All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our panel on securing Bitcoin assets.
I'm really excited to have a conversation with these folks here today.
My name is Lucas Nuzzi. I am the head of R&D at Coinmetrics.
I've been working in various areas related to Bitcoin custody over the years,
and we put together a really fun panel to discuss some key items on that front.
So I'll have the panelists introduce themselves,
and we'll get started, maybe starting with you, Will.
Yeah. Will Cole. I'm the chief product officer at Unchained Capital.
We do Bitcoin-native financial services, custody, lending, trade execution, that sort of thing.
I'm Jameson Lopp, and I'm the CTO and co-founder of CASA.
I've been helping people secure their Bitcoin for going on seven years now.
Great. Raj Thamotsran from MasterCard.
We've been working on crypto for a number of years, helping people experience crypto in a safe and secure manner.
I look forward to talking with the colleagues.
I'm Nick Newman, CEO at CASA.
We make it really easy for people to secure their Bitcoin and hold their own keys.
Excellent. So to kick things off,
I will have you guys talk about the process of securing Bitcoin assets from a user perspective, right?
Because MasterCard now has been doing some really interesting initiatives, getting into crypto assets and Bitcoin.
And that maybe is a big funnel to users getting better educated around custody
and perhaps moving to a system where they're securing their own assets
and making some more solid decisions around the security of their keys.
How do you guys envision that workflow of adoption?
And how are you educating new users coming into the system?
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's really about û we were talking, actually, but offstage about this as well.
This is really about bringing the next billion users into crypto.
Obviously, there is a lot of energy here about serving people who are already in crypto that should continue to be the focus.
As a person coming in newly into crypto, they're looking for bringing their existing assets in there.
They may use, for example, a card to buy their first Bitcoin.
They may decide to do it in self-custody, which some of the colleagues are going to talk about.
All of that process, when you bring in whatever jurisdiction you have, you need to identify yourself.
You need to prove that you own the other side of the wallet as well.
So we have security and identity products throughout that lifecycle,
starting with just verifying your identity or verifying where the address is,
or more recently about a company called Cypher Trace,
which talks a little bit about the analytics behind many networks, including Bitcoin,
where the wallets are, where the money is flowing,
and to provide the people who are bringing the fiat into the ecosystem
a risk score about how those wallets are done.
And the point of this is really about securing and making the rest of the ecosystem feel comfortable about the crypto as well,
and to just go through that process in a compliant manner.
And I think we believe it brings the next billion users a lot more assets into crypto.
It is doing really well, as you can see from the energy in this conference,
but I think we can bring it to even the next million or billion users
if we really open up that flow between the crypto and the fiat world.
I think it's interesting that you asked about the process, because there will be many processes.
People will come into the space from a variety of different perspectives,
and to date, I would say the primary process is, as Raj explained,
that people are going to some sort of exchange or custodian, basically a financial institution
that's sort of straddling the lines between traditional finance and the new crypto ecosystem.
And since they're going through these more regulated on-ramps,
in many cases, they are going to have to go through these other processes.
Now, maybe that won't always be the case.
Maybe we will see certain smaller ecosystems kind of leapfrog that,
especially people who are in ecosystems that don't have any banking infrastructure,
any traditional finance, and thus may not have access to any of these crypto exchanges
that are straddling the two.
So for certain ecosystems where people are coming in full native
and are just performing services or selling goods directly in exchange for their Bitcoin,
then it may be more sensible for them to immediately jump into self-custody,
because they aren't being presented with a custodial product.
But it's not just that.
Like, I hope that what we can build is that, you know,
right now, while most Bitcoin might be held in self-custody and not in a custodial manner,
the vast majority of people are onboarding in a custodial manner.
And a lot of us have scars ourselves and friends with scars around what that means.
The trusted third parties are security holes.
And how do we make sure that the next billion people, several hundred million of them,
have the option to skip that step altogether?
A lot of businesses are having to make critical decisions right now,
either because they want to start accepting Bitcoin
or offering it to their users using an omnibus model.
And a lot of clients from back in the day have called me to ask questions about
this emergence of MPC as a custody technology.
