Episode 119 of the Public Key podcast is here !! Tax season might be over, but the accounting and tax industry at the intersection of web3 is just starting to heat up. In this episode we speak with Lindsey Argalas (CEO, TaxBit) about the challenges of traditional FIs holding crypto on balance sheets. She discusses the proposed regulations from the IRS and MiCA as well as the tax implications of real world asset tokenization.
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Public Key Episode 119: The Intersection of Tax, Accounting, and Blockchain in the Digital Asset Era
“There’s tens of billions of dollars of uncollected taxes on the crypto side, so hence why you have the Treasury Department and IRS pretty motivated there.” – Lindsey Argalas (CEO, TaxBit)
Tax season might be over, but the accounting and tax industry at the intersection of web3 is just starting to heat up. In this episode, Ian Andrews (CMO, Chainalysis) speaks with Lindsey Argalas (CEO, TaxBit) discusses the innovative tools and solutions TaxBit offers for both consumers and enterprises in the crypto space, while highlighting the importance of compliance and regulatory clarity.She discusses the proposed tax and accounting regulations from the IRS and MiCA and the tax implications of real world asset tokenization and the promising developments in accounting standards that benefit companies holding digital assets.
Lindsey also highlights the collaborative work that TaxBit is doing with the IRS to support the complex data that is being obtained for accounting / tax purposes and the company’s partnerships with companies like PayPal and Block.
Quote of the episode
“There’s tens of billions of dollars of uncollected taxes on the crypto side, so hence why you have the Treasury Department and IRS pretty motivated there.” – Lindsey Argalas (CEO, TaxBit)
Minute-by-minute episode breakdown
2 | Lindsey’s early start in crypto at Santander Bank and the delineation between crypto and blockchain
7 | Real-time tax KYC Explainer and new accounting tools and customer insights
12 | The IRS proposed broker rules and the impact of regulations on digital assets in the EU and US
15 | Understanding the EU regulatory framework and introduction of DAC8 alongside MiCA
18 | International tax and accounting standards and Global Expansion |
23 | The emergence of Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) and the tax and accounting implications
27 | Collaboration with Government Agencies like the IRS and other Global Tax Enforcement Agencies
29 | Looking ahead at the web3 industry for 2024 and beyond
Related resources
Check out more resources provided by Chainalysis that perfectly complement this episode of the Public Key.
- Website: TaxBit: Modern Tax and Accounting Compliance
- Blog: Insights & Thoughts about Future Legislation Arising from the 1099-DA
- Blog: Navigating Upcoming Tax Regulation Timelines for the US & EU
- Article: Tokenizing real-world assets: Start small, solve problems, drink milk
- Event: TraceDC (July 16-17) The leading public sector event of the cryptocurrency ecosystem
- YouTube: Chainalysis YouTube page
- Twitter: Chainalysis Twitter: Building trust in blockchain
- Tik Tok: Building trust in #blockchains among people, businesses, and governments.
- Telegram: Chainalysis on Telegram
Speakers on today’s episode
- Ian Andrews * Host * (Chief Marketing Officer, Chainalysis)
- Lindsey Argalas (CEO, TaxBit)
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Transcript
Ian:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Public Key. This is your host, Ian Andrews. Today I’m joined by Lindsey Argalas, who’s the CEO of TaxBit. Lindsey, welcome to the show.
Lindsey:
Thanks, Ian. It’s great to be here.
Ian:
TaxBit is probably a firm that a lot of our listeners are familiar with, particularly since we’re recording this just a couple of weeks after tax filing deadline day, and I imagine many of them used software of your firm to hopefully successfully file their taxes without too much stress. But I am actually interested maybe to rewind back in time a little bit and talk about your early career as a starting point and connect into the crypto journey. You were at Intuit I think for about a decade, and then you did some international banking. Where along that journey did you first run into crypto?
Lindsey:
Yeah, love the question. So I first developed my love for tax and accounting software at Intuit. As you might imagine, that was a pleasant surprise and really enjoyed my time there, but didn’t really get into crypto and blockchain until my time at Santander, the global financial institution. While I was there, I was the chief digital innovation officer, so I had all the new technology stuff in addition to digital transformation. As part of that, I had our blockchain lab and experimental efforts there. As you can imagine, going from Silicon Valley, cloud-based software, everything is kind of cutting edge and going to a large bank and seeing the way that money moves around the world. I developed a real conviction around the power of blockchain to help modernize financial infrastructure, and so my team at Santander tokenized the first bond to understand how do you make that whole process much more efficient?
