Dan Tapiero, co-founder and CEO of RoundTable Partners and 10T Holdings, joins theCUBE at the NYSE to discuss his extensive background in finance and his transition into the digital asset ecosystem. With over 20 years in the macro hedge fund industry, Tapiero brings valuable insights as he highlights the role of cryptocurrencies and blockchain in transforming business finance and infrastructure. theCUBE Research team, led by John Furrier, engages Tapiero in an in-depth discussion on the evolution of digital assets and the future of growth in this sector.
Tapiero emphasizes the potential of digital assets, predicting a substantial market value increase from $300 billion to a projected $10 trillion within the next decade. According to Tapiero, the current environment favors companies building this new ecosystem, as businesses generate significant revenue and prepare to enter public markets. The interview explores the role of US regulatory shifts in fostering a supportive atmosphere for cryptocurrencies, along with the importance of positioning the US as a global hub for blockchain technology and digital assets. #DanTapiero #DigitalAssets #theCUBE #NYSE #Crypto #Blockchain #Web3
Explore more about this topic and related insights on SiliconANGLE: siliconangle.com. Subscribe to our blockchain playlist for further discussions: [Blockchain Playlist](#).
00:00 - Intro
00:06 - Cryptocurrency and Blockchain: An Introductory Overview
02:31 - The Journey of Dan Tapiero and the Rise of 10T Holdings
09:09 - Crypto Industry Developments and Challenges
16:31 - Crypto Companies and Public Offerings
20:44 - The Future of Digital Assets
23:10 - The Digital Cultural Revolution: Final Reflections
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Anthony Vassallo, Silicon Valley Bank
Dan Tapiero, co-founder and CEO of RoundTable Partners and 10T Holdings, joins theCUBE at the NYSE to discuss his extensive background in finance and his transition into the digital asset ecosystem. With over 20 years in the macro hedge fund industry, Tapiero brings valuable insights as he highlights the role of cryptocurrencies and blockchain in transforming business finance and infrastructure. theCUBE Research team, led by John Furrier, engages Tapiero in an in-depth discussion on the evolution of digital assets and the future of growth in this sector.
Tapiero emphasizes the potential of digital assets, predicting a substantial market value increase from $300 billion to a projected $10 trillion within the next decade. According to Tapiero, the current environment favors companies building this new ecosystem, as businesses generate significant revenue and prepare to enter public markets. The interview explores the role of US regulatory shifts in fostering a supportive atmosphere for cryptocurrencies, along with the importance of positioning the US as a global hub for blockchain technology and digital assets. #DanTapiero #DigitalAssets #theCUBE #NYSE #Crypto #Blockchain #Web3
Explore more about this topic and related insights on SiliconANGLE: siliconangle.com. Subscribe to our blockchain playlist for further discussions: [Blockchain Playlist](#).
00:00 - Intro
00:06 - Cryptocurrency and Blockchain: An Introductory Overview
02:31 - The Journey of Dan Tapiero and the Rise of 10T Holdings
09:09 - Crypto Industry Developments and Challenges
16:31 - Crypto Companies and Public Offerings
20:44 - The Future of Digital Assets
23:10 - The Digital Cultural Revolution: Final Reflections
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers, Anthony Vassallo, head of crypto at Silicon Valley Bank, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss the shift from crypto speculation to production infrastructure and the regulatory clarity unlocking institutional adoption. Vassallo describes SVB's 12-year track record in crypto banking, now serving over 500 clients across wallets, marketplaces and Bitcoin miners through a dedicated FinTech practice. He notes that nearly $8 billion flowed into crypto VC last year, with the trend shifting toward fe...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
How do you support cryptocurrency businesses while ensuring compliance and avoiding de‑banking?add
What should entrepreneurs know about the current state and trends in crypto venture capital—how much capital is being deployed, how VCs are approaching investments, and which verticals are attracting funding?add
What are the most common questions clients ask about fundraising and regulation in crypto, and how is the industry evolving from speculation to infrastructure (including M&A activity)?add
What is it like to work at Silicon Valley Bank during its transition (after the First Citizens integration), and what is the bank's culture like?add
>> Welcome back. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here at our NYSC studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is our Crypto Trailblazer series. We highlight the leaders in crypto, making it happen, bringing in this next era of infrastructure, powering the financial system, the money system, software money. The world is converging real world and digital coming together. Anthony Vassallo is here. He's the head of crypto at Silicon Valley Bank. Thank you for coming in, Anthony. Good to see you. Thanks for coming in. It's Crypto Week in New York City.
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah. Thanks for having me. Digital Asset Summit.
John Furrier
>> We tried to get in you on our last series. You live in Austin. Now you're in New York. Thanks for coming in. Silicon Valley Bank obviously transitioned under the ownership of First Citizens, still operating as an independent division. Storied franchise, loved the name, being from Silicon Valley myself. But it's modernized, it's active and crypto is hot. Tell us what is on the agenda. What are you guys doing?
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah. So Silicon Valley Bank is always focused on the innovation economy, we have a dedicated national FinTech practice, and we've been banking crypto for 12 years at this point. It's an imperative part of the future of finance. And the VCs that we support as well, of course, want us to support their portfolio companies. We offer a comprehensive commercial banking platform for over 500 clients building on and around the blockchain. And whatever you can think of from a wallet provider to a marketplace to a Bitcoin miner, as long as they are compliant, we try to find a way to support them.
John Furrier
>> We really appreciate what you do there. It's certainly a great industry benefit. In light of the past regime, a lot of de-banking, a lot of friends of mine, fellow entrepreneurs have complained publicly and privately like, "Hey, I don't want to be de-banked." So there's the tech community and the Silicon Valley community, they want to have a friend in the banking business. This is really not just chatter. It's like legit. This is big money now happening. The mainstreaming of crypto is here.
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> This is a super important piece.
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah. Commitment and relationships are kind of everything, right? I don't think it's very difficult to just open a checking account anymore, but one thing that separates us is we do upfront diligence before onboarding a company, and it allows us to understand the business before we commit to it. So over the course of the relationship, we've already documented and asked the client what they're doing. So we understand the activity that they're trying to do through the bank, how they're executing on their roadmap. And they also get dedicated support. We're a team of crypto natives. The head of our enhanced due diligence team owns a crypto punk. So we're just kind of here infiltrating the bank from the inside.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, yeah. That's cool. We're a small customer of SVB, so wish we could say we had billions and we were a whale in the Bitcoin business, but we're not. But there are a lot of whales out there. There's a lot of crypto growth has been phenomenal. It's been mainstreaming. What's that mean for you guys and from an activity standpoint? Because as OGs, you're now on the wave of commercialization of crypto, crypto infrastructure, the currency itself. It's enabling a huge market opportunity.
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> What are some of the key things that entrepreneurs should know and people should know about the keys that you guys have right now?
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah. We saw last year a little shy of eight billion go into crypto VC. So while some of the louder voices are pointing at price, the quieter ones are building and the trend is fewer but bigger checks. So bigger checks to fewer winners and there's a lot more discipline from VCs now compared to what you saw in the valuation overhang of '21 and '22, and a lot of focus on specific verticals. 40 cents of every crypto VC dollar last year went to some conversions of crypto and AI. And then the other main segments would be payments, aka just stablecoins for the most part, real world assets and a few other things. There's been a movement away from other segments. You're also seeing some of the winners that raised in some of those down years now come out and either be acquired or close growth equity rounds. So the trend is clear. It's not necessarily more difficult to raise a proper round. You just have to be building the right thing and you have to show a path to revenue.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. The Clarity Act is being worked on. The GENIUS Act really opened up the aperture and confidence.
Anthony Vassallo
>> Right.
