Legacy Finance Meets Crypto: I Asked CEO Austin Diamond Who Will Drive the Next Crypto Boom

With investors like traditional finance firms, for example, Franklin Templeton, that are backing crypto native companies and protocols like your company alongside Universal, there appears to be a convergence of legacy finance and crypto native systems. Do you believe the next wave of crypto growth will come from institutional adoption or retail users or both? And how does that shape what kinds of products are most important to build today?

Yes, I'll avoid the cop out of saying both and lean in one direction and say that I actually do believe that the next wave of growth comes from more of that institutional adoption. And I think downstream of that then you've got retail adoption without even realizing that some of this stuff involves crypto. So to give you an example, you alluded to working with Franklin Templeton. I've been really lucky to have them as investors. I think if you look at previous cycles, the bets that the Franklin Templetons and blackrocks of the world were making were let's do small venture bets and kind of let a thousand flowers bloom and see what comes of that. It was very much paying lip service to the idea of internally changing their operations. There were small pilots, there were white papers, but broadly speaking, it wasn't directionally changing the nature of their business day to day. I think the thing that's shifted the most over the course last couple years is that's totally no longer the case. And so if you look at something like a Franklin Templeton, they've actually had an on chain money market fund with hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to it for several years now. And you've got people like Larry Fink of BlackRock saying that tokenization is going to totally upend what they do at BlackRock or the chair of the SEC saying tokenization is really going to eat markets. And so I tend to think that if you look at where growth is going to come from, I think there's a lot of fatigue around crypto assets today. I think that the majority of growth is really going to come from taking what we consider to be equities or asset classes that have nothing to do with crypto and bringing them on chain and really experiencing the efficiencies of just really what boils down to better plumbing for, for how to do financial operations. And so I think that users will feel that in the form of lower fees or faster settlement and really those types of experiences 24, seven markets. But that's going to come downstream of working with the fidelities of the world, the blackrocks of the world that are producing products that ultimately utilize the underlying.