# Crypto Market Strategy: Clarity Act and AI Demand

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-03-02

## Transcript

And I think that Bitcoin has a phenomenal ability to find the exact market pathway that will blow out the most number of people.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Du Set here, and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that can't believe it's only March 2nd.
It's gonna be a long year, folks.
And to help us navigate this, we're joined by Peter Smith, the founder and CEO of Blockchain.com, an OG of the industry, and someone who has seen it all.
He's been doing it since 2013, man.
So he's gonna bring his wisdom and we're gonna talk about why we are where we are in the market.
If the Clarity Act is supposed to happen, I don't even know.
The deadline was March 1st, it's March 2nd.
I actually don't know what's what the latest is.
The effects of this uh new geopolitical theater on our dear crypto, and of course, what he's interested in going forward.
Today's episode is brought to you by midnight, bringing rationale privacy to blockchain, warbucks, the easiest way to trade crypto, and nexo, earn interest, borrow, and trade crypto.
Peter, welcome to the show, man.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, absolutely.
Great to see you.
Okay, listen, there's uh there's a lot of different things that we could actually talk about today.
And we were kind of chatting about all of them beforehand.
I actually want to know, I don't know this part because I haven't looked at the news or nobody's talking about it because everyone just wants to talk about Iran and and what's happening there.
There was a deadline for the Clarity Act that was yesterday.
I'm assuming it wasn't met.
I don't know what the latest is.
No, I think it got, you know, consumed by the uh the uh shooting war that's going on over in the Middle East now.
They got other things going on.
Yeah, so I think there's other other things that have uh sort of taken priority.
And you know, I think that March 1st priority was a bit of an artificial construct anyway.
So what's happening with that?
Because I think that that that's that's been like an overhanging story this year, right?
Where we saw that pump in January when it was gonna come, Brian Armstrong saying no thanks, and and the kind of falling to the back burner, let's say.
But what do you think is actually gonna happen there?
Yeah, I think that the Clarity act is going to pass.
Um, and I think it'll pass before the midterms.
That's kind of the big question everyone's asking.
Is it is it gonna be passing before the midterms, after the midterms?
You know, the reality of it is that I think it's uh gonna it's a little harder to get done than people thought.
But that's often things in life.
But I think we're getting closer and closer, and and the bill has kind of reached the appropriate level of compromise.
You know, so our position along with a lot of the industry is that a bill is better than no bill, and we're really rapidly getting to the point where we should really just kind of as an industry get together and and pass this thing.
I think you know, some of the price action you're seeing also reflects that, right?
You're you're seeing, you know, that dynamic as well, uh, which is important.
The market is, you know, an important barometer of how likely we think things are.
But, you know, look, my guess is that the Clarity Act passes, like I said, before the midterms, probably before the summer.
Um, and then we're able to sort of put that behind us and uh get on with making the US the crypto capital of the world.
Would you be would you be willing to accept kind of the concession on yield?
That that was the kind of the main holdup at the last draft.
Yeah, you know, and I think that this is part of the political process in a democracy is like it no one's gonna walk away from this 100% happy, you know, and that that in itself is important.
You know, as I've spent a lot of time in DC the last couple of months lobbying.
I was talking to one senator, you know, she's like, Well, you know, I'd really like to go this far, you'd like to go that far.
And then uh she's like, But I think I could settle here, and we're all gonna be a little unhappy.
She's like, the problem is crypto people don't know how to be a little unhappy.
And I said, you know, I think um it's not a not an unfair observation.
You know, we're we're a very loud and annoying constituency, one could say.
And I think if something is logical, and to me, like what the crypto industry wants on yield is logical and great for consumers, like I can understand why some of the other folks in the industry want to dig in on it.
At the same time, you know, I'm also sort of a big fan of um incremental progress.
I think you either have to have step change progress or incremental progress.
The Clarity Act is not step change progress, it is incremental progress, no matter what is in that bill.