John Furrier
>> Clarity Act, when that gets nailed down, it's going to open up much more institutional thinking around measuring the compliance. A lot of the heavy lifting that you guys do now, we think that's going to open up a tsunami of developers. And we compare that trend opportunity similar to OpenClaw right now. OpenClaw on the agent side is just like, it's like drugs. Everyone's doing it. Under the age of 30, if you're coding in AI, you jump on the OpenClaw bandwagon. Why? Because it's cool and fun. Yeah. You get a little high off of it. So crypto, we believe is going to hit that threshold. What's your thoughts on that? Because when the Clarity Act comes in, then you got the GENIUS Act and the kind of the rules of the road nailed down. Talk about that impact. What's your reaction to that?
Anthony Vassallo
>> So no interpretation that we are in a bear market and the bull cycle was probably a little bit underwhelming for most. We didn't even get a double from the prior all time high and we've since tested 50% retracement off the top of Bitcoin. But at the same time, you're seeing the backdrop more favorable than ever, and particularly for bear markets, this is not anything like what we saw from '17 into '18 following the ICO mania. This is nothing at all like what we saw in '22 with some of the failures of certain bad and risky actors. Even though the price is down right now, like you said, the regulatory backdrop could not be better. You have the SEC and the CFTC agreeing on definitions. We have the first federal law in the books around stablecoins. Now, a lot of that still has to be tested and doesn't eventuate until next year and we'll have to go through the judicial system. And if and when we get market structure, I think again, like you said, it'll allow a lot of strategies that are already in place to just press the green button and execute the roadmap across financial institutions and more product and partnership announcements from some founders.
John Furrier
>> I'm really glad you highlighted the regulatory side of it because I think that's absolutely correct. And it does put shade on any kind of questions around kind of where we came from, ICO craze and the FTC situation. What are some of the technical and business challenges that you see now? Because is it just time, over target, get this stuff done? What are some of the hurdles that we still have to cross over?
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah. I think the same questions that our clients ask us, it's usually the same two questions. How do you think we should think about raising and can you connect us to capital? And what do you think the rules are going to be and where are we going to land? And we don't really have insight there that they necessarily don't have. They just want to get our opinion. But I think it's important now more than ever to show that path to profitability and that IP. So what we're seeing is the ones who are doing something significant are now building infrastructure. And before, what financial institutions were doing was all proof of concept, but now it's turning into plumbing and production. So there's also, there's a lack on the supply side of the amount of companies that do these things. I mean, the M&A arms race kind of set off last year when Stripe finalized the acquisition of Bridge. Last week, we saw the acquisition of BVNK and there's been a few others in the mix. Last year was the biggest year for crypto M&A. We predict that this year's going to be even bigger and you might see the biggest acquisition of all time. So seeing this whole asset clash just go from speculation to infrastructure and how it's rewiring the financial system, I think is what really matters. But from the outside looking in, I also understand the criticism of others saying, "Well, Altcoins still have a market cap of a trillion. Why is Dogecoin have the value that it does? What's going on with all these rug pulls?" But again, what's really being built is the stuff that matters is the IP and infrastructure.
John Furrier
>> I mean there's speculative stuff out there, we all see that. But I think to me that's the sign that I love is it's infrastructure. It reminds me of the cloud game back around 2011, very primitive. But now blockchain and Ethereum, Solana, all these chains are solid and that's going to enable more activity on top of them. So I think that's a positive thing. We've been covering crypto since 2012 on SiliconANGLE and watched it through its progression. The one key thing that's been consistent every year, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is the trade off between anti-money laundering and know your customer, AML or KYC versus privacy. What's the trade offs? Because that's always kind of been the big issue, but now you have immutable infrastructure. Is that going to smooth out? Is that already there? What's the status? Because I want to raise money with crypto. I want to build with crypto. That's coming. What are some of these old, I won't say trip wires, but like requirements?
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah. The whole idea of a blockchain is to prove that a digital object was in a place at a single time. And one of the most natural applications of that besides moving value or money is identity. And if you think about the ethos, especially around Bitcoin, it's peer-to-peer electronic cash. So how much should we have to disclose who we're interacting with, especially if it's peer-to-peer? And inherently, privacy is identity, right?
John Furrier
>> Yep.
