Alex Leishman (River Financial) on Launching Proof of Reserves (EP. 562)
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Hello, and welcome back. I'm Nick Carter. Today, we're sitting down with Alex Leishman, the founder and CEO of River, which is a Bitcoin focused brokerage. Alex has been on the show in the past. We actually talked about the subject of today's conversation, which is proof of reserves back then. He was expressing concerns about the procedure 4 years on. River is announcing that they have built a proof of reserve functionality. And, for those curious, this means attesting to the assets controlled and the user liabilities on the platform. We dig into all that. I know many of you have criticisms of
great to be back. A lot's changed in 4 years.
Has it? I mean, you know, maybe a little bit. You know, actually, last time you came on the show, we talked about proof of reserves, and you said why it was difficult Yeah. To implement. That's
right.
Well, let's, what about a little refresher? Tell us about River. What's the premise of River? What do you guys do?
At River, we make we we make it really easy for Americans to, buy and sell and secure custody Bitcoin. We serve both individuals and businesses, and we pride ourselves on very good client services and being full reserve and investing a lot into security and soundness and making sure that nothing ever happens to your Bitcoin. So that's really what we
do. Yeah. I River is kind of a different start up in many respects. You guys have always done things a little differently. You know, you you didn't really outsource any of the key functions of running an exchange, and, you've been Bitcoin focused the whole time, haven't been distracted. So, actually, I think we'll start there. Tell us about building your own sort of internal custodial feature and and the way that the sort of design choices you opted for as you're building River. Yeah.
So, you know, a number of our competitors sort of outsourced the custody and, sort of regulated financial part of the business when they first started, which to allow them to move faster. We decided to take, the the opposite approach and sort of do everything the hard way and and build the strong foundation brick by brick, which means which meant getting all the licenses to allow us to custody Bitcoin and process payments for our clients. The reason we did that was for a few there were a few reasons we did that. The number one thing was that I never felt comfortable offering custody to our cli
So, I mean, it's going it's going well. Right? Like, things seem to be humming along. Yeah.
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