YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Freeman

lines on the record: 58
first: 2022-11-24
most recent: 2022-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, it's really hard to go back that far, right? It was, you know, all markets were in a freefall on March and April 20. And we, like everyone else, was very concerned about everything, right? From the health of our employees and families and the safety of what was happening in the world, right? So some level of markets were secondary out of everyone was scrambling to get their lives in order and understand what was happening in the world. But that was an anomaly. Marcus sold off 50%. Crypto, Bitcoin sold off 50, 60% in one day, right? So I think thankfully we haven't been through that again. But each...”
2022-11-24 · Forward Guidance · Liquidity In Crypto Is Declining | Scott Freeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a twenty seventeen, 2018 was really the first bull market when things really started to pick up and a lot of folks started getting into it, understanding it. It was getting more popular. And that was the first bull market. But yeah, I've been in it a long time. I've been through five or six now bull and bear markets. We've been through a bunch of crypto winters. This one's particularly chilly. But we've seen a lot, right? And one of the interesting things that we've noticed and continue to notice that a lot of the issues that have happened in crypto really parallel what's happened in traditional markets. So there's really nothing unique that's happening in crypto. There's always if every issue we've had in crypto, there's been a corollary in traditional finance that is very, very similar.”
2022-11-24 · Forward Guidance · Liquidity In Crypto Is Declining | Scott Freeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was some of that as the market grew. There was a lot of trading on Skype. There was trading on WhatsApp. There was trading on all the different messaging apps where you then settled on the chain, but all the transactions happened off chain, right? Because the DeFi didn't exist and exchanges really weren't up to snuff yet. So we spent a lot of time onboarding people. Sorry, we were onboarding with exchanges and then we had a whole process. We had clients onboarding with us as well. That was a big process back then, right? Because we want to be compliant. We're very careful about regulation. I used to work at the Federal Reserve, so I'm very aware of money laundering issues and know your client issues and things like that. So we spent a lot of time dotting I's, crossing T's, getting our accountants, getting our lawyers comfortable what we were doing and vice versa. So this was really, really early on. And the rule book hadn't been written yet, put it that way.”
2022-11-24 · Forward Guidance · Liquidity In Crypto Is Declining | Scott Freeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were other assets we were trading wasn't just Bitcoin, but the issues could have involved how do you maintain your wallet, right? You had nanos back then. You didn't have MetaMask, right? So it was just the complexities around keeping your secret keys secret. How do you do it? It was very early in the process. So there was instructions and papers out there, but you wanted to test it yourself. You wanted to do backups. You wanted to resurrect while it's like all the things that we take for granted today, we would have gone through and tested out to make sure they worked. That was the first step. And then you start interacting with exchanges that really don't have APIs or they have native APIs. And their messaging was less than perfect, put it that way. So they would often go down. They would send you weird messages back. They wouldn't get messages back. So it was very, very hit or miss. And it was very inconsistent when you traded on exchanges way back when.”
2022-11-24 · Forward Guidance · Liquidity In Crypto Is Declining | Scott Freeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we were fortunate enough to be introduced to it by a former friend of mine from the Federal Reserve who was in the crypto ecosystem, and she approached and asked us to help out with the project she was working on. And she said, listen, we're trying to start up an exchange. We're trying to get liquidity into our digital asset. Can you help with it? And it was very much in our sweet spot. We just viewed it as another type of asset, another currency that we were comfortable making markets around. So it took us a while to get comfortable with some of the unique aspects of crypto at that time, which are still unique, but managing your wallets, dealing with the, we were in decentralized finance even back then, but dealing with exchanges that were just getting off the ground, understanding the risks of those exchanges. So a lot of issues that still exist today, we started dealing with in 2014 and 2015.”
2022-11-24 · Forward Guidance · Liquidity In Crypto Is Declining | Scott Freeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To understand when you think those patterns will continue and when you think those patterns won't continue. You're looking for patterns, whether they're relationships between assets, whether relationships within assets. You're essentially saying, hey, if this happened yesterday or this happened every day for a past year, I think it will happen today as well. So those types of strategies could be trend following. It could be mean reverting. There could be pure arbitrage where you're buying assets and selling assets at the same time on different locations. There are lots of different flavors to it.”
2022-11-24 · Forward Guidance · Liquidity In Crypto Is Declining | Scott Freeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at a basic level, when you work for a big bank like that, you have primary focus is being a market maker, right? So you're making a two-sided market. You want to just be very efficient and fast in what you do. You just want to have people trading against your bid offer all day. So you want to be smart. You want to understand where the mid price is. You want to understand how to manage risk. It's very short-term trading. You're looking at milliseconds or microseconds even and trying to understand where the market is. And you generally have some predictors in place that are all quantitative in nature as well. It help you predict where the market will go. But even those predictions tend to be within a very short time span. You're not talking hours, days, or even weeks. You're talking literally seconds or microseconds. So from that background, from just looking at real pure quantitative finance, you can then expand into other types of quantitative trading. But they all focus on fighting patterns in the past and hoping those patterns continue or replicate going forward, right? It's being smart enough.”
2022-11-24 · Forward Guidance · Liquidity In Crypto Is Declining | Scott Freeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So JST Capital is a financial services company focused 100% on crypto and digital assets. We've been in business for five years. I started out my career as a lawyer and worked among other places at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, made my way to in-house council at Citibank, and then ultimately was helping to run the foreign exchange businesses at B of A and City. I focused on systematic trading, which is a quantitative side of trading. From there, I started a hedge fund with some partners and focused on systematic trading again. And in 2014, we got into crypto when we were hired by one of the original crypto companies to help them turn up markets and make a market for them. And then we started JST in 2018. I started it with my partner, Todd, who's based in Singapore. So we're very much a systematic quantitative, focused trading company that focuses 100% of the time on crypto and digital assets.”
2022-11-24 · Forward Guidance · Liquidity In Crypto Is Declining | Scott Freeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT