Prime Trust & the Risk of Bitcoin Custodians with Alex Leishman - WBD687
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2023
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alex Leishman is a Founder, CEO, & CTO of River Financial. In this interview, we discuss the case of Prime Trust, a crypto infrastructure company, that's been placed into receivership following key management errors that resulted in it losing customer funds. We talk about the challenges of asset custody in the Bitcoin industry and the benefits and complexities of building a regulated business.
- - - -
Key management is the Achilles' heel for most Bitcoiners. We all know the importance of having a diligent process for safeguarding seed phrases, and yet, many people have experienced material loss as a result of losing access to keys. Currently, around 4 million Bitcoin, over 20% of the available supply, are estimated to have been lost. The concerning thing is that this isn't just a result of individuals making errors: there are businesses that are also culpable.
Prime Trust is a crypto services company that provided APIs and plug and play widgets for digital asset companies seeking backend infrastructure. A court in Nevada has just placed it in receivership citing operational instability and insolvency risks. The root issue is that Prime Trust accidentally lost access to wallets containing tens of millions of dollars in assets. Not your keys not your coins for the millionth time.
Custody is hard. But, it's the same old basic lessons that underpin sound custody solutions. Avoid complexity. Have robust processes. Think about the long term rather than taking expeditious shortcuts. Target self-custody. However, these are lessons that are somewhat alien to the fiat ideology of "move fast and break things". The community, therefore, needs to educate the new investor class that will be attracted to Bitcoin in the next bull market.
This episode's sponsors:
Iris Energy - Bitcoin Mining. Done Sustainably Ledn - Financial services for Bitcoin hodlers Bitcasino - The Future of Gaming is here Ledger - State of the art Bitcoin hardware wallet Wasabi Wallet - Privacy by default Unchained - Secure your bitcoin with confidence
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The systemic risk that people don't realize existed, which is one custodian could have an issue and take down like dozens of companies. |
| 0:11.0 | And that's what just happened. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello, good morning or good often. |
| 0:18.0 | Wherever you are, I'm back from Argentina, |
| 0:21.0 | I was out there making a film part four of following the money. |
| 0:24.0 | What an amazing country. |
| 0:26.0 | I just had the most incredible time. |
| 0:28.0 | Thank you to everyone who helped. |
| 0:30.0 | Great food, great people, great wine. |
| 0:32.0 | What an amazing country, especially with everything they're going through with the economic crisis there. |
| 0:38.0 | So that film is hopefully going to be out in September. |
| 0:42.0 | I'm really excited to get that finished and out to you all. |
| 0:44.6 | Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast which is brought to you by Iris Energy, the largest |
| 0:49.8 | NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. I'm your host Peter McCormack. Aztec |
| 0:53.2 | Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. I'm your host Peter McCormack and today on the show I have a River CEO Alex Leishman |
| 0:58.0 | and in this one we get into the shit show that is Prime Trust and why Alex built River from the bottom up so they |
| 1:04.6 | control all the infrastructure to avoid situations just like this. So I hope you |
| 1:08.8 | enjoy this one. It was great to catch up with Alex in Nashville and yeah you got any questions you know what to do you can hit me up on my email |
| 1:14.5 | His hello at what Bitcoin did dot com |
| 1:20.0 | All right. We'll start with we'll open the show with the ripple summary judgment is obviously not the last word in the issue if ripple labs |
| 1:26.9 | sets the limited win here which they won't |
| 1:30.4 | They'll still turbo fucks because they've got multi billions of dollars in |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Peter McCormack, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Peter McCormack and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.