JP Richardson on Exodus raising $75M and the state of crypto in 2021

0:01i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media in the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have jp richardson the ceo of exodus jp welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here thanks for having me ashton excited to be here likewise i'm really excited for our discussion exodus has a lot going on right now and

0:20you've been in this space for a while um and it's a pretty popular platform already but for the people that aren't familiar with it can you just start with an overview and the focus of exodus yeah exodus is the easiest most simple way to manage a portfolio of cryptocurrency and to send and receive cryptocurrency over 1.2 million people trust exes to

0:44keep their crypto assets safe and uh we've we've had a lot of traction since uh we still got started in in 2015. that's amazing 1.2 million and we're still so early in the crypto days compared to in traditional finance even we're just a spec so i anticipate a lot more growth and i've been following exodus for a few years already and i have used the platform as

1:08well i do like i do like the wallet so in your words can you say you know there are so many wallets now and they're not as many as there were in 2015 but there are a lot more now is there something that makes exodus unique or gives you your team a competitive advantage over other wallet kind of platforms the biggest focus for us is ease of use right to make cryptocurrency easy

1:33we want people to be able to download xs get started buy bitcoin have it in your wallet in less than two minutes we have that experience with the apple iphone if you have apple pay set up we're gonna bring that same experience over to uh google and android but but that's that's the biggest thing in addition to that a lot of our customers love the in-app

1:58exchange and what a lot of people don't realize is that behind the scenes we have seven exchange api providers that we are choosing uh to run exchanges through and one of those is even uniswap and it depends upon uh criteria such as price or reliability or things like that so that's what a lot of people really like exodus is the ease of use in the in-app exchange definitely and i

2:24completely agree it makes it so much easier to just hit swap inside of the wallet and be able to transfer especially with how fast the markets are moving and being 24 7 nowadays now your team has built a great platform you already have over a million users i know you're continuing to expand i was reading in the recent news that your your intention now is to

2:46tokenize the shares in the company through a reg a offering can you talk about you know those next steps and what you're really planning to do with that absolutely so what we're doing here is we are doing a public common stock offering to it it's to the public accredited investors not accredited investors and it's all inside of exodus wallet and so customers or investors can

3:13download exodus they can sign up directly inside of xs and they can buy the common stock with either bitcoin ethereum or usdc and i should say this isn't possible to buy it just yet it's pending sec approval we are planning uh for the sec to uh qualify this offering by the end of march or early april and and uh then it'll be live that's very

3:41exciting especially to have everybody get involved and through the wallet app itself that's not something that you see all the time and i'm i appreciate that your team is actually going through the proper regulations getting the sec approval you know there's a lot of other ways that people have been trying to raise capital in the crypto industry that aren't as regulated and

4:04just don't going through the proper processes and i think in in the states as well that just helps you know to have the sec's green stamp of approval so this is something that you've been working on here throughout 2021 once you get sec approval then it will be live in the app and and what are the next steps for potential investors so it'll be live the offering will be

4:25live in the app and then once the offering closes and and we don't know how long it'll be but we're raising 75 million dollars so we don't know if it's gonna take two days two weeks two months we're not sure but once the offering closes we plan to issue on a blockchain we still have to select the blockchain so we are we are blockchain shopping right now and

4:47we actually we wanted to issue on ethereum but it was going to cost up to nine million dollars in gas fees for all of our potential investors so there's no way that we were going to choose ethereum to do that so after we issue on the blockchain we intend to later this year allow trading on on t0 as a secondary market so people will have their their exodus

5:12shares and then they can start trading them in the t zero marketplace and our big vision here is that we we see a world where people can control their blockchain assets control their stock um kind of you can think of it like the anti-robin hood you saw what happened with robinhood and gamestop and we don't want people to feel like they're ever trapped in our platform

5:36and uh if they're upset with our platform they can take it and go anywhere anywhere else and uh that's that's some of the exciting things that we're working on and and we want other companies to be able to offer their stock on our platform to exitus customers and exit investors in the future after we prove that this is successful definitely and i think this is a huge

5:59milestone jp i've been following the you know security token offerings since it's it was supposed to be that 2018 was the year of security token offerings after you know the ico craze and i was going to security token offering conferences i spoke to the t0 team and it just seemed like there wasn't the proper infrastructure back then or maybe there just wasn't the

6:21institutional interest that there is now in 2021 because there is a lot more um so to to have that uh go through to a platform like t0 where it's actually a security token and have it traded in exodus that sounds like a huge milestone for not just exitus but the whole industry absolutely because what we're going to do is we're going to make this easy for people we're going to we intend

6:44to make to bring t0 the interface directly inside of exodus so it's accessible from one interface so you don't have to bounce around to different websites would be in one unified interface so it's easy for people and yeah the the industry is definitely maturing definitely and doing a reg a you know sort of vc like round is not as common in the in the

7:10blockchain industry you know a lot of people in the blockchain they like to go for these democratized decentralized transparent rounds that are more distributed with more retail investors and it seems like your team is looking at getting you know non-accredited investors and trying to distribute it as well do you see that balance where you're trying to do a vc round but

