Cory Klippsten on Swan Bitcoin's platform and 2022 geopolitical landscape

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have corey clipston founder of swan bitcoin corey welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on hey ashton thanks so much for having me you're very welcome let's dive into bitcoin swan bitcoin more and more

0:21people are just buying bitcoin there's more and more reasons to be buying bitcoin and holding it now than ever and i'm interested in hearing how swan bitcoin is going along with this progression so let's just kick off our conversation to start corey with a little bit about what is swan bitcoin and what is the main focus of the business yeah i mean our goal is to be your

0:42bitcoin wingman so basically serve all your bitcoin needs and obviously that starts with being able to buy bitcoin as easily and seamlessly with super low fees as possible so you can do one time small buys large buys set up automatic recurring purchase plans or dca dollar cost average a lot of people like to call it that and then we're expanding into a lot

1:04of other areas so we have a private client services division and an advisor services team that handles like more complicated situations for businesses for trusts ira rollovers kind of all the different ways that people around the world want to buy with entities or you know people from other countries you know we have a very large international business

1:23where there's not a good local exchange or a local broker and we're actually the best option so that's been great to see that kind of expand over the last couple of years and yeah later this year we're launching the swan app in march we're building in the self-custodial lightning wallet into the swan app that will be non-kyc interface in the same app

1:45We'll be launching a swan credit card with sats back so basically you know bitcoiners kind of hold their nose when they when they want to get that they'll use block fight even though they don't like the company so it makes sense that a bitcoin company would actually offer that instead so yeah lots of exciting stuff yeah and that's that's really the

2:06overarching goal and kind of driving force behind everything we do is to just be the you know the most trusted name in bitcoin definitely and that's great to hear about all these other products and services that you're working on you know i thought yeah you can you can buy bitcoin great and there's a lot of places now that you can buy bitcoin

2:25and it's hard to if you just have that one product like how do you compete you know when people hear swan bitcoin now that's where i can buy bitcoin is there a specific selling point or competitive advantage in how you can differentiate swan bitcoin from other on-ramp places where you can just buy bitcoin regularly yeah i mean we've always been i think

2:46bitcoin only is a big thing because you know if you're let's say i'll give an example because you have a pretty savvy audience we get a ton of referrals from like crypto fund managers to swan which seems counterintuitive but because those guys actually know how the sausage is made and they understand the game afoot and they understand you know

3:07the kind of information is symmetry you have to have to win in non-bitcoin crypto when it comes to their friends their family you know friends from you know school or whatever they're sending those people to swan because they know that we will keep them on the on the straight and narrow and you know buy the one the one asset in the whole space that is

3:28actually doing exactly what it's supposed to do and has been since inception is you know basically has the left end of the possible distribution completely chopped off you know like it's it's really hard to imagine a scenario in which bitcoin isn't worth a lot more in purchasing power in the future definitely yeah and it's interesting that you mentioned that about fund

3:51managers and you know more enterprises coming in and bigger partners as well as well as just individuals and sort of retail investors i'm curious you know running the platform for multiple years now looking at the trends of who is buying or what kind of customers are signing up are you seeing a major increase in both like institutional and retail on

4:15the platform yeah so people have very fuzzy definitions of institutional what we would call institutional is really not our target at all so institutions are like banks funds it's basically where the decision maker is an agent for other people's money swan is basically focused on the principal the person buying for themselves you know or who is like way

4:44closer to the buyer so i think family offices small and medium-sized businesses like all of those we're the only company that's going to give you sort of that white glove service that you would expect from like a you know goldman sachs pwm or morgan stanley private client services or something like that for those types of buyers and then obviously on the on the you

5:05know sort of the retail side with the website in the upcoming app that's about having a beautiful product it's having low fare fees it's about transparency it's about a ton of education community you know we invest more in education and content than any company in the bitcoin space by probably an order of magnitude it's kind of what we're known for a lot of the top authors and

5:28podcasters are on staff at swan so you know jan pritzker wrote inventing bitcoin he's the cto andy edstrom wrote why buy bitcoin he runs advisor services stefan livera from stefanovera podcast is one of our sales guys brady swenson from citizen bitcoin you know runs runs marketing and education so on and on and on you know the whole team is kind of just

5:50stacked with a lot of the top experts in the world about bitcoin and what people want when they're gonna go past sort of the okay i'm gonna punt one or two percent of my portfolio on crypto and take some flyers on these coins when they actually start to understand bitcoin the conversation becomes way way way deeper and they need to be able to trust that

6:13they're actually getting good advice and not just bs not just opium from the company that they're dealing with and so we stand you know with full integrity with you know on our two feet with everything that we talk about and have realistic views about bitcoin and where it's going and what the risk our risks are and it gives people confidence to go

6:33essentially much much deeper into you know their own net worth their share of wallet and be heading more toward you know ten percent twenty percent fifty percent eighty percent of their net worth going into bitcoin so that's that's why it's sustainable because you know the crypto traders don't have conviction about the actual things that they're buying that's why they're trading them

6:55instead of holding them right so it's a very different model when you're thinking about bitcoin and you know as people gain conviction about bitcoin they buy a lot more and if you're that partner that helps them on that path it can be very profitable definitely and i really do appreciate what swan is doing on the education side and i totally understand when you say you're

7:16putting out a lot of content just this morning i went on crypto twitter and i saw that swan was doing twitter spaces and there was all the team was in there all talking to people and there was hundreds of people just listening in so incredible work so far so congratulations on that i definitely do think it's more than just buying buying a coin

7:36yeah yeah that has been a nice outlet for us it's called cafe bitcoin and it's there's it's basically the main daily discussion on both clubhouse and on twitter for social audio about bitcoin is cafe bitcoin and yeah like most days it's over a thousand people concurrent four or five thousand people will dial in during the space then it's a podcast

8:00and gets a few more thousand views and or more listens so yeah it's nice to have that out but it's a good place to you know kind of get your your morning fill of bitcoin catch up on the news learn some amazing stuff we had you know stephan lavera guy swan brady swenston tomer strolite alex danzik tone vase a bunch of other people in there today as usual

8:23amazing and you mentioned some of the things that are coming up for swan like that the app and a card to be able to spend bitcoin and what i really took note in there as you mentioned i was like non kyc sort of self custodian not not spending bitcoin you'll you'll spend fiat and get bitcoin rewards so it's literally just that sats back yeah the stats back

8:47credit card you know hopefully you'll have some fiat inflows to pay off that bill to pay it off however you want but yeah it's just like we see blockfi and gemini and sofi and you know venmo there's six or seven sats back rewards cards out there right now not one by a bitcoin company right so the message is just you know coming from the wrong

9:10wrong group of people there so we're excited to be able to launch that definitely and i'd love to hear your opinion on you know in the recent news there's always conversations about bitcoin being on exchanges or being on somewhere where you're trading it where somebody else has your keys and it's not really self-custodian and now we're seeing governments starting to move in

9:32and if they don't like it they're freezing people's bitcoin accounts where where they're tied to the bank accounts and i feel like there's an ever more present need to have more sort of self-custodial options and the education on why people should be storing them to not you know have your access cut off by somebody else absolutely yeah so we've we've always

9:53been set up for people to take self-custody we educated about it constantly our company's goal our kpi for custody is zero bitcoin under custody that's our goal so about 70 of people take their coins off of platform it's free to custody with us and it's free withdrawals either you can set up automatic withdrawals or you can you can do it manually either

10:20way it's free to withdraw we are not trying to hold on to people's coins we don't want them we even built like a really cool x-pub tool that was the first of its kind which is an x-pub basically can create like a thousand or more you know different different addresses all tied to the same wallet and nobody had ever figured out how to do that trustlessly so if you're using an x-pub

10:44the exchange would actually have your x pub and thus also know all of your addresses and we figured out a way last year to do that where you basically enter the x pub into a tool and then trustlessly and provably we extract it sends us the first thousand addresses from the xpub that we can then use for withdrawals but we never actually see the xbob so always

11:04doing things like that where we can kind of push the envelope on improve privacy and help people use bitcoin the right way very cool corey and i'm familiar with the x-pub function i think people need to know about that because that's a huge privacy advantage to have a unique address which is going into the same wallet for well it looks it appears

11:24to be going into the same wallet and you don't have people looking into all of your funds it's still a major issue and a big issue that with ethereum as well doesn't really have that functionality that's why we have bitcoin i'm curious on you know as more people start using swan bitcoin and different generations of people are starting to realize that they should be

11:48owning some bitcoin do you see specific generations as being key to the next part of the mainstream adoption of this cryptocurrency for example you know gen z's and the younger crowd really seem to be attracted to bitcoin but also there's a lot of value in older generations and boomers understanding that this is actually something that should be validated and

12:14become a proper currency as well yeah i mean it's it's a bit of both you want number go up and it is monetary protocol so you want the value to move into the bitcoin protocol and be stored there and that wealth is obviously concentrated with the older generations kind of boomers and upper gen x let's say but number of people go up is a huge deal too and you know the percentage of

12:40millennials and gen z you know zoomers that might come in you know their smaller stacks can add up to a lot i think it's important to attack it from both sides and then it also you know these generations have parents and kids right so the zoomer might fall in love with swan and then tell their rich auntie about swan right and then she's buying millions of dollars from us

13:01and then also you know the boomers are set to in the u.s anyways that is they're going to be handing off 30 trillion dollars of inheritance to millennials over the next decade 30 trillion dollars and that's going to be in like non-yield bearing bonds and commercial real estate with no tenants and all these other asset classes gold bars like whatever it is you know the

13:30propensity for the newly rich trust fund millennial to want to put more of that into bitcoin is very high definitely yeah i keep getting flashbacks to like michael saylor talking about how bitcoin is the hardest best most movable fungible money in the world and especially to have something like commercial real estate that will now be empty buildings

13:54who knows what's going to happen with all of that capital and if people especially want to move it across borders yeah yeah so we don't have a lot of time left cory but you did mention there's a lot of cool updates coming for swan bitcoin i'm really excited to see this sats back card for the viewers that are looking to look at more options on how to buy

14:17bitcoin how to dollar cost average the education that you're putting out and the updates that are coming out what is the best way for them to follow along swanda.com very simple it's easy yeah go to swan.com but no i would say follow us on twitter which is at swan bitcoin that's a good place to hang out and then if you're kind of looking deeper into

14:45bitcoin like you've been messing around with crypto for a while but you've never really kind of gone down the rabbit hole the best book that i ever found that was like you know it's like a two and a half hour time investment to listen to it or read it actually is jan's book inventing bitcoin i find that recommended over and over again especially with people that travel

15:02around the world and have to go to like asia or singapore or hong kong or uae or whatever they'll just bring paperbacks to this thing anyway we give it away for free now which is awesome so you can actually grab an e-book or an audio book at swanbitcoin.comfreebook and just grab a copy of yan's book and you can give that to whoever you want spread the love orange pill the

15:22world very cool cory i love that i'm gonna check out the book i appreciate you coming on the show to talk about swan and to talk about bitcoin all the best to swan and to bitcoin as well moving forward and let's follow up in the near future sounds great ashton thanks for having me on