I think it's very relevant to some of the folks in this room who are having to make some of these decisions.
You know, a native multi-SIG scheme,
which is related to the products that Unchain and Casa offer.
Or do we go a more generalized MPC route with some other solutions that have just come out?
Do you guys have any thoughts around the differences around those two
and what are the trade-offs at play here?
Sure. Yeah, I'll kick it off.
I would make the argument that when you're making a decision on how to custody your Bitcoin,
you should be thinking about what jurisdiction you're in, what the laws are,
how you're going to deal with physical secure locations,
but also the technology that you're using in order to secure it.
What I see confusing Bitcoiners right now is that we have a lot of crypto companies
talking about MPC and comparing it directly or even saying that it is multi-SIG,
where in reality, there's a really big difference.
One, the MPC is not native to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's multi-SIG is native to Bitcoin,
and that most implementations still leave you in a single point of failure
with a single cryptographic signature at the end of the day.
I would say that the number one reason someone might use MPC over multi-SIG
would be because they need to secure more than just Bitcoin.
So, yeah, if you do have Bitcoin and a certain number of altcoins,
sure, MPC might be better, but for Bitcoin specifically, you can't beat multi-SIG.
Yeah, and I think I would just add that there are other trade-offs
when you're thinking about using something like MPC,
so MPC generally can't be used with hardware wallets, for example,
and so are you getting true cold storage?
Maybe there's a question there or not,
and I think really it boils down to what's your use case
and what are you trying to use this for.
If you're a business that is putting something on your balance sheet
to help fight against inflation over time,
well, Bitcoin's going to be your best bet for that,
and in that scenario, you're going to be much safer
using something like a multi-SIG to secure those assets than using MPC.
And then you go one other layer, and it's, you know, as a business,
do you actually want to be self-custodying your Bitcoin?
I know that there's some businesses that are big enough
where they have fiduciary duty that they feel like they need to use a custodian,
and that's something that hopefully we can work businesses over time
to get to the point where they feel,
any business feels comfortable holding their own keys
because that's truly the most secure way to do it,
but that's another question that we run into
when we're talking to businesses today.
Well, also, I mean, Nick, you know,
the Bitcoin multi-SIG wallets that are compatible with it,
they're purpose-made for multi-SIG and for Bitcoin signatures.
How many times have we seen MPC setups
where the HSM devices are iPhones, you know,
with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all of those things combined?
The Bitcoin wallets generally are built really well
for being error-gapped if you want, you know, that sort of thing.
Yeah, I think the short version is MPC can get you a lot more flexibility,
but you're building these constructions that are not a standard for Bitcoin,
and there are a lot of trade-offs there,
but it may make sense if you need flexibility and speed,
and you may not care as much about, I don't know, auditability, for example.
Yeah, absolutely, and in making those decisions,
there's a lot that is baked into that, right?
Treasury management, for example,
understanding if you're processing the payments
for users that are withdrawing from your platform
and your holder Bitcoin, which balances are you going to be using,
where are those stored?
Has the tooling around Treasury management,
had that improved over the years?
How do you guys see the spectrum of security
where you have, on one end, keys that are extremely cold, error-gapped,
and on the other hand, keys that are online
and processing these withdrawals at all times?
Has the tooling around that improved over the years
for new businesses that are getting into the space
and trying to answer those questions?
I mean, this is an area that we've focused on a lot,
not necessarily around Treasury management,
but around the range of keys that you may want to use for different situations.
So, within CASA, you can have a really simple key on your phone.
That's just your mobile wallet.
All you need is that phone to spend funds.
You could have three keys protecting your funds,
where you need a phone and a hardware wallet to spend,
and then CASA's got a backup key for you.
Or you could have five keys, and that's your super secure cold storage.
And we really take this approach where it's like a portfolio
from a security perspective.
And I think that this is, you know, we're on the enterprise stage.
This is applicable to how businesses will start to manage
their Bitcoin Treasuries as well,
because let's say you're making an international payment
to an international contractor twice a month.
You maybe want to do that out of a wallet that is a little bit easier to access.
