Building for Institutions with Eric Saraniecki
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Institutional adoption is just getting started. You know, transparency has always been the bug. I mean, it was even obvious to Satoshi. You go into the Bitcoin talk, he was very open and very clear about Bitcoin needs privacy to be really successful. We knew for an institutional adoption or adoption at scale that this was really a foundational issue.
How are institutions using stablecoins today?
The institutions are not really using stablecoins today. I think there's this misconception that stablecoins have found radical product market fit. It's just deeply inappropriate to use a public blockchain for for these things. You know, imagine doing payroll on most public blockchains. You're effectively leaking the salaries of all your employees and the bonuses of all your employees to each other. You want the benefit of a blockchain, but you don't benefit from the whole world seeing all those activities. In many ways, it could be counterproductive. We really are the only ecosystem that can
Welcome to another episode, ladies and gentlemen. Today, I have with me Eric Saraneki. He is a cofounder at Digital Asset and Canton Network. Prior to this, he was also a co founder at Cumberland, who is one of the larger liquidity providers out there in crypto. Welcome to the show, Eric.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Since right since 2017, we've been hearing about institutionalization of crypto right away, and it was made to sound as if it was imminent and it is still underway. Has changed its flavours and the way it is happening. But one can really say that for the last two years, we've really seen institutions dabbling into crypto, whether that's stablecoins, RWAs and whatnot. Can you just take us through how institutionalization has actually happened in crypto and meme?
I think everybody has their own version of this story because it's still very much happening actively across the ecosystem. Don't know if there is one answer to it. But from my perspective, what I've experienced is an interesting mix. So I would say that the thing that happened first, pre-twenty seventeen, is really just the institutional trading of crypto. When we started Cumberland, that was around 2013, 2014. Many other institutional trading firms came in over the years since then, and the way I generally like to talk about this is that as the space grew, as the valuation of crypto grew, th
Right. And as far as your journey goes, how was it before Cumberland? What was the thought process to start Cumberland and then move on to start digital asset and Canton network?
Personally, I've been around the Bitcoin scene since around 09/2010, and I was just personally very drawn to it. There was a very cool ecosystem of early Bitcoiners inside DRW, And there was a very lively internal conversation and I traded a very illiquid commodity, long dated natural gas futures. And there was a firm in the space, Centaurus, that their entire business model was, we'll make you a market in anything no matter how liquid it is, but you've got to cross our two way and we'll let you out. So you maybe would lose 50% on a trade, but not 100%, and you could get out if you needed to.
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