7:31you're also trying to adhere to the capital raising principles of like the cryptocurrency industry look i i can see the benefits as to why some companies might choose to do a vc round it can be an appealing thing for for sure but for us we're not vc backed at all and and so we didn't we didn't feel that we needed to go a traditional route and as a company in 2020 we did 21.3

7:59million dollars in revenue and this quarter alone we're on track to beat that and so we feel we can go direct to the market direct to exodus investors excess customers and create an entirely new market and and create something different and special uh that hasn't been done before and that's what's so exciting for us that is very exciting jp and just to talk about you know the the

8:24history and and the revenue 21 million uh in you know last uh year was it last year that's amazing and throughout 2015 there wasn't a lot of capital in the cryptocurrency industry you also had you know you'll have a year of bull market and you'll have all these bear markets as well where there's more seasonality there's not a lot of trading going on can you just talk about

8:47how you managed to get through that staying and becoming a profitable company even in the bear market when there wasn't a lot of interest in cryptocurrencies wow it's been a wild ride i'll tell you what in uh we raised about a half a million dollars in in 20 late 2016 and um and that's that's all we raised to date and it was the early 2017 when we started to prove out the business model

9:11and it was march of 2017 we made seventy thousand dollars that month by the end of the year uh we were bringing it was close to i don't know maybe maybe three million or so um at one point in time but then yes 2018 and 2019 brutal absolutely brutal but what we did is is uh in in early 2018 we we we took our revenues in bitcoin and we sold some bitcoin to make sure

9:36that we could protect our downside risk and that's what we did and we stayed lean over the years and now now today we're at 137 employees and continue to grow grow quickly but i i anticipate that this bull market i anticipate this one's going to stick around for a while because institutions are buying and you know michael saylor kicked this off and then

9:58elon musk is continuing the party and i don't i don't see institutions stopping purchasing and they institutions aren't afraid right if there's a little bit drop in the price institutions are not afraid they have the diamond hands they know the paper hands like uh some other people do and so i don't see this ending anytime soon yeah i completely agree jp

10:21and it seems michael saylor you know anytime there's a dip he's still buying bitcoin at 54 000 uh and you know if tesla's buying it around 50 000 you know that they're not going to sell it at a loss and they do have strong hands and i'm really interested to see how those institutions want to get involved in security token offerings and just kicking that off to you know

10:42everybody in the cryptocurrency industry and in the traditional industries to then tokenize their stocks just on the stock market and eventually have everything at t zero everything with no latency low fees uh things like that so i think that this is a great a great kickoff yeah absolutely this is going to happen for sure that's that's very exciting and now in

11:04terms of the continued growth you're going to do this offering the bull market's going to continue do you see any specific factors as you know some of the key factors to the long-term continued success of exodus yeah i mean what we have to do is we have to make cryptocurrency easy for people our mission is to help half the world exit the traditional

11:29financial system and today that's still hard to do inside of exodus the only way that you can do that you can from the traditional financial system into cryptocurrency is with the iphone and apple pay and to fulfill our mission you know there are people in other countries that don't know that they don't even have a bank account and so we have to find a way

11:51to get them to buy bitcoin and buy cryptocurrency in a very easy way maybe it's just bitcoin atms or or what have you um but that's one of the biggest things that we're looking to do is make it easy to go from the traditional financial system to cryptocurrency and then in addition to that we're always thinking about security and and how you know people are holding a large

12:13portfolio of cryptocurrency how can they keep their funds safe and that's going to be really important in the coming years so those two things making this easy and safe are the two most important things that we can do definitely and i completely agree jp and in terms of you mentioned you know the unbanked or the underbanked there's a lot of people that aren't even in the traditional

12:35financial system yet uh and to get them access to you know these kinds of assets what kind of challenges do you foresee as you continue to grow into those new markets where there are undereducated and underbanked people that need to get involved with exodus what kind of challenges do you think you'll have to overcome to get that well i think one of the biggest is

12:56education right and in sponsoring a lot of education in those regions that's going to be the number one thing is to make sure that that people have the education the resource they need to be successful and to get into this ecosystem but in addition to that is is actually accessibility make it so that it is easy and safe to even buy the cryptocurrency and again maybe

13:16that happens from uh from a bitcoin atm maybe it happens from uh local trusted vendors where you go in and you use cash but i think uh making it easy and safe and accessible and and ensuring that these people have educational opportunities to to learn about this space definitely and for the viewers that are interested in learning more about exodus learning more about your upcoming raise

13:41and you know your plans moving forward what's the best way for them to get involved use the platform and learn more about the community yeah just head on over to exes.com and everything is detailed out there you'll see a download link and you can get started directly from exodus.com that is the easiest way to get started great thank you so much jp i will leave

14:02the exodus.com link in the description box below as well for the viewers all the best with the upcoming plans for exodus and let's follow up in the near future thanks ashley you