It doesn't take as long to actually send funds,
so it's a little bit less secure.
But it also has a smaller amount of Bitcoin in it
than your big core Treasury that you're holding for five-plus years
without really moving things out of.
And then we start to see people build more of a portfolio
in terms of ease of access and security level to protect their funds.
And that goes into that Treasury management side of things.
Yeah, I think one other flow on this,
and I know you're talking about potentially enterprises using
and moving the value from one place to another,
I think it's also important to see how they see the other side
and where it is going.
Enterprises, by definition, are regulators.
They're a registered entity somewhere.
And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier
about knowing who the person is on the other side.
And knowing that and facilitating that transaction
is also, I think, quite important.
We believe, actually, this clarity of wallets
and what the risk score is, where the jurisdiction has been,
actually can bring more people into the crypto,
more flow of transaction, even if, let's say,
one enterprise has a self-custody solution with you,
and they want to send it to another person
also having a self-custody wallet,
or not maybe an enterprise custody with some other company.
That kind of flow, when you make that flow very easy to do,
risk-free or risk-reduced way to do,
I think we're going to bring more crypto into the ecosystem.
And that's part of this as well.
So it's about finding that integration points,
not just for the consumers,
but also businesses to move value from one to the other,
I think, would be a very critical way to scale this.
I would speculate that the majority of corporate,
treasury, Bitcoin management tools
has, unfortunately, been happening at the custodian level
for multiple reasons.
First of all, I think it's easier to provide
a smoother user experience if you're a custodian.
You get to hide a whole lot of technical complexity
of what you're actually doing with the keys under the hood.
Also, I would expect that a lot of companies,
especially large companies,
don't want to take on that responsibility
of figuring out how to delegate keys amongst themselves,
and it's so much easier to just be able to point the finger
at a provider and say,
okay, well, we trusted them to handle
our corporate treasury solution
if something goes terribly wrong.
And also, I'm sure that on the B2B side,
there's a lot of great sales and marketing tactics
around pitching corporate treasury management.
The thing that kind of irks me is especially hearing
about insurance around a lot of these custodial products,
because normally you'll see
a very large insurance figure get thrown at you
and you aren't told what the fine details are,
which is usually that that figure covers
the aggregate of all of the clients of that custodian,
and if there was some catastrophic issue
with that custodian, in many cases,
their total loss is going to be orders of magnitude
more than the total insurance.
And it doesn't insure you against the most common ways
that your funds could be...
Actually, I find that most corporate clients,
when you explain Bitcoin Multisig at a base layer,
that it's kind of intuitive to them.
They're used to complex financial controls
in handling their treasury
or even any type of transaction that they do.
So they have a lot of advantages.
One, they're already used to sort of this complex
financial control and permissioning for sending money.
The other is they usually typically have access
to secure locations, which is really important
in the physical world if you're trying to hold your own keys.
So Bitcoin Multisig layered on top of network security
and permissioning is actually something
that can look very familiar to your business
if you're looking to do something like
host your own treasury and hold your own keys while you do it.
It is important, too, because it's something that I worry about
where you think about, okay, everybody's excited
about the institutions are coming to Bitcoin, right?
But the more institutions that come to Bitcoin
and decide not to self-custody,
which it's like as Jameson was saying,
it can be really easy to just say,
I'm going to trust this custodian.
The more companies that make that decision,
each one adds more risk from a custodial perspective
to the systemic Bitcoin network.
And then the amount of Bitcoin that Coinbase Custody is holding
does what it did in the last year,
which is go from 1.5 million Bitcoin to 2.5 million Bitcoin
out of the whole 21.
And so I think it is important for institutions
to be thinking about their own use case
and hopefully to as much as possible be choosing self-custody,
which probably comes down to some of the smaller businesses, too.
Small to medium-sized businesses are maybe much better suited,
or it's just easier for them to decide to self-custody their funds
than it is for MicroStrategy as a publicly traded company
to decide to self-custody their funds.
Well, I want everyone to imagine
a million Bitcoin sitting on a custodian,
like Coinbase or something like that.
