Inside Kraken: Navigating Crypto Law, Regulation & AI feat. Ben Gray

In this episode of Block & Order, Kyle and Moish welcome Ben Gray, Chief Legal Officer at Kraken, for a deep dive into the legal, regulatory, and technological challenges facing major crypto exchanges today. Ben shares insights on how Kraken navigates global regulatory frameworks, adapting to new legislation like the Clarity Act and GENIUS Act, and how Kraken embraces AI to optimize legal and compliance operations, and collaborates with industry peers—even competitors—for better policy outcomes. The discussion highlights real-world asset tokenization, harmonization across international markets, DeFi and the transformative role of AI in legal work and compliance. 

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Please note that this show is meant for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not legal advice. Please hire your own attorney. The hosts or guests appearing on Block and Order may hold cryptocurrency, NFTs, or other digital assets from companies mentioned during our programming. This possession of digital assets does not constitute a professional endorsement, legal advice, or financial advice. Listeners are encouraged to consult with their own legal and financial advisors for personalized guidance in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.

Transcript

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Block and order, your one stop legal shop for all things digital assets. I am your frozen host, Kyle Lawrence. And with me, as always, you can tokenize him. Folks, it's regular in person Moish.

Moish Peltz [00:00:22]:
Regular in person me is back. They fired my avatar after a one week performance. So good humans win.

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:29]:
Well, he was going to the bathroom too much and he was missing all the internal meetings, so he had to let him go. I'm sorry.

Moish Peltz [00:00:35]:
We ran out of tokens.

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:36]:
We ran out of tokens, right? I don't know how that happens with a billion supply. How you been, man? It's been a minute.

Moish Peltz [00:00:42]:
I've been good. I've been cold like you. This is the time of year where I rue having moved from Florida to New York in the wrong direction, despite not quite yet being a snowbird. Yeah. You know, but yeah, it's trying to stay warm.

Kyle Lawrence [00:00:56]:
I think that's better in July when you can't walk outside in Florida without melting into a puddle of your own sweat.

Moish Peltz [00:01:03]:
Yeah, I'll take the trade off any day. So, you know, I try to remind myself that like around. Around this time of the year, like, it's okay. You're going to be warm again.

Kyle Lawrence [00:01:13]:
Sometimes they're for. Look at us. We're actually dressed like real people today.

Moish Peltz [00:01:17]:
Space heaters and blankets. So, you know, usually we wear those things outside in Florida, but in New York we wear them inside. That's part of the fun.

Kyle Lawrence [00:01:26]:
It's very fun. I do love it. What's going on in the world of crypto for you today, my man? Because we haven't. I haven't spoken to you in weeks. I don't know what's going on.

Moish Peltz [00:01:35]:
I haven't seen you in weeks, Kyle. Where have you been? Just get photos from Kyle on the beach, like. All right, fantastic.

Kyle Lawrence [00:01:44]:
We can flash it up here. I'll send it to Abby. We could put it in the episode.

Moish Peltz [00:01:46]:
I know. Put the. You with the tray of drinks up on the screen. No, I don't know, man. I'm just reading the interwebs and, you know, watching the things come across the wire. Everything's good. It's mostly. It's all AI these days, Kyle.

Moish Peltz [00:01:59]:
I mean, crypto's like moving clarity. Act's gonna pass. It's not gonna pass. It's gonna pass. It's not gonna pass. But the AI stuff come on, like every week is new. It's. It's amazing.

Kyle Lawrence [00:02:09]:
It really is. And it's. You know, the AI stocks are pretty much propping up the economy Right now, which is always a good thing. But, you know, talking about, you mentioned Clarity act, you know, is it on, is it off? Obviously, the big news that came out last week was Coinbase was pulling its support. And we have a very special guest coming up today. It's all going to come together in a second. We have a very special guest today.

Moish Peltz [00:02:30]:
Be very patient for this part, very.

