Cryptonews Podcast Dan O’Prey, Chief Product Officer of Bakkt, on The Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin in Public Markets, Custody, and Lightning Network | Ep. 299

Dan O’Prey, Chief Product Officer of Bakkt, on The Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin in Public Markets, Custody, and Lightning Network | Ep. 299

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Dan O’Prey, Chief Product Officer at Bakkt, talks about the Bitcoin ETF approval process, Bitcoin in the public market, lightning network, and the importance of custody.

About Dan O’Prey

Dan O’Prey is Bakkt’s Chief Product Officer. Dan most recently served as Chief Strategy Officer as part of the executive team at Digital Asset, creators of the Daml smart contract language. He was responsible for defining the corporate strategy and aligning the top-level product strategy, assisted with over $300 MM of financing, and oversaw marketing and communications across the firm. Dan joined Digital Asset as part of the acquisition of Hyperledger, the first permissioned distributed ledger platform, where he was co-founder and CEO. Dan then co-led the creation of Hyperledger at The Linux Foundation, where he participated at the board level since inception and was elected as the Chair of the Marketing Committee for 3 consecutive terms.

Prior to Hyperledger, Dan was the Co-Founder and CEO of MadeiraCloud, a Sequoia Capital-backed SaaS company for designing, monitoring, and managing cloud infrastructure resources based in Beijing, China. The company later rebranded to HyperHQ and was acquired by Ant Financial. Dan is a frequent public speaker and co-created the Synchronize DLT and Crypto conference. He holds a BA in Business Management and Information Management from the Sheffield University Management School.

Dan O’Prey gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

Bitcoin ETF – it could trigger other applications being approved and would likely encourage greater institutional adoption
Bitcoin in public markets – exposure to the crypto market via trusted public markets
2024 outlook & Bakkt’s key focus areas
Custody – recent industry events have shown the importance of a secure, regulated, and qualified custodian
Lightning – cross-border remittances, B2B settlement, instantaneous deposits and withdrawals for trading, and global, interoperable P2P

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, and we have some big news this week, folks. By the time you are listening to this episode, we very well may have a Bitcoin ETF hot and ready, or we could not. It’s an absolute shit show right now. No one knows if it’s going to happen. It’s looking good. Gensler just threw out a tweet a couple days ago warning people about buying and using crypto assets. I personally think that’s bullish as hell. I think that’s a good sign. I think he’s setting the stage. I think he’s laying some pavement for us. And I can’t wait to get into all of the Bitcoin ETF talk and everything back related with the star of the show today, Dan O’Prey, Chief Product Officer at Bakkt. Dan most recently served as Chief Strategy Officer as part of the executive team at Digital Asset, Creators of the Daml smart contract language. He’s a true veteran and has been in the space for over ten years. Crazy to think about that. He was responsible for defining the corporate strategy and aligning of the top level product strategy, assisted with over 300 mil of financing Wowza, and oversaw everything marketing and communications related. He was also part of the acquisition of Hyperledger, the first permissioned distributed ledger platform where he was Co-Founder and CEO. Super pumped to have you on. Dan, welcome to the show, my friend. How you doing?

Dan O’Prey
Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Real pleasure to be here and excited to talk about. It’s an exciting time, as you say at the moment.

Matt Zahab
It is. We’ve been waiting for this for a hot minute. Years and years and years. It’s finally happening. Folks, we are recording this episode two days before you will hear it on the 11th. Dan and I are recording on Tuesday, January 9th. Huge news. Everything ETF related. Is this going to happen, Dan? What is this going to do to the market? Give us your 360 degree take on the ETF. Give me the good, give me the bad, give me it all.

Dan O’Prey
Yeah. So, wow. Asking for a prediction the day before. We’re expected to hear on that the first batch of the 13 ETFs that are looking to be approved. To be honest, I’m not sure if tomorrow will be the day or not, but to me it doesn’t matter as much the particular day. I think really it’s inevitable now and we’re getting into the final stretch. So whether it’s tomorrow, weeks, or even a couple of months, the spot ETF are going to get approved in some fashion. I think, as you say, it’s far too far down the line. We’ve seen multiple revisions and tweaks that the SEC have been requesting of these ETF of the kind of details that only suggest that they’re refining prior to approval, such as the cash redemption portion and lots of changes over the last couple of days and the filings from the various ETF providers. So it may well be tomorrow or yesterday when this goes out, but I think it’s still, you never know with the SEC, given their historical stance towards these. There’s always a lot more to button up and little I’s to dot and T’s to cross. So we could well see a few more tweaks before they finally get approved. But I think it’s extremely likely in the short term at this point.

