The Hidden Dangers of Crypto Exchanges and Wallets Revealed! with Ido Ben-Natan - podcast episode cover

The Hidden Dangers of Crypto Exchanges and Wallets Revealed! with Ido Ben-Natan

Aug 29, 202536 min
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Episode description

Ido Ben-Natan, co-founder and CEO of Blockaid, joined me to discuss how Blockaid is helping to secure billions of dollars in crypto.
Topics: 
- Blockaid's security services for exchanges, wallets and more 
- Blockaid secured $50 million in Series B funding 
- Common attacks, hacks, and scams in crypto 
- Will AI Agents be a threat to crypto? 
- Gemini and Hashgraph integration 
- The future of crypto security 
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⏰ Time Stamps ⏰
00:00 Intro
02:55 Ido's background
06:23 Crypto's growth and adoption
08:05 Blockaid overview 
10:14 Securing Exchanges and Wallets 
11:57 Common scams & attacks 
15:14 Monitoring transactions for Coinbase and other exchanges 
18:56 AI usage & Threats
22:00 Blockaid's differentiators
24:00 Latest funding round
24:48 Crypto in security in 2030 
29:19 Roadmap
30:27 US Crypto legislation
35:03 Wrap up questions 
================================================= 
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Transcript

Intro

Speaker 1

We oftentimes say to a lot of our customers, rat is a symptom of success. You know, if you have a really really great product or ecosystem, then users or bad actors will try to circumvent and do all sorts of things in order to achieve things that the system does not want them to. Let's say twenty thirty fast forward five years, what does securing digital assets and platforms look like to you? We're going to see a lot of these really, really really complicated networks created over the

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custody your crypto. A great alternative once again with tax advantages and a lot of safety, very safe compared to many exchanges and all the links will be in a description. Check it out. Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and joining me today, is itdo, Benatton, who is the co founder and CEO of Blockade. You know,

great to have you, Tony. Great to be here. You know, excited to dive into Blockade because you are playing a critical role in securing transactions and platform and security is so important with this asset class. So I'm excited to dive into the details. But let's start with your background. Where are you from and what's your professional background? Yeah,

Ido's background

so I grew up in California. Yeah, my parents or Israeli. They moved there for work, both engineers, a group around computers. My whole life was programming since a really early age. And then we moved back when I was a little over sixteen, drafted to these cyber intelligence units if you're familiar with, in the Israeli Army, and then served there for a little over six years, primarily working on solving you know, and finding vulnerabilities and modern operating systems browsers.

And my last gig was around kind of cryptographic implementations where I spent most of my time. So that's where kind of the level for cryptography came. A ton of team members ended up either starting companies or working for companies that operate kind of in the crypto space. Being kind of an incredible application for for cryptography, and so kind of leading up to finishing our service together with my co founder Roz, you know, we wanted to do

something in the space. We thought it was incredibly exciting. You know, we became really passionate throughout our military service for like just users just like being U users in the space. Sought tons of parallels to we're both kind of computer networking nerds, so soft tons of parallels to the early days of like computer networking, and so we want to do something in crypto. We talked to everyone we possibly could. They told us security was a massive problem,

and so that's what you built. And it's been almost three years since. That's incredible. Obviously, your pedigree being in security, cryptography and much more, and starting this seems like such a natural evolution of your skill sets and so for good. But I'm curious, what was like your first encounter with bitcoin or and maybe etherem or whatever it may be, and what was your AHA moment to say, wait a minute, this is something and we should go build into space.

Oh man, this is pretty early on. There were there were a couple of I guess there were three phases in my life where where these things happened. I'll talk about two, maybe not the first. The first I was

pretty young. One of them was, UH was around kind of early days of of of kind of my cybersecurity career before I got drafted, right, you know, spend time with UH, with different folks in the industry that were kind of you know, either building or playing with malware UH and kind of understanding how these things, what kind of how they kind of interact and operate and UH and through ransomwares and and and also kind of you know,

how how these things are purchased and acquired. You know, not a great highlight of crypto and I don't I don't think a popular one today, but you know, that was one of the one of the early UH for ways.

And then again, you know what happened you know continuously kind of throughout my military service, where you know, you deal with with kind of cryptography and finding vulnerabilities and cryptographic implementations and so you know, whenever there are you know, questions about crypto right in these like units, in these places, they they bubble up in these two teams like the one that I was on, And so while while not a critical or main part of my role was a

was always kind of adjacent or kind of came up. But I think the love of it came from just you know, loving cryptography, understanding the space, and kind of going in and into kind of a deeper and deeper hole into how how these things work technically. Oh absolutely, And I can imagine that you guys started getting maybe

Crypto's growth and adoption

bombarded with like lots of crypto stuff as the use of it started growing. It's obviously matured as an acid class in technology. But uh, whether it be good actors, bad actors, everybody started using it in one way or the other. Yeah, I think ultimately, like you know, the vast, vast, vast majority of users in the space are net positive, right. You know, I come from a cybersecurity background, so obviously I have to wear that that that kind of that hat.

But uh, but yeah, one hundred percent. Like, uh, I think as the space has grown over the past couple of years, you know, we we have definitely seen a critical shift kind of and how people think about security, how people, uh, you know, address security challenges, how the ecosystem kind of handles and deals with incidents h and I think they will just persist right as the space becomes more mature, as things, you know, continue to evolve,

we will see organizations that will uplift the entire ecosystem and entire industry and how security standards are implemented and how security is treated and ultimately I think, you know, in a very very just and meaningful way, because when you think about at least today, the products that are built on top of crypto rails are ultimately financial products.

And and when you think about financial products, a lot of the reasons and differentiation that people choose to use certain financial products as opposed to others is is security. And so I think it's you know, a really really critical piece of not only you know, not only finance, but also also crypto holistically. Oh absolutely, so on a note,

Blockaid overview

give us an overview Blockade. What's your mission and what are the different services you offer? Yeah, so Blockade works with some of the biggest companies in the space to protect them and their users from broad fishing, different kind of hacks across the space. Right. The way that we think about these things and categorize them is both in terms of what we would consider low value high volume incidents. Right. This is like your fishing links, your scam tokens, your

users that are defrauded in whatever ways. These are generally smaller amounts but happen all the time, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts. And the other bucket that we think about are high value, low volume incidents. Right. They have been all too frequently, but generally higher ticket items affect product. This is like a smart contract that

gets hacked that blows up. This is a you know, even you know, even a phishing incident, right, which is kind of like bibit or like a broader cybersecurity incident, and many many others. Right. And so we think about both of these categories as the total attack landscape and the total kind of total attack vectors are encapsula encapsulated

within that, and Blockade aims to cover that. Holistically. You can kind of think about the technology we built as like this engine that's able to look at transactions or look at entities on the blockchain as they interact with the space and then alert and find various different incidents

and hacks before they take place. Right, So key examples of this are like our work with with meta mask and coinbase to flag various different you know, malicious transactions before users interact with them, or it's with you know, our partners like you know today we announced with HDERA and and we work very closely like with mystan and other kind of major protocols in the space to kind of monitor and find various different exploits across their space

and prevent those from happening across different kind of smart contracts and things like that as well too. So really really kind of taking that kind of core technology and enabling you know, us to prevent these kinds of incidents both high value and low value but higher volume in kind of one holistic solution. So you have solutions for exchanges, wallets,

Securing Exchanges and Wallets

blockchain protocols. It sounds like right because you're working with all these different folks like coin based, metamass, mist and so far the hash graph. So breakdown at which layer you are, you know, where where does blockade fit in the tech sect if you want to call it that, Where you are able to monitor these things? Is it an API integration. Is it reviewing the email server? I don't know, you know, wek us through that process. Yeah,

so technically I think it's it's it's pretty similar. We sit everywhere transactions flow, and so we can look at blockchains passively, right just by reading the mempool or you know, indexing the chain, understanding various different transactions will take place, obviously contextualizing them to our customers and what they care about.

We can sit as it's kind of like an add on to a wallet, right, so, this would be by integrating with various different custodian solutions or self cusodian solutions like noses, safe fire blocks, squads and Salana and others, and basically living in that transaction flow as like another approver that basically goes and views, simulates validates transactions, runs it through kind of our policy engine, and kind of spits back, right should this be, should you execute this

or not? And then we also sit inside directly inside of consumer wallets, right so, and we kind of simulate validate transactions in those cases as well. And we also work with different exchanges to prevent fraud in different interfaces, for example, like the withdrawal functionality preventing push payment fraud and things like that. So that's kind of like a high level overview. But can you can generally plug blockade in anywhere transactions flow? Interesting? I mean, you guys, like

Common scams & attacks

I said at the beginning, such a critical part of the infrastructure of this acid class and you know, with building trust and we've seen so many hacks and exploits over the years and people getting caught up in fishing scams. We need more of what you're doing to get this industry up to par, maybe with how TRADFI has, you know, run things. But look, TRADFI, there's bad actors in every industry, and but I think TRADFI has less because they've gone

through all the iterations of scams. So maybe what are the common scams and vulnerabilities that you're seeing and maybe if you can highlight some examples that you stopped. So I think this is actually a misnomer, right, I think there's actually much more bad actors using dollars than there are bad actors using stable coins, right, I mean, when

you think about it, it just doesn't make sense. Like think about like, let's assume for a second, you know Tony, you and meet your money launderers, right, and we're we're doing some nefarious stuff and we're trying and we made a bunch of cash and now we're trying to you know,

wash that. Right. You think it's a good idea to go and take a million bucks somehow get it into coinbase and then from there, I don't know, move it to some sort of mixer and then from there move it to a different exchange only to get it back into cash. Like, I don't know. It just doesn't like you go through too many areas of traceability and kind of friction. In my mind, you know, the data we see is that most of the illicit activity and crypto comes from crypto. What that means is that it comes

from cybersecurity incidents. Cybersecurity incidents that granted could be adjacent to crypto, like ransomware and things like that. It comes from hacks to different protocols or users. It comes or exchanges, you know, it comes from scams that sometimes onboard victims that aren't are related to crypto to these rails because they're better forms of payment infrastructure. And that's where the

majority of the illicit activity comes from. In my mind, Sorry for maybe for maybe taking us off a tangent here. But but so you know, I think as a percentage of general activity of illicit actors, crypto is a very small piece of that, right, And I think tradfy while it has tried to you know, uh you know, you know, I think ultimately has not zeroed this out. Right. We oftentimes say to a lot of our customers, like, fraud

is a symptom of success. Uh if you you know, if you have a really really great product or ecosystem, then users or bad actors will try to circumvent and do all sorts of things in order to achieve things that the system does not want them to, right. I think you know we can uh uh, you know, simple things is just like kids cutting in line, right, you know there's a line they you know. Sometimes it's not even with like super nefarious activity like in activity in mind.

You just want to do something that the system otherwise doesn't want you to do, and so and so. So. Yeah, fraud is like a it's like, you know, it's something we want to squash, but it's generally like a symptom of success. Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, if you're having success, you become an instant target. Right, you get this turn exactly exactly. I read that you guys have

Monitoring transactions for Coinbase and other exchanges

scanned uh like two point four billion transactions in the last year. How are you able to maintain the you know, tell us a bit about your team and your operations to handle big clients like coinbase and you mentioned a hash graph and then working with metamass and I think there was also Gemini at the crypto exchange. Yeah, how are you able to handle that? Yeah, we processed a ton of transactions. We process I think like a couple months ago, it was over five hundred million transactions on

a given month. And so you know, when you think about our team, right, one we served with some of the world's kind of best hackers in these like cyber intelligence units that have built you know, uh software to kind of interact and kind of that that is deployed

across you know, the country's uh most critical missions. And so you know that same team is is the one behind you know, this really critical piece of infrastructure that's able to secure probably most end users today and a lot of applications, right, And so you know, we we build things in mind in a way where it's like, you know, we know some of ours, our earliest customers.

You know, we're some of the largest companies in the space, and so it's basically forced us to build things in a way that is incredibly scalable and and is able to kind of support their build their their kind of their growth and their you know, in their user base.

What obviously becomes harder over time is is as obviously security threats you know, target these different kind of customers across our network, is understanding and piecing those things together and you know, closing those gaps incredibly quickly and making sure our customers are secure in the most meaningful way possible.

But that that thing that is really hard also makes the product really great because because we see these threat actors across the the you know, the extent of our network, we're able to go and really really quickly apply all those different security learnings to all of our customers basically instantly.

And so you know, when one when one more kind of customer joins, for example, like we announced a you know, hash graft today and we announced Gemini today, so they benefit from that extensive power of the broader network that we have in our kind of ecosystem, and so it's it's really really great to see how that's been playing out.

Oh sure, so you can essentially share learnings like oh hey, coinbase got attacked with In this way, you can automatically alert the other exchanges to watch out for X or Y, whatever it may be. It's almost implicit, right, It's like, uh uh, you know, our engine takes these different threats, understands them, and then applies them holistically to everyone, right, And so it's you know, we don't have to go and call anyone up right, It's it's like, uh, it

just kind of happens. Interesting, Are you providing any type of security training to these firms as well? So we work really really closely with our customers right on slack, on telegram with them twenty four hours a day, you know, three sixty five. Many of our customers see us as

like an extension of their security team. And so, you know, while well we don't have any courses on YouTube today or things like that, I think I think a lot of our customers will say that, you know, we we we spend a ton of time with them and and work to educate them, and we put a ton of content right like across the space about new and novel

kinds of techniques and hacks. So not only our customers too, but also you know, independent people or people across the industry or ecosystem that you know want to benefit from from these kinds of learnings. Yeah, for sure. Two part question,

AI usage & Threats

are you using AI in any way to help assist in managing the securities for these platforms? And two do you see AI agents or so being a threat and

also introducing new securities, threats and vulnerabilities. Yeah, I think it's core to everything we do, right, Like you know, whether that's in our detection capabilities, understanding what transactions you know are going to do, Understanding various different types of threats and uncovering those, whether that's across our understanding of various different other attack factors that are adjacent to the space.

You know, we go through this extensive process of scanning websites to find various different threat actors that are leveraging those four scams for fraud, for all sorts of different things. And so we definitely use various different AI agents and lms to basically, you know, understand what these sites are doing and categorize them in different ways. And of course it's in our development process and how we kind of go and write code and execute and ship things much

much faster. So, yeah, AA is core to everything that we do across our company as far as you know, you could think about, you know, how AI empowers attackers is actually pretty pretty sophistics. It's pretty crazy, right, Like one, it's much easier to build malware and build you know software today, and so just like deploying new and novel variants of various different things just gets that much easier, right, and so that game of cat and mouse just you

know accelerates in the bar to entry just lowers. We went through kind of a funny exercise right internally, how quickly can you go and kind of spin up you know,

fake phishing website and kind of do this thing. How quickly can you go and see some sort of like you know, uh, you know, smart contract that's exploited, copy the attacker byte code, and then kind of repurpose it for your own from your own use, Right, you can use these oul on agents really really quickly to kind of go and and build these things out and so and so definitely it's lowered the bar for for attackers to enter the space one hundred percent and so I

think that you know, all security teams, not only in crypto but across kind of the entire the entire world, you know, need to understand that that it's just become easier to do the thing is that you could in the past. And so we think the result of that is just that there will be more of them and so and so and and when when we see that

in practice. Yeah, And most recently, I think it was on Reddit, I saw someone post a fishing site a clone of coin base, and I think I don't know if the person the person identified it, and they were saying, this is probably generated by AI, whatever it may be, because it it looks so similar like they usually sometimes if you're a bit sophisticated, you can see some flaws

on the on the page and so forth. Right, But AI, to your point, will help make it easier lower to barrier entry and to spin these fishing sites up and and it will be perfect in a sense of an exact clone. Yeah, one hundred percent. Like we see this all the time. It takes seconds to do. Uh, it's uh. And so like I said, it's just become easier, uh, And so we'll see many, many more of them. You know, in comparison to other security firms in the industry, what