So if it's incremental progress, like let's just focus on progress.
I've also, you know, have been through the Mika, you know, process, the European equivalent for the last few years, and I know that you know, there's what gets passed, there's what gets reconciled, and then there's the implementation.
And so even once this passes, you know, there's gonna be a lot left to figure out exactly what this bill means in practice, which brings us back to like my view that incremental progress is probably the right thing here.
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Is this is this do you feel like the the lack of the Clarity Act and it's kind of an ambiguous deadline uh or or timeline, let's say, would you say that's one of the biggest kind of price suppressors at this at this current moment in the timeline?
Yes, I think you know, and I love crypto Twitter or X Twitter.
Crypto Twitter always, you know, X crypto X.
Crypto Twitter like just sounds better, but crypto X, as we as we could call it.
I love it, and I love reading technical analysis and foyer cycle theories, and my favorite new one is the Blood Moon cycle theory.
I think this is all somebody said this is all like uh the astrology for for men or day traders, astrology for day traders.
I think that's very true.
You know, and so but it's very entertaining, just like astrology is very entertaining.
And what I would say is, you know, I think that we've had a very weird set of market conditions for the last few years.
You had, I think, a on a very, very brutal set of market pullback when you know, post FTX implosion and all that, uh, due to like regulatory crackdown, like I think it got worse than it necessarily would have been otherwise.
I didn't think that the market got very excited about the Trump election.
You know, expectations were very, very high, so the price went to a level as if all of the things that Trump promised to do in his term were already done.
And then I think the market has gotten a little depressed as it has realized that things take a bit longer to do, right?
And so, you know, I had OGs and and we run a large OTC trading desk where we, you know, serve a lot of the Bitcoin OGs in Wales, and I had these OGs in Wales, you know, calling, telling me they're they're selling, you know, because this didn't happen, that didn't happen.
I was like, guys, like, did you think this was all gonna happen like in the first 90 days?
180 days?
Like, like there's a synod, there's a house, there's a you know, like also like there's crypto is very important, but like it's not it's not a priority one.
And so, do I think that the administration will deliver, you know, what it promised and is committed to to the industry by the end of his term?
Absolutely, particularly if they win the midterms.
No doubt.
Did I ever think that it was gonna happen in the first 180 days or 90 days?
Absolutely not.
I think that the market kind of got ahead of itself.
You know, that said, I think as these things start to happen, you will see the price appreciate and kind of come back to where that expectation was.
You sound like you're a bit more of a fundamentals guy, Peter.
Is that is that a good assumption, or do you believe?
I feel like as an OG, you also may believe in more of the TA cyclical nature of of crypto.
I I mean, I'm 100% in on the blood moon theory.
When you said that, I found an article about it on Trading View.
Let's pull that up and just quickly look at it, see if there's truth to this blood moon.
I like any price action in crypto, there's always gonna be some theory behind it.
No matter what, every week we've got a news story these days.
So this basically is telling us that the blood moon, I think happens.
Blood moon is set to occur in this cycle after the ones that occurred on March 14th and September 7th last year.
So when is the next blood moon?
And that's I I think it's arguing that there that's when the reversal will come.
Do you think, Peter?
Come on, man, you've been here since 2013.
Uh, you know, and and I think you were probably also witnessed this um, you know, that uh 4chan post back in September saying, you know, X amount of days bear market, X amount of days bull market, the top will be October 6th, and it happened exactly like that, even though it was a years old post.
Is crypto is Bitcoin so simple as to like tie it to like it do we overcome complicated with fundamentals?
Is it's so simple to be blood moons and four-year cycles and all that kind of stuff.
You've been here for you've been here for most of that.
Okay, so a couple things.
The first is that I think Satoshi did a really good job of lining up the Bitcoin cycle with the US election cycle, which you know historically is also pretty interrelated to the liquidity cycle and the ISM cycle.
So, like, you know, I don't believe in a per se exact four-year cycle because by the way, the four-year cycle has never been exactly a four-year cycle.
Also, you know, everybody that's still like four-year cycle, you know, um, one of the biggest features of the four-year cycle is that the new all-time high, the prior all-time high would get broken after the happening.
And this time it got broken way before the happening.
And then the price spent most of the price action after that, it the price spent has spent most of the time under the prior all-time high, right?
So, like, there's a lot of selective data manipulation to prove these theories.
I think that a price, a market, you know, finds a price based on a lot of factors.
So, for example, I 100% think that the market sold off in the fall because of people who believe in the four-year cycle.
Like at the end of the day, more buyers and you know, more sellers and buyers, and the price are going down.
And I think that there is a lot of people who believe in the four-year cycle.
And enough, if enough people believe in something, they can make it true in markets.
Hilariously, right?
The most the most famous example is GameStop.
Enough people believe that GameStop could go up that they actually made the damn thing go up.
Peter, you know some of these OG guys.
Are they is that is that how they behave?
Were they just like you were saying that after the election, certain things didn't happen, and so they were getting cold feet and they're selling.
Is that is that and we saw that in the charts too.
We saw that in the data, in the on-chain data, that a lot of people that are held Bitcoin for a long time were selling.
Whatever it is, you know, like and so you know, when the price was going up and looking strong, they were like, oh, okay.
But you know, as the price starts to come down, and they're like, well, you know, Trump maybe wasn't crypto president, maybe the four-year cycle is real.
And the interesting thing about Bitcoin is like it's not like a lot of other asset classes where like if if a million billion dollar position exists, it's most assuredly owned by an institution.
In crypto, there's like there's just regular people who are not financial traders or managers who have these enormous Bitcoin positions, right?
They're like the biggest active day traders in the world across crypto.
And I think, yeah, a lot of those guys, you know, as the market came down and looked weak, and you know, different factors came together, it's like maybe the four-year cycle is real, you know, and they started selling.
I think we're probably through most of that.
And now, if you look on chain, you know, whales are buying more than they're selling.
It's something I monitor pretty closely.
I think though, that like people often ask me, like, well, you know, what do you actually believe in when it comes down to the you know to the price of Bitcoin?
And I think that Bitcoin has a phenomenal ability to find the exact market pathway that will blow out the most number of people.
Like Bitcoin finds the maximum pain pathway.
Like it just does.
It's amazing at it.
And so my theory, my unified theory of the price of Bitcoin is like, tell me what's most painful for the market, and I will, that's what will happen.
That's what crypto's, that's what Bitcoin's gonna do.
Are you talking about Bitcoin specifically?
Or I guess you lump crypto in with everything else with Bitcoin and everybody else.
There's only one asset that's in crypto, only one big asset in crypto not trading correlated to Bitcoin right now, which is hyper liquid.
Hyper liquid, okay.
Yeah, I was hoping you'd say that.
Yeah.
So, you know, which we can talk about, but yeah, everything else is trading pretty correlated to Bitcoin, right?
So, yeah.
But now, what do I think is the most painful path forward for crypto, right?
For Bitcoin and price right now.
There's so many, it's one of two things.
There's so many OGs and fund managers and people I talk to that are expecting a Bitcoin price of like, you know, let's call it low 50s, 48.
So the 200 EMA weekly or whatever it is, which you know moves around a little bit based on you know, it's it's non-static price level.
But let's say that it's roughly at 51, depending on how you calculate.
Sure.
There's so many people expecting 51 that it almost cannot do that.
Like the two like ways that crypto goes forward from here that are most painful are either that Bitcoin rips back above 100, which by the way is only a 20% move or 30% move at these levels, because that's gonna blow out a bunch of people and be really painful for a lot of guys who didn't get long because they thought it was going to the 50s, or it's gonna go to like 38.
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Which the most what's the most painful one of those scenarios, Peter?
Honestly, the most painful because most people, like from what we're seeing in like the hedging markets and stuff, a lot of people have hedged the downside.
The most painful thing, it's probably for Bitcoin to go up really hard.
Because no one's expecting it.
We're all sitting here being like, okay, the entry zone is at you know 48k in the low 50s, and you know, like that's where the cycle bottom is, according to the uh Comi Cloud and the you know, something death crossover and whatever other astrological symbol we come up with.
And so the the most painful thing, I think, for most of the market right now is for crypto to go up pretty violently.
Would that be and do you think let's get it a little bit more specific?
Do you think it would be for Bitcoin to dominate in that scenario, or for Bitcoin to uh not for the opposite to happen for have like a mini alt season in that pop?
I think a mini alt season would be really painful for most managers.
Everybody has just sold them, you know.
Actually, you know, what alt people are buying uh is hype, right?
So the most painful thing, and it kind of happened today, right?
Everything's up massively today except hyperliquid.
Of course.
Yeah, yeah.
People already bought it.
People already bought it.
It already got bought, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
People already deployed their capital.
Correct.
Yeah.
People are people are rotating out of that their profit there into the other stuff.
Yeah.
People are like, sell your salon at ETH and buy hyperliquid.
And you look at hyperliquid, it's like, by the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm I am long hyperliquid.
It's a very it's a small position in my portfolio, but I'm long hyperliquid and think it's a super interesting product.
That said, like, you know, I think kind of like it's really funny when like crypto Twitter is just talking about something constantly, you probably should not be buying it.
You mentioned um you mentioned Peter that you know the the the anti-consensus trade can often be perhaps the right one, right?
You're saying that if everybody now is calling for lower to go to 51k or whatever that is, that if there's too much consensus, then maybe often it's wrong.
And we saw that in the fall, man.
Everybody's saying Q4 2025, man, this is it.
This is this is the moment you've all been waiting for Bitcoin 200k, ETH 10K, all the all those theories.
Now it's been the opposite.
So if if we're not so that's basically what you're telling me, right?
Is that the most likely scenario is the opposite of what the consensus is.
So we're in for a route.
I mean look, and we can just look at the sentiment on X, and you can look at the sentiment, you can be like the folks I talk to, like everybody is waiting, you know, for the day, you know, that's like uh when is it the 200 EMA?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ben Cohen, Ben Cohen called it back in October that we had a date with it, and that's where we're going.
Yeah, now everybody's like the accumulation zone is in the low 50s.
Right.
Right.
And so it's like, okay, now that we've all decided that, it's not happening.
Right.
Or, or, or, you know, or maybe even here's what I would see is that we rally to 100, all those people waiting waiting for their buy orders at 50, abandon the buy orders, like shit, I gotta get in on this rally, and then then we go back to 50 and their buy orders don't fill because they bought somewhere else.
I don't know.
Maybe.
I definitely think persistent volatility is likely.
Okay.
So you think if we pop back to 100, we would stay there or we wouldn't come back down.
Like would they would you say that if that if we went to 100, would you say that this little the last the past month we went to 60, 62, would that be the bottom of this bear market?
I tend to think in probabilities, not in like I'm not one of these uh social media personalities that's like here's what's going to happen.
I don't have to I don't have to do that, thank God.
I didn't think in probabilities, and I think that there is a reasonably strong probability, say a 65% chance that the bottom is in for this year.
Check back next, you know, I'm on the I changed my mind a lot.
But like from what I'm looking at today, I think there's a 65% chance, maybe even stronger, that we will not see a lower price this year than 59.
I think the market briefly went to 58,400 or something, 59, and the buying volume at you know, sub 61 was so heavy.
There's a 67% chance on polymarket that we will be at 55k in 2026, and a 61% chance of 50k.
So you've got you've got a good bet on your hands, man.
If you pick the no on that, if you really if you like that probability, it's actually the kind of the opposite of what you're saying.
So that's uh that's a good opportunity for you.