We did a lot of initiatives around cross-border payments. I think that’s one of the best use cases for digital assets, and so we did that for retail individual users sending cross-border payments, making it so that the fees were a lot lower, that it actually transferred near instantaneously versus the multi-day delays historically that you’ve had with traditional infrastructure. We served companies trying to do cross-border payment movements at much larger scale and transaction volume, and so that’s really where I developed the conviction for blockchain technology and tokenized assets. And as a result, I very much appreciated my time in the regulated financial sector space, but I really wanted to get back to technology and I felt like this was really the next frontier of technology innovation. So I went and joined a software startup and tax and accounting meets this world of blockchain and crypto.
Ian:
That’s awesome. As you were at Santander and exploring this world of the blockchain space, I’m curious what the perspective on crypto was specifically. It seemed like you were drawing a little bit of a distinction between the world of blockchain and the world of crypto. Was that based on your experience at the bank?
Lindsey:
Very much so. It was very intentional. As you can imagine, people understood that the bank and financial services need to transform, they need to adopt new technologies to do so. There was much more comfort level, both internally with compliance, risk, as well as with regulators. We had to share a lot of our innovation efforts with them, how we were doing things, why we were doing them, the benefits we saw of these initiatives, and so there was much more comfort with technology and applying these to kind of digital asset or digital transformation, if you will.
When it came to crypto, which as we know has been largely unregulated, that is a very difficult thing for heavily regulated financial institutions as you might imagine, and that was very much a no-go for Santander at the time. Obviously, financial institutions more recently have started offering buy-sell-hold crypto capabilities depending on which market you’re in, depending on which regulatory jurisdiction you fall under, and oftentimes they will work with other companies to help custody the assets. There’s different ways around this. People are being very thoughtful in the financial sector, but that there was a very deliberate delineation between blockchain, tokenized assets, and crypto.
Ian:
And what got you interested in moving further in the direction of the crypto space? What attracted you to the opportunity at TaxBit?
Lindsey:
I think first of all, again, I had and I continue to have real conviction around the transformative nature of blockchain and being able to put assets on the blockchain in a tokenized digital form. So I believe this is going to be the next wave of innovation. I think it will be very transformative not only for the financial sector, but also gaming, the creator economy. There’s lots of different use cases, I think over the next 10 to 20 years, will take hold.
A big barrier to that adoption, I saw that internally with the concerns that I see it across the industry. Is compliance and the need for compliance and the need for regulatory clarity. I think in order for us to really unlock the potential, companies that are dealing with digital assets or governments that want to enforce and supervise. Compliance is a really big part of unlocking the potential of that innovation. And so again, coupling my background in tax and accounting software, which is one part of compliance, I feel like that was a way for me to use my experience, but help move the industry forward so that we can drive compliant adoption of digital assets.
Ian:
Exciting. Now with TaxBit’s business today, I think maybe most listeners will be familiar with the tooling, the integrations into some of the trading platforms. You’ve got partnerships with people like PayPal, Block and Cash App, I think, but I think the business is much bigger than that. Maybe talk a little bit about the areas that you’re innovating in building technology and solutions for because beyond just retail tax filing, if I understand correctly.
Lindsey:
Yes, that’s right. We started serving that pain point. Our founders very early on realized it was very difficult, even if you wanted to be compliant and file your gains for tax purposes, it was very difficult to do that. So it started out in the consumer side, but we very quickly saw then that companies who wanted to engage with digital assets were struggling to comply. There’s inherent complexities of digital assets, whether it’s crypto or tokenized assets, NFTs, stable coins, etc. The fact that they’re 24/7, they’re much higher transaction volumes. There’s high price volatility, there’s fractionalizations to the 16th decimal point. These are all things that fundamentally make it very hard for companies and governments to comply using existing systems.
So we have built out and really focused on the accounting solution, so accounting sub-ledger that captures all of this complex digital asset activity. And then on the tax side to your point, we do help for form generation and so that companies can help their customers file, but we also do things like real-time tax, KYC, W-9 W-8 forms. We help with other kinds of tax regimes that are coming to effect globally on cross-border payments, etc. So our focus now really is on enabling companies and governments that deal with digital assets so that they can have confidence in how they comply.
Ian:
Yeah, fascinating. You mentioned something there that I don’t think I’ve ever heard of, which is real-time tax KYC. You have to explain that one to me.
