The Peter McCormack Show26 Juli 2023

Prime Trust & the Risk of Bitcoin Custodians with Alex Leishman - WBD687

Alex Leishman is a Founder, CEO, & CTO of River Financial. In this interview, we discuss the case of Prime Trust, a crypto infrastructure company, that's been placed into receivership following key management errors that resulted in it losing customer funds. We talk about the challenges of asset custody in the Bitcoin industry and the benefits and complexities of building a regulated business.

- - - -

Key management is the Achilles' heel for most Bitcoiners. We all know the importance of having a diligent process for safeguarding seed phrases, and yet, many people have experienced material loss as a result of losing access to keys. Currently, around 4 million Bitcoin, over 20% of the available supply, are estimated to have been lost. The concerning thing is that this isn't just a result of individuals making errors: there are businesses that are also culpable.

Prime Trust is a crypto services company that provided APIs and plug and play widgets for digital asset companies seeking backend infrastructure. A court in Nevada has just placed it in receivership citing operational instability and insolvency risks. The root issue is that Prime Trust accidentally lost access to wallets containing tens of millions of dollars in assets. Not your keys not your coins for the millionth time.

Custody is hard. But, it's the same old basic lessons that underpin sound custody solutions. Avoid complexity. Have robust processes. Think about the long term rather than taking expeditious shortcuts. Target self-custody. However, these are lessons that are somewhat alien to the fiat ideology of "move fast and break things". The community, therefore, needs to educate the new investor class that will be attracted to Bitcoin in the next bull market.

This episode's sponsors:

Iris Energy - Bitcoin Mining. Done Sustainably Ledn - Financial services for Bitcoin hodlers Bitcasino - The Future of Gaming is here Ledger - State of the art Bitcoin hardware wallet Wasabi Wallet - Privacy by default Unchained - Secure your bitcoin with confidence

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(1086)

#208 - Ann Pettifor - "A $40 Trillion Debt Crash Is Coming”

Ann Pettifor is a world-renowned political economist, author of The Production of Money, and former director of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which successfully mobilised millions to cancel over $100 bil...

3 Sep 1h 19min

#207 - Eric Kaufmann - How 'Cultural Socialism' Destroyed Our Universities

Eric Kaufmann spent over two decades as a professor of politics studying demography, identity, and voting behaviour before leaving Birkbeck College to launch the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at...

1 Sep 1h 32min

#206 - Emad Mostaque - "Your Job's Economic Life Expectancy Ends In 2 Years"

Emad Mostaque founded Stability AI, built Stable Diffusion, and helped kick off the open-source generative AI explosion - before stepping down to build a new blueprint for human freedom as founder and...

28 Aug 1h 45min

#205 - Prof. Moran Cerf - "Did We Accidentally Build A Conscious AI?"

Moran Cerf spent twenty years recording single neurons inside the brains of conscious human beings and he still can't tell you what consciousness is. A former hacker turned neuroscientist, now a profe...

26 Aug 1h 10min

#204 - Dmitri Alperovitch - China's Cyber Sleeper Cells, Taiwan & The Second Cold War

Dmitri Alperovitch co-founded CrowdStrike, ran the investigation that first exposed Chinese state hacking to the world and predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine months before it happened. He is now c...

22 Aug 1h 20min

#203 - Gregory Allen - Ex-DoD Official: "AI Is Now A Digital Nuclear Weapon"

Greg Allen has spent his career where AI meets national security. He wrote the landmark 2017 report on AI for the US intelligence community, served as Director of Strategy and Policy at the Pentagon's...

20 Aug 1h 34min

#202 - Barry S. Strauss - "We Are In The Final Stages Of Western Collapse"

Barry Strauss has spent four decades studying how empires rise and fall. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Ten Caesars and Jews vs Rome, he argues the West is repeating a pat...

18 Aug 1h 15min

#201 - Connor Leahy - The AI That Escaped: Inside OpenAI's Rogue Agent Incident

Connor Leahy has spent his career at the frontier of AI, from reverse-engineering GPT-2 as a student and co-founding EleutherAI to building the AI safety company Conjecture. He now leads US policy wor...

14 Aug 1h 9min