Um, I want to ask you, Peter, you you've been here for a while, right?
You've been you've been you started blockchain.com 13 years ago.
Uh whether it's cycles or it's fundamentals or all that kind of stuff, you've seen it all.
Um, fear and greed index is at in a low, in a low that it has rarely been in for very long.
I think it had its lowest level ever recently, the crypto fear and greed at like five.
Um, is this in your opinion, is this the worst, has this been the worst sentiment you have seen in crypto uh in your in your career here?
No, the worst sentiment that I saw was probably probably after the FTX implosion.
That may not have been across the whole market.
That may have been more just the people who were building companies.
I think you know, I tend to believe in numbers.
I don't feel like this is the worst I've ever seen it.
Um the hardest chapter for me ever was actually after the first market crash.
Which was what?
Like you mean way back?
Yeah, like over 10 years from now.
The reason is very simple.
Like back then we didn't know if there were it was gonna come back.
Like we were just like maybe this is it, maybe it's done.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, and so now, yeah, that was the most difficult for me.
I think though that, like, generally speaking, if you buy, like, if you're not buying crypto and the fear and greed index is at five, you basically need to believe that crypto is dead, and therefore, like you should either be selling everything you have, or if you have spare capital, you should be buying crypto at a sub-10 score.
Because like it's either the best time to be buying, or crypto is dead.
Or crypto is dead.
Yeah.
So, like, make up your like pick one, you know.
And you had you had a good tweet about that too.
And I love this is something I I've tried to remind people of as well.
Is that uh, you know, when you start to see these types of tweets, hold on, let me pull it up because you you quote tweeted it.
When you start to see these types of tweets, it's usually a pretty good bottom signal.
And uh the the tweet is from last Friday.
Crypto is pointless, not even the White House can fix that from New York Times.
And you quote tweeted it with uh one of my all-time fave crypto is dead headlines today, the world is your oyster, folks.
And I couldn't agree more, man.
I think it's like I think that this is this is honestly what I usually wait for.
I'm like, I wait, I want these headlines to pile on, and then that's that is a signal to me that it's like okay, that's that's the reversal when you have this like comical, you know, broad stroke retail kind of focused capitulation.
You also need like notable companies to pivot into adjacent fields, so like paradigm raising an AI fund is a good yeah, you know, you want people to retire.
We've seen some of that.
Also, my own personal emotions, like when I start like sitting back and being like, what are we doing?
What's happening?
You know, like the malaise starts to settle in.
Like all this familiar signs are there, and and this goes back to something that we didn't talk about before the show, but like, you know, one of the things that I find most fascinating to debate, and we won't really know for another year or two, is when did the bear market start?
And my controversial opinion is that it started about 13 months ago.
And the reason I think it started 13 months ago is because the following volume.
Volume is down massively, like straight line across the industry over the last 13 months.
Uh, web traffic is down month over month for the last 13 months.
If you remove the Bitcoin market cap and stable coin market gap, your crypto market cap has been nothing but down for 13 months.
And the last point is that if you look at Bitcoin gold, it's been down for 13 months.
I think the best way to measure how Bitcoin is doing is against the gold price because they're competing for the same story.
Like measuring Bitcoin and dollar price is kind of weird if you think about it.
Like it just tells you if it's like it's not getting worse.
But if you were to rebase the price of Bitcoin with inflation, we haven't even hit all like we haven't hit new all-time highs in the last 13 months.
Like that's what's crazy.
It's like if you were to dollar adjust it, you're still not hitting new highs.
And if you and basically the gold chart kind of tells you that.
So if you do one level of analysis, if you go a metric deeper on anything other than just what is the price of Bitcoin in dollars, every single one of those will tell you that you've been in a bear market since Q1 of last year.
Then there's usually like the psychological moment where you're like, oh shit, like that kind of got out of hand.
And for me, that was some of the mean coin launches in December and January of that time period.
All the AI stuff too.
So you're like, what why is this?
