Quadrillions: Unlocking Quadrillions | Don Wilson & Yuval Rooz
Episode publishedPodcast: EmpireEmpire
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to Quadrillions, a miniseries brought to you by both Blockworks and Digital Asset who's behind the Canton network. I'm really, really excited about this. The backstory here is I got to know Yuval and Eric, two of the three cofounders of Digital Asset over the last couple of months. Got really excited about what Canton is building. I think it's very clear that privacy is becoming not just a behind the scenes talking point, but really one of the main narratives going into 2026. Not only a narrative, it's, I think, consensus is forming that the main block between, you know,
Thanks for having us.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wanted to bring you guys both on because, obviously, there's there's a lot of exciting stuff about Canton coming up. You guys have been working on this for a long time. But actually, Don, I called a couple I wanna start not not with Canton, but I called a couple of your friends and said, what what makes Don, Don? And they said, look. Most traders focus on the next deal or the next trade. And Don is one of the few traders who thinks ten to fifteen years into the future. I'd love to just hear how this came to be.
Yeah. I don't know how to explain it, but it's the way my brain works. And, you know, I'm usually way too early on things. So, I mean, I was convinced that, you know, I used to trade on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and I was convinced that if the if the Merck hadn't completely transitioned to an electronic market by the year 2000, that they would be out of business. And I was just so wrong. I mean, the trading floor perpetuated for many, many years after that. But yeah, it just just kind of how I look at the world.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe give us the scope and size and just a brief history of DRW and then getting into also just your guys' crypto story is pretty, pretty historic and getting into Cumberland.
Yeah. So so I started DRW in 1992. At the time, I was standing in the Eurodollar option pit. So that's three month LIBOR options, interest rate options.
And,
you know, my I I mean, I wrote all my own risk software, built my own option, option pricing, models, you know, volatility surfaces, etcetera. And so I would stand in the pit during the day and then go home and write code at night. And so, you know, that was really that was the edge that we had was just that that we could, you know, manage risk and provide liquidity while fiddling around with models and software to do it more efficiently than other people. Gradually, over time, we expanded into more products. Today, D. R. W. Is just over 2,000 people. You know, I think of D. R. W. Not just as
Yeah. Yuval, you're I'm trying to recall your story from when we had dinner. I I if I if I remember correctly, you're a senior trader back in, 2008 or 2009 at DRW. And then do you remember when the firm started pushing into crypto?
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