In our talk at Consensus last week, we talked about security in crypto land.
There are a few highly trusted custody services in crypto, including the popular consumer and institutional custody services offered by our portfolio company Coinbase.
These companies have invested tens of millions, sometimes more, in building highly secure storage systems to keep their customer’s crypto assets secure.
There are also exchanges all over the world that people can use to trade crypto assets. While they may be great places to trade, they are often not great places to custody your assets.
And then there is “staking” which is a term I am using for all sorts of validation services that crypto holders are increasingly doing to secure networks that use proof of stake and other approaches to consensus. There are and will be more staking services that crypto holders can use to participate in these services and get paid for doing that.
Again, these staking services many not be great places to custody your assets.
What is emerging are different services that specialize in different parts of the crypto economy.
There will be best of breed offerings in each sector and there will be a few, like Coinbase, that will offer leading services across all of these sectors.
The nice thing about crypto is it is programmable money. It should be possible, and I think it will be possible, to use one service for custody, another for trading, and a third for staking.
But it has to start with custody. If you own crypto assets, you need to secure them. And that is often not at the place you trade them.