Like, I remember um those guys.
There was like one of those AI tokens, and it was like trading at like four billion dollar FTP.
And I was like, this is like this is something that we could build like in three or four days.
Like we shouldn't be trading at three or four million.
You know, like it's probably AI 16Z, right?
That's probably one of them.
Yeah, on Solana.
Yeah, yeah.
That was like a toolkit for for other agents.
Yeah.
Four billion FTV.
What?
Yeah.
I think if you were to, you know, and I challenge people sometimes like, look, find me anything other than just the pure Bitcoin dollar price that says that we weren't in a bear market from Q1 of last year.
And so far I haven't been able to find anybody that can give me a metric.
And we've had that, we've had that shared with us a few times on the show.
We've had Matt Crosby from Bitcoin Magni Magazine Pro uh shared with that with us months ago after kind of the major capitulation saying, like, if you actually look at it, similar.
And also Matt Hogan from Bitwise has shared that uh on Twitter and with us, uh, the idea of being in this this bear market.
But with that in mind, Peter, does that mean we come out of the bear market quicker?
Right?
Because then the theory then is if you're saying we've been in it for 13 months, that's a long time, versus the more common thread, which is that we've been in it since October.
Well, if I'm telling you that I think there's a very strong chance we've seen the low for the year, that means that I think we're coming out of it.
I guess so.
Yeah, yeah.
And a rally into the summer and into the midterms.
Is that what you're telling me?
I think so.
I mean, I think look, you know, people the the counterpoint to that is Bitcoin hasn't gone down enough yet.
And you know, those same people would have told us that Bitcoin still needed to go up a lot more on the four-year cycle theory, too.
Right.
And I think as more professional managers and more professional capital comes into Bitcoin, you're going to see the volatility compression, which we've seen for 10 years, by the way.
Bitcoin volatility has been compressing for 10 years.
If we didn't go far as far as the up, we probably shouldn't go as far as the down.
And so, you know, I don't know.
I don't know that I'm ready to like, you know, pledge fealty to the uh to the four-year cycle theory, which has never really existed in the first place.
But I am considering a total commitment to the blood moon theory.
Only could be that simple, man.
Uh what's your take?
Uh Peter, tell me a little bit more about your your you've how you feel AI is affecting the market, right?
Because you're saying that paradigm and and some others are obviously uh I feel like you're kind of portraying AI as like the hot new toy.
Um, but you know, if you zoom out, you can't deny the the unimaginable amounts of capex that all these big companies are throwing at AI.
Um, you've got it as a main piece of the geopolitical story these days as well.
Um, how does that how how do you feel like crypto's kind of wind in gonna wind into that?
That's a great question.
Um I think the AI is gonna create a huge amount of demand for crypto protocols.
The reality is that like crypto is probably a little more difficult to navigate than some of the traditional payment methods.
This is why you see, you know, in countries that don't have these, a huge amount of daily crypto use.
So Nigeria, Buenos Aires, Venezuela, you know, Argentina, like Pakistan, you'll see incredible amounts of crypto usage day to day.
US, not so much.
Why is that?
Well, like in the US, like it's pretty easy to use my card to pay for things.
Two, three percent.
There will be a search for efficiency.
Like, humans search for convenience, machines search for efficiency.
And so I think agents, you know, will finally be where like everybody's always been like, we've gotta make crypto easy enough for humans to use for payments.
It's like, no, I don't know that that's ever gonna happen.
I think that I don't think that we humans are gonna, I'm gonna be like, hey, um, AI model, go buy me, you know, go find the cheapest platform to get me McDonald's delivered and pay for it.
Thanks.
And that is what ultimately is gonna like solve the UX issue.
So I think it creates a huge amount of demand.
I think temporarily it's basically resulted in a huge downturn in the amount of VC investing in crypto companies.
You know, you can see that in like statistics put out by like Frank Shaparo from the block, stuff like that, where it's just like it's good news for people like me who run crypto companies because you know, more competition is always uh always fun, but maybe not the best for the business.
I think that that will correct though.
We see it go up and down across cycles a lot.
And uh, you know, at some point the AI bubble the AI bubble will also blow out, just like the on demand bubble blew out, and you know, there's arguably a crypto bubble which blew out.
Like all this stuff is sort of the same flavors of the same.
The challenge of the AI blow bubble bubble up is like it's basically been what has kept the US economy moving and going in from you know like without the AI CapEx, we're in a recession, which is why the economy in the US feels very uneven right now.
And so when that bubble blows up, I think it will very negatively impact the price of crypto.
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Can't wait for that.
Another boogeyman hiding in the closet later for our crypto tokens, man.
Exactly.
Yeah, I can't wait.
Um Peter, I want to wrap this up, but first I want to know what it what exactly is blockchain.com do, man.
I feel like you guys have changed a lot of your kind of mission statement over the years, over 13 years, but what exactly are you guys up to these days?
Um, always still the same mission, which is you know, helping build an open uh and fair financial system.
We do that by building uh products that enable people and companies and protocols uh to be part of the crypto financial system.
And obviously, I've been saying that for a decade.
What does that mean?
Like we're very sort of Amazon-esque in that we look at the world and we talk to our customers a lot.
Our customers say they need things and we go out and build them.
So, an example is like we were one of the first OTC trading des Why?
Because we had a bunch of like OG customers that needed to trade in large size.
You know, we were getting orders in our brokerage app, you know, like our buy and sell Bitcoin app, and by the way, 800 other cryptos now.
And we were getting these like people trying to put in like five million dollar orders, and we were like, wait a minute, that's not gonna work.
And so, you know, we build an OTC desk.
You know, today we do a lot of things.
We help, you know, tens of millions of customers all over the world on the retail front buy, sell, store their crypto.
It's a super wallet, so you can store your assets with us.
You can store your wallets, you know, in your own private key that we don't have access to.
Like I said, you can trade about 800 assets, you can earn rewards, you can stake really anything you want to do with crypto land.
Then we have an institutional business.
You know, we trade about 800 pairs there.
We also trade about 50 derivative contracts.
And you know, most of our customers are either Bitcoin OGs, other crypto companies, or crypto hedge funds.
And then we have an infrastructure business where you know we basically like take our infrastructure and help new companies and projects launch.
So whether you know you're building an app that's gonna like let you um buy and sell crypto in you know Nigeria or your new stablecoin protocol.
We can sort of provide your custody, your validating, your market liquidity, um, treasury management, sort of a full stop shop on launching a new crypto company or project.
What did you guys start as?
What was blockchain.com originally?
Well, originally we were a data and analytics website.
So, and by the way, we still have like still like 30 million people that visit us for that every month, which is like basically like looking at our website to be like, what's the price of Bitcoin?
Did this transaction happen?
You know, did this Ethereum, like, yeah, so Block Explorer and analytics site.
That's hilarious.
Right.
Well, good for you, man.
You've got that incumbent traffic from from years and years ago that still use you.
And I mean, it's a great name, obviously.
You jumped on it at the right time, uh, Peter.
Name works.
Yeah, it works.
Yeah.
Very simple and it's good.
Well, Peter, um, great to chat with you, man.
Thank you for all your insight.
Uh, and and and I hope you're right.
I hope, I hope we have bottomed uh and that that crypto or that AI implosion doesn't mess up our crypto anytime soon.
Let's see.
I mean, it's certainly more entertaining to think about than joining everybody else on X calling for uh 12 more months with a bear.
I do like the perspective that crypto will always choose the most painful scenario possible.
So I think that that's that's a good new lens uh for me and and I think a lot of our audience to look at things with is that whatever whatever the worst scenario would be for whatever the move is that you're doing or most painful, that is probably what will happen.
I love that.
I think that's why that's awesome.
Exactly.
All right, cheers, man.
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