Tether co-founder William Quigley on stablecoins, Bitcoin and what went wrong with NFTs

Transcript

It's being done as we speak like across across the global financial system. Uh blockchainbased technologies are getting adopted and are getting used. And what's kind of fascinating about it is Bitcoin pumped on news of a potential ceasefire in Iran. Is this the beginning of a new bull run for crypto and Bitcoin or just another bull trap to get us all suckered in before we go lower? Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that's here to remind you that the New York Times does not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. I'm your host, John Gillan.

Today is Thursday, April 9th. And today we are joined by William Quigley. William is a pioneering cryptocurrency entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Tether and as the co-founder of WAX, a purpose-built NFT and gaming blockchain. Will was an early investor in Coinbase, Kraken, and over 30 other major crypto projects. He's going to give us a ton of alpha today and insight about crypto and what's going on in the market. So, if that all sound good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Welcome to the Milk Road Show. Will Quigley, thank you so much for being here. >> Hey, thank you. >> Uh Will, I wanted to start with Bitcoin here. I think this is on a lot of people's minds right now. Bitcoin has been in a bare market, but it seems like

it's starting to build some positive momentum again. Do you think that the war ending and the Clarity Act passing is going to push Bitcoin back into a bull market, or do you think we've got a lot more bare market to work through before we see some positive action again? Well, I wish I could say one of those two because I think either of those would be fine. Uh I think the problem with Bitcoin is far deeper and that is that it has become attached to other global traded assets such that its movement now is kind of suppressed. Where it goes depends on where other globally traded assets go. And and I think how far it

goes and for how long that's sustained is um is going to be limited by all the things now that affect traditional finance. We had this wonderful period for whatever 10 plus years where Bitcoin was divorced from all that. But now that it moves in lock step uh any sustained rally doesn't happen because at some point uh you have actors coming in borrowing a lot uh shorting and uh driving the price at at at best it stops going up at worst it it it collapses.

what we saw just a few days ago after Trump's uh I guess negotiated peace or ceasefire for a few days or a week or so with the Iranians was a massive amount of of uh hedge funds other global investors who were covering their shorts. So they had to rush to the market and uh go long on things that they were short and that led to what's known as a short squeeze for a short period of time. Uh and Bitcoin is just part of those assets now that get thrown into that bucket.

And so I think what we've done is these uh the the quadrrenial Bitcoin cycle that we all got really used to and loved. Uh I think uh that probably now is more muted. It won't have the same effect and going forward uh where goes the rest of the financial markets. So we'll go Bitcoin. It it'll just be uh more attenuated than than a traditional, you know, stock. I I I would say think about Bitcoin right now the way you would think about a u a recently IPOed company where there's not a lot of float in the market for that stock and uh you

have a lot of things going on including the pending um release of the lockup where all the insiders are able to sell and uh you have people who don't really trust the company because it's recently public and Therefore, it hasn't withstood a full market cycle as a public company. You don't know if you can trust the management and so on. So, recently public companies tend to be the first things that get shot when the markets get skittish. And I would say Bitcoin uh unfortunately has been put in that bucket. We could all of course discuss how wait a minute, Bitcoin supposed to be this uh this uh asset that you rush to like gold in times of uncertainty. It is unrelated to all of

the global financial systems, but right now it's plugged into that and so it behaves in the same way other stuff does. Everything you're listening to today is also covered in our daily crypto newsletter and on Sundays we even recap the best parts of the entire week's worth podcast. So check it out at the link below. >> Do you think that this is a permanent change for Bitcoin? because I think you know Bitcoin has gone through a lot of iterations of of how the market has thought of it throughout its history. Um do you think it's permanently going to be part of this like coupled to this these broader macro moves or do you think that there's a new phase in the future where it could decouple again?

>> So the short answer is I do not know. Right. Bitcoin, I believe, is incredibly useful to a a large number of people, particularly people who want to own assets and don't want to worry about either the banks failing or being locked out of the banking system like many people are today in different parts of the world. Uh so I I think Bitcoin is resilient. It it it has a very good number of use cases. Having said that, a lot of the fantasies about Bitcoin that it was going to be replacing the payment systems and whatnot, that was never

going to happen. I never thought it was going to happen. Anyone who used it for payments knew very quickly it didn't work. Stable coins are much better for that. Having said that, uh I would say if we're going to think about Bitcoin doing like a 10xer in a given short cycle like it has done in the past, no, I I don't see that. If for no other reason than, you know, it's a it's a multi-t trillion dollar asset at this point. You can't 10x that very easily. >> Gotcha. Okay. So, let me ask you about the the what you're expecting for the rest of 2026 because a lot of people in crypto right now are trying to figure out is this going to be an extended bare market that that runs into 2027 or or longer. Uh or are we going to see the

market turn around and go to new all-time highs? If if you're expecting Bitcoin to sort of not follow the four-year cycle anymore, what are you predicting for the rest of 2026 from Bitcoin here? kind of appending on to what I had said earlier about Bitcoin is now tracing or tracking traditional financial markets. I think whatever your expectation is for let's say the US stock market or the the global equity markets what if that is where you think it's going Bitcoin will be tracking to that because at least for the last couple years that's what it's been doing. So um it will be more pronounced.

