Bitcoin yield without selling: Kraken's Bitcoin vault

Transcript

The legacy exchanges, Dows, 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. What's up everybody? It's LGD here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that has been holding for so long that we actually forgot where we put the private keys and really hope we won't have to dumpster dive for them anytime soon. Today is May 27th, 2026. Recording on May 26th. Listen, 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 just wait. Today, we'll talk about one of the best passive

methods for making money in crypto with John Zetler, 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 Kelshi, 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 of the last 10 years in crypto, that is exactly you. Um, John, we rarely do this, but I want to hear a little bit about you, man. like tell us about for

you the last like six, seven, eight years in the space uh especially your experience at Coinbase and before that and and kind of what brought you to Kraken. >> For sure. Well, I've been I've had the pleasure of uh working at Kraken for the last year. Came in to lead all things earn. So that is staking, stable coin, 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 uh area too as we're expanding towards building Payword services, our thirdparty crypto as a service platform too. What a great journey it's been. Um really enjoying the pace and the excitement here. But as you mentioned, you know, I've had a career in crypto before and I spent about 5 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 vaults um 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 could believe it, uh a Tradfi guy. So, 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. U I want to know John, what's for somebody like you then who who you know clearly has been pled to crypto a few times. What is when you wake up when you wake up in the morning or when you log in like what is the first thing you want to know? Are you like a 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 check the prices. Uh you know I think just as guilty as anyone on that one. Um, 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, they're just information systems. They're just, you know, a a 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 to it's I find it so funny that people call them real world assets because they are just also bits on a screen but you know stocks bonds credits treasuries all of these things are going to eventually move on chain because the industrial logic like it just makes sense to have a

more globally liquid lowerc cost solution that you know can scale. So yeah, I'd say ultimately like 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. >> Guys, listen, we are at a very crucial point in time right now. AI stocks have ripped. They're going to keep ripping. Our analysts on the AI side are up like literally 100% or more on quite a few calls. And crypto is about to boom again. Or at least it feels that way. If you want all the insight on what we're buying, what our analysts are doing, what's on their watch list, all of that is in Milk Road Pro. So, join at the link below.

>> I like that. And I will say, listen, RWA, 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 people listening, they know I don't want to go down this rabbit hole. We'll save a lot of for the end. But one of the other one of the 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. Um and that that that has been an interesting kind of uh foreground for that as well. But um let's kind of come back around to to um you know our 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 know you've you've built product in a

few different levels. what to you, you know, especially in the last couple years, let's say, dating back to, let's go four years ago, bare market hits, FTX collapse, and then you have this kind of resurgence of a bull market, but that never really hit this blowoff top. What did what has surprised you the most in terms of like either what's changed or what has emerged as narratives or trends in the space? >> For sure. Well, I one thing I always think too is that like the bull market is here. It's just not evenly distributed, >> so to speak. like ETH did not get much of a bull market this past cycle, but I think you could argue what has happened in Salana and and Hyperliquid as being extraordinary um particularly over the last kind of four-ear 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 stable coin volume and total stable coin market cap is growing tremendously. We have this broadbased uh 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 you more assets coming on chain. You have these big uh 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, which I just never never they wasn't allowed back in my day. Um, but um, you know, what you see is like it's coming. It's really happening. M and you know reflecting maybe a little bit on where we are now and what's happening is um 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 ravid 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, tradi institutions, fintexs, neo banks and so forth also wanting to incorporate crypto in their apps. This whole crypto as a service category um we at Kraken Yel umbrella company Payword Inc. um have launched a payword services

division which is specifically built for the B2B TTOC 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. the institutions are really coming and I think that is a really good sign of things to come because the legacy exchanges Dows 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 cippher punk, you know, history hats and say, you know, 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 do you feel John that the I guess like cipher cyber punk from that all the way to NFTTS and memecoins and the general I don't even know how we

classify that anymore. the degenerate part of the space, you know, which is >> despite even for the most sophisticated player in crypto, they still acknowledge and often have like a soft spot for the memes and the the the silliness and obviously not for the scams and the rug polls, 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 4 to 8 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, Salana, all of the different DAPs and DeFi and everything else which propagated through the internet needs to live off of and, you

know, ride on the back of internet culture. So, you know, I 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. like all the whole world is kind of coming online like the um uh re ref reffragmentation 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 uh as as some say and the online

community is just that. So maybe another way to say it is sure it might stop some institutions from jumping in head first, 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 s the scale and scope is too large and the volumes are too big and this is where the future's moving.

>> I like it. That's a good answer. That's a good answer. A ne a necessary a slightly necessary evil but perhaps that functions as as some form of uh topunnel marketing for the whole space uh for better or for worse but still brings a lot of attention in a way that that uh 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 see it a lot of converts too, right? Like Jamie Diamond, Larry Fank, like these guys used to hate crypto and think it was just a bunch of jokesters. But look who's building on crypto rails now.