Matt Zahab
Let’s put on our bearish hat for a second. Everyone on Twitter has said if it doesn’t get approved, everything is going to get absolutely nuked. I hate to be a bear in any capacity of life, especially when it comes to Bitcoin or crypto or Blockchain. If for whatever reason, this doesn’t get approved, are we going to see an absolute nuke? Is it going to be World War III for crypto? What’s going to happen there?

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, great question. I don’t think so. It’s the short answer. I think if it doesn’t get approved, it’ll come with a caveat of why and there’ll be one or two more specific changes that they’re looking for. So I can’t imagine it’s going to be a blanket, not approved. It’ll be to the ETF providers themselves not approved, but because of x and y, and I can’t imagine those are going to be substantial roadblocks. So we may see a short term hit to the market as everyone is presuming everything is going to go ahead tomorrow. But still, I think that will be short term, if at all, as we’re still marching towards that same end state.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, no, I completely agree there and really hope it does go through. Now, let’s flip the switch here. Let’s put on our bullish hats for a second. If this goes through, what does this do for the rest of the market? Is this the parade we’ve all been waiting for when massive institutional investors come in? Is this going to pump the price of Bitcoin? Is this going to increase mass adoption as a whole, not just on Bitcoin, but as the crypto market, as a whole, let’s just say that this does go through either before this episode airs or slightly after this episode airs. What does that do for the rest of 2024 crypto markets?

Dan O’Prey
It’s huge. I think everyone’s anticipating how large and making very large price predictions. It is massive. I don’t want to get too carried away with it because it is just a significant step towards the mainstreaming and institutionalization of Bitcoin in particular, but potentially more towards crypto generally. And it really, A, opens up, obviously a lot of potential for capital inflows from retail investing market, from pension funds and IRAs and capital that can’t go directly into spot Bitcoin or doesn’t have a vehicle for that today. And B, really gives it the credibility, like the rubber stamping that it gives to people within businesses, within institutions who maybe were a bit shy or didn’t want to say to their boss, hey, we should do something in Bitcoin now. Spot ETF with the SEC is approved. You’ve got BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, and it’s trading on national stock exchanges. So it really does change the game in terms of opening the door for capital as well as giving that stamp of approval that, hey, this is a serious asset class that you’re allowed to take seriously and you’re allowed to participate in now, given the types of players who are in the game and the quantities of money we expect to see involved.

Matt Zahab
And what about the 13 applicants that we currently have? Full disclosure here, Dan, I’m a bit of a rookie when it comes to ETF. I invest in a couple of ETF, but I really have no clue how the approval process works. Is the SEC just going to give everyone a kick at the can? Is it going to be one or two to start? Is it just going to be one half of them? I’d love if you could walk me through if you do know about this subject and sort of give us the lay the land in regards to how the SEC is going to roll out this whole ETF approval process.

Dan O’Prey
My guess is that it’ll be close to an all or nothing. I think it’d be very hard for the SEC to sort of pick winners and losers. And given these applications have been going for quite some time now and a lot of dialogue and feedback has been given to each of them, I’d be very surprised if they haven’t all coalesced towards something that the SEC finds acceptable or they all haven’t at this point. So maybe there’ll be one or two that doesn’t quite make the bar, but really with the ETF space, it very much is a sort of first mover advantage. The earlier, the better. The momentum, the branding. The size of the ETF really does tend to be that several winner takes all, but not far off it. So if the regulators were to approve one or two, they would essentially be blessing those two as the most likely long term winners relative to the others. And given the length of time, I’d struggle to imagine they haven’t all coalesced around something that either is or isn’t. Pretty sick at this point.

Matt Zahab
I love some of the tickers too. I believe it’s Valkyrie. I could be wrong, but their ticker is HODL, which is just absolutely phenomenal. I just can’t wait for this. This is going to be so much fun. And let’s just segue into Bakkt as well here. I’d love if you could give us an elevator pitch on Bakkt, just so the listeners can have a bit of an idea of what we’re going to talk about when we get into the nitty gritty, and then just sort of tie that into how the ETF is going to help your business expand as well.

Dan O’Prey
Sure. Yeah. So Bakkt formed in about four years ago, so we actually spun out of the intercontinental exchange, or commonly known as ICE. So they’re one of the largest and futures exchanges in the world and own a bunch of different exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange. So we were sort of incubated within them as the crypto division and then spun out to be an independent company. And we’ve since gone public on the New York Stock Exchange as well. So one of two publicly traded qualified custodians that I’m sure we’ll talk about a lot more alongside Coinbase. And really we’re very much focused on being the infrastructure and platform plumbing behind enabling institutions to participate in this space, as well as enabling retail facing companies that aren’t crypto native necessarily, who don’t have necessarily on the license, the infrastructure, the custody, the liquidity, the banking relationships for on ramps. So we’re on the one hand, powering a lot of trading for large retail brokerages, behind the scenes for crypto trading, and on the other, enabling institutions to participate in the space initially through our custody solution. So very much behind the scenes. We’re not a direct to consumer brand. Our play is really much more horizontally looking to power multiple companies rather than be an avertly integrated end to end offer us.

Matt Zahab
I love that. And one thing that I’m very curious about here Dan is someone who, when I first got into the space back in sort of 2019 2020, I didn’t want to put too many eggs into the just crypto basket. And I invested in a lot of companies similar to yourselves where I can use my, again I’m a Canadian, so it’s your version of the 401K kind of thing. We have an RRSP and a TFSA, just tax free investment vehicles where you can invest in stocks and ETF and so on and so forth and set it aside for a rainy day. And also, again, it’s tax free. That’s the biggest thing. I put a lot of money into stocks and publicly traded companies that have crypto on their balance sheet or are crypto custodians or do anything in the space similar to yourself. Right? A lot of infrastructure companies. As I figured, this is a good way for me to get exposure and not have to deal with all the crypto stuff. And obviously tax free. Was any of this part of your decision to go public on the best, realistically, the best stock exchange in the world? Was there ever discussion to launch a coin, an ICO, or from day one, was it always, let’s just go public, this is the right thing to do. This gives us more clout, this gives us more legitimacy, a better reputation, better branding. I’d love if you could sort of divulge the thought process behind going public as a stock.

Dan O’Prey
So I joined two and a half years ago. So it was the same year that we went public. I wasn’t at Bakkt since day one, but I think I can pretty confidently say I don’t think an ICO. I’m sure it was someone brought it up at some point. But Bakkt positioning in the space has very much been on the conservative, dependable, reliable, responsible end of the spectrum. We’re highly regulated. We’re trying to take the slow but steady approach. We know that this market is going to have ups and downs and bad players are going to come in and exit, as we’ve seen over the last few years, and really in the long term, as we get regulatory clarity as the market matures. I say long term, but not too long from now. That really a company that is compliant and regulatory friendly and working to some extent with the regulators to ensure that this is a safe and sound market for participants to come into, and given that we took a far more a traditional approach and wanted to make sure that we had access to the capital markets that being public brings you, as well as actually, as a nice side effect of that, it’s been a very large validation of our approach. When people are looking for companies, knowing that you’re public and you’re audited and your financials are available is a very different game, especially when you’re perhaps a much more conservative institution who doesn’t want to take risks as they’re entering what’s already perceived to be, or has been perceived to be a risky space.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, well said there. I hate to get into anything stock price related or coin price related, but one of the really interesting things with all publicly traded companies that have crypto exposure, whether they hold crypto assets or directly deal with crypto similar to yourselves, there’s almost always a correlative price action to Bitcoin and the crypto market as a whole. You guys are pretty similar in that regard as well. You’ve had a great couple months. Stock is looking super nice right now. It’s gone up a considerable amount. Is this going to change and will the Bitcoin ETF impact this in any capacity? Like me personally, Dan, I think if and when it gets approved, hopefully when it gets approved, I think all the Hut 8, the Marathon, the Michael Saylor MicroStrategy, the Coinbase, I feel like every company that’s publicly traded and has crypto exposure is going to take a little jump. And as more institutional money comes in, I feel like a lot of people are going to be like, okay, how can I get more exposure besides ETF? And they won’t want to invest in actual crypto coins themselves, but will want to invest in publicly traded vehicles that give exposure to crypto assets. Am I completely out the lunch there? What’s the deal with that?

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, I think it would be really interesting to see what the knock on effects are, as you say. Right? There is very much the bullcase, as you described, as it being sort of an entry point or a gateway into the wider ecosystem for those who wouldn’t necessarily have gone and signed up to a crypto exchange, transferred money across and put their cold, hard cash into crypto directly. But now their brokers and their IRAs are going to be making this available, in some cases promoting it to as a potential investment to people who hadn’t even considered it before. And that really will be their first step for a lot of people. And once they take that first step, obviously, depending on how well it performs, but assuming that the market continues to trend in this direction, as you say, people, I imagine, will look for other ways to get exposure. You mentioned mining companies, which have always been an interesting way to in some extent get leverage position. It’ll be interesting for companies like microstrategy as well who are holding large amounts of Bitcoin in addition to their software business, how a spot ETF impacts the investment around those as well. Then hopefully this will also be a stepping point down the road to people looking to buy Bitcoin directly and get direct exposure once they become comfortable with it as a regulated security trading on a stock exchange. I know the fees are looking very competitive. Over the last few days, we’ve seen a lot of compression there, as everyone sees, for a land grab to get that initial volume and the ball rolling. But I think it would also be quite positive for those that trade in spot commodity Bitcoin, as over time people look to just, I can just buy this directly as well and maybe even learn about self custody down the line too. Overall think it’s going to be a huge, just gateway into the wider ecosystem and massively positive from that regard.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, let’s hope the floodgates open there. You just brought up custody. Let’s jump into it. You guys have literally best in class infrastructure and the market has resonated with that and understands that you guys, multilayer technology, MPC, cryptography. I could go on and on, but you can explain this much better than I can. I’d love if you could talk about how world class your guys custody is and just sort of if you could segue into when you’re speaking with institutions who do choose you guys to hold their coins, what kind of questions did they ask where they’re like, hey, why should we go with you over Coinbase? Or why should we go with you over whoever else may also have a world class custody solution. I’ve never dealt with this again, I’m not a whale. There’s no point for me to be going to a massive institution like you guys for custody related, but when there is a massive institution, what kind of conversations do they have? What kind of questions do they ask you in regards to why should we go with you guys? I’d love if you could touch on your custody solution and why people end up going with you after the whole qubit and shabam is all said and done.

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, and in some ways it’s a very competitive space and in some ways it’s a very differentiated space still. So I think, again, sort of given that the last couple of years, quality custody has really been highlighted as something to take extremely seriously, not that people, but even another reminders of how critical that is. And I think generally, the crypto industry is a little immature in terms of the market structure for how the different entities within the crypto space enable institutions to participate. And by that, I mean you have companies where they do everything right. They’re the custodian, they’re the exchange, they’re the clearinghouse, essentially. They’re broker, in some cases have a prop trading company, and they’re all in one single legal entity. Whereas if you look at, like, say, US equities market, all these different things are broken out into deliberately different legal entities, so that if an exchange like FTX goes bankrupt, the funds aren’t at risk because the assets are held at a bankrupt remote custodian. And so that segregation of duties and roles is really important. And given our institutional heritage, that’s where we were born and where we started and where the original custody solution was designed to meet. And that sort of really shone through over the last year, several years, as we’ve massively reinvested in our custody solution. But also the market started to appreciate some of the approaches that we took and why those are so important. So to your question, we’re a New York Department of Financial Services trust chartered company, and why DFS are considered kind of the gold standard and creme de la creme of the strictest regulators in this space. I mean, they issued the bit license multiple years ago. And so we have a separate legal entity, a trust that’s regulated by New York, where all the assets are held, that has an independent board of managers, it’s chaired by the chairwoman of New York Stock Exchange, very much a legally, completely separate company. We’re not an exchange ourselves. We don’t take proprietary positions. We don’t take risk. So if, God forbid, anything happened to the remainder of Bakkt, that trust company is remote from anything in that. And the remainder of the company doesn’t take the certain kinds of risks that exchanges or prop trading companies have. So being a trust company being independent, as mentioned, being a public company, audited, and financials being public is super valuable and helpful. And, you know, if you look at the number of companies that even just tick those boxes, it’s very few.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, few and far. Well said there. Dan, we got to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. But when we get back, we are going to talk about how bananas the last half of 2023 has been versus the second half of 2022. You guys saw up to ten times qualified sales opportunities. The market is, for a lack of better terms, horny for Bitcoin and crypto, and we are going to get into that. But until that huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. You guys know who this is. This is PrimeXBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. We love them as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that deposit, that is, 50% will be deposited and credited to your trading account. Again, promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with Dan. You guys said that qualified sales opportunities were up ten times in the first half of 2023 versus the second half of 2022. This is just the first half of 2023. Not even talking about the second half. How horny is the market right now? You guys have a good gauge on the horniness better than most, as people are coming to you for custody to hold their coins for everything. How horny are people right now Dan?

Dan O’Prey
It’s a great metric I’m going to have to take back and start to measure as a key KPI internally. Yeah, it’s been a complete 180 from this time last year. Obviously the bar was somewhat low then, with multiple very high profile examples and money being lost and bad actors to say the least. But that said, it has been extremely encouraging how quickly the market has rebounded. I’ve always thought it’s mentioned I’ve been in the Blockchain space for ten years now, seen a few bears, and the market does tend to have a fairly short memory and is here for the long term, tends to come back pretty rapidly. This was quite a long bear market. But yeah, really the level of credibility that’s sort of come back. How quickly the market has rebounded from what were some of the biggest scandals, not just in crypto, but in business financial market history. To now be where we are talking about a spot ETF potentially being improved tomorrow is an incredible sort of turnaround and really a sign if anyone still needed one, that misses here to stay and that actually the fundamentals are unchanged by some actors on the bad actors on the edges. So yeah, it’s been fantastic for us. I mean, both actually, selfishly, as the product guy, having a bit of a breather and having six months to sort of focus and build and determine where we’re going to go next. Bear markets are for builders and it was nice in a way, in a sense, to not have all the hype and buzz and fads that were sort of coming and going when the market was as fought as it was, and every day there was a new shiny toy and distraction and potential products we could build and interest in this and that and that fuzzy buzzy interest has since faded and gone back to really, what are the core pieces, which are custody, trading and then also starting to invest in the payment space as well. So it was nice for me to have that focus time, and then it’s been amazing for us and everyone in the space to see how quickly everything has returned. And the interest in crypto remakes extremely high and only growing and hopefully soon to be taken to the next level.

Matt Zahab
It is crazy how quickly the sentiment changes. I’m sure. Of course, you remember literally a year and a half ago, like mid 2022, when it was just like, what are we doing? Like, even the sentiment on the podcast was much different. I don’t want to say not as fun, because it was still fun speaking to really intelligent people like yourselves, but the whole sentiment was just different. Twitter wasn’t the best kind of dumpster fire ever. All type of crypto communities were buzzing. There was no buzz in the air, no positivity. Extremely negative, you know, the SBF trickle effects, the network effects were still extremely present. And now it just seems like the party, it still hasn’t seemed like the party is fully started, but it’s just so much fun. And one thing I would love, someone has to make a movie about this. Like just the whole process of the last three, four years. Heck, even maybe the whole crypto cycle as a whole. But I would love to watch a good documentary or a good series on all this banana lands. I think it’d be a hoop.

Dan O’Prey
I think there’s definitely a series in there and then not just the movie. I agree. It’s been a fascinating time, crazy to be part of and watch unfold and even things that no one could have predicted quite the level of what was going on. So it’s been incredible. And I think while, as you say, it was bad for the industry and less fun, I think it is also positive for the market to have had the clear out and have had that reminder that not everything is a good investment and you should do your due diligence and you should invest in companies that have bought that crazy concept of. So that was the level that tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown around with very little oversight and due diligence being performed. And that meant that capital was going where it shouldn’t have and maybe not to where it should have. And so it’s a great reminder, I think, to the space to not everything is going to be valuable. Not every company is going to be around forever. Look for those who are doing it right, who are playing the long game, who are trying to do things by the book and not just make a quick buck, because those are the companies that are going to be the monsters in 5, 10 years.

Matt Zahab
Well said. There a couple more topics here, Dan, and then we’ll wrap up. Lightning network, you brought up payments a couple of minutes ago. This is still an aspect of Bitcoin that needs to giddy up. We need the train to leave the station for everything payments related. We’ve seen it with Ordinals, we’ve seen it with a lot of applications being built on the Bitcoin network. It’s still far too slow. It does not allow us to really crank up the mass adoption radar. You guys have dabbled in this space. You guys have more than just dabbled. You guys are building and executing and shipping a bunch of really cool things in this space. B2B settlements, instantaneous deposits, withdrawals, global trading, interoperable peer to peer trading. How has Lightning impacted your business and how are you guys building within on the Lightning Network present day?

