Bitgo: Securing the World’s Crypto

The Interview - Crypto ·
Featuring Mike Belshe and Raoul Pal

Published on: February 12th, 2021 • Duration: 38 minutes

Mike Belshe, co-founder and CEO of Bitgo, joins Raoul Pal, Real Vision CEO, to discuss Bitgo, tokenization, and the DeFi markets. Belshe describes Bitgo as a security and technology company, acting as custodian for approximately 18 blockchains and 300+ tokens. He explains the importance of the institutional component to adoption and how crucial secure custodians are for institutions to be able to fully enter the space. Belshe believes that DeFi is starting to show some incredible opportunities, and he mentions that there are already smart contracts operating at significant scale, automating away parts of traditional finance such as automated market makers. Belshe also mentions the value of token standards like ERC20 for building out the layers of crypto infrastructure. Standardization of various tokenization formats will accelerate the security and composability of the crypto space. Filmed on January 27, 2021.

Key Learnings: Security is paramount when working with institutional level investments. In order for crypto to be an asset class accessible to all, a secure fiduciary custodian is necessary infrastructure. We are in the early stages of the infrastructure build out for the crypto space, and as the value of the assets grow, the level of security must also scale with it.