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Plus, SIM swap protection that puts you in control of your number so no one, not even Cape, can hijack Cape. Use code milkroad at milkroad.com/cape for 33% off your first 6 months. Let's talk about your product. Let's talk about what you guys have coming out today. So, um, I'll kind of announce it, but then I want you, John, to walk us through it. Um, so, basically, you guys have launched, Krockenhead's launching a Bitcoin vault that enables Bitcoin or holders to get Bitcoin denominated rewards while still maintaining price exposure. Um, meaning that I can come onto Kroken and stake my Bitcoin. Am I staking it? And and I'm getting like a couple percentage back, right? which is awesome because there's no there's no

there's no yield on Bitcoin otherwise. Uh 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 is how do I get yield on my Bitcoin >> and 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 um 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 um Bitcoin

at Kraken. It's an ERC20 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 uh that is with our partner Veta. They create these vaults and administer them and then the strategy is managed by Centur. Centura is one of the risk managers out there. There's a list of these who do, you know, 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 stable coin rewards, uh, 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 3 to four years of applying the iigen layer restaking model that shared economic security via Bitcoin. There's some great protocols out there who were driving this. One that comes top line is Babylon. Um, 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 you know I'll start by explaining kind of easy mode which is the USDC vaults a product we've had in market for about 4 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 the simple version is that the yield is coming from borrowers onchain borrowers on the other side of a borrow lend protocol. Mhm. >> They're posting collateral. They're borrowing something like USDC against it and 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 kind of of like what I think of in my mind is 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. So that's how the USDC vault uh works. That is, you know, a product that now has between our three vaults 250 million in TVL, which is pretty incredible. And that product has been live for 4 months since January.

>> And what makes this product, the Bitcoin Vault, new and interesting is, well, one, it's, you know, new. We don't know of any competitors, any major competitors out there who have something like this. So, uh, you know, if you're over at another exchange, bring it over to Kraken and come get 2% of your Bitcoin. But, um, how it works is, again, this is a strategy that is run by the risk manager on the vault, Centura. 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 onchain. 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 you know 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 overcolateralized and that system didn't work. But through that crash of 2022, DeFi did work. And so this is a version of truly onchain transparent, visible DeFi architecture powering yield on Bitcoin, which is just why we're so excited about this and why I think it's, you know, the next of a big wave. >> Yeah, that's Oh, man. That's that sounds really good. How come 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, you know, and 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 like centralized exchanges are going to be the vanguard of like big institutions you know interacting and and building into DeFi. Um so you know we've seen some of the vault products before. Coinbase has an offering. OKX 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. Um, Privy powers many different fintech apps. Um, 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 or self-custodial wallet and walk away. That's totally within.

>> But then you lose the yield, right? Obviously, once you're not once you're not in the Kraken anymore, then you lose the yield naturally. >> These are permissionless onchain bolts. So, you're actually still earning, but but it's going to be completely separate, right? So like then you got the inconvenience of having to do this all on chain by yourself and >> which is not Yeah. I don't feel like there's that many people listen to the show who have a huge appetite for that especially 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, cool. >> Sure. So yeah, I would summarize it in that way that like it took a number of pieces to be here. um 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. Do you expect your competitors to 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 and 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, you know, at a much faster pace doing what our customers want and being cliententric. like that is one of the Kraken missions and our one of our cultural values is to be client centric. Um, 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 adopted 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 uh first off, it's available in all three of our primary individual interfaces. So, uh, Kraken, um, the consumer app we call it internally, but that's Kraken.com or the Kraken Purple app, Kraken Pro, and Crack, our Neo Bank app. It's available in all three of them. And it's globally available, too. There's a couple 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, you know, um, uh, 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 um 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 I guess maybe you know instead you can't give us 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 thy 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 uh 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 pe uh participants involved to make sure that this thing works. Um it takes a village to raise a product maybe is a a good way of putting it because um not only are there so many internal teams but we have worked closely with the uh vault provider Veta, we've worked with the embedded wallet provider Privy,

we've worked with uh the strategy provider and risk manager Centur um a number of different uh partners as well who've all made this thing work. And again, it's just a 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 this is a common kind of narrative, let's say, is that the the UI of crypto is horrific.