Anthony Vassallo
>> But there's a fine line between privacy, I'm hiding and I'm trying to do something illicit, or I'm using a mixer, a tumbler, I'm obfuscating transaction history, or just using zero knowledge cryptography and showing, maybe I don't want to reveal John's home address, but I will say that this is John's mailbox and I will prove that it exists and I will use this technology to show that. But there's really a fine line. And I think the other thing that's discounted that a lot of naysayers don't appreciate is what you can prove, what can be public and how the blockchain offers programmable compliance as well. And it's also really important at the on and off ramps within banks to conduct robust KYC, AML.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you bring up a good point. I want to ask you about velocity because one of the things that you get with transparency, you can do things transaction wise that kind of aren't really needed in the old way because you have transparency. AI is going to be a big force of change. There's already talk of AI agents refactoring chains, doing all kinds of cool stuff. And we're seeing that on the commercial side of the enterprise and large players where all the compliance stuff is all agents doing their thing, chit chatting back and forth, doing the work. How do you see the AI infusion coming in helping and where's the areas of concern to watch because not yet fully converged, we're already hearing great conversations with people leveraging AI to do cool things and to move the needle?
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah. It's a great question and a rhetorical that I often ask is, does crypto need AI more than AI needs crypto and what's the purpose of one another working with each other? So blockchain can verify AI's outputs and AI can simplify crypto. And what I mean by that is you might be hesitant to give certain information or your thoughts to one of these centralized behemoths and they might also curtail their answers, right? Not answer your question, not give you a complete answer or kind of pair it back a little bit. And in a decentralized model, you could see how if you have a bunch of different nodes competing for the same answer, for example, on how the Bittensor network works, that you might actually get a more robust, complete, accurate, objective answer and you don't necessarily need to disclose something to a large centralized company. So the promise is certainly there in terms of what you can use. I do think that you increase a little bit of the attack surface, so you have to be careful as well. And there's a bit of an adoption issue as well. We're so hardwired now to just open Claude, ChatGPT and just ... I don't know a lot of people even deep in crypto that are using the crypto native products. And as well to your second point, if you believe that agents are going to do things for us, I think that's a pretty safe assumption, that they need to transfer value and make payments. Well, the question is, how are they going to do it? And especially when an agent pays another agent, what currency are they going to do it in? And it doesn't necessarily make sense in all circumstances, but I think it's natural to assume that that's going to be stablecoins, especially in smaller value transactions or agent to agent transactions.
John Furrier
>> Well, I'm super excited to see Silicon Valley Bank continue their mission. Innovation has always been kind of the heart of it. And having insiders, OGs been there, done that inside the big company. What's it like to be in there in this transition? Because Silicon Valley Bank is cutting edge, they're keeping the brand. They're thundering away on the frontier. What's it like there? And share the culture. What's it like?
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah. It's super cool. I've been there for 10 years. There's a reason that I've stayed. I've worked across credit, product and now on the crypto side. We literally get to work with the biggest innovators in the world and we try to find ways to help them in any way that we can. And we just try to get creative and they're even more creative than us. So however we can support them, I think everybody was glad that we kept the brand and it's the same people that you know as well. So our executive team, for example, has an average tenure over 20 years. On a consolidated basis, we're the same size that we were with First Citizens in a more diversified balance sheet. So still the same commitment and service model to the builders.
John Furrier
>> I got to say, First Citizens have done a great job of integrating SVB and smart to keep the brand. Thanks for coming on as trailblazer. Good to see SVB, Silicon Valley Bank, trailblazing. Appreciate it. Thanks again for coming in.
Anthony Vassallo
>> Yeah thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.
John Furrier
>> All right, we got the Crypto Trailblazers here. So, Silicon Valley Bank, iconic name on the frontier, pioneering crypto. Again, the financial money system, whether you have Apple Pay on your phone or a wallet, the world is coming together. The mainstreaming of crypto is coming super fast. And again, AI is right around the corner. AI for crypto, crypto for AI all coming together. Again, the digital world and physical meeting and real world assets on chain all happening. We're doing our best to keep track of it and share that with you. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier