4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
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This week Kraken Financial became the first crypto company to receive a banking charter under Wyoming's Special Purpose Depository Institution statute. On this Speaking of Bitcoin episode, Join CEO David Kinitsky for a look at what it all means and how it'll work with hosts Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Stephanie Murphy.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Nexo.io.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there were no rules, or at least none that people understood. The first batch of companies were focused entirely on functionality; Simply making things possible that before crypto had been impossible.
In the aftermath of the collapse of first MTGox and then later TheDAO, it became obvious that rules did apply, or at least would moving forward. But what wasn't very clear was how they'd apply as different regulatory bodies claimed authority in confusing and often conflicting ways.
As law, if not order, came to the industry, much of crypto's first wave of US based exchanges were crushed as they struggled to get legal, a challenging task with different rules and unique compliance burdens for each state and territory they'd operate in. New York famously introduced the Bitlicense, which in the five years since it's introduction has approved just 25 companies to operate in the U.S. financial hub.
On today's show Kraken Financial CEO David Kinitsky joins the discussion of just how much things have changed as Kraken becomes the first crypto company to receive a banking charter under Wyoming's Special Purpose Depository Institution statute. And more importantly, what happens next.
Credits
This episode was edited by Adam B. Levine, with music provided by Jared Rubens.
Episode Art by Doran Erickson on Unsplash
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0:00.0 | There is no question in my mind, and there never actually really has been, that you would |
0:05.3 | need to move to banking to be able to properly offer a full suite of financial services |
0:10.7 | and incorporate digital assets into them. |
0:12.9 | There are a lot of regulated financial services, industries and regimes and regulators |
0:17.1 | across the US, but banking is the granddaddy of them all and at the bottom of the staff. And if you really want to be a player in the space, you're going to need to go to banking. |
0:25.5 | And banking preempts a lot of other regimes as well. So you don't have this duplicative kind |
0:31.9 | of oversight. If you were to say, well, we want to go a 50 state money transmitter. And now we need to |
0:37.2 | be a broker dealer in order to like custody and clear. |
0:40.3 | And we need to, you know, go to the CFTC for derivatives. |
0:43.4 | All this stuff can be consolidated at a banking regime level, which is why it's so exciting. |
0:48.5 | I don't think there's any doubt that you're going to see other digital asset companies pursuing |
0:52.8 | bank charters. |
0:53.9 | And you're going to see already |
0:55.7 | bank chartered institutions getting into digital assets. |
1:00.0 | The advantage here is Wyoming and the SPDI regime, I believe, is two years ahead of any |
1:04.5 | other regulator in the space. |
1:06.0 | Now that'll be accelerated because they will borrow very liberally from the Wyoming standards. |
1:10.4 | But the fact of the matter is |
1:11.2 | when you have someone like the OCC come out with that interpretive letter, that's tremendous. Again, |
1:15.2 | I've said I've always understood banks to be able to do that. But if you're a large institution, |
1:20.1 | having that letter reduces some perceived risk on your part. But the bottom line is that the |
1:24.5 | frameworks haven't changed and the supervisory program hasn't |
... |
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