Lindsey:
Yes, so basically as someone is onboarding to do a trade of sorts, we have a call into the IRS system to do a real-time. We’ll collect the taxpayer identification number. We should be collecting the tax documents as well, the W-9 or W-8 forms. And so we can help the exchange or the company who is onboarding the customer real-time validate whether that is the right taxpayer number, and so that helps just companies save hassle down the way or have to do cleanup down down the line. And then there are penalties as well that will be forthcoming that if you don’t have that information collected right, or if you haven’t done it in a proper way, that will be problematic for the company.
Ian:
Super interesting. I actually did not realize that there was any sort of real-time validation that you’ve got the correct taxpayer, but I assume that’s necessary so that then when you do end of year 1099 filing and you’re saying, “Hey, this individual did all this trading activity and here are the gains associated”, that then gets attributed to the correct entity at the end of the day?
Lindsey:
Exactly, exactly. And again, we’re fundamentally a software company. We don’t do anything directly with crypto or digital assets. We’re enabling other companies so that they are in a much better place. It’s automating a lot of the compliance around people who are allowing that kind of trading activity on their platform.
Ian:
Yeah, amazing. Now you also mentioned the accounting tools that you’ve been developing and this idea of a digital asset subledger tying into financial reporting systems. Can you talk about the types of customers that are starting to use that? Because one of the questions I get all the time is like, “Okay, who’s actually holding crypto as part of their corporate treasury or what types of companies are actually using crypto to pay people?” And I would imagine you’ve got deep insight into that, given that if they’re doing one of those things, they’re probably using your technology.
Lindsey:
Yeah, yeah. I mean to your point in there are just a wide variety of use cases as well as customer segments. So as I mentioned, anyone that is touching digital assets or having it on the balance sheet, they have to have some means to account for it and just keep on top of all of the activity so that they can pass audits, so that they can do the financial reporting, so that they can prepare their own corporate taxes. There’s a number of reasons why they need specialized digital asset subledger.
So let’s take a couple different companies to give you an example. So the crypto exchanges that will allow buy, sell, hold of crypto, a lot of them will have crypto, some of them will have a crypto on their balance sheet, and so that is a very obvious use case. Not surprisingly, those were early adopters. Take miners like Marathon for example, lots of token activity associated with that, and so they need to keep track of all of that activity. You have people like Google experimenting with digital assets. They’re a very large, publicly traded company. They want to keep their books and accounts in very good order. And so although they may not have the volume of activity like a crypto exchange, they have a very high bar for compliance and the way that they run their financial operations.
So that just gives you a sample of very different kinds of companies, how they are using digital assets, their level of maturity, but ultimately it is about control, visibility, auditability, transparency for the finance team.
Ian:
Yeah, it is interesting. Mining obviously generates a ton of assets, any of the Bitcoin miners and many of those companies are actually publicly traded. And so not only do they have a tax obligation, but they’ve also got fairly complex financial reporting obligations. And so yeah, that is obvious now that you’ve said it, so that’s fantastic.
I’m curious about if you have a view on the broker rules that have been proposed by the IRS. It seems on the surface that could be very interesting for TaxBit’s business because it maybe widens the scope of people who would need to use your software, but they’re obviously fairly controversial in the digital assets space. I think we’ve seen, I would call it broad anti-sentiment from the industry, maybe. Can you just talk about your perspective on the proposed rules and where you see that going?
Lindsey:
Yeah, I think we, like everyone else in the industry, provided our formal comments when the draft regulations came out in August. A couple of thoughts here. Overall, I do think the regulation and the regulatory clarity is much needed and it will advance the industry. So that’s kind of the overarching thing.
Second, we agree with the industry. Clearly, we want to foster innovation. So I think there’s a very important point that these need to be practical. When they get implemented, they can’t be overly onerous. And so I think a lot of the comments and feedback from ourselves as well as others in the industry were around that practical lens of how this information will be used. Let’s make sure that these are reasonable. So some feedback on some of the stable coins or certain thresholds. There were lots of comments on the scope of the digital asset broker.
And so at the end of the day, our position is ultimately we want to enable companies to be compliant. So we have points of view on these things. The regs will land where they are. They received ample comments, I think 120,000. So our understanding is they’re still working through all of those comments and we’re all still awaiting the final regulation. But at the end of the day, yes, there will be a large subset of the industry that will be subject to these reporting requirements, very analogous to what we see in the financial sector. And so I think our job is really to help the industry comply as this come into effect.
Ian:
Yeah. Do you think we’ll end up in a state where anyone operating a node on a blockchain ultimately has to start reporting those transactions?
Lindsey:
We’ll see. I mean, I think what has been made very clear, which is these things, the safety and soundness of the ecosystem needs to be preserved, for anything that has a digital asset that pertains to some kind of value. So hopefully it doesn’t get carried away with just the technology, but once it starts touching value, value creation, value transfer, that is where then is going to mimic kind of more the financial sector, which I think is appropriate.
Ultimately, I think it will slow innovation in some regards, but I think also as we’ve seen the last 18 months, that is also probably needed. There are some guardrails for the innovation that is required. And so I will say in the US there’s lots of dialogue or lots of comments that were submitted between industry and policymakers. We also have recently expanded into Europe. I will say I’m encouraged by what we see there. I mean, that is a different thing where the rights have been finalized at the European level and then now we and other industry members are actively working with countries on the practical implementation of those regulations.
Ian:
Yeah, I’d love to talk about that a bit more. I know that you were recently in Paris for Paris Blockchain Week. TaxBit hosted, I think, an inaugural conference event as a side event to the bigger get-together. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on this podcast talking about the MiCA regulations. At least to my novice read, there hasn’t been much tax and accounting focus there. It’s been much more about getting a consistent regulatory and licensing scheme plus some of the stable coin specific legislation. Those seem to be the high points. But as a result of MiCA happening, has there been increased clarity or are we still dealing with a patchwork of different regulations from France to Germany to the rest of the EU?
Lindsey:
There actually has been increased clarity, and again, in our tax world. So a few months after the passing of MiCA, there was a tax information reporting framework that was agreed called DAC8 at the European level. That is due to go into effect January 1st of ’26 at the latest. And so once something gets agreed at the European level, now the individual countries are coming up with their implementation framework of it, the implementation timing and what exactly that looks like in each jurisdiction in the 27 markets.
So that is something that we see has really increased the activity in Europe, I think for implementation timelines, although ’26 seems like quite a ways away, that actually will come fairly quickly, and so both governments and enterprises are starting to figure out how they’re going to comply there.
Ian:
Any noticeable meaningful differences from Europe, like lessons that we could learn that we should try and influence the American system as it moves forward or things where they’ve maybe gotten it wrong in Europe?
Lindsey:
I think so far, I mean the DAC8 and the US, I mean again, not surprisingly, they do very much compare notes. We do find them to be quite similar frameworks, of course, with the caveat that we’re waiting to see what the final US regulations are. And again, the DAC8 European framework, both the US and Europe are also part of the broader crypto asset reporting framework at CARF, which is going to be adopted or 48 countries have said that they’re going to adopt that.
So all this to say there is movement. I know it’s slower than all of us would like. There are lots of countries comparing notes. They’re actively trying to take learnings. Because none of these have been implemented yet, they’re forthcoming, it’s a little bit hard to take any lessons learned of what was practical, what worked, what didn’t. So I expect this to be an ongoing dialogue between countries and jurisdictions.
Ian:
It will be an exciting day when we can get to a point where folks feel confident about both holding digital assets and then appropriately paying taxes based on their holdings.
Lindsey:
And maybe I will say just on the silver lining or a bright spot, not to overly dwell on the lack of regulatory clarity in the US. On the accounting side, we have seen some good progress. So the FASB in the United States in December clarified and updated their guidance around the treatment of digital assets for companies that hold crypto or digital assets on the balance sheet. So now that has been very favorably received by industry. It doesn’t penalize the holding, which was the case previously. So now you have the US accounting standard setting body FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board with IFRS standards being very similar and moving to more fair market value pricing, so much more in line with normal accounting standards. So that I think was a positive development on the accounting side.
Ian:
Yeah, that’s terrific. And for people that aren’t familiar, I think I’ll summarize again as a non-accountant that the previous treatment basically required that if you held the asset, you had to mark it down. If the assets-
Lindsey:
You take an impairment charge.
Ian:
Take an impairment charge, but if the asset appreciated, you didn’t ever recognize that gain until you sold it. So it led to all sorts of strange reporting for companies like Microsoft.
Lindsey:
Yes, and these are real disincentive, right? You’d always have to complain it. So just companies didn’t want to deal with the headache. I think now that that has been addressed, we’re going to see much more companies feeling comfortable, at least the financial controllers, treasurers, accountants being more comfortable with it.
