theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers | Shawn Douglass, Amberdata

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Shawn Douglass

CEO

Amberdata

play_circle_outline Institutional grade data and analytics for digital assets provided by Amberdata

play_circle_outline Growth in trading volume and institutional interest in digital assets

play_circle_outline Recent regulatory changes in the US favoring digital assets

play_circle_outline Utilizing Amberdata for Real-Time Market Data & On-Chain Analytics in Digital Asset Trading

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Shawn Douglass, Amberdata

Shawn Douglass

CEO Amberdata

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>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE here in New York City at the New York Stock Exchange. This is theCUBE's new set, partnering with the NYSE Wired founder, Brian Baumann. Put together a great , growing like a weed, and our Crypto Trailblazer series has been another example of that. We've got all the best leaders coming in. Breaking it down. Shawn Douglass, the founder and CEO of Amberdata's here, friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni. He's doing some amazing work in the area of instrumenting the blockchain infrastructure, understanding the money, how it's all tracked, kind of like an IT stack for crypto. Maybe that's a bad way to put it, but Shawn, great to see you. Thanks for coming into our Crypto Trailblazers with NYSE Wired.

Shawn Douglass

>> Great to be here. Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure and it's great to see that you're here in NYSE. This is amazing. What an amazing opportunity.

>> When I saw, when Brian and I were talking about the Crypto Trailblazers, Amberdata came up, because you guys, obviously the tailwinds now with the shift in policy, you guys are on the radar, so congratulations.

Shawn Douglass

>> Thank you.

>> But I know that you've been doing this work for how many years now? At least, what?

Shawn Douglass

>> Going on eight.

>> Eight years.

Shawn Douglass

>> Very early.

>> If you go back eight years, that was really the OG formation of scaling up decentralized infrastructure and DeFi was just starting to hit the scene. Of course, then we saw the token economics, trough of disillusionment, but the game is back. Nothing's stopping distributed computing from scaling in the cloud with AI and decentralized infrastructure. It's a no-brainer. We all see it. I think half the world, maybe a third of the world, if not half knows it's going to happen. A hundred percent sure. The rest are trying to figure out what it is. But you guys are doing some great work. I want you to explain first of all, the original thesis of Amberdata and where you guys are now. And I want to get into some of the specifics around how the money side, because you started to see mainstream come in. So talk about the history.

Shawn Douglass

>> Yeah, so we started coming in 2017. So we are so OG that when we started, there was no DeFi. There was no NFTs. There was no tokenization. It was literally the use case was if banks need to consolidate their backend infrastructure, they will need operational telemetry. They will need a Splunk and app dynamics to understand what's happening in these trust system networks. We quickly learned after we raised our first round of financing that we're way too early. So we pivoted to public Ethereum first and we built the very first analytics platform before Dune. The only thing that was before us would be Etherscan. And the token ICOs started to happen, we added market data, our first customers were people like Fidelity and market makers out of Chicago, and it was on. We realized that the need was really to build institutional infrastructure like a Refinitiv for digital assets, so you can see everything that's happening everywhere across the economy. And we fast-forward to where we're at today eight years ago, and we've been pioneers. We defined and created this category for institutional grade data and analytics, and today we processed and when we started this, trading volume was like a hundred million dollars a day. It was nothing. And fast-forward today, we processed $580 billion a day in notional, in trading activity across spot markets, derivatives markets, options venues, on-chain network data, liquidity transactions, everything that's happening in every major decks, every lending protocol, every stable coin. We aggregate all of that up and we are the only end-to-end solution that serves the entire value chain, whether it be front office, mid-office, back office, regulators, and we serve institutions and regulators globally today. Last year we delivered about three billion API calls, which is crazy. I've been talking to you for a very long time and when we started this business, it was thousands a day. Now we're like three billion API calls last year. And our customer base really spans the who's who, whether it be trading, whether it be market making, whether it be banking, whether it be the regulators across the world. So we've just been fortunate to be able to survive, because it's been a little bit up and down the last few years.

>> It's been a tough go. I mean, you got to say a hostile environment would be an understatement in the US prior to Trump coming in, changing the tone a little bit. But what I love about your story is, and by the way, congratulations for surviving, kind of like rations, rations.

Shawn Douglass

>> Got hit in the face a few times, but we're pretty good now.

>> nails, eat glass, spit out nails. But what's interesting is that you came at it from a technical, digital asset, from an IT perspective being a CTO, kind of like theCUBE coming at media as a foreign, in the traditional sense we weren't really media people, but we came back from a tech perspective. Looking back at that, that was a good call, but now the world's gone scale. So when we had the event in Palo Alto and prior to before Dan was here on theCUBE, these are serious players coming in. So you now have big-time business transformation at the banking and institutional levels. What's that like going on now? Because that's like when you start getting into the JP Morgan Chase, kind of like people, you know their IT budget's 10 billion a year, so that's their IT budget. It's not really IT, it's technology and business. It's coming fast, because there's money there. Wherever there's money, there's people chasing it, or wanting to manage it and the data is all going to be available. So having that kind of telemetry and the kind of observability in the application of money, you guys are in the sweet spot. So what is the current state of the art and where are we, if you had to peg the progress of where it could be?

Shawn Douglass

>> Yeah, so there's a lot there. Let me do my best to unpack that. So where are we? I think we're still early. Now with that said, you have people like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Apollo saying they're going to tokenize $70 trillion worth of assets by 2030. That is a-

>> That's a massive number.

Shawn Douglass

>> That's a massive number. It is literally redoing and modernizing the fabric of financial services. You have stablecoins now doing $300 billion a day in stablecoin transactions, trillions of dollars of total market cap, rebuilding the infrastructure of how payments is going to work, how banking is going to work. The new stablecoin, the Genesis act that they're just in DC right now working on. It's going to break open the rails to enable dollarization around the world and allow people to actually benefit from the interest rates that the banks have kind of been benefiting from. You've got the rewiring via tokenization, which is enabling the composability of all these protocols in DeFi that allow you to own your assets and to create new financial products, and new structure. And the beautiful thing about digital assets in crypto, is that everything that happens on these decentralized networks, we have visibility into the decentralized trading venues, whether that be the order book and Coinbase, or what's happening in vault surfaces and open interests in Deribit, or what have you. We have that wired already. But from an on chain perspective, what's really unique about digital assets is coming from the engineer in me, is to be able to see every input and every output, and the economic outcomes and incentives for all of this economy. And we're the first people that created that. We're the deepest in that space. And what that means is we can see liquidity on every decks, every lending protocol, who needs to be clean, who needs to be liquidated because the risk profile doesn't match a healthy protocol. It's our clients that are doing the arbitrage and holding the price between centralized, and decentralized trading venues. And so, it is just this massive opportunity. And something that you would also said, "What's changed in this whole regulatory landscape? What's going on?" I mean, in the past four months before the new administration came in, you saw everything that has been a headwind for the last four years just start to get ripped out. You have the administration has come in and said, "We're going to be the crypto capital of the world." And they've made it an executive order that says, I forget the name of the Digital Asset Act or what have you. You have a crypto czar put in place, David Sachs, AI and crypto. You have Mark Uyeda, head of the SEC pulled together crypto committee. You have a at the White House crypto thing there. You have Caroline Pham from the CFTC, who is the acting chair... Says chairman, but she should be chairwoman, running really avant-garde thinking. Hester Peirce doing great work in the SEC. At the same time, the United States now has a Bitcoin reserve. You've got stablecoin bill. There is just a land slide of massive change that has, and if you think about every impediment to the adoption of digital assets over the last four years, including all the lawsuits against Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Uniswap, they've all been pulled back. So everything that was a headwind is now behind us. Wind in the sails, pushing full speed ahead is going to absolutely transform the future of financial services. It's going to happen here. It's going to happen now. It's going to happen in the United States.

>> And we're certainly hit the center of all the acts of the NYSE and New York Wall Street. What I'm fascinated by is the Wall Street angle, like you mentioned, you had all these arbitrage between the buy the books and all the stuff. I'm not a finance guy, but I can figure out a lot of moving parts there. So I want to ask you, give me an example of a use case today that takes advantage of this system. Give me an example of what risk profile, is it my Bitcoin, is it an asset hold? Is it a position? I'm trying to understand what you're measuring. Is it just pools of capital? What does risk mean? And what's that other side of that chain, if you will? Can you give me some of confidentiality problems?

Shawn Douglass

>> Because I think there's three major themes that is happening. One is there's a convergence between TradFi and crypto, right? Two, there's a consolidation. We're seeing acquisitions. Three, there is a new set of products that are being created based upon new rails that you couldn't previously do. That you could do on paper, but you couldn't do it in an open, transparent, global way. So if you think about from a convergence, well, so let's pull it back for a second before I go into each one of those specifically. Think about Bitcoin. Super simple. It's the most OG asset. It is a store of value. It is everybody in the world is excited about Bitcoin right now, because of its scarcity, because of its transparency, because its decentralized nature. And that has now been effectively securitized and has become an ETF. And that ETFs that have been listed by Fidelity, by BlackRock, by Franklin Templeton, there's a long list of our clients, and I'm probably forgetting somebody really important, that have taken Bitcoin, a native digital asset and brought that to the New York Stock Exchange. They brought that to NASDAQ, they brought that to every equities market in the world, and they've anointed that as a financial asset that's been accepted this world. So when that happened, that was the largest inflow of investment into any new asset class, period, full stop. Bitcoin ETF in six months took, what? It took three years for the gold ETF to do. And today it's just going parabolic. And that's now, as that happens, you now start to have, okay, iBit has options trading on NASDAQ. So now you have, okay, I'm going to be able to enable my portfolio managers, my registered investment advisors, my asset managers to be able to manage their risk in long-term, increased yield or hedge off their risk using derivatives. And if you look at traditional financial markets, derivatives are exponentially larger markets than just stocks. So there's that whole financialization of a crypto native digital assets like Bitcoin, right? The second, or the first primary trend was I talked about convergence. So this is kind of a convergence play. You're taking a crypto native asset like Bitcoin, you're financializing that, you're now making that available. So as a kind of follow onto that, you've seen Robinhood acquire Bitstamp, one of the largest, oldest crypto exchanges. You've seen rumored Coinbase is acquiring it. It's more of a consolidation play, but Coinbase is rumored to be acquiring Deribit. They do 80% of all the options trading. You've seen Stripe acquire Bridge, billion dollar stablecoin player. So you're seeing this convergence, where the lines are blurring between crypto native and traditional financial markets, which naturally goes into that consolidation. You're now starting to see a bunch of people lined up to go public. They're trying to, you have Kraken doing an acquisition of a NinjaTrader, $1.5 billion. It's the biggest acquisition that has been done to date of a TradFi player into a crypto native firm like Kraken. And I think they're going to do more and there's going to be more of these that are coming. And I think that you're going to start to see the traditional data players and the analytics players that are starting to blend into this space. And then you also start, if you look at again, the convergence play, stablecoins for example is a great thing. It's just a tokenization of the dollar, but now you're on rails that run around the world, around the clock more efficiently, more effectively, more transparently. There's just so many things going on, John.

>> Yeah, and we had Kraken on theCUBE here as part of this program. It's interesting, because this is the money system now.

Shawn Douglass

>> It is.

>> And it's still early days. This is like mainframes haven't been invented yet. I mean, the beginning of the evolution mainframe, we see the computing. We saw that movie before. So in this world, it's happening. So I guess the question to ask, put your engineering tech hat on, if you were back in your venture capital days, when you do tech evaluations and do due diligence, how would you classify the opportunity? What's next? What's the high ground here? Is it get through, put those sails up and get out, don't sail in the North Atlantic and where the icebergs are, and go over to the warmer part of the territory? I mean, where's the action, I guess? Where are you going to?

Shawn Douglass

>> So I think, let me answer that in two parts and then I didn't fully answer your last question, so I'll go back to that in a second. So the two parts are where do you sail, right? So pre-new administration, it was Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Singapore, London. That was where digital assets were going. It was get the hell out of the US, you might go to jail, bad things, but the world, nobody's putting the genie back in the bottle on this. And because all of those different regions had regulatory clarity and were inviting digital assets, and crypto companies to come here, do business. So I spent the last two years traveling around the world and building customers, and relationships with regulators, and earning everybody's trust in those regions. So those areas have continued to grow. Now they all want to take New York Stock Exchange, this is the capital of capital. This is where the United States, they all wanted to take that business from the United States. The new administration, they're like-

>> They want it back.

Shawn Douglass

>> "... It's happening. It's happening here, and we're going to be the..."

>> Bitcoin Reserve was a big stake in the ground.

Shawn Douglass

>> It's a huge stake, right? And I'm excited to see what they do there. So not only is the whole world competing and inviting business, and facilitating, and enabling, and has clear regulatory. Now the United States is back in the game, because it's been a shit show for the last couple of years with the enforcement, regulation by enforcement.

>> A thousand paper cuts.

Shawn Douglass

>> Oh my God.

>> Legal action.

Shawn Douglass

>> It was ridiculous. I think that, so anyway, so there's in the United States and then there's outside of the United States, and now they're both going at a full steam ahead. And if you look at the UAE, they're investing, they just invested $2 billion in Binance. Okay, that's just a signal that this is serious.

>> So on the product side, how does that impact Amberdata? Because you have some of the most cutting edge products on measurement, which is analytics, which is deep analytics.

Shawn Douglass

>> This goes, I can answer my last question that I didn't answer about that. So what do we do and what problem do we solve for who, and why is digital assets different than traditional markets, and where do they converge? So Amberdata, what we do is we do institutional real-time and historical market on-chain data across everything, everywhere, and allow you to reconstitute. We create unique proprietary data sets to understand what is happening, measure risk, act, trade, transact, value, what have you, right? So there's this whole analytics play. So going back to the prior question is, what is the opportunity between this TradFi and with crypto? When you think about, so say you're a trader and you're trading Bitcoin by CME, right? Well, CME closes at six o'clock on Friday night and doesn't open, oh, they close at, yeah, five o'clock on Friday night, and they open on six o'clock on Sunday. So if there's a 10% move over the weekend and you're a TradFi guy, and you're yoloing with a handful of futures contracts, you're holding the bag. But what's happening in the digital assets world is that's happening 24/7 around the world, around the clock. Not only is it happening in spot markets, it's happening in derivatives markets, it's happening in options markets, it's happening in DeFi markets, things are being denominated in RAPBTC and all these DeFi protocols. We provide the ability to see what's happening in liquidity across all these venues, and these are all going to converge. And that's what we do. We provide the visibility into all the on-chain activity, all of the market activity, all of the liquidity analytics, both across, if you want to trade iBit options on NASDAQ, we have that. If you want to trade Deribit options, if you want to YOLO and go really deep in liquidity and Aave, or Uniswap or what have you, we're really the only the people that provide that. So what we do is we provide that comprehensive view across everything that matters in digital assets, in crypto, spanning into TradFi. So we're still a little early. We're ahead of the game, but we're building more people.

>> All right, as the trailblazer, you plowed the trails. You said you got stuff blown on your face, headwinds, now you got the tailwind. What did you learn coming out of that survival phase that you're going to put as good muscle into the going forward plan? Just on a personal level or from a business perspective, what's the learning that's going to make you sprint faster and what are you going to do?

Shawn Douglass

>> Yeah, so I think there's personal learnings and there's business learnings, and I think there's business learnings that you have to survive to win. And no matter what's going on, you have to survive, right?

>> Don't run out of cash.

Shawn Douglass

>> Right? Don't run out of cash. And then two is, when the market is starting to warm up and run, you need to run harder, faster. And it's only that you can only do that and win, because you spent the last two years grinding it out and improving your process, and being more efficient, and having better customer support, and better customer interactions, and building the best product for the need, and having your clients tell you where the market is going. So right now, we are positioned to win. We define this category, we're leading this category. We're the only comprehensive end-to-end solution that provides all of that. From a personal level, I think that this has been a challenging space. And I think that every day you just got to wake up, dust yourself off, and have the grit to smile and enjoy. Whether you get hit in the face or you're getting a huge check, you need to just enjoy the moment and go hard.

>> And how's pipeline right now? Must be good.

Shawn Douglass

>> Phenomenal. We've just had a five Xer pipeline in the last five months. It is just crazy. I'm hiring salespeople. We're hiring business development people. We are winning, and we're going to do more M&A.

>> Well, thanks for coming into our first segment on the new set here. We got the other set in the balcony. This is theCUBE's dedicated location.

Shawn Douglass

>> Thank you for having me.

>> Not too shabby.

Shawn Douglass

>> Yeah, this is phenomenal.

>> Great to see you.

