# Kraken Bitcoin Vault Launch Signals Institutional Crypto Convergence

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-05-27

## Transcript

The legacy exchanges, DAOs, protocols cannot be the only organizations in the space.
If we want this to be the future of global finance, it has to be everyone.
we are all holders here.
Many of us are in it from the long run, especially when it comes to Bitcoin.
But there's so much more you can actually do with your coins while you're holding them than just wait.
Today, we'll talk about one of the best passive methods for making money in crypto with John Zettler, Director of Product at Kraken.
Today's episode is brought to you by Cape, the privacy-first mobile carrier, Nexo, Earn Interest, Borrow and Trade Crypto, and CalShea, where your takes finally pay out.
John, welcome to the show, man.
Hey, great to be here.
Thanks for having me, LG.
Okay, let's give it's your first appearance on the show.
And I always love having people that are building product, not hardcore founders that are just like super founder people, but people that are like driven by like, I want to just iterate and make a lot of new things.
And if we look kind of at your history, the last 10 years of crypto, that is exactly you.
John.
We rarely do this, but I want to hear a little bit about you, man.
Tell us about, for you, the last six, seven, eight years in the space, especially your experience at Coinbase and before that, and what brought you to Kraken.
For sure.
Well, I've had the pleasure of working at Kraken for the last year.
I came in to lead all things earned, so that is staking, stablecoin, DeFi, opt-in rewards, anywhere where customers are earning interest on assets at rest.
And since more recently, I've taken on our trading as a service area too, as we're expanding towards building payward services, our third party crypto as a service platform too.
What a great journey it's been.
Really enjoying the pace and the excitement here.
But as you mentioned, I've had a career in crypto before and I spent about five and a half years before that at Coinbase.
doing some similar things.
I was involved in the founding of CBE.
I ran the staking business over there.
I then was doing some very similar stuff with Vault, with the Morpho integration and their DeFi Lend product.
Before that, twice a founder in the crypto space, a early combined crypto and stock trading platform, and then one of the first art NFT marketplaces, Rare Art.
And even before that, in a prior life, I was, if you can believe it, a TradFi guy.
So I started in investment banking, worked at a hedge fund for a bit.
But yeah, once I found crypto, it was down the rabbit hole and never looking back.
It was kind of the perfect fit for me, tech and finance.
I couldn't imagine anything more fun.
And culture as well, because you're in NFTs, right?
So there's a little bit of that when you started.
I want to know, John, for somebody like you then who clearly has been pilled to crypto a few times, when you wake up in the morning or when you log in, what is the first thing you want to know?
Are you like a price guy?
Are you a flows guy?
Are you looking at your product team?
Is that what you're focused on?
Yeah, I would say, look, I'd be lying to you if I didn't say I checked the prices.
You know, I think just as guilty as anyone on that one.
But in reality, you know, building products for to unlock crypto for the next 1 billion users on planet Earth is like really what gets me excited.
And this is just like ultimately revolutionary technology.
Right.
And we can sometimes forget that from the day to day and so forth.
But.
What we are building here has the opportunity and perhaps the inevitability to change the way that finance assets and value all work between humans.
At the end of the day, money, value, assets are just information systems.
They're just, you know, ultimately a big ledger that moves around units of account of what people owe whom for what goods or services.
And it just doesn't make sense that it all shouldn't live in a...
internet native way for an internet native economy.
So I think what we're doing here really is, you know, it's a longer mission than maybe some of the short termists signed up for.
It's going to take another decade or two to get there to the point where everyone is using stable coins.
All of our agents are natively transacting in stable coins.
We're moving all of, you know, I find it so funny that people call them real world assets because they are just also.
bits on a screen, but stocks, bonds, credits, treasuries, all of these things are going to eventually move on chain because the industrial logic, it just makes sense to have a more globally liquid, lower cost solution that can scale.
So yeah, I'd say ultimately, the thing that really gets me up in the morning is the excitement that we're building the future and we're living on the frontier.
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I like that.
And I will say, listen, RWA is...
Yes, stocks and equities are blips on a screen, but listen, you've got, you've got, you came from the NFT world and I promise to people listening, they know he doesn't want to go down this rabbit hole.