Ian:
Yeah. I saw on LinkedIn that you all had a recent announcement that you now fully support those IFRS standards as well. Talk about that. Was that a big engineering investment to internationalize the platform?
Lindsey:
I should have mentioned my time at Intuit eight of the 10 years I was there, I was working on international and I know how difficult it is to build a global platform for accounting, and it’s even more difficult, I would say for tax. I was pleasantly surprised. Again, we have a very modern tech stack. We’ve built it with all APIs and services architecture, and so it actually was quite easy for us. I don’t want to misspeak here, but we were able to do it quite quickly on the accounting side because the FASB US standards and the IFRS international standards are quite similar. They probably overlap about 85%. There wasn’t too much customization work that we had to do, so we’re pretty excited about that.
I will say about a year ago, we really just declared that international was a big priority for us. So 80% of our US clients have international operations. When you think about the inherent characteristics of digital assets, one of the benefits is that they’re borderless. Some of the best use cases are for cross border, and so we really wanted to enable that capability to better serve companies because most of them are operating in multiple jurisdictions. So on the accounting side now, we do have the international and US accounting standards. We have multi entity to accommodate the fact that people are operating in multiple jurisdictions. And then on the tax side, as I mentioned, that is a more nuanced thing. Again, because a lot of the countries we aim to serve are under the crypto asset reporting framework, again, there are similarities, and then ultimately we partner with the big four. We’re partnering with three of the big four to help us with that kind of last mile local expertise, all of the individual country-specific tax rules.
Ian:
Yeah, that’s exciting. I’m curious what the reception was at Paris Blockchain Week. I’ve never actually been to that conference, but I have sensed from afar that it’s very much community-driven, there’s a lot of excitement over the last couple of years around things like NFTs. How does tax and accounting software land with that crowd?
Lindsey:
It’s a very good question. I will tell you, as you alluded to, this was the first event that we’ve hosted in Europe, and so we thought we would have a small intimate event, 30 to 40 people, and we had over 200 people that wanted to come and talk about tax and accounting. So we were pleasantly surprised. I know. In our specialized world.
What I would say, this was the first time I had attended Paris Blockchain Week, but I had heard from the attendees that over the last year or two, it certainly has become more institutional in nature. So I think that is part of the maturation of the industry. It’s in pockets, as I mentioned in Europe, there is more regulatory clarity, so you do see larger institutions and enterprises moving more into this space. So there actually was quite good representation from companies there in addition to startups and kind of the more organic community. So I think those can peacefully coexist. They aren’t in conflict. But I thought there were really good conversations, really good engagement and I would say just a really good energy and vibe, which was great to see.
Ian:
Exciting. I have to ask about real world asset tokenization. This is a topic that I would say kind of picked up steam, it seemed like in the lows of crypto winter where everybody felt like that was going to drive the next cycle. I would imagine that there is both big opportunity and big challenges for a product like yours. When we start talking about things like collateralized debt obligations or corporate or government treasury suddenly being deployed on chain. How are you all thinking about real world assets?
Lindsey:
Yeah, this very much depends on the use case. So a couple of things. Again, our technology can serve us the different use cases, but ultimately, whether a company needs specialized software, tax and accounting software to serve that use case depends. So if we think about a tokenized deposit activity versus a tokenized real estate mortgage versus a tokenized bond, those are all different characteristics and it kind of depends around the guardrails or the activity that company plans to see or enable with that.
So I think what would require a company to use specialized software like TaxBit’s? If now you start seeing very high transactional volumes that historically were not able to take place with the traditional form of the asset. The fractional nature of it, that is something that is very difficult for incumbent or legacy systems to accommodate. And so these kinds of things, the 24/7 nature of the fact that now these assets are tokenized.
So it really depends. Ultimately, again, this is an area where back to the regs, we are waiting in the US to see whether ultimately they fall in scope. The current definition is just that anything that is a digital representation of value on the blockchain, that is a very broad definition with no minimum threshold requirements. That could make the tax information reporting very onerous. So it really just depends on what the final regs say and then what the use cases are, and then as a result, the fact that they’ve tokenized that asset, what kind of activity do they see around it?
Ian:
Yeah. Are you seeing any particular area of the ecosystem kind of push forward on this, meaning either particular type of assets or particular area of the industry where people are really leaning into this and they’re coming to you and saying, “Hey, Lindsey, we need your help to figure this out because we’re going ahead. This is going to be real here shortly.”