Shawn Douglass

>> Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

>> Shawn Douglass, really a pioneer, as well as a trailblazer in crypto infrastructure, measurement, analytics, observability, telemetry. You got to get the data. These are systems now, and these systems have money in it, and they're doing a good job. And again, this is where the transition is happening. The traditional main street money market systems are coming together with decentralized players. It's going to be a great ride. And again, we've got a good environment here in the US. Of course, theCUBE's bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

Shawn Douglass, Amberdata

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>> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE here in New York City at the New York Stock Exchange. This is theCUBE's new set, partnering with the NYSE Wired founder, Brian Baumann. Put together a great , growing like a weed, and our Crypto Trailblazer series has been another example of that. We've got all the best leaders coming in. Breaking it down. Shawn Douglass, the founder and CEO of Amberdata's here, friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni. He's doing some amazing work in the area of instrumenting the blockchain infrastructure, understanding the money, how it's all tracked, kind of like an IT stack for crypto. Maybe that's a bad way to put it, but Shawn, great to see you. Thanks for coming into our Crypto Trailblazers with NYSE Wired.

Shawn Douglass

>> Great to be here. Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure and it's great to see that you're here in NYSE. This is amazing. What an amazing opportunity.

>> When I saw, when Brian and I were talking about the Crypto Trailblazers, Amberdata came up, because you guys, obviously the tailwinds now with the shift in policy, you guys are on the radar, so congratulations.

Shawn Douglass

>> Thank you.

>> But I know that you've been doing this work for how many years now? At least, what?

Shawn Douglass

>> Going on eight.

>> Eight years.

Shawn Douglass

>> Very early.

>> If you go back eight years, that was really the OG formation of scaling up decentralized infrastructure and DeFi was just starting to hit the scene. Of course, then we saw the token economics, trough of disillusionment, but the game is back. Nothing's stopping distributed computing from scaling in the cloud with AI and decentralized infrastructure. It's a no-brainer. We all see it. I think half the world, maybe a third of the world, if not half knows it's going to happen. A hundred percent sure. The rest are trying to figure out what it is. But you guys are doing some great work. I want you to explain first of all, the original thesis of Amberdata and where you guys are now. And I want to get into some of the specifics around how the money side, because you started to see mainstream come in. So talk about the history.

Shawn Douglass

>> Yeah, so we started coming in 2017. So we are so OG that when we started, there was no DeFi. There was no NFTs. There was no tokenization. It was literally the use case was if banks need to consolidate their backend infrastructure, they will need operational telemetry. They will need a Splunk and app dynamics to understand what's happening in these trust system networks. We quickly learned after we raised our first round of financing that we're way too early. So we pivoted to public Ethereum first and we built the very first analytics platform before Dune. The only thing that was before us would be Etherscan. And the token ICOs started to happen, we added market data, our first customers were people like Fidelity and market makers out of Chicago, and it was on. We realized that the need was really to build institutional infrastructure like a Refinitiv for digital assets, so you can see everything that's happening everywhere across the economy. And we fast-forward to where we're at today eight years ago, and we've been pioneers. We defined and created this category for institutional grade data and analytics, and today we processed and when we started this, trading volume was like a hundred million dollars a day. It was nothing. And fast-forward today, we processed $580 billion a day in notional, in trading activity across spot markets, derivatives markets, options venues, on-chain network data, liquidity transactions, everything that's happening in every major decks, every lending protocol, every stable coin. We aggregate all of that up and we are the only end-to-end solution that serves the entire value chain, whether it be front office, mid-office, back office, regulators, and we serve institutions and regulators globally today. Last year we delivered about three billion API calls, which is crazy. I've been talking to you for a very long time and when we started this business, it was thousands a day. Now we're like three billion API calls last year. And our customer base really spans the who's who, whether it be trading, whether it be market making, whether it be banking, whether it be the regulators across the world. So we've just been fortunate to be able to survive, because it's been a little bit up and down the last few years.

>> It's been a tough go. I mean, you got to say a hostile environment would be an understatement in the US prior to Trump coming in, changing the tone a little bit. But what I love about your story is, and by the way, congratulations for surviving, kind of like rations, rations.

Shawn Douglass

>> Got hit in the face a few times, but we're pretty good now.