Just imagine there's a million Bitcoin.
They might have a dozen keys,
maybe two dozen if we're being generous
protecting that million Bitcoin.
That same million Bitcoin split very evenly
between Unchain and CASA,
that might be tens of thousands of keys.
The security posture that you're getting personally
and that the Bitcoin network is getting out of that is immense.
It's hard to downplay, I think,
the severity of the risk.
People don't really think about it.
We don't want to think about it.
It's quite frankly concerning,
especially for those of us who are around,
especially for Mt. Gox
and some of the other major catastrophes.
And exchanges and custodians
are still suffering from losses on a regular basis.
I think you just don't hear about it
quite as much these days,
probably because in terms of total scale,
I think we're seeing more losses happen in DeFi land.
What I would love to figure out,
what looks like is the right panel here
to figure this out and maybe onstage or offstage,
is really how we can,
the people who want to self-custody,
whether it's the enterprise or individuals
using one of your tools,
and they want to bring value from outside.
How can we make that happen in a simple way?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well,
because people do want to put,
people buying Bitcoin with our cards today,
and I want to make sure that that experience is smooth
from a safety and security perspective,
and they have an option.
They don't always have to end up
in one of the institutional custody solutions
or custody directly.
They should be able to do it.
I think some of the self-custody wallets
are turning on card payments today,
and I think that's a great way to do,
and some players in the industry are starting to do.
Love to hear your views on that,
because that's what will bring more demand to this
and more players who are normally not used to,
you know, holding Bitcoin themselves.
Well, I think the tech and being able to use your card
and all that kind of stuff is an important piece of it,
but actually the thing that we come back to
all the time at CASA as the core piece
is why should I care about self-custody?
I don't even know what this thing is.
I've been using a bank for my entire life
where somebody, the bank has my money, and that's fine.
Why doesn't that work with Bitcoin?
And so, and explaining that
and explaining how this is actually empowering
to be your own bank, and you now have access
to a permissionless, open, global financial system
that is Bitcoin, and you don't have to ask your bank
or your card holder or anybody to spend that money,
to use your money.
That's super important,
and helping to get that message out there
helps people understand why they would want to
hold their own keys in the first place,
and then you can bring them in
with really simple integrations
with buying Bitcoin with your card
and having it go straight to your wallet
where you hold the keys.
No, I think you have a great point there,
and different people want to do this for different reasons.
Some of them maybe,
because they believe that's the financial system,
some of them want to hold Bitcoin
purely as an investment thing,
and buy and hold, right?
That's all they are thinking about as one of their,
and whether they are doing it
because they are banked or unbanked.
I'm talking about people who have assets elsewhere in fiat
want to bring in there.
Motivations may vary from different people.
That's about choice.
We're enabling choice, not passing judgment
on why people want to do this,
and that's the process, making it, I think,
we as an industry can work together,
and you would see a lot more people coming into it,
not just enterprises who want to self-custody,
which is a great use case, of course,
if that's what they want to choose,
but also making that process seamless.
I think I see some of the wallets
starting to do it on other networks,
and I think we should work together
to bring that as well here.
We might be approaching the golden age of payments, right?
The reclaim of the payments use case
with technologies like Lightning,
seeing an explosion in terms of capacity,
as well as a number of channels that are being opened.
We heard from Strike yesterday
their integration with the Lightning network.
Do you think that would be a big factor in self-custoding,
because purely from a cost perspective,
if you think about a Lightning payment
relative to the status quo,
merchants could be saving billions of dollars
on an annualized basis
if they were to adopt a technology like this,
purely from a cost perspective,
and use as an incentive mechanism
maybe a system of rebates,
where they're giving back,
they're paying on average 2% in transaction fees,
they're giving back 1%,
and essentially use that as a carrot for users
to use this new payment system.
How do you guys think about that as being one of the ways
where self-custody will increase?
Has MasterCard considered that as these developments
on the payments front, not so much on the investment front?
Look, we've been in payments for a while,
and we know what works in payments.
The payments, it comes down to the reach and simplicity.
The consumer experience being the same thing.