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, I think as you mentioned at the beginning, right? We can talk about the ETF and the halvening and these kind of like big investment events, and these are fantastic for bringing money and credibility into the space, but they are still investment, right? They’re trading their investment and that is still the primary mass market use case for crypto and not pure utility. So really the investment, the speculation ultimately, I believe, is based on ultimately one day these things actually being used for a mainstream mass market use case that normal people who may not even care about Bitcoin or crypto or know it’s being used get value from. In the same way, most people today don’t know what TCP IP is and don’t need to know what it is. They can just use products which leverage it and get everyday value out of it. That’s where I see sort of the next major mainstream adoption driver being for Bitcoin in particular. And Satoshi’s white paper’s title was Bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic hash system, not Bitcoin a digital gold that you hoard and hold but go know. I think not everything Satoshi said was perfect. He’s not a God, but that was what it was originally designed for and that is still the best in my opinion, by far the best use case. Having an Internet native instrument of value that no one controls in the same way that no one controls the Internet, or in fact even less so than how people control the Internet will be absolutely massive for global commerce, for remittances, for programmable payments, for streaming, right? As people can actually stream sats while they’re watching a podcast and pay instead of 99 a month or whatever it may be. It’s obviously been a use case that people talk about a lot and has had a lot of attention but still hasn’t quite happened. And I think with the Lightning Network in particular that scalability, instantaneous settlement, near zero fees has been a massive game changer and Lightning is now four or five years old and getting to the stage where it’s starting to be mature enough to operate at scale and a lot of companies are taking it very seriously and making investments there. And I think that FIAT to FIAT use case where users don’t necessarily know they’re using Lightning or Bitcoin and don’t care, they just send dollars. Someone receives dollars or someone receives pesos. And behind the scenes that’s going in and out of Bitcoin and Lightning, I think is still going to be the killer app which really drives the person on the street who doesn’t care about Bitcoin to actually use it.

Matt Zahab
Well said there. Dan last question here before we wrap up, mate. 2024 outlook. Besides Bitcoin, we’ve discussed a lot about Bitcoin. It’s been the bread and butter of the show along with yourself and Bakkt any other non Bitcoin crypto related topics. Any hot takes you have for 2024 can be good, can be bad. What do you got for hot takes in the crypto market for this coming year?

Dan O’Prey
I’ll answer in the reverse in that I think the hot take is that Bitcoin is going to start to really stand out from the rest of the market for the remainder of the year, not just with the spot ETF, but the understanding and appreciation that Bitcoin is unique as an asset within the crypto space. And really there is no crypto space in the same way there’s no Internet space. There’s a bunch of different markets within that. So yeah, my hot take is that Bitcoin will not just continue to be the primary asset, but will actually start to pull further ahead in terms of institutional adoption acceptance, regulatory acceptance that we’ve already seen. It’s got a unique standing in. So I guess that would be my hottest take.

Matt Zahab
I love it. I mean, that’d be incredible for the market. And as we’ve seen in the past, when Bitcoin rips, everything else follows. So let’s hope that’s all we can do. Dan, incredible episode. Thank you so much for coming on, man. Really appreciate it. And for the non listeners, for the viewers who are watching on YouTube or Insta or TikTok or our website, wherever it may be, Dan’s background is absolutely electric. Dan, we got to finish with that. When did you kick up that background? I believe you said it was Covid related. It’s one of the best ones I’ve seen. It looks like a very cozy home office. What’s the story behind that?

Dan O’Prey
Yeah, I’ve got a little room which sticks out the side of my house, which unfortunately in New Jersey, it’s snowing, so it’s pretty freezing in here at the moment. That’s the one downside, but nice to have a little bit of space. And what you can’t see is I’ve built out a whole bunch of stuff in front of me. So now I’ve got multiple screens and all of that. So, yeah, just during COVID you know had nothing else to do other than invest in my home office and built out a gaming pc and just started adding and adding. So took a little bit of tidying up to do for those who are watching on video. But yeah, Lightning how it’s turning out. Thanks for that.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Dan, what an episode. Really appreciate you coming on, my man. Before you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Bakkt online and on socials.

Dan O’Prey
Sure thing. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. So it’s bakkt.com or on Twitter and @danoprey on Twitter mostly.

Matt Zahab
Amazing. Dan, what an episode. Really appreciate it. Can’t wait to have you and the team on for round two. And as always, folks, I will include everything in the show notes, huge shout out to Dan for coming on the show. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I, speaking of the team, love you guys so much. Thank you for everything as always. Justas, my amazing sound editor. Appreciate you, my man. And back to the listeners. Love you guys, keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.