We'll save a lot after the end.
But one of the other, one of the other bull markets happening right now is in Pokemon cards and TCG.
And that's, that, that is definitely, there's a huge RWA play happening there.
And that, that, that has been an interesting kind of foreground for that as well.
But let's kind of come back around to, to, you know, our dear crypto space and our dear tokens.
John, for you, somebody who has been through a few different cycles at this point, and you've built product at a few different levels, what to you, especially in the last couple of years, let's say dating back to, let's go four years ago, fair market hits, FTX collapse, and then you have this kind of resurgence of a bull market, but that never really hit this blow off top.
What has surprised you the most in terms of either what's changed or what has emerged as narratives or trends in the space?
For sure.
Well, one thing I always think too is that the bull market is here.
It's just not evenly distributed, so to speak.
ETH did not get much of a bull market this past cycle.
But I think you could argue what has happened in Solana and Hyperliquid as being extraordinary, particularly over the last four-year cycle.
But beyond just the prices and the activity of new chains, the other thing that really strikes me is that the fundamentals of the industry seem better than ever.
Like stablecoin volume and total stablecoin market cap is growing tremendously.
We have this broad-based acceptance of crypto in the US administration and regulatory apparatus.
Genius Act passed.
Clarity Act looks like it's going to pass.
And these things are going to enshrine our ability to innovate and do business and create new solutions.
for years and decades to come in a way that like a deceitful nefarious regulator like our past sec chairman could never be able to undo Furthermore, you have more assets coming on chain.
You have these big, you know, the institutions are coming narrative, which we've been, I remember people talking about this since like 2018 is actually here.
I mean, I am on the front lines of it.
They're, they're reaching out to me.
You've got these bankers using telegram, you know, pinging us trying to set up there, which I just never, never, it wasn't allowed back in my day.
But what you see is like it's coming.
It's really happening.
And reflecting maybe a little bit on where we are now and what's happening is, yes, I mean, I often think that the prices and the fundamental value and traction of the fundamentals, like they're two totally separate things.
Let's just completely separate them for a sec, put prices down.
On the fundamentals, the institutional interest is rabid right now.
Where we're seeing a ton of it is on the vault space.
One thing we're really excited to talk about today, Kraken has a big launch that's going live by the time this is out, which we can talk about.
And furthermore, that we're also seeing all sorts of institutions, TradFi institutions, fintechs, neobanks, and so forth.
also wanting to incorporate crypto in their apps this whole crypto as a service category um we at cracking yoke umbrella company payward inc um have launched a payword services division which is specifically built for the b2b2c use case and the amount of knocks on our door right now is more than we can handle.
We're hiring aggressively.
We're open to everyone.
If you're a business out there who is looking to integrate crypto in one way or another, please reach out to me or the team and we'd love to talk to you.
But the institutions are really coming.
And I think that is a really good sign of things to come because the legacy exchanges, DAOs, protocols cannot be the only organizations.
in the space if we want this to be the future of global finance it has to be everyone and so we need to sometimes take off our cypherpunk you know history hats and say oh we we don't like the institutions like that bitcoin maxi historical aversion to institutions it's not going to scale it's not going to work we need to appreciate the fact that what we're building is open permissionless infrastructure and part of those participants who are going to use that open permissionless infrastructure are also the institutions who have millions and millions of customers and trillions of dollars of assets already.
Do you feel, John, that the, I guess, like Cypherpunk, from that all the way to NFTs and meme coins and the general, I don't even know how we classify that anymore, the degenerate part of the space, you know, which is- Sure.
despite even for the most sophisticated player in crypto, they still acknowledge and often have like a soft spot for the memes and the silliness and obviously not for the scams and the rug pulls.
But there's a huge acknowledgement that it's like, listen, that is still a huge part of it.
Things like Dogecoin and Pepe, it's like those are still top, you know, Dogecoin is still like a top 10 coin or whatever.
Is that, does that hold the space back?
What a great question.
Look, I think that could it deter some very stiff corporate types?
from participating yes that's possible and frankly i think maybe that was more the case four to eight years ago through past cycles but like you know taking on putting on my optimistic hat here what i think what we're seeing is it's not always so much like a crypto thing it's an internet thing right like Memes aren't really something that we came up with.