So if the markets jump 10%, Bitcoin might do double that. But if the markets retrench, Bitcoin will drop further. Uh for the time being anyway, that's where we are stuck. And if you then take a look one level below that and say, well, what about all the other tokens? Um historically, everything has moved in line with Bitcoin. they may have moved faster so or higher. So you know Ethereum generally increased about two to 3x what Bitcoin did for some period of time but also fell harder and then all the other smaller tokens underneath

that will have the same sort of response to Bitcoin. They'll move in lock step with it but uh they'll move in a greater way. Now, by the way, they shouldn't move in lock step with Bitcoin. Um, and I believe the reason they do is mainly because of various exchanges who immediately dump or short other tokens when Bitcoin is going down. I've got lots of reasons for thinking that. Uh, but, uh, the most basic is just everything moves mechanically.

It's bizarre how when Bitcoin drops, you just see all the other tokens drop uh in lockstep and uh I think that's mostly a result of uh of exchanges, not even big whales. I think it's mostly exchanges that do that. >> Okay. Well, I want to ask you about stable coins. Obviously, as a co-founder of Tether, a lot of people are curious your thoughts on stable coins these days. Um, you've said that the real legacy of crypto is actually going to turn out to be USD stable coins and not Bitcoin. It seems like almost every major economy is either moving towards some version of of stable coins or digital currency. Talk to me about how you see this playing out. What does this shift look like as the world's currencies start to move towards stable

coins and and USD stable coins particularly? >> Yeah, uh, it's a it's a very big question, right? We could talk for many many hours about this. So, so how can I briefly say this? Uh, money moves across ancient antiquated inefficient annoyingly and unnecessarily complex infrastructure today. All right? Because each country really holds on to the movement of money within its country both in and out.

Right? Currency controls are a huge thing in many countries around the world. And as a result of that and as a result of various banking regulations, countries worried about financing terrorism or global drug uh warlords and and so on or sanctioned countries like Iran, North Korea, the movement of money is is is restricted. It's it's hard to do even if you got rid of all of the government interference. just the way it's done from an infrastructure standpoint is really adequate. So when you can throw all of that away and add a introduce a a single platform that has

really no layers to it. It's a blockchain and everybody can see that that piece of software. Everybody can see where things are located and can determine in real time with virtually no cost that the thing they're getting is genuine, which is what a stable coin on a reliable blockchain is. Well, you can easily see why people would want to throw out all the old tech and go to the new tech. It's like the old uh phone network that was all done in copper wires. Uh it had some benefits, but it was also incredibly inefficient and was constrained by lots of things uh including how much data it could

support. Well, go to uh a blockchain and have stable coins where everybody is looking at the same system. You don't have to worry about what what when I leave the country, what particular network is my money movement jumping to, which is going to make it opaque to me. And then I'll have to rely on just the word of somebody in another country that they actually got what I wanted, ignoring altogether the problem of currency conversion and the costs and the difficulties of that. You can see why a stable coin system would be almost magical. What will slow the adoption of stable coins will will not be technology because they're so easy to to build the

stable coin networks. It will be regulations and how we fold stable coins into existing regulations. uh but I can't foresee a an even medium-term future where banks are using old methods for for uh particularly crossber payment settlement versus stable coins. They will be the kind of the coin of the realm. And just like the US dollar today is the principal settlement currency for most crossber transactions, the same will be true going forward. Uh most people uh are happy to hold uh US

dollars. The US dollar only has one real problem and that is it it makes it very easy for the US government to sanction the holder of those dollars anywhere in the world particularly because of the Patriot Act. And this is why for instance Iran recently said, "Hey, we want a uh we want to create a toll booth in the straight of Hormuz where ships moving uh oil will pay us per gallon or per barrel of of uh I think it's a dollar per barrel is what they're proposing. But they want to be paid in what they call crypto, which probably means Bitcoin. And and why? Because they they saw what the US and the Europeans

did to Russians. uh uh central bank reserves that were dollar denominated uh they were seized and so they don't want any money they collect to ever be at risk of seizure. And so um that's a that would be uh you could kind of create the same sort of thing with a stable coin where it would not be easily subject to seizure. So uh uh and I can see a lot of countries particularly Russia, China, obviously Iran and so forth, people who don't have a good relationship with the United States being more comfortable with stable coins than they are with cash uh reserves held in a in a uh you know a New York bank.

>> Gotcha. So, but doesn't this behavior from Iran sort of validate one of the original thesises of Bitcoin, which is that eventually a lot of players, a lot of actors in the economy are going to be looking for an alternative system and Bitcoin could be that alternative system. Do you think there's truth to that or is this just like a a momentary occurrence? Okay. >> Uh it it's it's it's about tradeoffs, right? So, in a perfect world where you didn't have to worry about a government agency seizing your bank account, you'd probably want the thing that most people are used to using and that is cheap or cheap enough. And that would be the way, let's say, people rely on US dollars for most types of transactions.

It's it's the cheapest. It's the most liquid. It's the most easily um broadly accepted form of payment globally. Bitcoin doesn't have this kind of of um of of depth, right? It it doesn't have the liquidity. it I it will never have the kind of liquidity of the US dollar because the US government can print infinite dollars and uh really no other country can do that in in in small ways they can but but the printing of the currency requires a global appetite for your debt because the issuance of debt is the primary way we distribute currency into the global financial system. So many countries are happy to hold US debt. But when you go from US

debt to every other country or let's say conglomerate of countries like even um the EU, the the euro is a regional currency. I don't think anyone seriously wants to start accepting R&B. The yen is nice, but there's just not enough of it. So, we're kind of stuck with the dollar and except for corner cases like in the case of Iran where that country's concern about its foreign assets or foreignbased deposits is the risk of seizure of those is is a greater risk to them than the difficulty of dealing with a more thinly traded thing like Bitcoin. But uh I don't think

Bitcoin will ever be a like a threat to the US dollar. It would be more likely in my mind that another country with a large economy uh started issuing debt and people started getting more comfortable holding that than the dollar. Then Bitcoin being able to do it because as you know I said Bitcoin liquidity is not deep enough and it's limited in what it can do. At 21 million Bitcoin that's it. Crypto taxes are a nightmare. You've got trades across 15 exchanges, DeFi positions you forgot about, NFT flips, staking rewards, airdrops, and somehow you're supposed to report all of this to the IRS. Good luck. Cue the solution. SUM. [music] You may know it by its old name, cryptot tax

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to choose. Midnight empowers [music] innovators to break free from this limitation to a place where privacy isn't just a feature but foundational. Go to milkgrow.com/midnight to learn more. >> Right. Yeah. Well, I'm hoping that the dollar and Bitcoin can continue to grow together. Um, but yeah, you we'll see how a lot of these play out there. There's a lot unknown in a lot of these things still and the market is figuring some of this out. Um will I wanted to ask you some questions about WAX. Um because this is a blockchain project that I'm I'm interested in. It's always like you know historically been focused on NFTTS and gaming. A lot of people got very bullish on this narrative in the last cycle. Um and it seems like a lot of those projects are still going but maybe didn't reach the the potential that they thought they might have in the

last cycle. Why are you still so bullish on this space and and what's going on in the WAX ecosystem today? >> So to be clear, what I'd say is uh uh bullish wouldn't be a way I would describe my my feelings of blockchain based gaming. It is more circumspect than that. Remember where me and my partner came from? We had been for 20 years we had been in the business of buying and selling video game virtual items, right? The the it some of your audience may know this, but the the early adopters and users of Bitcoin in particular were from my industry, the video game virtual item trading

industry. And we used video game virtual items very in a very similar way to how we used Bitcoin, right? crossber payments. You felt like uh it was reliable. A lot of people would take it who couldn't get into banking. Many of the people who were trading let's say uh Counter Strike virtual items, they were gamers all over the world and that was considered money good. We ran a u a video game virtual item marketplace that allowed people to exchange those items for fiat. Now, one of our constant issues was video game publishers didn't like people trading video game items, their video game items. They thought it

messed with their the in-game economics. Uh there there's some truth to that, but there are also a lot of people who just like trading these items. They like collecting them and trading them. And so, uh, our initial thought was, well, if we have video games that are blockchain native where the trading of the games is baked into the whole idea of the game, then we wouldn't have to deal with these annoying like PC games or mobile games that that restricted that. Um, what we have not solved yet is how you create a game in using a blockchain that gets rid of all of that or most of the inconveniences that are

involved when you use blockchains. setting up your wallet, figuring out what gas is, paying for the gas, well, finding where that token is traded and whether you in whatever country you're in can actually use the exchange uh that trades that token because a lot of exchanges are blocked in different countries. So just getting started, there's so much friction that I think it took the the gas out of people being willing to um uh get into the whole idea of blockchain based gaming. That has not been solved yet. And I think that's the fundamental problem with it. Uh NFTTS, I've said this, you can look at a

million things I've said online. I love NFTTS, but NFTTS got inextricably like linked to pretty pictures. And uh an NFT is not a pretty picture or a snippet of a of a video or music. An NFT is simply some item that you can easily transmit where a recipient can get it validated as genuine at no cost instantly and do it even if the person sending it to them is anonymous. Like that's really cool. That's what an NFT is. So an ability to validate anything instantly at no cost to know it's

genuine. meaning any form of ID. Obviously, there's a lot of things in the in the uh online security realm where these things would be super useful. And of course, currency. You could in some ways think of a a stable coin as having many of the same characteristics as an NFT. The only difference is for the most part the NFTs were deemed u unique, you know, one of a kind. So I think we also had you can't ignore it the idea that who jumped into video gaming blockchain video gaming for the most part it was speculators people who were speculating around the price of the token and then once enough people

started to sell those tokens it became this death spiral and that was the play to earn kind of problem right you uh once you earned enough you wanted out but And people who joined that that that game later on were basically buying their tokens at the same time they were seeing the value being sold away. And so since the only people who really embraced the games were speculators, the games weren't fun. And and you can also say for the most part the games were low quality. So you just had a myriad of problems that um made uh blockchainbased gaming with NFTTS as one of the principal value items in it that you

would use. They both got a a stigma attached and I I would say in the foreseeable future we will not see anything really exciting come out of that. At some point, we'll see gamers use NFTTS again, but I think if anything, it's going to be traditional people, traditional PC gaming, and it's mostly a PC gaming phenomenon, uh, that will adopt some element of blockchain, not native blockchain gamers trying to convince traditional gamers to to to join in. you uh made this point about NFTTS getting inextricably tied to pretty pictures or or it just you know whatever whatever the case may be. Um but there was a big craze around that.

But you also pointed out that that technology has a lot of other applications. I know you spend a lot of time you know looking at and talking to projects that are building in the space. Are there projects, companies, ideas for how to use NFTs that you are excited about that you think might find product market fit here or is this still a technology people are still prototyping on and trying to figure out? >> It's traditional. It's what I said it's the traditional businesses that or traditional um entities that will take the characteristics and this is the key to being a good entrepreneur.

you can distill down the aspects of an of an innovation that are useful. Uh the this is a core exercise I think of of real inspiration and insight when it comes to entrepreneurship. What is it about this new technology that what is the capability that I can use either to better address an existing market or create a brand new market that no one has uh uh developed yet because they didn't have that special uh uh piece of technology and with NFTTS if you look at just traditional things

that it can supplant the obvious one would be identification. You know, the the world is filled with with documents that are what you might call bearer instruments. They they signify ownership of something, right? Regardless of who the holder may even be. Uh so if you have a uh a passport, that's an NFT or currency, right? And in case of currency, that is why stable coins are so valuable is because you cannot create a counterfeit currency. If if it's if it's a stable coin and if you

are smart enough to understand that if that thing was burnt from that particular smart contract and and if my stable coin was burnt from that smart contract, easy to check, then that's a valid stable coin. We uh we have such a problem in this world with counterfeit and fakes and you know impostors particularly with US currency that having something that can be determined to be authentic instantly at no cost with no effort is such a powerful uh uh combination of ingredients and I think we've the blockchain people a lot of people in in the crypto world I think raised a lot money, many of them, but

didn't really understand the technology they were dealing with. You know, there was, let's face it, there was a lot of uh scammers, a lot of uh hype around things that weren't genuine. And so, if we could get people to really think about what is it that this technology brings that is only uh available if you're using a blockchain and then go from there, we'd be in way better shape. That's how we came up with tether you know we because we distilled down blockchainbased technology to what were the core capabilities that no other technology could give us. That's what needs to be done. And u crypto has become such a

like a um a a place for just the raw speculation and uh when's the last time you've heard people talk about real world utility, right? That was such a big deal. And it's uh it's it's not really the foremost thing people talk about right now. It's mostly the speculative aspect of it. But that's where we need to go. And I think you could come up with an almost infinite number of existing technologies or existing things that NFTs are blockchain based tech could make better. I pointed out multiple ones uh including the you know the repo market which this this podcast isn't uh

long enough for us to talk about that but that's an enormous part of what you might call the real world asset market that um things like uh standard blockchain based tokens and and NFTs in particular could really provide a lot of value to. I like this focus on real world utility, real economic value, real products and services that are in demand. Um, and I do think that the market is starting to focus on those things. So, we'll see what finds product market fit and and where those things go from here. But, um, you know, William, I you made a comment that I wanted to ask you about in in late 2025, you said that the the crash that we saw, this October 10th flash crash, wasn't the real problem. the real problem that crypto is facing is a lack of a clear upside or a

new innovation that would be a catalyst for for new growth in the in the space. I'm curious if you have a thought now on on what that catalyst could be or what you're watching for on the horizon that would signal that crypto's ready for its next phase of adoption and growth. Um if if there's some specific thing you're watching for that would that would signal that that's going to happen. >> So I would answer that this way. I am watching for something in particular and as we speak it is being done and it's massive and that is the uh traditional finance world adopting elements of blockchain to improve their business.

This is going on right now from foreign banks to to uh BlackRock to every other major money management firm. All of the major Wall Street investment banks are looking at real world assets or the tokenization of real world assets. And um another thing we could talk about for a long time would be why tokenization is not digitization. We don't have time here for that. But tokenization is powerful and it's it's being done uh as we speak like across across the global financial system. Uh blockchainbased

technologies are getting adopted and are getting used. And what's kind of fascinating about it is it's uh it's all being done but it's sort of invisible to us. It's a little bit ironic. you know that that uh there's this massive adoption going on around blockchain but we're not really seeing it because it's the plumbing that it's being used for and that's not something that consumers are really aware of or really care about. In fact, I I actually believe most people will never realize they're using a stable coin. Uh because the financial world loves overcharging

people to move money. It's a massive part of their profit. FX, the foreign currency transaction fees, you know, that's a trillion dollars of value that's sucked every year out of a hundred trillion dollar global economy. that's taken every year from businesses and consumers by 5,000 or so entities that are approved by their governments to exchange currencies. And I think they're going to be very reluctant to get rid of the that revenue stream. So, uh, I think you'll see the the plumbing of the global financial system get rebuilt around blockchainbased

technologies and and in particular cases, not all cases, you know, I'm not one of these zealots who believes that blockchain replaces everything, but it has very strong utility in certain areas, but uh, it would work against these financial institutions to tell you, "Wow, we just adopted a stable stable coin that's going to cut our cost to conduct a crossber transaction by let's say 99%. So uh because your first question is going to be how much of that savings is passed on to me and the answer is probably going to be none. I could even see in fact I I think this is how it's going to go. We'll be told that wow now you can get near instant

settlement right near instant settlement means you can withdraw those funds. They just don't tell you you have them, but you can withdraw them. And that will be done with stable coins, but they will charge you extra. So, they're going to charge you for a thing that costs them a lot less to do. And uh unfortunately, that's that's just baked into how the global financial system works because it's very expensive for people to uh be allowed to work in that area. You need to be licensed. You have to have a lot of capital. uh they put up a lot of of barriers around anyone doing it and they want to be paid for having that privilege of of exchanging money and

they aren't going to just adopt a technology that that allows you to do everything for free. But nonetheless, it's all happening. Real world assets is an enormous space and uh uh it reminds me a little of 200 let's say one to like 2007 and 8 when there was so much going on with uh with on the internet but it was sort of invisible to most people. So people thought oh the internet bubble burst but there was a lot of adoption of internet technology and then one day boom suddenly everybody's like oh yeah everything's internet. I think that's going on right now. But will it affect the price of tokens? I don't know.

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Yeah. Well, I I think we're all waiting to see what happens with that. But that that is a really great analogy cuz that's how it feels to me, too. Like retail and and most native crypto investors are sort of checked out, tuned out. At the same time, institutions are coming in in ways they never have before and with commitments they never made before. Uh William, this has been a really great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on the Milk Road Show and sharing all your thoughts on all these different things with us because you've been a, like I said, a leader in the space in a lot of ways for a long time. So, thanks for coming in and and sharing this with us. Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?

>> I I'm not very online. I'll I'll say that. I I don't spend a lot of time uh responding to DMs, but uh William Equigley is my handle on Twitter, and I and I roll out commentary now and then there. That's really it. >> Okay. Well, we'll keep watching for your commentary. I hope we can have you back on another time to catch up again uh and and see where all this plays out. >> Great. Good talking to you. >> Thank you, William. Thanks for being here. And thank you all for joining us.

I hope you all learned something today. So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of the Milkro Show. Thanks for being here, everyone. Bye. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets [music] and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milkro Daily and Pro Newsletters and start investing like the top 1%. [music] 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.