Blockaid's differentiators

what are your differentiators and where do you think you have the advantage? And you know, on maybe a two fold question, there is also you know, what's your vision? Do you do you want to see Blockade B kind of that security layer for all Web three transactions? Yeah, I think it's a great question. You know, I think holistically, like the way I view this is that and we have you know, we're lucky to be in a space

with incredibly talented competitors as well too. But you know, where we stand out and where we differentiate is is one. I think the caliber of team that we've been able to amass is just like UH by far and incredibly you know, it's incredible, like the talent we're you know, I think everyone that comes in every single data blockade is incredibly excited to uh to work alongside the people

that that are here. I think, you know, it's that network of customers that gives us that ability to have, you know, this incredible data that's able to kind of

power all of these things. And I think, you know, the last the last piece of it is I think that you know, we we We've been around in the space for so long and have seen so much, like through the work and through kind of these different things, and and you know, care so much about our customers that we really kind of give a tailored experience around every single kind of deployment, every single kind of integration. And then I think other people just don't in the space.

I think our customers would definitely say that, right that working with us is kind of, you know, incredibly rewarding. You asked, you know, if we if we go and share these kinds of things and stuff like that, if you know there's learnings or trainings or stuff like that, I think, you know, the folks that work with us definitely learn a lot more and and and kind of you know, leave much more secure. And so you know, that's kind of how I see us against kind of

some of our competitors across the space. And and I think ultimately, like when you compare, there's no comparison right when you go in put us side by side. Ultimately, the experience with us is pretty phenomenal. And most recently

Latest funding round

I read that you guys security fifty million dollar series be funding led by Ribid Capital, So you're getting additional funding your scale and your business is kind of what's happening right now. Yeah, so I think, you know, the

space is growing incredibly quickly. There's a ton of demand for not just security, but all kinds of infrastructure across crypt Now we see this across all of our all the parts of our business, right, all our company, all our users are expanding, all of our you know, all of our customers are kind of growing in scale, a

number of transactions and so and so. Yeah, I think the way for us to keep up is definitely, you know, working harder, growing the team, and just like you know, continuing to support this this kind of this this ecosystem. Let's say, okay, it's twenty thirty, fast forward five years, right, what does securing digital assets and platforms look like to you?

Crypto in security in 2030

You know, I think there's two questions there, because one, it's what does the industry look like in twenty thirty, right, like what is what is there? And then what what

is what are you secure? Right? You know? I saw this tweet after kind of the circle uh new circles, new chain kind of announcement around how you know, you know, your merchant you know, uh, receiving payment from your customers, you know, and USDC on circles new chain, but your payment terminal only receives right uh uh stripe USD on strip chain and then you have to go and pay, you know, but you custody with Bank of America and so you have to take Bank of America us D

and put that on on on b of a chain and then you know, you have to pay your vendors, but they're on on JP chain with JP coin, and so I think, like, what's incredible is that a lot of that And that's just again one use case for payments will be seamless, but will happen, right, And so we're gonna see a lot of these like really really really complicated networks created over the next couple of years.

And that sounds kind of crazy and scary because a lot of folks in crypto or consumers, but that's actually like that the level of complexity is actually not terrifying or horrible if you have applications that abstract it, right, like we shouldn't care that that's what's happening. We should see a dollar here and a dollar there, and that's it, right, and everything should take care of itself behind the scenes.