>> nails, eat glass, spit out nails. But what's interesting is that you came at it from a technical, digital asset, from an IT perspective being a CTO, kind of like theCUBE coming at media as a foreign, in the traditional sense we weren't really media people, but we came back from a tech perspective. Looking back at that, that was a good call, but now the world's gone scale. So when we had the event in Palo Alto and prior to before Dan was here on theCUBE, these are serious players coming in. So you now have big-time business transformation at the banking and institutional levels. What's that like going on now? Because that's like when you start getting into the JP Morgan Chase, kind of like people, you know their IT budget's 10 billion a year, so that's their IT budget. It's not really IT, it's technology and business. It's coming fast, because there's money there. Wherever there's money, there's people chasing it, or wanting to manage it and the data is all going to be available. So having that kind of telemetry and the kind of observability in the application of money, you guys are in the sweet spot. So what is the current state of the art and where are we, if you had to peg the progress of where it could be?

Shawn Douglass

>> Yeah, so there's a lot there. Let me do my best to unpack that. So where are we? I think we're still early. Now with that said, you have people like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Apollo saying they're going to tokenize $70 trillion worth of assets by 2030. That is a-

>> That's a massive number.

Shawn Douglass

>> That's a massive number. It is literally redoing and modernizing the fabric of financial services. You have stablecoins now doing $300 billion a day in stablecoin transactions, trillions of dollars of total market cap, rebuilding the infrastructure of how payments is going to work, how banking is going to work. The new stablecoin, the Genesis act that they're just in DC right now working on. It's going to break open the rails to enable dollarization around the world and allow people to actually benefit from the interest rates that the banks have kind of been benefiting from. You've got the rewiring via tokenization, which is enabling the composability of all these protocols in DeFi that allow you to own your assets and to create new financial products, and new structure. And the beautiful thing about digital assets in crypto, is that everything that happens on these decentralized networks, we have visibility into the decentralized trading venues, whether that be the order book and Coinbase, or what's happening in vault surfaces and open interests in Deribit, or what have you. We have that wired already. But from an on chain perspective, what's really unique about digital assets is coming from the engineer in me, is to be able to see every input and every output, and the economic outcomes and incentives for all of this economy. And we're the first people that created that. We're the deepest in that space. And what that means is we can see liquidity on every decks, every lending protocol, who needs to be clean, who needs to be liquidated because the risk profile doesn't match a healthy protocol. It's our clients that are doing the arbitrage and holding the price between centralized, and decentralized trading venues. And so, it is just this massive opportunity. And something that you would also said, "What's changed in this whole regulatory landscape? What's going on?" I mean, in the past four months before the new administration came in, you saw everything that has been a headwind for the last four years just start to get ripped out. You have the administration has come in and said, "We're going to be the crypto capital of the world." And they've made it an executive order that says, I forget the name of the Digital Asset Act or what have you. You have a crypto czar put in place, David Sachs, AI and crypto. You have Mark Uyeda, head of the SEC pulled together crypto committee. You have a at the White House crypto thing there. You have Caroline Pham from the CFTC, who is the acting chair... Says chairman, but she should be chairwoman, running really avant-garde thinking. Hester Peirce doing great work in the SEC. At the same time, the United States now has a Bitcoin reserve. You've got stablecoin bill. There is just a land slide of massive change that has, and if you think about every impediment to the adoption of digital assets over the last four years, including all the lawsuits against Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Uniswap, they've all been pulled back. So everything that was a headwind is now behind us. Wind in the sails, pushing full speed ahead is going to absolutely transform the future of financial services. It's going to happen here. It's going to happen now. It's going to happen in the United States.

>> And we're certainly hit the center of all the acts of the NYSE and New York Wall Street. What I'm fascinated by is the Wall Street angle, like you mentioned, you had all these arbitrage between the buy the books and all the stuff. I'm not a finance guy, but I can figure out a lot of moving parts there. So I want to ask you, give me an example of a use case today that takes advantage of this system. Give me an example of what risk profile, is it my Bitcoin, is it an asset hold? Is it a position? I'm trying to understand what you're measuring. Is it just pools of capital? What does risk mean? And what's that other side of that chain, if you will? Can you give me some of confidentiality problems?

Shawn Douglass

>> Because I think there's three major themes that is happening. One is there's a convergence between TradFi and crypto, right? Two, there's a consolidation. We're seeing acquisitions. Three, there is a new set of products that are being created based upon new rails that you couldn't previously do. That you could do on paper, but you couldn't do it in an open, transparent, global way. So if you think about from a convergence, well, so let's pull it back for a second before I go into each one of those specifically. Think about Bitcoin. Super simple. It's the most OG asset. It is a store of value. It is everybody in the world is excited about Bitcoin right now, because of its scarcity, because of its transparency, because its decentralized nature. And that has now been effectively securitized and has become an ETF. And that ETFs that have been listed by Fidelity, by BlackRock, by Franklin Templeton, there's a long list of our clients, and I'm probably forgetting somebody really important, that have taken Bitcoin, a native digital asset and brought that to the New York Stock Exchange. They brought that to NASDAQ, they brought that to every equities market in the world, and they've anointed that as a financial asset that's been accepted this world. So when that happened, that was the largest inflow of investment into any new asset class, period, full stop. Bitcoin ETF in six months took, what? It took three years for the gold ETF to do. And today it's just going parabolic. And that's now, as that happens, you now start to have, okay, iBit has options trading on NASDAQ. So now you have, okay, I'm going to be able to enable my portfolio managers, my registered investment advisors, my asset managers to be able to manage their risk in long-term, increased yield or hedge off their risk using derivatives. And if you look at traditional financial markets, derivatives are exponentially larger markets than just stocks. So there's that whole financialization of a crypto native digital assets like Bitcoin, right? The second, or the first primary trend was I talked about convergence. So this is kind of a convergence play. You're taking a crypto native asset like Bitcoin, you're financializing that, you're now making that available. So as a kind of follow onto that, you've seen Robinhood acquire Bitstamp, one of the largest, oldest crypto exchanges. You've seen rumored Coinbase is acquiring it. It's more of a consolidation play, but Coinbase is rumored to be acquiring Deribit. They do 80% of all the options trading. You've seen Stripe acquire Bridge, billion dollar stablecoin player. So you're seeing this convergence, where the lines are blurring between crypto native and traditional financial markets, which naturally goes into that consolidation. You're now starting to see a bunch of people lined up to go public. They're trying to, you have Kraken doing an acquisition of a NinjaTrader, $1.5 billion. It's the biggest acquisition that has been done to date of a TradFi player into a crypto native firm like Kraken. And I think they're going to do more and there's going to be more of these that are coming. And I think that you're going to start to see the traditional data players and the analytics players that are starting to blend into this space. And then you also start, if you look at again, the convergence play, stablecoins for example is a great thing. It's just a tokenization of the dollar, but now you're on rails that run around the world, around the clock more efficiently, more effectively, more transparently. There's just so many things going on, John.

>> Yeah, and we had Kraken on theCUBE here as part of this program. It's interesting, because this is the money system now.

Shawn Douglass

>> It is.

>> And it's still early days. This is like mainframes haven't been invented yet. I mean, the beginning of the evolution mainframe, we see the computing. We saw that movie before. So in this world, it's happening. So I guess the question to ask, put your engineering tech hat on, if you were back in your venture capital days, when you do tech evaluations and do due diligence, how would you classify the opportunity? What's next? What's the high ground here? Is it get through, put those sails up and get out, don't sail in the North Atlantic and where the icebergs are, and go over to the warmer part of the territory? I mean, where's the action, I guess? Where are you going to?

Shawn Douglass

>> So I think, let me answer that in two parts and then I didn't fully answer your last question, so I'll go back to that in a second. So the two parts are where do you sail, right? So pre-new administration, it was Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Singapore, London. That was where digital assets were going. It was get the hell out of the US, you might go to jail, bad things, but the world, nobody's putting the genie back in the bottle on this. And because all of those different regions had regulatory clarity and were inviting digital assets, and crypto companies to come here, do business. So I spent the last two years traveling around the world and building customers, and relationships with regulators, and earning everybody's trust in those regions. So those areas have continued to grow. Now they all want to take New York Stock Exchange, this is the capital of capital. This is where the United States, they all wanted to take that business from the United States. The new administration, they're like-

>> They want it back.

Shawn Douglass

>> "... It's happening. It's happening here, and we're going to be the..."

>> Bitcoin Reserve was a big stake in the ground.

Shawn Douglass

>> It's a huge stake, right? And I'm excited to see what they do there. So not only is the whole world competing and inviting business, and facilitating, and enabling, and has clear regulatory. Now the United States is back in the game, because it's been a shit show for the last couple of years with the enforcement, regulation by enforcement.

>> A thousand paper cuts.

Shawn Douglass

>> Oh my God.

>> Legal action.

Shawn Douglass

>> It was ridiculous. I think that, so anyway, so there's in the United States and then there's outside of the United States, and now they're both going at a full steam ahead. And if you look at the UAE, they're investing, they just invested $2 billion in Binance. Okay, that's just a signal that this is serious.

>> So on the product side, how does that impact Amberdata? Because you have some of the most cutting edge products on measurement, which is analytics, which is deep analytics.

Shawn Douglass

>> This goes, I can answer my last question that I didn't answer about that. So what do we do and what problem do we solve for who, and why is digital assets different than traditional markets, and where do they converge? So Amberdata, what we do is we do institutional real-time and historical market on-chain data across everything, everywhere, and allow you to reconstitute. We create unique proprietary data sets to understand what is happening, measure risk, act, trade, transact, value, what have you, right? So there's this whole analytics play. So going back to the prior question is, what is the opportunity between this TradFi and with crypto? When you think about, so say you're a trader and you're trading Bitcoin by CME, right? Well, CME closes at six o'clock on Friday night and doesn't open, oh, they close at, yeah, five o'clock on Friday night, and they open on six o'clock on Sunday. So if there's a 10% move over the weekend and you're a TradFi guy, and you're yoloing with a handful of futures contracts, you're holding the bag. But what's happening in the digital assets world is that's happening 24/7 around the world, around the clock. Not only is it happening in spot markets, it's happening in derivatives markets, it's happening in options markets, it's happening in DeFi markets, things are being denominated in RAPBTC and all these DeFi protocols. We provide the ability to see what's happening in liquidity across all these venues, and these are all going to converge. And that's what we do. We provide the visibility into all the on-chain activity, all of the market activity, all of the liquidity analytics, both across, if you want to trade iBit options on NASDAQ, we have that. If you want to trade Deribit options, if you want to YOLO and go really deep in liquidity and Aave, or Uniswap or what have you, we're really the only the people that provide that. So what we do is we provide that comprehensive view across everything that matters in digital assets, in crypto, spanning into TradFi. So we're still a little early. We're ahead of the game, but we're building more people.

>> All right, as the trailblazer, you plowed the trails. You said you got stuff blown on your face, headwinds, now you got the tailwind. What did you learn coming out of that survival phase that you're going to put as good muscle into the going forward plan? Just on a personal level or from a business perspective, what's the learning that's going to make you sprint faster and what are you going to do?

Shawn Douglass

>> Yeah, so I think there's personal learnings and there's business learnings, and I think there's business learnings that you have to survive to win. And no matter what's going on, you have to survive, right?

>> Don't run out of cash.

Shawn Douglass

>> Right? Don't run out of cash. And then two is, when the market is starting to warm up and run, you need to run harder, faster. And it's only that you can only do that and win, because you spent the last two years grinding it out and improving your process, and being more efficient, and having better customer support, and better customer interactions, and building the best product for the need, and having your clients tell you where the market is going. So right now, we are positioned to win. We define this category, we're leading this category. We're the only comprehensive end-to-end solution that provides all of that. From a personal level, I think that this has been a challenging space. And I think that every day you just got to wake up, dust yourself off, and have the grit to smile and enjoy. Whether you get hit in the face or you're getting a huge check, you need to just enjoy the moment and go hard.

>> And how's pipeline right now? Must be good.

Shawn Douglass

>> Phenomenal. We've just had a five Xer pipeline in the last five months. It is just crazy. I'm hiring salespeople. We're hiring business development people. We are winning, and we're going to do more M&A.

>> Well, thanks for coming into our first segment on the new set here. We got the other set in the balcony. This is theCUBE's dedicated location.

Shawn Douglass

>> Thank you for having me.

>> Not too shabby.

Shawn Douglass

>> Yeah, this is phenomenal.

>> Great to see you.

Shawn Douglass

>> Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

>> Shawn Douglass, really a pioneer, as well as a trailblazer in crypto infrastructure, measurement, analytics, observability, telemetry. You got to get the data. These are systems now, and these systems have money in it, and they're doing a good job. And again, this is where the transition is happening. The traditional main street money market systems are coming together with decentralized players. It's going to be a great ride. And again, we've got a good environment here in the US. Of course, theCUBE's bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.