YouSaid · the spoken record

Vishal Gupta

lines on the record: 34
first: 2025-06-18
most recent: 2025-06-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I mean, I like the idea of like an auction. Let's say if I'm doing my series B or something like that and people want to join in and they, you know, maybe there's more like transparent way of doing a later stage like raise. I'd love to do something like that, but I don't know that that's my job right away. But I think that that's a very interesting way of thinking about it. Like seed series, like our seed investors I've known for years and like we had a very competitive bid out there and it was great to find prices intelligently kind of behind the scenes. I don't think I'd want to take that to an auction. I feel like that's not the first place to start. Now someone could prove me wrong. You can say, hey, like let's raise 10 million bucks in an auction. Like I guess so. Let the market kind of find its way. But I like the investors that we have on our cap table. Everybody from PayPal to a bunch of great investors that like help us as we kind of move forward into the market. And I wouldn't get that if I just had an auction with a million of.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's such a great point because I feel like we sort of learned that, and especially years ago, like the ICO mania, where it just felt like everything needs to go public. And then you realize that, yeah, maybe there's a good reason why like a brand new company doesn't get mark to market every single second. That's the job for the BCs to hold that risk. Yeah, it does feel like there's a medium there to walk.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is also interesting to me and kind of launching in a world where we can do both would be amazing. I do think that not every startup day one should be like a listed trading. I shouldn't have shouldn't be trading true markets yet. Give us a couple years.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's crypto or traditional equity, which was Circle's IPO. I think, by the way, the only thing crypto about Circles IPO is that it was a stablecoin business. And anything, it just shows that there's a lot of bid on buying crypto companies out there. So that's why you're seeing everybody from Justin's son to everybody else saying, hey, let's go public, right? But to do it in a crypto native way, I think that there's a big question around that. And that also delves into securities and whether or not they should be tokenized. And again, as long as it utility is high and the risk is low, let's tokenize the world, right? And what we need to do is kind of work on the utility needs to build, build, build, build. And we need to lower the risk, risk, risk, risk. And that's like, that's our goals there. I do think I'd love to see clear regulation around utility tokens and things like that. So like Amex points, like using them within our systems, like we talk about point systems, talk about like Amex points are not equity. Like that's very interesting to me. I think the equity being tokenized.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's funny as a markets guy, I think I would want everything to be in public and everything to be publicly traded. And the reality is a startup, I would say that there's a lot of benefit to not being liquid sometimes. Liquidly having a price attached to you, we raised our first seed round when I think Coinbase was shutting at 50 bucks. And if you try to just like draw the straight lines to a startup that's like sitting in the same world, it's really hard to say where your market cap should be or where your valuation should be. It seems illiquidity is actually a feature in venture kind of price something is very interesting. I do think there's moments of liquidity that should happen and they should find real price. We should find the price is the right way, whether it's through auctions or having a listed order book is very like are two different things. You see all these secondary markets for like startups. I think that feels inefficient. So finding efficient pricing is going to be really important.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've got matching engine, we've got CFI settlement, we've got DeFi settlement, we've got order routing, all kind of built into this hard tech. And then we have an app sitting on top. But like if you want to code to our infrastructure, you can come in at any level on-chain via fix as a user or as an institution. I think market infrastructure is just going to keep evolving. And I think that we're the first ones that are outside of the New York stock chains Nasdaqs of the world. We've been around for hundreds of years. And outside of like the Coinbase and Binance of the world, it kind of like fell into markets. We're the first ones that have kind of done both worlds, building some of the first ATSs, building some of the really interesting things and equities and options, and also helping run some of the biggest crypto businesses and just saying, hey, let's take a step back and build beautiful market infrastructure and just deploy it wherever we can.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really important. Building a 24 7 infrastructure that I could white label to give to any of these next markets is really important, giving them liquidity services and all the other things that are needed. I think we'll have an AWS moment for markets and that's matching engines, that's cloud solutions, a bunch of things that we want to build. There's settlement solutions both to a qualified custodian and on chain. There's a lot of stuff to build there. And if you're building the next prediction market, you shouldn't have to start from scratch all over again. So I think that just market infrastructure is really interesting, especially in a world where like AI is taking over, AI is going to be, you know, at some point one AI is going to talk to another AI and want to like transact with them. They're going to need to use something like USDC and wallets. They're going to need to convert those things. They're going to need to be able to buy and sell things at some point. All those APIs, whether on chain, off-chain, fix, they're going to want to patch into a patchwork of markets infrastructure. So True Markets is a market's infrastructure team.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that the idea of so one of my favorite quotes from markets in general was like a novel quote that was, you know, he said that a group of people thinking the same and coming to consensus as a mob and a group of people thinking differently and coming to consensus as a market. So like there's this idea of like there's truth within markets. And I think that what Shane on the polymarkets team and the Kolshi team has really kind of scratched the idea that like as like as media has become less like easy to trust, looking at a market and saying, hey, this is going to happen or this is going to happen. I think prediction markets have been very interesting. I think that what they've done there in bringing that idea mainstream. And again, we haven't seen the volumes. We haven't seen the open interest, but we have seen the eyeballs. I think that's really interesting and showing that there is like truth in markets and that's kind of how we came up with the name True Markets that the truth can come out in markets. And I think that just building markets infrastructure.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I use it for collateral? What can I use it for settlement? Dollars made a lot of sense. Gold could make sense. Oil, stuff like that could make commodities in general kind of make sense as long as there's like low risk and high utility. I was part of the team that kind of drove the securities business at Coinbase and the ideas around that. And we kept kind of butting up against the why of like, why are we doing this thing? Why are we trying to tokenize this asset? If it's just a trade 24-7, I can do that without tokenization. So let's make sure we're not just like shoving a product, like shoving the solution into the problem. Let's like solve the actual problem. And that's like, again, why I launched True Markets. I want to like really take 24-7 markets to everyone everywhere globally. That includes securities, that includes everything else. And like tokenization.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think this goes right back to the equation of utility versus risk. And like one of the projects that we had shelved at Coinbase was to launch CB Gold, but that became the kind of the impetus for us to launch CBETH and CBBTC and all these other things. Like we were trying to like, at some point I was convinced, you know, as we're doing Amazon of assets at Coinbase trying to scale the number of assets we were launching. I told Brian and Sergit, who was the chief product officer at the time, like even Netflix at one point had to like have their own movies. So at some point we have to create our own assets. And I thought that was like an important thing to do. And if you look back at the FTX world, they were doing leverage tokens and a bunch of other interesting things that they were trying to do. Obviously corporate governance over there. But I think, you know, honestly, I think that if I had to predict where we're going to go into tokenization, it's going to be assets that have high utility. What can I use it for? What can I?”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of summer will be the easiest in terms of interface will be the cheapest in terms of cost and will be the safest platform to buy Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, SPL, EVM, and base tokens. We can do that. We're a small team. We're about 10 people. We're not 4,000, 5,000 people, and we're running an exchange, an app and a bunch of other things.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always an R between the spot markets and the purpose markets, and people are just systematically trading. And if you look at the fee schedules, while at retail, you're trading maybe at 200, 250 basis points. And the systematic side, you may be taking liquidity for sub basis points. So there's a lot of opportunity where you as a systematic trader can just execute trades and maybe barely make money on a trade-by-trade basis, but you're doing millions and millions of trades at some point you're making a ton of money. So I think a lot of this is being still driven by systematic traders. And there's like, especially in the US, there's very like there's very few retail traders that are going to diving in and market buying like, you know, a full Bitcoin through an app. But I do think that that's where the market is. And I think there's more opportunity, right? Like there's a lot more opportunity. Again, it's really hard to get spot exposure in the US. And that's what we're trying to offer.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, number one, I should state very clearly as an exchange operator, I actually don't trade crypto. I've been at the helm of one of the largest exchanges in the world. I would get paid somewhat in Bitcoin. I had some Ethereum and Solana, but that's just like in my past. Like I don't trade actively on purpose. Like I think that as an exchange operator, you should be able to say that. And if anybody knows me and they know I'm a trusted person that can run an exchange and in this world, I think that's really important to say that. Now, I'd say what's happening in terms of price action in crypto, I mean, there's a lot of things there. The one thing I'd say is in the spot markets and the derivative markets, you're also seeing the vast majority of the trades, the actual volume is coming from systematic traders that are managing ARBs or managing hedges. They're doing a bunch of other things there. There's no Regan MS where in the US and the equity world where it would mandate the best bid or offer on these exchanges or route away in the US and globally, there's no...”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This also fragments more in the US spot market, which is why we're building what we're building. I had a really great job. I loved working with Brian and team. But the reality is I had a lot more ambition to kind of like build what I thought would be the next phase of crypto exchange.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm bullish of like getting more and more of our options in these listed worlds. And so you're going to see these proxies to spot that are going to be really interesting in the US. And again, I'm hyper focused in the US right now. I think there's a lot of opportunities globally, but I think that there's a lot to do in the US space. There's four exchanges in the US that make up 99% of the volume in spot, which in Coinbase is 75% of that business of that business. And I was lucky enough to be at the helm of that through IPO. We took it from 35% of US spot to 75%. big moves. But the reality is there was no real competition. We probably could have taken it to 90% with not a lot of work because we could charge whatever we want and nobody's keeping up with us. I think we now live in a world where there should be many exchanges in the United States that you can trade spot and we should be competing on pricing and product and a bunch of other things. And my hope is that like the stablecoin.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Market structures that are built to incentivize market makers to intercept a retail order. So that's where the payment order flow businesses come out of. That's where Robin Hood makes half their revenues. And so the IBI bit options markets are going to be much better than you're going to see and like, you know, an on-chain options market. It's just not going to work because there's no real competition. There's no reason for the market makers to kind of like step up and give you a proper market. So like there's a bunch of things that the retail client doesn't know, which is essentially the market structure will drive your prices. And if you have”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let me break this apart a little bit. The one thing I'd say is that in the US, getting spot exposure to like even Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana is extremely hard. Like you're still paying 200, 250 basis points as a retail client to go to like a large exchange to buy Bitcoin. It just, it takes a lot to get there. And it's like, do you trust the custodian or like, how is it being set up? Who's actually holding the assets? Are you putting like there's a bunch of questions you're going to ask yourself? So even just getting spot exposure is quite hard, right? And then you're talking about derivatives and obviously the internet, like whether it's on-chain, off-chain, settled wherever it might be, you're going to have different problems with like market structure. So the one thing beautiful about the US equity listed options world, and I think there's like 12 to 15 exchanges out there and they have like very mature markets there that have been trading for a long time. And again, that's my old world where you'd see like everything from price time, make or take, pro rata, like these, all these different.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These things where you're talking about millions of assets and you lean more into DeFi, which is what we're doing. So we're hybrid DeFi, DeFi. Well, we'll list Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, all the head torso assets, but we'll enable SPL, EVM, base tokens, and kind of just allow you to trade the universe. We'll give you warnings if we think something's dangerous, but like I think that exchanges need to move away from being gatekeepers and saying, hey, this is an asset that's okay to trade into gateways to new assets. And like we can kind of warn you of things that are happening, but we should be able to enable all assets out there.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, as a retail, like kind of adjacent trader, I would say more interesting for me to see going along a YOLO call that could be like, you know, a year or two out. And I think, you know, Bitcoin's going to trade at $250,000. I want to put that on versus kind of holding like a 10x leverage that if I get a bad print, like maybe I get auto liquidated and it feels bad. I would say that the innovation in the perp space is actually pretty limited. There's not a lot more to do there. Like it's kind of like we're kind of in the final phases of what this looks like. You look at like the hyperliquids of the world. Like that's a great matching engine that's sitting in the cloud that's using some sort of, you know, I'm not entirely clear, but they're using some sort of non-custodial wall that's kind of like handled the settlement. Like that's the innovation. Their innovation is also asset addition, which is extremely hard. And like my gut is that these exchanges in time become less focused on like acid addition and listings that don't scale because you can only do hundreds of.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To see world, you kind of stay in the 2.8 max leverage. But like in the persec world, we see exchanges. There'll be like 100x leverage or whatever it is. And the reality is one bad print and you're liquidated that feels really bad for a retail client. And I'd say that we have to be really careful of like just like assuming that the volumes mean that this is the best thing for retail clients in general. And I'd say that in the US markets, like you said, the US options world, which was my old world, the US listed options world is where was built for retail. And it was built for back in the 60s and 70s, CBOE, ISC. This was built for retail. And I'd say that we haven't seen a great option solution in crypto yet. Now, obviously globally, you see Deribit, you see a bunch of other players, but in the US, it's extremely hard to do that. You're seeing options being traded on the ETFs. You're seeing a bunch of other things happening kind of under the hood.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I'm a rare guy who's run options businesses for about 15 years, and I've also run some futures businesses, including a perpetual futures exchange. This is somehow my fifth crypto exchange. I helped run Poloni exit circle, Coinbase Spot, Coinbase Derivative Exchange, Coinbase International Perpetual Futures Exchange, now True Markets. And I'd say I'm also a derivative trader. Like I use them myself. So I would say for retail, there's a couple things that they want. And the one thing that kind of convinced the Coinbase board that we needed to launch perpetual futures is number one, that the US spot market is only like 4% of the global market in general and perps makes up the vast majority of the rest of it. And perps are easier, to be honest. Like perps you settle dollars. You don't have to worry about chains. You don't have to worry about anything. You're just speaking dollar terms. And they're essentially levered IOUs. Now, there's a bunch of dangers to a perp or any other future, especially when it's highly levered, you know, like in the CFP.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we've seen prior to this year, or maybe even prior the year before, was that there was this regulatory capture of taking dollars into the crypto world in the United States. It was extremely hard to maintain the bank accounts or whatever, you know, for FBO accounts. Only really Coinbase circle Kraken, a couple other players were able to really nail down the kind of like the dollar.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, interesting. So, yeah, true markets is obviously very much has stable coins at the foundation of it. And I'm curious if you think if there's benefits to that for other either brokerages or exchanges in the TradFi world to adopt in terms of quick settlement, finality, collateral efficiency, those sort of things. Like, do you see a future where stablecoins get utilized further by existing Tratify firms as well?”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's USDC. It's PYUC, or it's another stablecoin. That's non commoditized. But let's say on the exchange level, the client just wants to bring dollars in. And so that is also commoditized. So what we're trying to do is kind of normalize the idea that you can speak many stablecoins. And so our platform will do so. So, you know, we don't want to pick favorites, but we have a default stablecoin that allows us to use like one stablecoin as a pivot point for all of our markets, but that's something that can change over time. But right now we use PayPal, PYU.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was always kind of way over here, and it's still kind of being proven out. Like if you look at the actual dollars and dollars out, a lot of it's still kind of just being used for crypto use cases. Now that pie will fragment. It'll grow, right? The US domicile, US denominated stablecoins are going to grow in size, but you got to assume that USDC's share is going to get smaller than 99%, right? With that fragmentation, you're going to need infrastructure. And with infrastructure, you're going to need teams that are going to be able to speak kind of all of these things. And like it'd be great if Stripe and PayPal and USDC can all like be used for collateral for like the first couple use cases, right? And then, you know, for payments and other things, you're going to need clearing systems like $1 is going to be the next dollar. The one thing I tell the team a lot is the dollar itself is commoditized, right? The dollars are sending in bank accounts. They're just regular dollars. The clients, like they're just dollars, right? The middle layer where it's like, okay, there's a wrapper.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's really two markets here there's the US enabled market, the US domiciled market for stablecoins. So that's like a dollar coming from the US business that's housed in the US. That's USDC. That's USDC's world. And then you have the international space, which is largely Tether's world, right? So let's talk about the US space for a second here. And in the US space, USDC is 99. I think 5% of the entire market in terms of market cap at this point, some very large number. And you expect the likes of PayPal who already has a stablecoin stripe all the banks. They're going to start to create their own stablecoins. Then they're going to make sense in different types of platforms, whether it's the OG use case for stablecoins was always like, I need to settle this thing, whether it's an OTC or listed trade, and I need to be able to trust it. And I also need the ability to like not necessarily touch dollar rails all the time. So like OTC listed trading settlement was number one using it for collateral for lending was number two. Payments.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think that both Cryptify and Traffi can learn from each other a lot. So there's like a lot of immaturity left in the crypto markets and a post-FTX world. We still haven't figured it out. On the wrist side, it's actually pretty low risk. There's no regulator that's really going to come and mandate you guys freeze a bunch of these. It's less things are going to happen on the regulatory side. Now in the ReganMS, like securities world, there's actually very low utility right now. Like what am I going to use it for? Am I using it for collateral against a Bitcoin trade? Probably not. Like that's not how reg team margin works. It doesn't work, right? And then the risks associated are actually quite high because he's going to get involved with every single trade at that point. Now, that doesn't mean we can't find a world where there's going to be higher utility and lower risk, but right now the SEC is still not in a place where that's going to make any sense.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We launched it as Coinbase derivative exchanges, and we took that engine, and within six months, and this is before FTX blew up, we made the decision to launch Coinbase International Exchange of Perpetual Futures Exchange. And we did that with no new hires and just the existing team. And I think that thing trades near 10% of perks market now.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I joined as head of exchange at the time, we were a US spot market trading 20 assets. And honestly, the infrastructure is pretty bad. It would fall over all the time. And our goal was to kind of like bolster that infrastructure. So Patrick, my co-founder here, was one of my first hires kind of, I think this current matching engine is built as a seventh matching engine. So he's been kind of building this stuff for a long time. And you need to kind of walk away from an old school like, you know, Coinbase is matching and it was built out of necessity and it was built with, you know, duct taping and gum to a degree. And we wanted to industrialize this thing to allow us to scale assets and allow us to launch derivative exchanges and all these other things. So like before I joined, we traded 20 assets by the end. We trade 235 assets. We acquired a company called Ferrix, which was one of the largest acquisitions in crypto at the time. It was a CFTC regulated DCM or an exchange.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time. And I saw that as a good place for me to put my fingerprint on in crypto. And again, it was early stages. We didn't, you know, there was many stablecoins kind of launching at the same time, GUSD, TrueSD, a bunch of other stablecoins. And I thought that, you know, being multi-ish being kind of free, which was super important at the time for Mint Burn, and also just being fast. You know, we were the first to kind of code up to Silvergate Sen. And I saw that as an advantage and we were able to kind of get it out there to the market. And so I was just kind of drawn into like what I saw was a very immature market that needed a lot of maturity. And I think in one day I went from being the youngest guy in the room and Tradified to the oldest guy in the room in crypto. And I thought I could bring a lot to that.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in the TratFi world, we realized that the only innovation that we were seeing was faster and faster. And that didn't feel like innovation anymore. And again, I was in probably Trat5 from 02 to 15 or 16. And I pivoted originally towards fintech. So I was an early guy at a place called Moneyline, which was an online lender, app focused online lender, etc., kind of building out that space. And I really, you know, I've always been kind of gazing over at crypto as an interesting product class and like looking at the market structure I saw it as really immature. And I wanted to play in that. I wanted to build out a prime broker in the space. And this is way too early. And I think Bitcoin at the time was sub $1,000 and nobody really wanted to talk about it. I saw the exchange space is somewhere really kind of immature and I saw that those a lot of improvement that could happen. I got enticed by circle. I joined as head of business development, but more importantly head of USDC. It was just a white paper.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, and I grew up in that electronic trading world when we're talking about pre-Flashboys like HFT stuff. This is O2. We were building out equity order routing. We built out some of the FX and future businesses. And I ended up really kind of running the US listed options business there. We learned a lot. I mean, I say we because I met my co-founder there 17 years ago. This is our fifth business together. He's an ex-Goldman, ex-Coinbase. So like, you know, we have a little bit of a team here. I just happen to be the guy that's that gets to go on podcasts and he's the guy that codes everything up.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, even prior to Goldman, I was an engineer in Silicon Valley. I worked at Cisco Systems as a hardware engineer. So I was like old school, OG, electrical engineer, computer engineer, graduated into the dot-com bust. So I saw all the like Ferraris in the parking lot kind of go away during my internship at Cisco. I graduated into this dot-com bust and I honestly didn't know what I was going to do. I moved to New York, worked at a telecom startup for a little while and that's really interesting only the fact that like two of my investors for the current company actually came from that and you know one became a venture investor at RE and the other is the CEOproof.com And so I ended up leaving the startup only when I got an opportunity at Goldman Sachs to join as a sales and trading analyst. So one of the first sales and trading analysts with a computer engineering background, maybe the first. So I was on the trading floor, but I was by education technical.”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. Likewise. So, yeah, I would love to just start in terms of just tracking your journey because it's a really interesting one. Obviously, like you're mentioning before we hit record here, a lot of our audience on forward guidance is pretty macro and market savvy and starting to piece through a lot of the interesting innovations that are coming from crypto. So I would love to just hear a bit about your journey because it's a really interesting one. And I think will be an interesting case study into some of the aspects of what you've been working on and what you're passionate about. You started at Goldman. What were you doing there and what were you passionate about?”
2025-06-18 · Forward Guidance · Market Infrastructure Is Being Rebuilt on Blockchain | Vishal Gupta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT