Today, my guest is Michael Shaulov, the CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks, a secure digital asset infrastructure company. Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 1,200 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $2.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. Some of the biggest trading desks have switched to Fireblocks because it's the only solution that CISOs and Ops Teams love. Before Fireblocks, he co-founded Lacoon Mobile Security, which was acquired by Check Point, and was then appointed the Head of Products, Mobile, and Cloud Security for Check Point. Michael is a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur and investor. He is also a recognized industry speaker, delivering talks at RSA Conference, BlackHat, and Infosec. Michael Shaulov received his B.Sc. in Computer Sciences and Physics from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, in 2009. We discuss various topics, including the importance of infrastructure, ensuring crypto’s mission, TradFi’s role in crypto, Premissioned DeFi, and much more. We begin our conversation by discussing the state of infrastructure in crypto. Michael shares how we can continue evolving and improving the infrastructure so that power crypto becomes better. We discuss the future of infrastructure in crypto and the importance of infrastructure in delivering crypto’s ethos. We also touch on preserving crypto’s ethos of equality and liberation. Our next topic focused on the role of TradFi and other incumbents. Michael shares how these incumbents can help crypto cross the chasm and bring the next wave of adoption to crypto. We also touch on crypto's regulatory hurdles and how these incumbents can help the industry navigate the regulatory waters. We transitioned to discuss permissioned DeFi. We discuss how we can build crypto-native tools to enable better consumer protection and the balancing act between DeFi and regulatory compliance. Michael very eloquently explains the advantages of building on-chain metadata and how this unlocks new markets for crypto. We end our conversation by discussing how companies can partner with Fireblocks to give their project the best in class infrastructure and backend capabilities to scale their project as efficiently and securely. Please enjoy my conversation with Michael Shaoluv.
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