It's just we're all internet native and using this internet native currency.
And so it almost just makes sense that like Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, all of the different dApps and DeFi and everything else which propagated through the internet needs to live off of and ride on the back of internet culture.
Could it hold back some?
Yes, I think it could.
But really, I would say that more likely than not, it's just the direction of travel for everything in society.
all the whole world is kind of coming online.
Like the refragmentation, there's an old Paul Graham essay about this too, that like, you know, back in the day, way back in the day, there were just a small number of networks and then, you know, everything frayed with the internet.
But almost what I think we're seeing is like with X, with Twitter, you know, everything is sort of reconverging sort of towards one globally online community.
You can be too online or you can be too offline, right?
As some say.
The online community is just that.
So maybe another way to say it is, sure, it might stop some institutions from jumping in headfirst, but what it will do is it will bring hundreds of millions of more everyday average humans involved who actually just like the culture and this is how they want to interact and communicate in a less formal way.
And then the institutions will eventually be brought on board anyway, because the scale and scope is too large and the volumes are too big.
And this is where the future is moving.
I like that's a good answer.
That's a good answer.
And that's a necessary, a slightly necessary evil, but perhaps that functions as some form of top of funnel marketing.
for the whole space, for better or for worse, but still brings a lot of attention in a way that it brings attention to the internet, like you're saying.
It's just kind of permeating that internet culture and creating a market for things that didn't have markets before.
And you've seen a lot of converts too, right?
Like Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink.
These guys used to hate crypto and think it was just a bunch of jokesters, but look who's building on crypto rails now.
Yeah, absolutely.
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Let's talk about your product.
Let's talk about what you guys have coming out today.
So I'll kind of announce it, but then I want you, John, to walk us through it.
So basically, you guys have launched, Crockin is launching a Bitcoin vault that enables Bitcoin or holders to get Bitcoin-denominated rewards while still maintaining price exposure, meaning that I can come onto Crockin and...
stake my Bitcoin?
Am I staking it?
And I'm getting like a couple of percentage back, right?
Which is awesome because there's no yield on Bitcoin otherwise.
It's just an asset you just hold.
Tell me more about it, John.
Totally.
Well, this has been the white whale, right?
That everyone's been chasing for so long as how do I get yield on my Bitcoin?
i'll start by just talking a little bit about how it works and we can talk about vaults in general um and then you know happy to dive into like how we got here and where we're going but um how it works in principle is a user has bitcoin on kraken we then when they go through the interface to actually allocate it into what we call the Bitcoin vault.
What's happening is it's being wrapped into KBTC, which is Kraken Bitcoin.
It's redeemable for Bitcoin at Kraken.
It's an ERC-20 token.
That then moves through an embedded self-custodial wallet that the user has full control over that then gets deposited into a vault.
And this is a vault that is with our partner Veda.
They create these vaults and administer them.
And then the strategy is managed by Centora.
Centora is one of the risk managers out there.
There's a list of these who do risk curation and so forth for vault management.
And they then run the strategy that is yielding approximately 2% on Bitcoin.
So it's really exciting because, yeah, we've had staking.
We've had stablecoin rewards, but we really haven't had any meaningful amount of Bitcoin yield.
There was a push and an attempt in the space over the last three to four years of applying the eigenlayer restaking model that shared economic security via Bitcoin.
There are some great protocols out there who were driving this.
One that comes to top line is Babylon.
But what we've also seen is that those yields have decayed over time.
And there have been just in general, less demand for the AVS side of the market that was kind of powering the yield.
So I think that maybe comes to the next question of where does the yield come from?
And so I'll start by explaining kind of easy mode.
which is the USDC vaults, a product we've had in market for about four months, and which are a little bit more standard.
And then we'll talk about how the Bitcoin vault product works.
So USDC vaults and maybe vaults in general, generally the simple version is that the yield is coming from borrowers, on-chain borrowers, on the other side of a borrow-lend protocol.
They're posting collateral.
They're borrowing something like USDC.
against it.
Then they choose to use with that USDC whatever they want.
Sometimes they are going levered long and they're buying more assets.
Sometimes they're taking a personal loan, whatever they want to do.