And for that to happen really really securely, you know, you need a really really great security layer to go in kind of just like encapsulate these different things. Right, And so I'm a big fan of kind of early day Internet, and so when you think about the early days of the Internet, you know, that kind of scary, you know, complicated network that I just described is actually

not too disimilar than how the internetworks today. Right, Many people don't know this, but like you know, in crypto, we talked about bridges for moving money from one network to another on the Internet. Those things are called routers, and people don't know what routers actually used to be called bridges and the bridge between two networks and the early early early days of what we now think about, if the Internet started with what we're called or what

still are called local area networks or lands. Right, these are just like a couple computers connected to one another. And as things grew and as networks became connected to one another, you had to connect multiple lands. Those became

WANs wide area networks. And so you can kind of think about your metropolis network, right that connect multiple houses together, becoming like a wide area network, and you know, between every single one of those lands to those lands is like is a bridge, right, and between those lands to other wins, there's other bridges. And you know, there were firewalls and all sorts of other security products that were introduced to go and protect those networks in different ways,

whether that's you know, blocking and filtering different transactions. There were all sorts of piece of anti virus that were introduced to network connected computers to block and filter out these different things. And today what happens, like quite literally, is like for internet connected device to connect to transferformation with server, it doesn't go through one hop, right, it goes through seven or eight on average, and that all

happens in milliseconds, incredibly quickly and incredibly securely. And so you ask kind of so that's how I think about

the space in twenty thirty. Where I think blockade fits in is at every single part in that space and every single part in that stack, providing security solutions for our customers to ultimately ultimately make that thing happen in a way where one you definitely don't see it happening and you don't care that you know, money is moving in these different ways, and two in a way that you're definitely not worried you're going to lose all your money and that it won't ever reach sustination and that

maybe it'll reach the wrong destination or maybe some contract that it's touching will blow up. And I think a lot of the core products that we're building today really fit into those things really really nicely, both pre and post transaction, to continuously kind of you know, cover the space. Yeah, for sure, well said, I think there's a lot of parallels and comparisons between how the Internet works and how

we grew and where crypto's at now. Yeah, we won't necessarily be thinking about how it works, just that it works. And that's going to be for the majority of the population. Obviously, those who are tech savvy and very much in the weeds with crypto and blockchain will kind of understand how the back end works, but majority of people, they just need to know it works one hundred percent. Yeah, what's on your roadmap? I know you talked a lot about,

Roadmap

you know, the things you guys are working on, but anything else you want to highlight? Yeah, I think we covered a lot actually, like through the conversation, a lot of our roadmap. I think, uh, you know, customers have come to learn about blockade through our kind of you know, pre transaction simulation, validation engines inside of wallets. We do a lot more than that right around monitoring for different

kind of exploits across smart contracts. We do a lot more than that in terms of working with different you know, UH, institutional UH and UH and enterprise customers to you know, through our co signing product, which basically is like a co approver for transactions across these different wallets, leveraging the same kind of technology in our in our in our wallet, in our kind of consumer wallet business. And we do a lot more with different exchanges to detect over these

different kinds of fraud and things like that. You know, the roadmap is basically just continuing to kind of execute across those those those those product categories UH and continue to serve our customers and the best way you possibly can. Oh. Very cool. I would love to get your thoughts on, you know, what's happening overall in the crypto market. Obviously, we had the Genius Act passed into law that's huge for the stable coin market. We got the Market Structure

US Crypto legislation

Build a Clarity Act coming up for votes in September. You know, what are your thoughts on legislation being past, this industry getting the clarity it needs and its tradi fi is coming in and much more so. We talked to us our customers across the space. I think, you know, Genius UH is an incredible piece of legislation because before it, crypto was literally lawless, like there were no crypto laws uh.

And so you know, you could argue how how much of the Wild West it is, but it was, but it was literally lawless and so and so whether you know, Genius itself changes the level a lot or a little for the space and practice. I think it changes everything because it's it's just the first crypto law and then the second part of that. And we talked to a ton of customers across the space ton institutions. There is

a lot. So we're seeing the activity on chain grow right when you one one metric we look at is kind of the movement between activity on centralized exchanges to you know, dex is on chain and we've seen that grow ten percent over the past ten months and ten percent over the year beforehand. And so this is a metric that's been growing regardless of market cyclicality. And what's what's kind of incredibly exciting to see and here is

while you see that kind of metric moving. When we talk to some of the largest institutions in the world, one thing that they're worried about before moving on chain. Even when we talked to some institutions that are already operating in crypto but just on centralized exchanges, they're really looking out for the clarity kind of clarity bill to pass and the market structure build to pass before they go and kind of are much much more involved in

defy and much much more involved on chain. And so I think that's really really exciting and we're going to see a massive unlocked there in terms of you know what that does to both institutions that are not currently active, but also institutions that are active just not in DeFi or not not as active on chain, right and so and so I'm really really really excited about that. There was an executive order path there were two executive orders passed,

you know from the White House. We were really really excited about, uh. The first one, Uh predominantly they had a whole sextual on security, which is incredibly exciting to see kind of this shift in and I think this shift is beginning to start right legislation. Legislators that I think think think today a lot about the market or a lot about crypto as you know, just another network of moving money, but it's also a network of computers.

And so when they think about it from the prism of a network of moving money, they think about illicit finance.

And I think, you know a lot of us think about it because we've been trying to think about it this way actually when we kind of you know, peel the onion a little bit more and try to look at like what is that illicit finance and where does it originate from a lot of it is cybersecurity and fraud related, and so we're really excited to see kind of regulators start to talk about cybersecurity and fraud related pieces of legislation, which I actually think are much more

meaningful than illicit finance to the space holistically. Like a funny anecdote is like when you think about the Internet, right, the Internet you know moves money too, right, You have credit cards there and things like that, and so you know, no one's asking a user before they enter a website to kind of KYC right across the Internet, right, And it's because they don't view this in the realm of

like elicit finds. But they do. But there are legislation an around big enough businesses around data security and access management and cybersecurity controls because they know that it's prone to these different risks and those risks lead to these bad outcomes. What I think kind of, you know, the SPACE has not yet understood fully is that if we solve our cybersecurity challenges, we will actually solve a lot

of our listed finance challenges. And so that's really excited about, like from from some of the new legislation that's coming out of SPACE. Yeah. Absolutely. And the services you guys provide, are you able to provide this to even tradified institutions like banks who are now getting involved in crypto they want to build their own blockchain into great blockchain percent Yeah. So so like we work with a bunch of traditional finance customers too. We can't mention many of them, but

but but yeah, we one hundred percent do. Many are kind of you know, dipping their toes in, and some are and are some I think are going to dive head first. And so I think a lot of them are waiting and looking at to see, you know, some of the pieces of legislation and what kind of unfolds. But you know, I think, as with a lot of technology shifts, Uh, it may take longer, but it'll be bigger than people think. Oh absolutely, you know. I got some wrap up questions here for you. First, if you

Wrap up questions

could create jo own metaverse, will the theme be a metaverse where no cybersecurity incidents take place? I don't know exactly what that means, probably like the exact opposite of like the matrix. I don't know. Rapid fire questions. Favorite food I like a Burger, Favorite musician or band. I'm a fan of the Arctic Monkeys. Favorite movie. I'll give you the favorite movie I saw recently. Maybe The Fantastic Four, the New The mar the New marvel On. Favorite book.

I'm a huge fan of Asimov. When you're not working at Blockade, what are you doing for fun? Dude? Working at Blockade is incredibly fun. That's that's kind of that's what I do. If I'm not if I'm not if I'm not working at Blockade, maybe I'm maybe I'm working out. Okay, cool, cool, you know, great stuff, and like I said at the beginning, you guys are a core part of the infrastructure for this acid class to continue to mature and function well. Securities,

of course one of those pillars. So I'm looking forward to the future updates. But thank you so much for joining me, Tony A pleasure, Thank you so much.

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