You get a card today from your bank,
tomorrow you walk into some place in Africa,
a merchant got wired up just yesterday,
and the card just works.
Simple tap, that consumer experience work.
We take it of all of the behind-the-scenes activity
that makes that happen.
So why is that working that well?
First thing is consumer experience,
the simplicity of what you're taking and using.
I think it's very, very important.
You talked about rewards.
That is also, in a sense, people on which card they bring.
The way that we are thinking about bridging the crypto world
with the card world,
and which is we have great products in there,
whether the wallet is self-custodied or not,
we can point the card basically to pull the balance
from either the Bitcoin or whatever assets that you have.
Most of them happen to be Bitcoin.
And people can use the cards.
This is existing experience.
Merchants are used to that experience,
and they're looking for moving people fast
through whatever the checkout line,
whether it's online or here.
The simplicity of consumer experience
matters quite a bit.
And we're providing this bridge access.
And basically what we call as a crypto card
that allows access to many of the wallets out there,
and people use it.
Most people, like I was talking earlier,
most people want to use it as an investment vehicle,
but people do want to access it, have a choice.
We believe in this choice in a big way
that people have alternatives.
I'm going to take a possibly unpopular pessimistic view,
but I believe that Lightning suffers
from some of the same problems that I mentioned earlier,
where the user experience that you can provide
to Lightning Network users
when you're offering a custodial version of it,
it's a lot easier, once again,
to provide a smoother user experience,
because, once again, there's a lot of complexity
that you can shove under the hood.
And it's different types of complexity
instead of all the key management and UTXO stuff,
it's liquidity management and channel-related issues.
So we're already seeing in the Lightning Network wallet
and sort of payment processor space,
I think, a lot of custodial options being very popular,
because there aren't as many rough edges
for people to run into on the user experience side.
So, I mean, that's fine.
I'm a technologist. Give me a good challenge.
I've been building self-custody wallets for seven years,
and that's because it's not easy,
and there's no one simple solution to this.
It is an ongoing war of convenience versus security,
convenience versus privacy.
There are always fundamental trade-offs
where we need to keep fighting to improve the user experience
for people to be self-sovereign,
because much like with privacy and security in general,
the defaults tend to be towards extreme convenience,
because, you're right, people want convenience.
They tend to value convenience and usability
over everything else.
And as much as I love going out
and talking about various educational aspects
of why you should care about self-sovereignty
and security and privacy and stuff,
I also recognize that a lot of people
read the manual, read the fine lines,
and so it's important for us as technologists
to try to offer better and better user experience
that comes with improved privacy and security.
It's good for us to have a sense of proportion, though, right?
Like, in terms of spending and using Lightning Network
and using custodial models, it's not necessarily a bad thing
if you're talking about smaller sums of money,
but you don't want your life savings
or your entire treasury in that type of environment, right?
Is it already clich˜̠to talk about, you know, Canadian truckers?
Like, how many times has that been brought up here?
But, like, seriously, is that going to get better or worse?
For your business, as an individual, like...
We see the trend.
Having a sense of proportion here is like,
sure, custodial isn't an evil thing.
Like, if you're doing payments, if you're paying for, you know,
lunch, if you're paying for dinner,
but, like, for your life savings, for your treasury,
keep it in self-custody.
Yeah, I mean, that's the flip side.
You know, on one side, you keep trying to lower the bar,
make the user experience better,
make it fewer hoops that people have to jump through.
The flip side is, you know,
we see the trend from various authoritarian figures.
You know, they're going to keep finding the choke points
and applying pressure,
whatever allows them to exert the most power over people.
And as certain people, segments of the population,
find themselves under that pressure,
that will be a forcing function
for them to be willing to jump through more hoops,
to see, like, what are the other options out there.
I'd make one more argument, too.
For everyone here, you know,
the enterprise stage for your businesses,
I would make the argument that holding your own keys
through, you know, a product like Unchained or CASA
is not that hard.
It's not harder than driving a car
or learning how to drive a car.
I think a lot of people get spooked by it
because of, you know, the meme that, you know,
oh, man, you know, holding your own keys is super difficult.