But if you think of what I think of in my mind as the DeFi pyramid, you have liquidity at the bottom level, you have then the borrowers in the middle level, and then you have the yield, the vaults, the suppliers of the capital up top.
That's how the USDC vault works.
That is a product that now has, between our three vaults, $250 million in TVL, which is pretty incredible.
And that product has been live for four months, since January.
And what makes this product, the Bitcoin vault, new and interesting is, well, one, it's new.
We don't know of any competitors, any major competitors out here who have something like this.
So if you're over at another exchange, bring it over to Kraken and come get 2% of your Bitcoin.
But how it works is, again, this is a strategy that is run by the risk manager on the vault, Centora.
And their approach is to use the KBTC as collateral, borrow stable coins against it, yield farm with those stable coins, and then earn a spread of the yield over the borrow cost, convert all that yield back to Bitcoin.
and pass it to the customers.
So there is risk involved, let's be clear, but this is the type of risk that is on-chain, it is over-collateralized, it is transparent, which is something That in the 2021, 2022 cycle, when there were a number of blowups of people promising Bitcoin staking and other kind of fluffy versions of how, where is the yield coming from?
Most of them were just running kind of independent prop desks.
And I'm thinking of Celsius and BlockFi and all of those ones who ultimately blew up.
Nobody knew.
Where the actual yield was coming from, nobody could see the Bitcoin.
They couldn't see the transactions.
Nothing was necessarily over collateralized.
And that system didn't work.
But through that crash of 2022, DeFi did work.
And so this is a version of truly on-chain, transparent, visible DeFi architecture powering yield on Bitcoin, which is just why we're so excited about this and why I think it's the next of a big wave.
Yeah.
That's, oh man, that sounds really good.
How come no one's been doing this?
How come no one's done it this way, John?
Well, it's complex, first and foremost.
And we've seen a lot of maturity into the vault space over maybe the last two to three years.
There have been a couple of integrations of DeFi vaults into centralized exchanges.
And of course, remember, centralized exchanges are going to be the vanguard of like...
big institutions, you know, interacting and building into DeFi.
So, you know, we've seen some of the vault products before.
Coinbase has an offering.
OKEx has an offering.
I believe Binance has something along this too.
And so vaults are just starting to find their footing in centralized exchanges.
But furthermore, even before you had the embedded wallet infrastructure, so we rely on Privy.
They've been a great partner to us.
Privy powers many different fintech apps.
But ultimately, the important thing about Privy is that it is an embedded wallet that is self-custodial, meaning you, the user.
If at any time you get unsatisfied with Kraken, you can say, all right, I'm ejecting my keys.
I bid you farewell.
I'm taking my assets and private keys and leaving.
And you can go port it into your MetaMask or self-custodial wallet and walk away.
That is totally within your life.
But then you lose the yield, right?
Obviously, once you're not.
Once you're not in the crock anymore, then you lose the yield naturally.
These are permissionless on-chain vaults.
So you're actually still earning, but it's going to be completely separate, right?
So like, then you've got the inconvenience of having to do this all on-chain by yourself.
Yeah, which is not, yeah.
I don't feel like there's that many people listening to the show who have a huge appetite for that.
Especially with a big holding that they want to earn a little bit extra cash on.
I don't know if that's where they want to go with it.
Okay.
So yeah, I would summarize it in that way that like it took a number of pieces to be here, plus a less aggressive and antagonistic United States regulator.
And we now have the right perfect storm of a good environment, the right infrastructure and technology, and a maturity in DeFi that allows for these pieces.
That's really cool.
Do you, I mean, this is an obvious question, but do you expect?
your competitors to copy you?
Is this something where they're going to be like, well, they're going to listen to the show and be like, all right, how did John do this?
And they're going to go do the same thing.
Well, you know, here's the thing is that these are publicly verifiable transactions.
You can watch your assets flow on chain.
All of it really is transparent at the end of the day.
And honestly, that's what we owe to our users first and foremost.
So regardless of what our customers do, we're going to, our competitors do.
We're going to beat them anyway because we just move faster and execute at a much faster pace doing what our customers want and being client-centric.
That is one of the cracking missions and one of our cultural values is to be client-centric.
So I'm not so worried about them.
What I'm worried about is creating just a great product for customers that they can audit for themselves, trust but verify, and ultimately just...
delivers them what they want.
And like, this is what customers want.
People love Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is gold.
It's the first asset.
It's the most pristine asset.
And the biggest thing missing for the history of Bitcoin is you couldn't earn a yield that you felt comfortable with.
And we've solved that.
And I hope that customers adopt it in droves.
Do you, who, who is your expected client for something like this?
Like, is this, do you feel like this is going to be more of an institutional product or retail product somewhere in between?
Well, you know, I would say that, first off, it's available in all three of our primary individual interfaces.
So Kraken, the consumer app, we call it internally, but that's kraken.com or the Kraken Purple app, Kraken Pro, and Kraken, our Neobank app.
It's available in all three of them.
And it's globally available, too.
There's a couple of geos that can't get access right now.
We're working to unblock those.
But by and large, almost all countries, all customers have access to this.
Now, those are individuals.
But what we've seen with our USDC vaults product is we've had institutions who've been setting up pro accounts to even just find ways to get access into this product or institutions that have been deploying directly into the vaults on chain.
We very much are excited to.
incorporate these into our qualified custody, our Kraken Prime, our more institutional facing products.
More to come there.
And I don't want to spoil anyone's surprises.
Oh, come on, man.
That was my next question is like, what's next for Kraken after this?
Like, well, I guess maybe, you know, instead you can't give a specifics, John, and I feel like you've already kind of answered this in a lot of different ways.
in the show, but what is your, you know, clearly you're building for the masses.
You're somebody who's very passionate about scaling crypto and making it something that everybody can use.
What is your, I guess, like philosophy when you're building products?
Like what do you preach to your team when they are making decisions?
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, the number one thing always is do what is best for the customer.
Like, you know, know that customer should be like something that is just like pinned to everyone's computer monitor or something, because at the end of the day, it's why we're here right like like if you don't get joy in bringing something new that helps solve a problem or improves a customer's life on the other side of your application and you're just in the wrong industry like that is the thing that wakes that i like that i preach to my team and um it's what gets me really excited and should always come first and then downstream of that right you have to incorporate all the other pieces that get involved because it's not just about a sexy headline of 2% on Bitcoin and a slick user experience, but there's tons and tons and tons of work that needs to go in it from all the other stakeholder groups, from all the other participants involved to make sure that this thing works.
It takes a village to raise a product, maybe is a good way of putting it, because not only are there so many internal teams, but we have worked closely with the Vault provider, Veda.
We've worked with the Invented Wallet provider, Privy.
We've worked with the strategy provider, Risk Manager, Centora, a number of different partners as well who've all made this thing work.
And again, it's a team effort.
And so it really takes...
Number one, a big focus on the customer, but then a just relentless pursuit to strive for the highest possible bar and pushing constantly to improve the product, test it, use it, make sure it's going to surpass every expectation from your customer.
John, this is a common kind of narrative, let's say, is that the UI of crypto is horrific.
And I don't mean that about crocking.
I mean, just in general, you know what I mean?
That it's like somehow it for a lot of things, there's still so many parts of crypto that are just so hard to use.
Right.
And obviously you're on the other side of that because, you know, it's just like you guys are centralized exchange.
You can bring your money in, buy Bitcoin.
Now you can get yield on it.
It's very simple.
Right.
It's great.
And you guys are doing a great job that.
But how, you know, as somebody who designs product and building product here for a long time, where are we in like the ballgame of crypto?
uh in terms of the the the uh customer experience the consumer experience like how how much further do we have to go we're still like in the first inning and we started the game because that is very much a common thing and especially you know you and i both coming from the nft side man it's like you know i see honestly when i think nfts we just passed the four-year anniversary of when we had to pay 200 million dollars of gas to admit apes board apes land like it just did brutal like you gotta set the gas in your meta mask like just the worst money burn ever, terrible experience.
Where are we?
You know, I think this is a good one because I have long thought that this conversation around dApps and like decentralized apps that we're all using was actually pretty misguided.
That like these things for the most part probably shouldn't be standalone apps, but more like the APIs and more infrastructure.
