Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta
Episode publishedPodcast: Forward GuidanceForward Guidance
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What's up, everybody? Right before we get into the show here, just wanna give a quick shout out for our next BlockWorks conference coming up. Permissionless four is happening June, and it's a crypto conference all for the developers and builders in the space. So we're gonna be hosting it right in the heart of Brooklyn, New York, and it's gonna be a ton of fun. There's gonna be a lot of fantastic speakers, and the whole Ford guidance crew is gonna be there. Myself, Tyler, Quinn, we're gonna be doing a live roundup. There's gonna be some wicked community events. Come meet us, have a beer with us
it's good to be on. I thank you thank you again for the time.
Yeah. Yeah. Likewise. So, yeah, we'd love to just start in terms of just tracking your journey because it's a really interesting one. Obviously, like you're mentioning before we hit record here, a lot of our our audience and forward guidance is is is pretty macro and market savvy and, you know, starting to piece through a lot of the interesting innovations that are coming from crypto. So I would love to just hear a bit about your journey because it's a really interesting one, and I think will will be an interesting case study into some of the aspects of of what you've been working on or what y
I mean, even prior to Goldman, I was an engineer in Silicon Valley. I worked at Cisco Systems as a hardware engineer. So I was, like, old school OG electrical engineer, computer engineer, graduated into the dot com bust. So I saw all the, like, Ferraris in the parking lot kinda go away during my internship at at Cisco. I graduated into this dot com bust, and I I honestly didn't know what I was gonna do. I moved to New York, worked at a telecom startup for a little while, and it's really interesting only the fact that, like, two of my investors for the current company actually came from that. A
Sweet. Right on. And so you were mostly working on derivatives and and that sort of thing in the TradFi world. And what made you make the pivot into crypto? What was interesting to you? What was the, yeah, what got you fired up?
Yeah. I'd say in the TradFi world, we we realized that the only innovation that we were seeing was faster and faster, and that didn't feel like innovation anymore. And, again, I was in probably TradFi from o two to '15 or '16. And I pivoted originally towards fintech, so I was an early guy at a place called MoneyLion, which is an online lender, app focused online lender, exited the last Goldman guy is kinda building up that space. And I really you know, I've always been kind of gazing over at crypto as an interesting product class and, like, looking at the market structure, I saw it as really
Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Definitely wanna circle back on the stablecoins and and what you did there and how you think about those today. Obviously, with the the Circle IPO coming, it's got a lot of people talking about it. But just moving along in terms of your career, then you went to Coinbase, and you were head of exchange there?
Yeah. So I joined as head of exchange. At the time, we were a US spot market trading 20 assets, and, you know, honestly, the infrastructure is pretty bad. It would fall over all the time. And our goal was to kind of, like, bolster that infrastructure. So Patrick, my cofounder here, was one of my first hires. Kinda, I think, this this current matching engine is built, is the seventh matching engine. So he's been kind of building this stuff for a long time, and you need to kinda walk away from, an old school like, you know, Coinbase's matching engine was built out of necessity, an
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