And I don't mean that about Crockett. 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, just like you guys are central alliance exchange, you can bring your money in, buy Bitcoin, now you can get yield on it. It's very simple, right? That's that's great and you guys are doing a great job that. uh how you know as somebody who designs product and been building product here for a long time where are we in like the ball game 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 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 of gas to mint apes board apes land like it just a brutal like you got to set the gas in your metam 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 DAPs 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 DAPIs and more infrastructure because when I think of what makes the A protocol or Morpho product 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 gene genius or the beauty behind it. It's really ultimately the code, the back-end 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 firstparty 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 the innovators and the very early adopters who are on the cutting edge of the spear 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 is 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 and if instead it's just oh move it from this account to this account you confirm you you know tap your UB key and then which I guess we still pass key maybe is going to be a more accessible technology but abstracting all of the crypto nuance,

the onchain 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, you know, 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 customer, next users into the into the global crypto

economy. You're listening to the Milk Road Show, which means you've got takes, strong ones, I bet. But where do those takes actually go? Do you tweet them into the void, argue them in the group chat, or do you try to express them by buying a stock? The thing is, stocks move on like 50 other things at once. And that's where Kali comes in. It's a CFTC regulated prediction market where you bet directly on outcomes like Bitcoin hitting 100K, Fed rate cuts, GameStop buying eBay with a clean yes or no. We did a full deep dive on why prediction markets might be crypto's third product market fit moment. Check the show notes for the full report and claim $10 free when you trade $10 on Koshi. John, my last question for you is of all the trends right now in crypto, and I don't mean the DGen trends, okay?

That's not what I mean. I mean the actual the real the the the big boy trends. um what what what do you what in your opinion is the most important andor 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 I think it would be a bit of a copout 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 shred 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 as onchain wrapped versions and that's equities. But like equities is actually a small portion of total global trady 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 Trady

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,000x 10,000xes. All those trillions of dollars of value come on chain. So it helps everyone. It helps like the dexes and the trading. It helps the layer 1 chains. It helps the DeFi protocols. All of it when we're bringing all these assets onchain. I think that's the big thing because like ultimately what is a stable coin other than a real world asset a wrapped US dollar and so you know 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 thousandx the size when we bring in all of the trady assets that the global world already wants to hold and trade. >> That's okay. Well, I mean, that's definitely that's definitely a way to put it that we've heard a few times on the show and it's something that 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 you're totally right. How do we how do we make the most of that?"

Something we answer on our show often and and in our our Milk Road Pro Discord as well. Okay, John, we we have fulfilled the aotted time that we needed before we could talk about things like NFTs. So, now that we've now we've done all that stuff, u one one question I get all the time as a former NFT, yes, you've got your your uh squiggles there, >> one question I get all the time as a former podcast NFT podcaster is, and and if you guys want to know more about the Kraken stuff, um we'll put the all the links below. We'll we'll put the announcement below and you guys go check that out. Uh so, thank you, John, for for kind of walking us through that. One question I get all the time time, John, and we see all the time in the timeline.

Can NFTTS 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 NFTs 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, NFTs, just stepping back, like NFTs are just a tool, right? Like an ERC 721 is a standard. It is a is a type of unit of account that can do anything that is a nonfgeable oneofone you unique representation. So just as much as it can be a collectible of like a 1 in 10,000 crypto punks, it also serves as my uh ownership record of my John Zetler ENS name. It also when I am, you know, 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, get my ETH back. So it's a tool, right? It's a it's a tool. It's a unit of account. 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 NFTTS as. >> So putting that aside, I do think like you know 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 like look like I often in my mind think of that moment that summer 2021 NFT summer as sort of like the four-year cycle of the like ICO boom where everyone was trading a hope and a dream and an like

trading the opportunity for 100x. They just went from being like these ideas and white papers to then being these like this is the collection. This is the future of art and culture and everything's gonna hear 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 think act 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 Robin Hood uh promotion in my Instagram feed ever

again. Um 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 NFTts. Personally I would say like I think Crypto Punks is here to stay. It was the original 1 in 10,000 project. you know, Matt and John were real pioneers in the space and every one of those 1 in 10,000 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, you know, Snowfro was like the very first of the generative art blocks movement and it

will always be the first of that movement. Um, so I think that one has like real intrinsic value to people who care about like the history of art and 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 the test of time. And I'm no expert, you know, I'm just, you know, guy who likes to collect interesting looking pixels. So, you know, I'll buy the ones that speak to me and I like those and I think there'll be some that really last and and will like 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 got >> Yeah, that's it. Yeah, exact. Yeah. Well, twice a year they're good for a pump. I found like twice a year was like NFTs are back and then then and then we forget, you know, up 30% in a day and then then it's over. Um anyways, John, pleasure to chat, man. Thank you for all the info and and congrats on the success. Congrats to you guys and and the rest of the team at Kroken on on the launch. Uh that's very exciting. And again, if people want to check that out, um, we'll put the link below and, um,

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, uh, John, pleasure to have you on, man. Uh, and best of luck. >> Thanks so much, LG. Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, you know, please, we would love to get the feedback, too. So, bring your Bitcoin onto Kraken, get that 2% yield, and then tell us, you know, 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 title wave. There's many more assets coming. There's many more risk managers coming. I think we're at the beginning like in inning

one of a big trend. So, please uh 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. >> Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like the top 1%. This show is for educational purposes only. Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.