We've made it a lot easier.
There's a long way to go, for sure,
but you shouldn't be, you know, scared off by it.
One thing that I wanted to make sure that we covered
is another trend that's happening and affecting custodians,
which is the emergence of lending products around Bitcoin
and the desire of even users of omnibus systems
to lender Bitcoins and receive yield as a return.
Do you guys think this trend is at odds with self-custody?
How are you positioning yourself out of that?
No, not necessarily.
There was actually a great talk on the stage a few hours ago
about Bitcoin as pristine collateral.
Most of the products, as far as I'm aware,
the ones that are coming out tend to be custodial,
but we're seeing hybrids come out,
so you don't necessarily have to put yourself up
at the rehypothecation risk in order to use Bitcoin as collateral.
Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin is great collateral,
and, you know, you can still have a key cryptographic relationship
with your customer as a lender.
At Unchained, what we do is when you take out a loan from us,
you can have a private key.
You can't have unilateral control over the collateral,
but you can prove that your key signs for this address
and that the collateral is not being rehypothecated like we promise.
I think the key is that it comes down to user choice.
So we're all building for this self-sovereign world.
Well, in that world, you should be able to choose
if you want to lend out your Bitcoin in a custodial way
to earn some yield or borrow against your Bitcoin
because you don't want to sell it, but you want to go buy something,
or you can keep it in fully cold storage
and not touch it and not participate in that.
That's different than the major fiat financial system,
in which case when you put your money in a bank,
it's getting lent out and you have no choice.
You can't keep all... generally can't keep all of your money
under your mattress to keep from having to do that,
but with Bitcoin in self-custody, you actually have a legitimate choice
where it's not that difficult to hold your own keys
because it's digital money.
And so the convenience of that is much closer
to the convenience of using a custodian.
And so when you talk about how that affects the entire system
at a systemic level, that choice and that ability for anybody
who wants to kind of go down all the way to the base layer
where they are holding their own keys is important.
And then if they want to do things like lend out their Bitcoin
in order to earn yield, that's their choice.
And it doesn't affect my choice with what I want to do with my Bitcoin.
But it also allows us to take an enormous amount of risk
out of our Bitcoin financial system, right?
Which is not a choice you have with fiat.
We get to reduce systemic risk because we have the choice
of private key relationships with our financial service providers.
Yeah, this started with a topic that we were again talking
a bit offstage about this identity, decentralized identity
and how you could use that for some of that executing your choices, right?
And people may want to do different things.
I think this is an important topic in terms of wherever your identities are tested,
whoever is the authority does it or there are a range of people,
whether it is a government does it or an institution does it
or somebody else who is trusted by a third party.
How do you bring that information to self-custody Bitcoin wallets
would be a great thing for the industry to work on as well.
There are things emerging on other chains like the DID and so forth.
I think that notion and the concept of self-sovereign identities
is a great one to apply here as well.
But you need external validators and incentives set up for them
to come and provide that attestation so that you can scale that.
I think that will be a good thing, again, bringing the next level of scale into this.
Yeah, I mean, I think that we, especially as self-custody providers,
we're not just here about self-custody.
We're looking at the long game and believe that private keys
are going to become a way for people to empower themselves
in a variety of different aspects of their life.
But one of the big missing pieces is identity.
But I see it from a technological perspective of if you can authenticate yourself
with other parties throughout the world
and you can authenticate yourself cryptographically
rather than having user names and passwords
and other really, really sensitive information
that you're literally spewing all over the internet
and then it's getting leaked and used against you
and you're having your identity stolen.
That is just yet another way that we can apply these self-custody models
to securing things other than just Bitcoin.
100%.
The transparency of it does entail greater responsibility on service providers
because transparency and privacy at times can be at odds.
How do you guys see privacy as service providers
and how you're positioning your products in light of that trade-off?
I mean, offering a...
That is one of the trade-offs that you make with a lot of the service providers right now.
If you choose Unchained right now, you're sovereign over your Bitcoin,
but Unchained does know your balance.
But in the Bitcoin ecosystem, there's loads of ways to both be sovereign and be private.
There's really not a way to do a custodial solution with privacy
unless there was some sort of decentralized identification method.
It would benefit us all to have that.
Even if it is centralized identity, it is about...
You talked about choice. It's about where a specific consumer or an entity
deciding to disclose that identity for what purpose,
and it is actually done through authentication and so forth.
This is one of our core principles.
When we are looking at crypto as well,
as we support some of the crypto transactions and onboarding and offboarding and all that,
this is a core principle of how we operate consumer protections and privacies
is in everything, informs everything that we do.
It's almost like a governing principle of what we get involved and what we don't get involved in.
I think this is about curating the space so that people can come in
with very minimal requirements and making the access simple.
Consumer experience, again, is part of it.
This identity is a big part of it with privacy protection.
Privacy, there's a million different variables and knobs and levers
and where on the spectrum do you want to be.
If you want the ultimate extreme privacy,
if you're going to be a hardcore cypherpunk,
then the downside to that is you literally have to do everything yourself.
As soon as you start reaching out and asking for help from service providers,
you're going to be leaking some sort of information.
That's the basis of knowledge sharing.
CASA tries to strike a balance there.
It's possible to be on the fairly private side,
but if you want our consultation services,
we need to get to know certain aspects of your life and help you make certain decisions,
especially if you're talking about architecting self-custody
for potentially life-changing sum of money.
There's a lot of very personal decisions that go into that.
It's possible always to be on the ultimate security or ultimate privacy side,
but it takes a lot more resources and effort
because you're not able to leverage other people's knowledge.
Part of privacy, too, is just the number of counterparties that you have.
If you can reduce that down to just one or just two,
instead of in the fiat world having four, five, six
that you have to divulge yourself to,
thinking about if you need to store Bitcoin, if you need to buy Bitcoin,
if you need to transact in Bitcoin and you have different providers
or you're disclosing to multiple counterparties at every type of transaction that you can do,
then you're leaking more private information.
If you can do that in one place, potentially a better outcome for you.
There's a lot of complexity here, and we're close to time,
but as a final question, I'd love to hear from you guys.
Given the scope of knowledge that's required to make solid decisions around security,
what is the one thing that you see as crucial for your users to understand
from an educational perspective as they're getting onboarded into your products?
I think for us, it all boils down to knowing that you are holding the keys,
and we try to build the experience in such a way that you don't need to know everything from the start
the second you get started with the product.
If we're doing our job well, you know you're holding the keys and that CASA knows what we're doing,
and then we are going to present the things that you need to know as they are relevant for you
based on how much Bitcoin you're storing or what you are doing with the keys that you have.
That kind of bread-crumbing is something that we don't always do well as a Bitcoin industry.
Sometimes people ask you, they're very new to Bitcoin, and they're like,
what should I do? And they just get vomited.
Firehose.
Yes. And that turns a lot of people off.
You've got to make it approachable and present them with the information they need when they need it.
And that makes them much more likely to act on that in the right way.
And so that's how we think about it.
Yeah, for us, it's simplicity of consumer experience and really bringing a simple,
trustable consumer experience so that people can repeatedly understand how this works as well as bringing that.
And part of that is the ecosystem.
So, for example, we had a different part of the ecosystem when somebody wants to use their card to buy Bitcoin,
for example. There is another end of that spectrum is an issuer of the card.
They need to understand that the person charging is crypto and why they are doing it, what is the risk,
what is the level of the entity, whether it's self-custodied wallet or it is an enterprise on the other side.
What is their risk rating on that? And that's the product that we offer as well.
All of this does û this is my long way of saying that bringing trust into the ecosystem and educating people,
bringing simple consumer experience was what brings the next set of people.
And we are putting a lot of people on that education as well, both on the overall kind of the marketing consumer side,
but more importantly, we as a B2B2C company, educating the ecosystem as well in terms of how that can have that safe experiences.
Excellent insights. Gentlemen, thank you for your time. Very fun panel.
Thank you.
Thank you all for being here with us.
Thank you for your time.