CEO Michael Shaulov (Exclusive Interview)

Fireblocks is one of the largest providers of custodian infrastructure solutions in the cryptocurrency industry. The company was founded back in 2018 by Michael Shaulov, Pavel Berengoltz and Idan Ofrat.

In January this year, the Fireblocks raised $ 550 million to a whopping $ 8 billion. From a small team of a few people in the beginning, an idea that many thought was “stupid and stupid”, the company grew into a team of 500 employees serving the most prominent players in the industry.

Kryptopotet got the chance to talk to Michael Shaulov – one of the three co-founders and the company’s CEO.

“People told me our idea was stupid and stupid”

As mentioned above, Fireblocks has come a long way in the last four years, and the latest valuation estimates it at $ 8 billion – a staggering and rapid growth, by all means. But this has not always been the case, and the road has not been without critics.

A very funny story I have is that when we actually started, people told me that the idea is stupid and stupid. They said that people will continue to use cold storage and why do we bother to focus on the heat storage problem or the transfer problem at all.

Shaulov shared that he did not expect the company to grow so fast, especially over the last 18 months, which he describes as “very unexpected and sometimes even unplanned.” According to the CEO, they have managed to build a product with an “exceptional product market adapted to where the market was heading and is heading.”

And although it has been a wild journey for the whole industry, Shaulov says that in his view, “the company has not changed much, even though it grew from 3 or 10 people as we were in the beginning to around 500 people at this time. “

This is not how we expected this type of growth, but we are happy that we are able to deliver something that is valuable.

From crypto trading to real-world use: The challenge

The last couple of months have been particularly challenging for the entire cryptocurrency industry, which saw trillions of dollars wiped out by the total market value. From almost $ 2 trillion 60 days ago, the market value currently rests at around $ 900 billion.

That said, Shaulov believes that these tumultuous times have brought up one of the biggest challenges for the cryptocurrency field as a whole – real-world utility issues.

I believe that the main challenge right now, and that is probably the most timely challenge, given everything that has happened in the industry in the last couple of weeks, is to really find and strengthen the use cases in the real world.

He believes that the industry has been focused on trading cryptocurrency for the vast majority of the time.

As we all know, outside of Bitcoin, the value of Ethereum or Solana is the question of how this will actually be used for utility purposes in the real world – will it be used for payments? Will it be used for tokenized assets?

According to him, the industry is starting to see some of these use cases emerge, but “we need to see more and more of them across everything instead of focusing on use cases for crypto trading.”

The problem with that, and what makes it difficult, however, is that “you have to go and transform existing industries through innovations.”

Bear Markets is for construction: fire blocks less affected

Shaulov, like other leaders and entrepreneurs in the area, believes that the current market downturn is an opportunity to focus on deliveries and continue to build.

However, he said the downturn certainly affected their customers.

The latest set of incients – both from Luna and more recently – the entire reduction in the market from Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, and so on, definitely imitates our customer base and the continuous expansion of the market.

In the midst of the turbulent conditions, Fireblocks continues to employ people in the research and development department (R&D). The CEO said that the downturn allows them to focus more resources internally to streamline processes and make them more efficient.

He also shared that although Celsius, Three Arrows Capital and Voyager are all their customers, the company’s customer base is highly diversified, including banks and institutions where this type of market volatility does not affect them as much because they are focused on the long term. -term real use cases.

Shaulov also does not think that companies that cut staffing need to be a bad thing necessarily.

To hear more about how Fireblocks plans to tackle the ongoing downturn and their entry into Web3, be sure to check out the full video above.