River: A Bitcoin Brokerage Built From The Ground Up

Firm Identify: River

Founders: Alexander Leishman

Date Based: February 2019

Location of Headquarters: Columbus, OH

Quantity of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: Proof of reserves launching quickly

Variety of Staff: 50

Web site: https://river.com/

Public or Personal? Personal

How do you make a bitcoin-only brokerage worthwhile? The reply isn’t sophisticated.

You provide the very best high quality providers to as many individuals as potential for an excellent worth.

That is the technique Alexander Leishman and the group at River make use of.

And River’s high-quality providers largely hinge on staying true to what Leishman calls “the Bitcoin ethos,” on the core of which is the “not your keys, not your cash” philosophy.

“At River, we determined to take the gradual, arduous means, which allowed us to construct our personal custody techniques and really custody our purchasers’ Bitcoin and function as a monetary establishment,” Leishman advised Bitcoin Journal.

Constructing on a robust basis is clearly essential to Leishman, somebody who operates from his personal notable instructional {and professional} base.

The Engineer

Leishman accomplished an undergraduate diploma in aerospace engineering and holds a grasp’s diploma in pc science from Stanford.

His résumé boasts of expertise starting from a robotics engineering intern to a cryptography researcher at Stanford to a software program safety engineer for Airbnb.

In so many phrases, he has notable technical talents — the kind you’d need somebody who secures hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in bitcoin on behalf of purchasers to have.

And even with all of his data and expertise, he’s nonetheless humble sufficient to be aware of the danger concerned in what he does.

“Our primary focus above all else is at all times do not fuck up,” stated Leishman.

“Folks actually underestimate that that does not occur by default. It’s important to actively spend 50 plus p.c of your sources to include entropy and ensure you’re at all times bettering techniques and procedures, constructing the automation and constructing every little thing you might want to include these dangers and preempt new dangers,” he added.

“That is truly what nearly all of the work goes into.”

These are sobering phrases in an business that has a popularity for exchanges going bust and/or dropping shopper funds. And Leishman is conscious of this.

“It seems on this business there aren’t an entire lot of reliable individuals,” stated Leishman.

“We have seen even probably the most regulated belief corporations go bust. They’re going to inform you, we’ve this certification and this license and this, this and this. Then, when all of it comes out, you discover out this man was having individuals deposit cash to a Ledger that they misplaced the important thing to 3 years in the past,” he added.

“That is why we do issues ourselves.”

Why Bitcoin?

Given how tough it’s to securely run a Bitcoin firm and the truth that, together with his credentials and expertise, Leishman may make an excellent dwelling in plenty of fields, why did he gravitate towards Bitcoin?

“The explanation that I bought into Bitcoin was as a result of I went down the economics rabbit gap on the facet in faculty,” recalled Leishman. “I began studying about Austrian economics and finally learn The Denationalization of Cash by Friedrich Hayek.”

He was drawn to the concept of difficult central banking as he grew to become extra conscious of the risks of centralized energy constructions of all kinds — from The Fed to supranational entities just like the EU.

Earlier than discovering bitcoin, Leishman needed to create his personal type of cash that the federal government couldn’t management.

“I needed to create a commodity-backed cash, however it will have been centralized,” he stated.

“I could not actually determine do it with out going to jail, and I didn’t know make a enterprise out of it,” he added.

“After I got here throughout Bitcoin I used to be like ‘My gosh this fulfills the prophecy — that is going to alter every little thing.’ I simply knew I needed to work on it.”

And work on it he did. After faculty, he accomplished a coding bootcamp after which headed west to San Francisco to seek out work in what was then floor zero for the Bitcoin business within the US.

Bitcoin And The Bay Space

“I didn’t have a job earlier than I moved to the Bay Space,” recalled Leishman. “I moved there as a result of again then that is the place all of the Bitcoin stuff was taking place, and I needed to be within the heart of it.”

It didn’t take him lengthy to seek out work, although. In March 2014, Leishman landed his first job within the Bitcoin area with a Taiwanese Bitcoin alternate known as MaiCoin, which specialised in bitcoin buying and selling and funds.

At MaiCoin, Leishman recognized and glued safety vulnerabilities and constructed APIs used for service provider providers.

Past his expertise at MaiCoin, Leishman remembers his time within the Bay Space fondly.

“The tradition was very completely different again then,” he stated.

“There wasn’t actually this idea of Bitcoin maximalism. Nobody was offended by new cash as a result of individuals would principally use this stuff to experiment with new concepts,” he added.

“It was far more free, extra educational, like individuals may attempt concepts with out the financial part and with out creating this dichotomy between scammers and legit individuals as a lot.”

From one angle, these may sound like unusual phrases from somebody who runs a bitcoin-only enterprise. From one other, one may think that Leishman discovered greater than a handful of classes firsthand about why Bitcoin is completely different from all different crypto networks and property throughout his time in San Francisco.

Plus, he stated that “everybody knew Bitcoin was king — nobody was making an attempt to return at it.”

After MaiCoin, Leishman accomplished his graduate research at Stanford, the place he labored as a instructing assistant for a course on Bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies taught by Dan Boneh, co-founder of Stanford’s Laptop Safety Lab, after which constructed safe infrastructure for asset administration for Polychain Capital, a crypto hedge fund.

By early 2019, he was prepared to start out his personal endeavor.

Constructing River

Harnessing what he’d discovered about crypto safety and funds, Leishman got down to construct a Bitcoin platform that not solely featured a top-notch multisig safety mannequin for shopper funds at its core but additionally helped customers extra readily make the most of bitcoin as a medium of alternate by way of the Lightning Community, as River offers customers with custodial Lightning wallets.

Leishman defined constructing out all the infrastructure for River is what distinguishes it from different corporations prefer it. When brokerages use third-party custodians they provide up management over what they will provide their purchasers.

“They’ll solely use no matter their third-party decides to construct,” stated Leishman of exchanges that don’t construct their very own custodial infrastructure. “And the third events are all multi-coin custodians that not often prioritize Bitcoin stuff.”

With Leishman on the helm sporting the hats of CEO and CTO, River has a definite benefit in forging its personal path.

“Pondering like an excellent engineer results in an excellent enterprise,” stated Leishman.

“I am the individual main the corporate. I understand how to construct what we have to construct. I understand how to ship what we have to ship to serve our clients,” he added.

“For a corporation like ours, I believe it’s the proper archetype.”

Extra Of The Similar — For Now

Whereas Bitcoin is rising in popularity as a retailer of worth, Leishman thinks we nonetheless have a methods to go earlier than it turns into a extra broadly accepted medium of alternate.

Plus, River’s bread and butter is its brokerage service.

“We make most of our cash on our bitcoin brokerage,” Leishman stated.

He additionally famous that River makes cash off of its different providers, like working two main Lightning nodes, however that the income produced from this pales compared to what the corporate earns from its brokerage service, which River continues to work to enhance.

“There’s at all times extra that we could be doing to make the method less complicated and better high quality to enroll, purchase — and custody looks like you have got all of your safety wants lined,” Leishman stated.

“Additionally, actually the place the arduous work is, is the interface with the fiat system. And so the large development that we’re leaning into within the subsequent three to 5 years, in my view, is that Bitcoin goes to change into, nonetheless rising as a retailer of worth,” he added.

“We’re getting into an period the place persons are going to be saving in {dollars} and Bitcoin, and the seamless backwards and forwards between Bitcoin and fiat is the place we’re targeted.”

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