Lindsey:
Yeah. I think certainly the people that are talking most about real world asset tokenization are the financial institutions, and they have large teams working on this. As I mentioned at Santander, we had tokenized the first bond that was back in, like six years ago or something.
So the point in your question, the tail end was quickly, the financial sector is not going to move fast into this, but they are putting increasing amounts of resources and then not surprisingly, in order for them to launch and put these things like this in the market, they are very thoughtful about compliance, and as a result, they work very closely with the regulator. They engage with their big four counterparts, they engage with people like us because it actually even helps shape how do they bring to market the product so that they can architect it the right way so they can ensure they have the right controls in place and they don’t have to retrofit after the fact.
So we’re excited to partner with them. Of course, the velocity of innovation will be much faster with if you take a Web3 native company, but we see lots of startups that are specialized in the enablement of these larger players of real world asset tokenization as well. So there is a groundswell of activity. I’m super bullish on it. I just think this is going to play out over the next decade plus.
Ian:
Yeah, yeah. We’ve talked a lot about the commercial side of your business, but you also work with regulators and tax authorities. Can you just share the context of that work and what are you actually helping those organizations to do?
Lindsey:
Yeah. Most notably, we’ve been working with the IRS for the past four years, and we help them with the more complex crypto examinations and audits. Again, it’s very difficult to determine what is the proper or the accurate tax obligation? Did this person pay the appropriate taxes that were to be collected? And so we help provide the information to the IRS, for the examiners, for them to then go request further their information or as a tool or as an aid for them to do that. We also help them with bulk data analysis, so as they will summons data from certain exchanges, they will use our tools. We’ll help them interpret, “Hey, here are some transactions. You probably should go look into that” and give them kind of some guidance or indications that they can then go do what they want to request more information, investigate, et cetera.
And then I’m excited, we also are starting to serve governments in other capacities. That’s obviously the tax revenue agency, which I should mention. Estimate is that there’s tens of billions of dollars of uncollected taxes on the crypto side, so hence why you have Treasury Department and IRS pretty motivated there. But we’re also expanding now to government in other use cases in the intelligence community helping them. There’s a lot around helping drive the compliant adoption. What are the bad things happening in the system? Or even our teams are speaking, how do we integrate some of the great tracing data from Chainalysis and the tax calculations engine from TaxBit? So just trying to serve other use cases again where tax and or accounting is helpful to governments in their supervisory and or investigative responsibilities.
Ian:
Through all that work, what’s your perspective on the level of maturity or readiness for government agencies to really be thoughtful and understand all the crypto data that they’re now collecting?
Lindsey:
I think to their credit, I would say in working closely with the IRS, the IRS has improved their understanding a lot over the course of the time that we’ve been working with them, which is four years. I do think I’ve had the benefit of speaking with revenue agencies from Asia, Latin America and Europe. The US is the furthest along in terms of the tax enforcement, if you will, of crypto and digital assets.
So I think although there is still ways to go, which they would absolutely admit, the US, I think is at the forefront for tax revenue agencies. But again, there’s a lot to do when we think about all of the increased data and information they’re going to receive once the regulations go into effect. They realize that they also really need to modernize their systems to make good use of all of the extra data that they’ll be receiving.
Ian:
Yeah. Last question from me. When you look out to the remainder of 2024, what are you really excited about?
Lindsey:
I feel obviously 2023 was a really tough year for the industry. I’m an optimist. I love what we’re seeing and I’m just excited. I know we talk a lot about the regulatory environment because it is very important and we need that clarity, but I’m excited because I genuinely think we’re going to start seeing the fruits of the labor and the innovation. There’s a lot of good building activity happening with the Web3 startup developers as well as the larger institutions.
Like I said, I was encouraged because even during crypto winter, companies didn’t shy away from their digital asset or blockchain efforts. They kept people still working on it. There’s really good different use cases and applications that I think are forthcoming. When we get the regulatory clarity, I do think you’re going to start seeing those innovations reach more the light of the day from the larger institutions, and I think again, there’s just really good activity. So I’m excited to see the innovation. Move the conversation from, “Crypto, crypto bad. What’s the value of digital assets?” To actually bringing more of the innovation to life?
Ian:
Love it. Innovation and optimism. My two favorite things. Thank you.
Lindsey:
Exactly.
Ian:
Thank you, Lindsey. This was fantastic.
Lindsey:
Thank you so much, Ian. It’s a pleasure.