Bakkt CEO on the interconnection between crypto and the traditional financial system

Yahoo Finance's Jennifer Schonberger discusses the future of banking and crypto technology with Bakkt CEO Gavin Michael.

Video transcript

JENNIFER SCHONBERGER: And, Gavin, you've rolled out these crypto debit and credit cards. Certainly crypto is becoming more intertwined with the traditional banking system, the traditional financial system. How do you see that evolving? And what does that look like to you?

GAVIN MICHAEL: I think, you know, one thing we need to step back as work out is where we're complementary to the existing system, where we're replacing potentially assets, or methods, or approaches that we see as somewhat inefficient, and really start to stay focused on bringing those to light. As I said, earlier, I mean, Bitcoin was always envisaged as a form of payment, rather than as a store of value. We're evolving now at that inflection point away from a store of value into a form of payment. And initiatives, like the one that we announced this morning, are really helping us bring that into day payments.

And we're excited by the opportunity to continue to drive that holistic story around digital assets, to be able to provide the ability for consumers, and businesses, and institutions to access these new markets at scale. But the other important point of the announcement this morning is we're working with an established financial services player with Mastercard as our partner to be able to offer these to existing issuers on the Mastercard network. And by doing that, we're really marrying together two approaches.

And that's where the innovation will occur. That's where we're excited, you know, looking at traditional rewards, propositions for credit cards, and evolving those into something that involves crypto is a tremendous amount of innovation that really shows that these two technologies, these two approaches aren't necessarily in competition. They're in cooperation with each other. And the end beneficiary is the consumer.

JENNIFER SCHONBERGER: Gavin, SCC Chair Gensler was on our All Markets Summit earlier this morning. He told our Brian Cheung that if we don't put proper protections in place things are not going to end well. The acting comptroller of the currency has likened crypto to derivatives in the early 2000s. He told me in an interview last month that if we don't regulate this now, we're headed for a financial crisis.

Do you agree with any of that? And where do you see the potential regulatory gaps here? Where do we need regulation, given that you are a crypto exchange that is indeed regulated?

GAVIN MICHAEL: So exactly. I mean, we come out of-- our heritage is out of ice, as you spoke about. We take a very, very strong view on regulation and on controls. In fact, our platform is engineered with all of these in its core. You know, we've built the platform to be digitally asset native.

And we're doing it in a way that really allows us to respond quickly to the changing regulatory environment. Having said that, we're held to the same standard as any financial institution with respect to BSA, and AML, and KYC. And we take those controls very, very seriously.

They're engineered into the core of our platform. And we take that approach of being regulatory first, privacy first, because we agree that we need to see regulation evolve to take into account the changing environment we find ourselves in. But having said that, I think it's also important that we look at the areas in which we are working to identify those that we are complementary to, those that we are replacing, and those that we are introducing as dew points of innovation, and ensure that the regulation flows around those in the same way.

You know, we've done this before. We did it with the advent of the internet when we bought digital banking to life. And I see many of the lessons that we learnt from there and making sure that the regulation that we're using applies correctly to the areas in which we're working as being beneficial as we think about our approach here.