Because when I think of what makes the Aave protocol or Morpho protocol exceptional, I'm not really thinking, yeah, I visualize them as the web apps that I go and use them, but that's not really the genius or the beauty behind it.
It's really ultimately the code, the backend system, the logic that has been.
enshrined and battle-tested over the years to facilitate tens of billions of dollars of volumes.
And so what I think is that there's always going to be that sort of niche hobbyist DGEN user who is using whatever tool or whatever first-party web app.
to access, maybe provided by that protocol or that foundation to use their app.
I think that will continue to exist, but it will be the narrow point of the wedge.
It'll be like the, if you think of like the crossing the chasm mechanism, it's like the model, it's like the innovators and the very early adopters who are on the cutting edge of the sphere, where I think really most global users, individuals in the world are going to get access to crypto is as infrastructure behind the scenes that they barely see or feel or even know is crypto.
And we see some of this, right?
It's like, I do think that this is where stable coins are going to go over time.
It's like when you're doing a transfer from one institution to another, like, please, God, can we stop using wires?
Like as soon as possible, I would like to not have to ever do another wire.
And if instead it's just, oh, move it from this account to this account, you confirm, you tap your YubiKey and then, which I guess we still passkey maybe is going to be a more accessible technology, but abstracting all of the crypto nuance, the on-chain interactions into background processes that again, a user can trust, but verify we're actually done.
That, I think, is where we're going to go.
And it leans into the actual user trends that we see, which is that users want to use apps that are as slick and performant as their social media apps on their phone or their email client on, you know, email web client on their web browser.
That's what I think users' expectations really are.
And we need to meet users where they are if we want to bring on a billion next customers and next users into the global crypto economy.
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John, my last question for you is of all the...
trends right now in crypto, and I don't mean the DGN trends, okay?
That's not what I mean.
I mean, the actual, the real, the big boy trends.
What do you, what in your opinion is the most important and or has the most legs out of all the stuff that's happening in the space right now?
Yeah, I would say, you know, so I think it would be a bit of a cop out to just say like institutional adoption, because that's too big and too broad.
But here's what I think is going to happen is I think almost every type, of TradFi asset is going to come on chain as some form of representation of that asset.
So Kraken is a big proponent and big player in X stocks.
These are wrapped equities where you can trade Tesla, Nvidia.
maybe other big coming soon IPOs also, like his on-chain wrapped versions.
And that's equities.
But equities is actually a small portion of total global TradFi assets.
There's actually a lot more credit in the world than there is equity.
And so treasuries, international sovereigns, corporate debt, private debt, things like receivables, all of these assets.
are going to come on chain as wrapped diversions one way or another.
And as that happens, we're then going to have the assets that TradFi wants to interact and trade and use.
And all of the infrastructure that we've built is then has the opportunity to grow by 100X, 1000X, 10,000X as all those trillions of dollars of value come on chain.
So it helps everyone.
It helps like the DEXs and the trading, it helps the layer one chains, it helps the DeFi protocols, all of it when we're bringing all these assets on chain.
And I think that's the big thing because ultimately what is a stable coin other than a real world asset, a wrapped US dollar?
And so that found product market fit pretty quickly.
Equities is still getting there.
And I think debt will too.
And then we're just going to see an explosion of everything else, of all the infrastructure that we already have, but it scales thousand X the size when we bring in all of the TradFi assets that the global world already wants to hold and trade.
That's okay.
Well, I mean, that's definitely a way to put it that we've heard a few times on the show.
And it's something that...
You know, and you can't speak to this, but we're trying to figure out on the show how to capitalize on that.
That's what we want to know.
We're like, all right, this is it.
You're totally right.
How do we make the most of that?
Some of the answer on our show often and in our Milk Road Pro Discord as well.
Okay, John, we have fulfilled the allotted time that we needed before we could talk about things like NFTs.
So now that we've now we've done all that stuff.
One question I get all the time as a former NFT.
Yes, you've got your squiggles there.
One question I get all the time is a former podcast, NFT podcaster is, and if you guys want to know more about the Kraken stuff, we'll put all the links below.
We'll put the announcement below and you guys go check that out.
So thank you, John, for kind of walking us through that.
One question I get all the time, John, and we see all the time in the timeline, can NFTs ever come back?
And it's a very loaded question.
What's your answer?
Yeah, I love this one because first I'll like to disclose my bias, right?
That like, I love.
and kind of like the traditional when people are talking about nfts like the collectible versions i love it um i love it i have a small but growing collection of some pieces that i find really interesting and exciting i love my crypto punk i think you'd have to pry it from my cold dead ledger hands if you ever wanted to take that thing from me um but the look i mean nft is just stepping back right nfts are just a tool An ERC-721 is a standard.
It is a type of unit of account that can do anything that is a non-fungible one-of-one unique representation.
Just as much as it can be a collectible of a one in 10,000 CryptoPunks, it also serves as my ownership record of my johnzettler.eth.
ENS name.
It also, when I am exiting out or unstaking out of Lido, it also represents my spot in line.
It's my redemption ticket that comes due and I can redeem it and get my ETH back.
So it's a tool, right?
It's a tool.
It's a unit of account.
It's something that goes far beyond just the collectible or the one of 10,000 PFP mania that was what I think a lot of people know NFTs as.
So putting that aside, I do think the technology is here to stay.
There's going to be a lot more use cases.
But now to maybe speak even more specifically about the stuff that I think people think about when they talk about NFTs, what I would say is, look, I often, in my mind, think of that moment, that summer 2021 NFT summer, as sort of like the four-year cycle of the ICO boom.
where everyone was trading a hope and a dream and trading the opportunity for 100x, they just went from being like these ideas in white papers to then being these like, this is the collection, this is the future of art and culture, and everything's going to happen here.
And like, I must own all these things.
So, you know, so many people were trading these things, not really for the merits, the value thing, like not really for intrinsic value of them, but more speculative pieces.
I think most of that behavior, is like 99% of it is gone forever and good, like good.
Like as with most 99% of the ICOs, like probably to zero.
And that's probably a good thing.
I never want to see another common hood promotion in my Instagram feed ever again.
But, you know, there will be gold standards.
Like, you know, some excellent projects out of 2017 survived and became.
great platforms there will be certain of these collectible nfts personally i would say like i think crypto punks is here to stay it was the original one in ten thousand project you know matt and john were real pioneers in the space and every one of those one in ten thousand pfp projects was basically a derivative of the crypto punk so like that to me is gold standard and i think that's going to be here forever Squiggles was like the very first one.
Eric Snowfro was like the very first of the generative art blocks movement.
And it will always be the first of that movement.
So I think that one has a real intrinsic value to people who care about like the history of art and culture on chain.
Again, there's going to be tons of other ones that probably don't make that list, that don't survive the test of time.
And I'm no expert.
I'm just a guy who likes to collect interesting looking pixels.
So I'll buy the ones that speak to me and I like those.
And I think there'll be some that really last and will turn out to be much more valuable than where they are today.
But that doesn't mean the whole space will come back.
There is a whole other podcast hidden here.
in this, in what I would want to say to you and ask you.
We'll have to run it back.
We'll have to run it back.
When the NFTs start showing signs of life again, you've got to invest.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, well, twice a year, they're good for a pump.
I found like twice a year, it was like, NFTs are back.
And then we forget.
Up 30% in a day, and then it's over.
Anyways, John.
Pleasure to chat, man.
Thank you for all the info and congrats on the success.
Congrats to you guys and the rest of the team at Kraken on the launch.
That's very exciting.
And again, if you want to check that out, we'll put the link below and, you know, go get some money for your Bitcoin, man, while we're holding for whatever price target you have.
People talk price targets all the time on the show.
If you're holding for any of those, you might as well collect a little extra 2% on the way.
So, John, pleasure to have you on, man, and best of luck.
Thanks so much, LG.
Really appreciate it.
And to everyone out there, please, we would love to get the feedback too.
So bring your Bitcoin onto Kraken, get that 2% yield, and then tell us.
Tell us what could be better.
Tell us what other assets you'd like to earn on.
Vaults is just a, this is the beginning of a tidal wave.
There's many more assets coming.
There's many more risk managers coming.
I think we're at the beginning, like in any one, of a big trend.
So please, would love the feedback.
Hopefully you get a chance to use it globally available as of today.
So give it a shot.
Tell us what you think.
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