Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
B (0:14)
All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. All you good, wonderful crusaders of Crypt nation, I hope you're just enjoying the holiday season. I'm your co host, Bryce. As always, this is joined by my equally excitable companion over here, Mr. Brendan Veeman. How are you doing, Brendan?
C (0:36)
I am doing good. You know, I'm. We've spoken a little bit. I'm a little bit under the weather, so maybe I sound a bit more nasally. I blamed it on the bears before. I'm gonna do it again. I'm not supposed to get a cold in South Florida, but man, this is just one of those pods, Bryce, where, you know, we knew who was coming on. I was like, I cannot miss this one. I've been really looking forward to it and so I know the audience is going to enjoy it as well.
B (0:59)
Yeah, no, it's been a little bit of a crypto winter this year. Bitcoin is negative year to date and many altcoins are very, very, very negative year to date. And so we always thought, you know, the year after the bitcoin having was going to be this, you know, classic four year cycle bull market. I don't know, maybe the four year cycle's dead, but we'll kind of get into a lot of what's going on with market dynamics. But most importantly, we want to introduce everybody to our Guest, Zach Prince, MD, managing director at Galaxy and the head of wealth for the new Galaxy one product. Zach, how are you doing?
D (1:37)
Doing great, guys. It's a little, it's a little cold where I'm based, but other than that, no complaints. Excited to be here.
B (1:42)
Good. So you're fighting off, fighting off the cold. Brendan is succumbing to the warmth and becoming a little sick. But yeah, no, we're excited to have you, but let's just, you know, get you acquainted here with our audience at crypto101. Tell a little bit about your background and how you, you know, became a managing director at one of the largest, you know, crypto publicly traded companies. You know, they. Galaxy touches so many different areas of the industry. So, so give us a little 101 on Zach Prince.
D (2:11)
Yeah, sure, happy to. So I, I grew up in South Texas, went to college down there. And then based on being a, a semi professional poker player in college, I got an internship at a advertising technology company in New York City. And so I moved to New York City. Right after college, I worked at two different startups in the ad tech space. One that was acquired by Google and then two different startups in the financial technology space. And while I was working at one of those startups, I started a blog writing about what just all things happening in the fintech ecosystem. So this is like 2014 time frame. Robo advisors were just coming out, crowdfunding was just starting to happen. There's a lot of stuff going on in fintech. And so I started writing this blog that I don't think really many people read, but writing it led me to discover Bitcoin. And so I was screaming on this, on this blog in 2014, early 2015 that you know, if people wanted exposure to something that had kind of a venture capital type return profile, you know, it could easily 100x potentially if it works, but also, you know, very volatile, they should be looking at buying crypto. And I was originally fascinated by crypto because a lot of what happens in fintech is just putting a mobile app or an online website on top of the traditional financial infrastructure from banks and broker dealers. And so then in 2017 I started a company called BlockFi. The original idea for BlockFi was to make loans with cryptocurrency as collateral. We started with that product and that's actually where I got my introduction to Galaxy. Galaxy was a seed round investor in BlockFi on the equity side. And they also provided BlockFi with its first credit facility to fund the loans that we were making. Blockfi had a four and a half year run of pretty remarkable growth. We had that loan product, we had an interest account product trading platform. We launched the world's first bitcoin rewards credit card. Then we also had an institutional side of our business. But ultimately BlockFi ended in tragedy after selling to FTX and filing for bankruptcy in 2022. Then I thought I was going to retire. I'll gloss over this part. I thought I was going to retire for a minute and then I became the CEO of a real estate kind of tax optimization business for a year and just couldn't, couldn't resist the urge to come back into crypto and financial services. When, when Mike and Chris reached out to me about this acquisition that they were making, which ultimately became the kind of starting point for the Galaxy One platform that we launched in October. So that's my background. I tried to be really concise for you.