Welcome to The Kurty D Show, a podcast presenting unique perspectives shaping the world. Today, Kurt welcomes to the show CEO of Arca and his brother-in-law, Rayne Steinberg. Prior to founding Arca, Rayne co-founded the NASDAQ listed asset management company, WisdomTree. There, he was responsible for raising capital, creating intellectual property, and building and overseeing the sales team responsible for raising $15 billion in assets under management. In this episode, Rayne speaks to his background and the origin story of Arca, one of the leading hedge funds in the explosive category of digital assets and blockchain. Rayne shares about his role as CEO at Arca, what they offer their clients, and why digital assets (Bitcoin, Crypto, NFTs) have gained such traction over the past few years. Kurt and Rayne dive deep into a discussion on the digital asset industry, touching on passive tokenization and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Finally, Rayne takes on some rapid-fire questions and lets listeners know where they can learn more about Arca.
What we covered:
01:29 – Kurt welcomes to the show, Rayne Steinberg, who shares his background in business, his origin story, and the lessons he’s learned throughout his career
10:48 – Rayne tells the story of WisdomTree
18:02 – Passive indexation explained
22:27 – Rayne provides his perspective on the Great Recession of 2008
25:35 – Rayne recalls the first time he ever heard about Bitcoin and digital currency
28:03 – The mission and vision of Arca
33:31 – Rayne provides his thoughts on regulation in the digital asset industry
41:07 – Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)
47:02 – The value that Arca brings to its customers
52:21 – Passive tokenization
58:39 – Rayne opens up about the hardest challenges he’s had to overcome throughout his life
1:02:32 – The best boss Rayne ever had- his brother Jonathan Steinberg- plus an unknown fact about Rayne and the one band he would go see play live if he could
1:05:30 – Kurt thanks Rayne for joining the show and let’s listeners know where they can connect and collaborate with Rayne
Episode Sponsor:
Tweetable Quotes:
“What we’re seeing with digital assets is that a lot of the things that we thought were fundamental truths were really simply technological limitations to the way things were done.”
“You participate in a brand’s growth, you reap the rewards that everyone becomes a min investor or allocator of their time. This idea of reengaging people or leveling the playing field or aligning effort with reward, we’ve never seen something that could do it as much as [digital currency].”
“We think that there’s a world where investment vehicles – that space between investment and payment – is gonna go down to basically nothing. You’re gonna be able to pay for your coffee without ever leaving your allocation to the S&P 500.”
“It [Bitcoin] was an incredibly elegant solution to the concept of money and how one creates money and how one disperses it and how one secures it in a digital world and how one solves things like ‘double spend problem,’ and all done in a decentralized manner.”
“So we actually have a duplicative effort where we’re demonstrating to both users and regulators that you can actually have the same functionality of a transfer agent on blockchain and watch that work.”
“I think that’s really the power of this [cryptocurrency], more than the returns now, is the philosophical experiment that this is.”
Links Mentioned: