired a lot of people over the last two years that have never seen this type of volatility and one of the things you have to do as a founder and as a management team member and just as a teammate is encourage and also educate your team about how these moments happen and why you have to lean into your key principles. And one of the things our core values at blockchain.com are just to relentlessly build even when it's tough. And so we've been having those conversations with our team, reassuring our team and reminding them that these moments where there's ups and downs are really the time where you define yourself as a company. And in crypto, we talk about crypto winter. We're here in Finland, one of the coolest places in the world. Those times when you build a company, when things are hard, when the market's not growing, when it's difficult to get customers that's when you build the sinew of your company. That's where you build the real muscle that gets you through the hard times. And so just like companies, anyone that's doing well when the market's growing they're there with good timing. And I think we cultivate what I like to describe as winter power and that's how you survive when things are tough. We've been through this through four cycles where the value of the market is dropped by more than 50%. A financial services executive, if they were sitting in this chair would maybe talk about two or three events in their entire career where they saw something like that. We're kind of used to it, but it doesn't make it necessarily any easier. But if you understand that it's part of the cycle of adoption, especially in our industry, you have to teach that through the organization. Yeah, because you had the last winter like three, four years ago. So that wasn't even that long ago. Yeah, there's sort of like this cycle where there's all this optimism and hope then a year where everyone says it's never going to work, then you build through that. It starts to improve. There's an incredible year and then there's a whole bunch of correction because there's tons of malinvestment. Many projects don't work. A bunch of individuals that come in aren't there for the right reasons. And what I call crypto tourists who are all showing up to make a quick fix or a quick buck on something get wiped out. Just like you can't become a professional athlete by taking shortcuts. You can't build a sustainable and enduring business by doing the same thing. It takes a lot of work. The motto of our company is do the work. Why do you think that so many people? I mean, you mentioned that you guys have been seeing a lot of new customers and a lot of migration. But why do you think these centralized exchanges remain so, so popular? There are some seductive reasons for building a centralized exchange. You have total surveillance over all of the economic activity happening on that venue. That can give you significant pricing advantages. It gives you tools to monetize the behavior on the platform. And so there's a reason why we have enormous amounts of regulation in financial services when you have venues and who can trade on them. What kind of, you know, rules they have about all that front running customers and all those things. So there's incredible risks when you centralized control over people's economic activity. And unfortunately, we're learning the painful lesson again here. So from my perspective, this is why over the long run, over the next 10 years, as the innovations, especially in decentralized finance, come to fruition, we will see that there will no longer be a need to build decentralized services. And one of the big trade-offs over the past 10 years has always been around speed and security. Those debates are being settled technically today. And I'm very encouraged over the long run that we will solve these things without the need for more catastrophes like the FTX fiasco. But also user experience and interfaces, right? Like downloading fancy things you don't understand and computer code and all of that. You're right. The industry has to do a better job in making these interfaces more user friendly. And one of the things you're going to start to see are merged interfaces, basically that support both trading features, NFT wallets, galleries for things, tickets to future concerts, all of these things inside one app that lets you control precious information that you need to bilaterally exchange with counterparties. That might be as simple as making a payment. That might be as amazing as getting a royalty from a musician that you invested in. It might be owning a hard digital asset like Bitcoin or something else. And so when you think about what the future of finance really looks like, it's about holding custody over your precious information and exchanging that in a secure way with counterparties without having to rely on any custodians or anyone between you and the person you need to receive that precious information. And so the future of it is really going to rely on building an interface that is just easier to navigate. So the centralized services were sort of necessary in the early stages. I think you're watching the technology sink its teeth in and disintermediate it. And that will continue. So going back to your business and crypto winter. So you guys have had a little bit of a roller coaster year. You raised funding in the spring out of $14 billion valuation. Recent reports that you're trying to raise again out of much lower valuation. You struck a bunch of awesome sports partnerships. You've also had layoffs like what is happening? Are you looking for more cash? How are you managing through your business right now? Yeah, so we built up and hired really aggressively into 2021. It's a public number. We had over $1.5 billion in revenue. It was a monster year for us. So we've always been a very nimble company. Heading into last year or 18 months ago, we had just shy of 200 people at blockchain.com. So we were working hard to add more muscle across the organization. The beginning of this year basically starts to demonstrate that there's a slowdown in tech. And so we capitalize the company aggressively. And then we see a slowdown also in the macro economy. And this is the first time where crypto and the macro economy have started to sort of march and step. And that's unusual. Usually they've been dislocated. So in short, you know, every smart company in the world should always be talking to investors. We are always talking to investors and cultivating relationships. I think the opportunity set in front of the crypto market is extraordinary right now. There's going to be a lot less competition. There's going to be amazing opportunities for M&A. There's tons of work to do on building better software. So our team is really excited about building and we're going to be here for the next 10 years. Well, how do you feel about, you know, partnerships and other money that you've spent on marketing and, you know, in the sports world, that was kind of the big theme in the last couple of years. Like now in hindsight, do you still think that those are great investments or do you wish you knew now or you knew then what you know now about where the market went? Look, so Kia's referencing a major sports sponsorship that Blockchain.com inks with the Dallas Cowboys. Dallas Cowboys are the largest football franchise in terms of fan base in the United States and we're really proud of that partnership. We are in this for the long term to educate people all around the world about the future of finance and it's going to take partnerships with dependable firms to get through that process and so I'm not disappointed by that partnership at all. We have very good partnership with the Dallas Cowboys and look forward to continuing to deliver on new and exciting fan experiences and much more over the coming years. Ultimately, you know, we surveyed the Dallas Cowboys fan base in advance of that partnership to understand, you know, what do NFL fans think about crypto? Are we crazy to maybe think about doing an investment like that? And 56% of them said they thought crypto would be the future of finance and so we're already seeing sentiment start to change. The very early adopters have, you know, been shouting off the rooftops about why, you know, hard digital assets are so critical, especially in the era of inflation. That is more true today than ever before. The cavern has been crossed between these early adopters and mainstream adopters and that's why the cultural zeitgeist is constantly talking about crypto. That will continue and so, you know, we've basically gotten to a point where roughly 200 million people in the world have adopted crypto in some form. There's still a lot of open pasture and a lot of opportunity for everyone that's involved in this industry still. So short, we're excited about all the opportunity ahead of us and it's just going to take time to build. So shifting into looking at the future, right, because we're supposed to be talking about past, present and future, we had the NFT boom during the last couple of years. Twitter is going through some challenges and a lot of folks are talking about how maybe a decentralized version of that would be a better option for everyone to move to. What do you think are going to be the durable use cases in the future beyond just crypto as an investment instrument or store value? Yeah, sure. So I do think it's relevant to, like, talk about the past a little bit on this topic because the purpose of Bitcoin, which was the first cryptocurrency, was to build a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash system for the Internet. And it has spawned a variety of competitors and there's still a lot of work to deliver on that promise, but it's a really exciting one. I think, you know, the current market is basically healing from what's happened over the last two weeks, but it's also giving us some gaze into the future. So what does the future of finance look like? What does an alternative financial system for the Internet really look like over the next decade? Well, I think you're going to see the digitization of all kinds of data and real-world assets. I think you're going to see business models completely change. I think the Twitter example is a really fascinating one. It's been reported that roughly 50% of Twitter was fired last night. It's going to be a wild ride over there, but imagine if there was a protocol that rewarded you for your attention. Twitter makes money based on you clicking on things and they have an algorithm that puts constantly ever more addictive things in front of you. That's fine. It's a great business model. I would be so rich I spent so much time on Twitter. Yeah, I think my airtime on Twitter the last two weeks has been at all time high as well, but I would rather be compensated for my time on Twitter as opposed to compensating the world's richest person. So I think it would be interesting if someone came along and built a decentralized social media platform that still had advertisements on it to support the functioning of the development, but that in exchange for my time on the platform, I was earning attention tokens that would then be traded on some other decentralized exchange. And that's an example of a social media application. There are applications for doing this with music rights, applications for doing this with writing movie scripts and much more. So I'm so excited about giving tools to creators that enable them to own more of the things that they're building. And so if the internet has been through three evolutions where it launched and was a place that anyone could kind of get access to readable information, and then it inverted into a read-write situation where we saw the dawn of social media and much more in platforms where people can publish anything they want, we're moving into a read-write-own environment where the content I'm creating can be directly compensated for. And in order to deliver on that future, we have to build a wide-scale, super-global, very efficient digital payment system for the internet. And crypto is natively designed to deliver on that promise without any centralized entities supporting it, making it possible for people all over the world send, receive, secure and exchange precious information directly from the palm of their hands to anybody else. So that's the vision. We're working on it, but it's going to take some more time. Do you think that economic aspect of it is what's really going to get people to truly commit to this new way of services and using services? Because I feel like, like the exchanges, people tend to gravitate to the centralized versions because they have nice interfaces. They don't have to deal with anything themselves. It's just easy. Give us a couple more years. We're going to work on those interfaces. They're going to get better, and you won't know the difference in a short period of time. Okay. All right. What's your prediction for 2023 for the crypto industry? I think 2023 is going to be a year where the week gets shifted from the chaff, meaning there's going to be some extraordinary companies that are founded. There will be some extraordinary survival stories, and there's going to be a lot of opportunity to build things, but you've got to concentrate on the fundamentals. Take care of your customers. Make sure you're resilient. Make sure you've got time to survive this macroeconomic climate, which feels like there's extraordinary sort of anxiety and risk all around us. But I would posit that during these times where it feels like everything's going wrong and it's hard, these are the times to lean in and get gritty about it. There are reasons why we all got involved in this industry. We're here to stay. We're going to relentlessly continue to work on behalf of our customers and our whole team. And yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic about the next 12 to 18 months. It'll turn around. There's something that is definitely going to happen in the crypto space, which is in 2024, the Bitcoin happening will occur, which will cut the supply of the most valuable cryptocurrency in the world in half. And every time that happens, it drives an entire new adoption cycle. And so that moment will happen again, and you just need to be in position for it when it does. So you're just hunkering down until 2024? We're investing. We're building. We're growing and we're hiring. So if anything I said was interesting, please visit blockchain.com. We'd love to have you on board. Well, now I feel like I have to check in with you in a year. I'd like that. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Nick, and thank you to everyone for being here with us. Thank you, Q.