YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Forman

lines on the record: 93
first: 2025-04-21
most recent: 2025-04-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's really where permission DeFi comes into play. So I think just taking a step back, the DeFi that we use today is really this idea of permissionless DeFi. Anyone can show up to a website and connect their non-custodial wallet and start partaking in finance without any login information. Usernames, passwords, you can just start using things. And that has scaled very quickly, but it just doesn't scale beyond the few million people that are really using these networks today for the reasons I mentioned. It's not institutional. So permission DeFi describes a new system where addresses are whitelisted by a centralized authority after they've gone.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's what's being called permissioned DeFi. And it's very important. And it actually could be one of the most important themes in crypto today. The idea of permission DeFi really comes from a problem and the problem is that many regulated institutions cannot interact with blockchain applications today due to compliance and regulatory reasons. You don't know who your counterparty is when you're interacting with a smart contract. And earlier this year, the EU Parliament passed KYC AML measures that basically said, whenever you're transferring crypto or whenever you're interacting on chain, you need to know who your counterparty is. And that's very problematic for institutions and is keeping a number of institutions who are otherwise interested in the space on the sidelines.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make risk assessments around which DeFi applications are safe or which ones are not, that doesn't scale beyond four or five million people. You want a world where people are using DeFi without even knowing that they're using it. It's really invisible. It's powering the back end because it's better, faster, cheaper. And so in order to get that, you need folks like Robinhood that are sitting on top of these DeFi applications are using them on behalf of users, are risk managing, and are kind of the gateway. So really DeFi scaling is in my mind a D to B2C distribution model, DAO to business to consumer. You need that kind of layer in between. Not dissimilar from email, when you send an email, no one thinks about using SMTP. You just use Gmail or Microsoft Outlook. And it works. You need that application layer.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inception, there have maybe been roughly four to four or five million wallets, unique wallets that have ever interacted with DeFi applications. Not that many. In order for that number to grow to 100 million to a billion and beyond, I think you need really two things. So you need abstraction, you need a layer on top of DeFi that abstracts away the complexity of using it. So the concept of people downloading self-custodial wallets, writing down 12 word seed phrases, understanding gas prices, and then being able to”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm excited about DeFi scaling. And my hope is that and my sense is that people won't even use the term DeFi in five to ten years. It will just be called finance because we don't call finance today centralized finance. It's just called finance. But I envision really DeFi as being the back end for all capital markets and financial activity. And the largest consumers of DeFi will be banks will be fintech companies and will be institutions. It's very complex to interact with DeFi applications. And the reality is most people just don't care about finance or blockchains. So the most of the people that are using DeFi applications today are, it's a self-selected group. But to scale DeFi and DeFi since”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you look at something like Tether, they come out with some transparency reporting. The last I looked about 80% of the assets backing USDT were in cash. The other 20% were in short-term securities, T-bills, some commercial paper. And really the way I think about fiat-backed stablecoins is they're almost akin to IOUs or credit issued by the institutions that are issuing the stablecoins. So if you own USDT, you're taking Tether counterparty risk. How do you price that? What return do you need to earn to make that worth your while? If you own USDC, you're taking kind of circle counterparty risk and you're making a bet on their risk management. It's no different than having a checking deposit with JP Morgan or Bank of America. You're ultimately taking the risk of the issuer.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These algorithmic stablecoins. That's where UST falls. There are dozens of these algorithmic stablecoins that have been launched over the years. Most of them have failed. Some of them have temporarily failed and revived. There's just quite a bit of experimentation there.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 75%. So of the 200 billion, about 150 billion are fiat-backed stablecoins. The largest one is Tether, the second largest one is USDC, and then they're a longer tail of others. Now, the final 50 billion are two categories, so credit-based stablecoins and algorithmic stable coins. So in the credit-based stablecoin category, you may have $3 of Ethereum or $2 of Bitcoin backing a $1 pegged stablecoin. There's no dollar in a bank account in the real world. It's money created through credit. So it's almost like M2 instead of M1. And that category has exhibited a significant amount of stability over time and is growing. And then the second non-fiat back category are.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stablecoins and certainly algorithmic stablecoins have been in the news recently with Tara and Luna. I'd love to get your help understanding what portion of stablecoins are backed by assets and therefore the one-for-one exchange is, let's call it, stable.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That last category, the biggest bucket within that category is stablecoins. So stable coins are about 200 billion of the $1.5 trillion in the blockchain space. And these are in some cases dollars in bank accounts backing tokens on the blockchain. And those tokens are redeemable one for one. There are also stablecoins that are not backed by real world assets. They're maybe backed by digital assets over collateralized or backed by fictitious assets. And so that's the biggest category is stablecoins. Outside of stablecoins, there are stablecoins I would say are probably 90-95% of all real world assets brought on chain. That number's moving lower over time.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So zooming out crypto today is about 20 basis points of all global assets. So it's a trillion and a half asset class. Global assets are roughly $600 trillion. And that number has gone from basically nothing to 20 basis points. If you really break down the trillion and a half, there are several different categories. There are things like Bitcoin, which are stores of value. There are operating systems or smart contract platforms commonly known as layer ones like Ethereum, like Solana, et cetera. There are applications built on top of those smart contract platforms, typically DAOs or these different DeFi applications. And then the fourth category is real world assets that are ported over and tokenized and brought on chain.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a great question. There are certain data related services that are built to identify risks and track risks. So there are lots of different blockchain explorers that are built by community members that can flag risks in a network. There's also Twitter, which is wisdom of the crowds, a collection of people that are just constantly steering at blockchain-related data and identifying anomalies and raising their hand and saying, hey, this doesn't look right. And then there are smart contract auditors, which are a little bit different, but they assess the overall architecture of these networks, both from a code standpoint as well as from a game theory and behavioral standpoint to ensure that there aren't edge cases that can be exploited. So certainly it's not perfect today, but the risk management.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The financial crisis occurred in 0809 is if you were to look at the 10Q of Lehman Brothers last filing before it went bankrupt, there's a big other line item on the balance sheet. You have to read into the footnotes. No one really knew what risk that large of a financial institution held on its balance sheet. Not even the executives working there. DeFi is, you can see it all. And if you can see it all and you can understand it better, if you can understand it better, you can anticipate it.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's really no limit on the number of times a token can get rehypothecated in DeFi or on these digital networks. And we see there may be a certain token that's bridged to another blockchain or pledged as collateral on one blockchain borrowed against, converted into a preferred instrument. The number of permutations and experimentation that you're seeing is getting quite complex. And one could argue like that complexity produces risk. And I think that's true. The positive thing is you can see it all on chain. So you can assess it and you can recognize it because it's all visible. In the traditional financial system, I think a lot of risk exists. You just can't see it. We don't know how many times a specific asset is getting rehypothecated or how it's getting tranched up or a lot of the time like what assets even represent or what risk there is. One of the reasons”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To use that comparison in the stock world, we've had instances of, say, the shares outstanding of a company being some very, very high number because people can rehypothe the same stock over and over and over again. How does that work in the crypto world when you can imagine a token, a coin can be tagged and there could be limits on how many times you can relend the same coin?”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World of more tokenized real world assets. So today, these networks involve people borrowing against tokens like Ethereum. What you're starting to see is tokenized physical gold or tokenized U.S. Treasuries, or you can imagine a state of the world where there's tokenized Amazon stock, where you can borrow against those assets, almost as like a repo. And one of the things that is interesting in the securities lending market is if you own stocks on your Fidelity or Schwab account, you are earning 0% on them if you're a retail investor. And on the back end, to the extent people are shorting an asset that you own, Fidelity Schwab, whoever your brokerage is, is making that spread. So really every asset should have some sort of organic embedded yield, even if it's one basis point or five basis points. And so these networks really allow”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's certainly a portion of the borrowing that takes place in DeFi that's for people that want to speculate. I think speculation, it seems like a dirty word. It's part of every financial market in the world. And it exists in DeFi. So period. I think that borrowing and having access to efficient credit markets is incredibly important for businesses, for companies. And what's interesting here and what the potential I see here is because these networks are governed by software and they have very low marginal cost, there are no people behind these networks. They're truly DAOs that are just software programs. So in an equilibrium state, lenders should be able to earn more. Borrowers should be able to pay less. And there's less rent-seeking by these platforms. That's exciting to me. We're also entering a”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about two different types of, let's say, borrowing. One is in the world you started. So in any kind of corporate entity, you have optimal capital structures, you have borrowing for investment cases. The other you could say is for trading, say leverage. As you described it, it sounded to me like there's more borrowing against tokens for that trading side. And I'd love to get a sense of the risk that you see in the system down to project risk from borrowing for the purpose of just creating leverage.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And very low, if any, principal defaults on the blue chip platforms. The one area that we're still figuring out is unsecured or undersecured borrowing. So in a world of blockchain where code is law and these instruments are all bearer assets and there aren't the same rights and remedies you'd have as a lender or borrower in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, there's very little recourse. And so people have attempted to build reputation-based systems or other systems to pull in Web2 data to give people kind of a Web3 credit card or Web3 credit. And we're just starting to scrape the surface of what's possible there.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, lending and borrowing is an interesting use case. So there are several money market style platforms where lenders can show up, deposit tokens, and earn a yield on them. And they get paid a yield by borrowers. Borrowers maybe deciding to borrow crypto because they have a low tax basis. They don't want to sell to realize a taxable event. They may need working capital. They may want to go leverage long. And so these borrowers, they may post, like, say, $2 of collateral for every $1 they borrow. So these money markets are kind of governed based on different loan-to-value ratios that can get changed by these networks. Secured lending is a category within DeFi that is actually probably the most mature in terms of finding product market fit and having real volumes run through these systems.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really what DeFi is. And what's exciting about DeFi and what attracted me to it to begin with is it's working. Like this isn't something we're talking about that may work in five years or 10 years. This is here and now. I used a DeFi protocol this morning before coming here. We use them at Perify every day. And there are trillions of dollars of value flowing through these networks. Uniswap, for example, just passed one trillion dollars of trading volume since Inception. It launched a few years ago. That's one of many, many examples. So just the fact that these systems work today are providing real value is very exciting.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're completely transparent and open source, so you can see every single transaction that's ever occurred on decentralized exchange like Uniswap or a money market like Compound See every single loan, see every single borrower, every repayment. These networks are global, so they're the first ever global financial products. Every other financial product is launched within a specific country. These are the first global markets, which should make markets more liquid, more efficient. And they're programmable, which it's this idea of unlocking new types of financial primitives that simply weren't possible in traditional markets.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And instead of centralized authorities controlling these finance verbs, you have software doing it for you. So you have a network of software programs that mimic financial contracts using if-then statements. And if you think about any financial contract, whether it's buying insurance or selling a call option or entering into an interest rate swap or a loan agreement, it's really just a series of if-then statements. If price is X, Party A pays party B C dollars. And so this new network of decentralized finance is roughly a couple hundred billion dollar industry in terms of value that's locked in these networks. These systems are totally peer-to-peer, so there's no counterparty risk. They're permissionless to use and access.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't see the risk in these systems. They're rent seeking. So finance globally is $11 to 12% of GDP. And finance as an industry doesn't produce anything that's inherently valuable. It's just an industry that is a lubricant for other sectors like healthcare, education, et cetera, to actually make the world a better place. So finance should be, I think, a lower percentage of GDP and not seek as much rent. And the final thing is financial services today are largely inaccessible. So 20% of the world is unbanked. Another 70% is underbanked. And so what is interesting about DeFi is that we're moving from a world of intermediated finance to disintermediated finance.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has lowered the cost of launching a satellite by 100X, but we're still paying $3 to take money out of an ATM. The financial system really has not evolved in the same way that other sectors of the economy have. If you kind of think about finance today, finance really describes a collection of verbs that you can do, that kind of ING verbs of finance. lending, spending, borrowing, hedging, insuring, indexing. It's all these things you can do in the financial system. The reality is those activities today tend to be intermediated, so they're done through banks, broker dealers, custodians. They tend to be permissioned. So not everyone can access them. You can only access them if you have an account. These custodians and intermediaries are opaque, so you don't know what counterparty risk you're taking.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to kind of start with the why because I think if you lose track of why DeFi should exist, like why it needs to exist, you're going too far. So just taking a step back, like as I think about the financial system today from first principles, if we were to restart global financial markets, would we design them the same way that they exist today? If we're starting from a blank sheet of paper, I think everyone would agree we probably wouldn't. Most of the laws were written in the 1930s and 40s. Most of the code for things like SWIFT were written in the 1970s and 80s to send money internationally. You're paying eight to ten percent. Equities are settling T plus two. Bonds are settling T plus three. Distressed bank loans are settling T plus 20. The only part of banks that have grown in headcount are back office and compliance.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a humbling experience. I felt as though I was as intellectually stimulated as I'd ever been because it was so interesting to dig into the unity economics of the DeFi applications and understand how they worked and talk to founders, but it was also challenging because you wanted to build a business that was sustainable and could stand on its own two feet. And to do that, to scale an asset management firm, you need to raise capital. So it was challenging.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2018 and 2019. You just couldn't see the returns. They were invisible. We chose to make the investments. And we got over that time really smart on DeFi. We were very close to the metal using a lot of the largest applications today when they were kind of V1 products. We were the first capital messing around with them. And so we learned quite a bit.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great on a relative basis, but not great on an absolute basis. And I came to him for advice. And I remember him saying, look, when I started private equity or when I started KickyR in the 1970s, the term private equity didn't exist. They were called bootstrap funds. And the concept of buying businesses with debt was kind of foreign. It was really a new asset class. He went around and talked to allocators. Like they really didn't even understand what he was talking about. And their eyes would kind of roll into the back of their head or they fall asleep during meetings. He said, you know, look, if you have conviction, like you need to stick with it. And so that always really stuck with me given the opportunity associated with a new asset class. It just takes time for people to get their arms around it. So it was certainly challenging. At the same time, it was exciting because in the early days, when I think back to some of the best investments we made, they were in.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The timing in the short term wasn't great. It was really at the beginning of a pretty precipitous bear market. Taken a long term view, and I had really high conviction that blockchain would be a thing long term, but in the short term, the markets were down fairly dramatically in the back half of 2018. This was kind of the hangover following the ICO boom. It was very difficult to scale our business, to raise capital, to get institutions to actually care. I think majority of institutions wrote off the asset class. I kind of think back to like the early days as being both challenging and exciting. I remember, so Henry Kravis was a day one investor in Parify and is still a mentor of mine. And I remember getting lunch with him, say like a year into starting Parify. And we really weren't scaling. We were sub 20 million of AUM. Our performance”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't always get to pick when there's opportunity. You kind of have to just identify it. And then the second thing is I've always optimized in my career for learning and in the blockchain space, you get to learn about so many different exciting areas, everything from economics to cryptography to game theory to financial market structure. So I figured, look, if this didn't work at the very least, I'd learn a lot and I wouldn't get bored. And I'd be able to carry my learning to the next experience. So that was really that. And it was a tough decision because I loved my job at KKR, but I ended up leaving.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to use Bitcoin to pay for things, to buy a cup of coffee. One of KKR's largest positions at the time was called First Data. Today it's called PfizerV. And it was a legacy payment player that was charging merchants a few percent to accept credit cards. And so there was concern around disintermediation from blockchain. So I dug into that world, dug into a number of other areas in the space. And towards the end of my time at KKR, I made the decision to leave. And I think if you would have told me maybe six months, a year before I left KKR, hey, you're going to leave KKR and start a crypto fund. I would have said, you are out of your mind. But I think two things really clicked for me. So one is this was an entirely new asset class. It's very rare to live through the inception of a new asset class. It's maybe a once every decade or couple decade thing.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a kind of zero to one moment for me in terms of my understanding of other applications of blockchain. In 2016, I was at KKR and the firm had an innovation council in-house. And there was one person responsible for autonomous driving and another person responsible for cloud computing. And so I raised my hand to be the blockchain slash crypto person at KKR. And so I spent two years really canvassing the space. The world was a lot smaller back then. Coinbase was a series B company. The entire crypto market cap was maybe 10 billion, so less than one-hundredth of the size that it is today. And I was really more focused on understanding Bitcoin as a payment technology. At the time, there was a feeling that people”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will dropped, your collateral was liquidated, and you borrowed in the form of a perpetual bond. So interest accrude to your balance. And this entire system was governed by math. There were no people involved. There were no forms to fill out. There was no underwriting process. It was globally distributed. And it was incredibly efficient and elegant and simple. And it just worked. And actually, to be fair, at the time it was in white paper format, it launched in late 2017 and to this day, it works incredibly well. So that was exciting for me to see because being in the credit space and dealing in corporate restructurings and 300-page credit agreements and bond indentures to be able to distill a bunch of legalese into code was exciting.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My story into crypto probably could have ended there with just Bitcoin. But in 2015, mid-2015, Ethereum went to mainnet. Ethereum launched. And Ethereum was different than Bitcoin. It was this decentralized computer. And in the early days, I mean, it was really a ghost town. There were maybe like a couple dozen misfit developers and other people in the ecosystem around it. But what caught my eye about Ethereum was a credit application that was being built on it. It was called MakerDow. And it was an decentralized revolving credit facility or you could think about it as decentralized repo where you could post coins to a contract and borrow against them very similar to a margin loan on Schwab or Fidelity and to the extent the value of your collateral”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I found it interesting because I had worked in finance my whole career, but I had never really asked myself, what is money? Like it's such a fundamental question, right? Like, what is money? Money is this like lubricant for all capital markets and for the entire financial services space. And digging into the question of what is money, I found to be an incredibly intellectually stimulating exercise and quickly realized that money is a technology that humans use to communicate value with one another. It's just a technology. So that to me was incredibly exciting. And I ended up buying Bitcoin in 2014, not at a great time. There was a bull market in 2013. And then in early 2014, the price started a two-year decline. So my entry point wasn't phenomenal, but I bought some and started to pay attention.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2014, I was living in San Francisco. I had a roommate who was working at Google, who's a dear friend of mine to this day. And he had some of his coworkers over for dinner, and they were talking about Bitcoin. And I remember hearing the word Bitcoin for the first time. Someone explained what it was. I was extremely skeptical. I thought it was somewhat of a silly idea. And my friend said, hey, you shouldn't come to a view on it until you've actually done your work. So I said, okay, well, what is doing your work entail? And he said, you should read the Satoshi white paper. I said, okay, I don't know who Satoshi is, but I'll read his white paper. So the Satoshi white paper is an eight-page document that was written by a pseudonymous individual that describes the idea for Bitcoin. I think it was written in 2008. And I had to read it a couple times to really digest what he was describing.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My whole career, or just do credit. I loved touching different parts of the capital structure and learning things from scratch. I think in part, it was that curiosity that kind of led me into crypto.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The majority of that time was spent at TPG and KKR. I think the thing I learned most during the first 10 years of my career was just how to rip apart financial statements. So really dig deep into Unity economics of businesses, balance sheets, cash flows, income statements, really probe management team's claims around earnings or their business model along that journey I was also able to work on a lot of corporate restructurings. So this was kind of coming out of the financial crisis. And I think when things get messy, when you have different creditors and management teams, when businesses have not been going well, you end up learning a lot. When things are going well, maybe you don't learn as much. So I was fortunate to work on some like complex hairy restructurings. In my career, I never wanted to be just one type of investor. I didn't want to just do private equity.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before Lehman Brothers went under. And I would say I didn't really have any hard skills in finance and accounting. I wasn't able to navigate GAP financial statements with any degree of fluency. And I really had to learn on the job. And I think necessity is the mother of all inventions. So if you're forced to learn something in your salary and your life depends on it, you'll probably learn it very well. So I spent the first 10 years of my career from 2008 to 2018 really working across a number of different investment roles, everything from private equity to credit investing. So I touched a number of different parts of”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“War, markets, business, and a number of different other areas. And that fascinated me. So game theory, along with behavioral economics, really became a primary focus of mine in college. And I loved understanding really the way people responded to incentives and then the cognitive biases that impacted them. What I came to realize was there was no greater game theoretic experiment in the world than financial markets. It was the most complex and there was also the most on the line. And so I very quickly kind of put my plans to be a teacher on pause and wanted to enter in to the arena myself. So I graduated in 2008 and I was fortunate to get a job in investment banking. I started my career a few months after Bear Stearns went under and a few months.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great to see you. Yeah, thanks, Ted. Well, I'd love to go back to your traditional finance background into the non-traditional world of crypto, but why don't we start how you initially got into finance? Yeah, so I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and I had in my mind that I wanted to get a PhD in economics and become a teacher. So entering college, I remember looking through the course list and seeing game theory on the list of classes in the economics department. And I didn't know what game theory was, but it caught my eye because I loved games. I was a competitive chess player growing up. I loved poker and board games and puzzles were a core part of my childhood and my time with friends and family. So I Googled game theory and I found out that it was the study of how and why people make decisions in competitive situations. And it can be applied to deploy.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guest on the third episode of Crypto for Institutions 2 is Ben Foreman, the founder and managing partner of Parify Capital, a $1 billion investment and technology firm that focuses on decentralized finance across digital assets, venture equity, and quantitative strategies. Ben launched Parify in 2018 after a decade in traditional finance roles across investment banking, credit investing, and private equity at venerable institutions such as Rothschild, TPG, and KKR. Our conversation covers Ben's background, pivot to crypto, and launch of Parify into a bear market. We then discuss opportunities in the world of DeFi, including borrowing and lending, stablecoins, scaling, insurance, governance, and capital allocation. We close with Parify's research and valuation approach, engagement with DeFi protocols, Ceding crypto managers.”
2025-04-21 · Capital Allocators · [REPLAY] Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source