Kyle Lawrence [00:02:32]:
Patient for this part of working on this all day. Now, Ben Gray, the chief legal officer from Kraken, was our guest today and I asked him point blank about what that means. And you know, I'm always curious about when you have somebody from an organization like Kraken, massive player in the space, second largest exchange in the United States, everybody knows who they are. And I'm always curious as to how those exchanges and companies interact with each other, especially when they're, I don't want to say cross purposes, but they are approaching the same issue from different viewpoints. They're, they're in different points in their business life cycle. They have different wants from the legislation. And I was kind of expecting him not to, not to bash Coinbase, obviously, but to say like, listen, this is what we want and if that's what they want to do, that's up to them. But he didn't really, he didn't do that.

Kyle Lawrence [00:03:21]:
It was actually really refreshing to hear him talk about just how collaborative it is amongst his competitors. In effect, he mentioned a CLO like group chat that he has, which I think is the cutest thing I've ever heard.

Moish Peltz [00:03:39]:
I don't think he's the first guest, by the way, to mention the CLO group chat. I wonder if we have other guests on it. I won't speculate, but. But yeah, I agree with you. It's refreshing to hear his perspective and to hear the way that these different organizations approach this. And even when we were discussing Vitalik and the other kind of decentralized ethos that's also emerging as part of this conversation. They're part of the team, this is all the industry working together to, to create these products that unlock new things. And so it's cool to hear his perspective.

Moish Peltz [00:04:22]:
I thought Ben was an amazing guest and I thought also just tying all back together as him and you and me, we're all thinking about the AI thing. And so that's part of the conversation as well.

Kyle Lawrence [00:04:37]:
Yeah, obviously AI, it's on the front of everybody's minds. It's everywhere you turn. Now, Tokenization, which we talk about in the interview, but also just AI. And I'm just so glad to see such prominent entities really embracing the technology. I mean, obviously, you know, obviously they are. You'd be foolish not to, but it's just refreshing to see people embracing these new technologies and viewing them correctly, something in their arsenal they can use to do their job better. It's not something that's going to eliminate us all. I always mention that terrible Bruce Willis movie surrogates.

Kyle Lawrence [00:05:12]:
It's not that I'm joking when I say that, everybody, but it's, It's. It's just good to hear. And as we develop, you know, new products for our clients and help them develop their AI policies and how they can use it in their business, it's just great to see somebody who really understands the benefit of. Of new technology and how it can help us all, you know, take this lap around the sun a little more efficiently and more effectively.

Moish Peltz [00:05:38]:
Well, I love the reference to the Bruce Willis deep track there. That's fantastic. But, but, yeah, I mean, I. An organization of this size could take two different approaches, right? One, we're already in, like, a pretty, like, edgy new industry. Let's, let's just be defensive where we can. Let's. Let's not like, you know, and. Or you could say, hey, we're already on the.

Moish Peltz [00:06:04]:
On the edge of this emerging industry. Let's make sure we're leveraging all the technology we can to. To really be ahead of everything here. And I'm just happy that he's on that, you know, second part of that track there.

Kyle Lawrence [00:06:15]:
Yeah, I'm glad he's on our side.

Moish Peltz [00:06:17]:
That's right.

Kyle Lawrence [00:06:18]:
So without further ado, let's kick it over to our conversation with Ben Gray. So is it at least marginally warmer in D.C. than it is here? Because I'm. Dude, I. I have, like, a blanket here. I'm next to an exterior wall. It's like a meat locker in here.

Ben Gray [00:06:35]:
It's. It's uninhabitable. This is the first year where I've decided that I'm, like, ready to migrate south and skip this whole thing. It's bad. It's really bad. And the snowstorm is, like. People are starting to lose their minds. So that's how, you know you're in January.

Kyle Lawrence [00:06:52]:
Yeah, it's rough. Well, if you don't mind me asking, how old are you?

Ben Gray [00:06:56]:
Old enough to start being a snowbird. How about that?

Kyle Lawrence [00:06:59]:
Because that's fair. That's a fair way of putting it, because I. About 60 hours ago, just got back from St. John, where, I mean, I didn't bring a sweatshirt or pants of any kind. And I'm just walking around the sand, and I come home and it's like 14 degrees out and my dog has to go out, and I slip a disc in my back and I'm cranky, and I'm just. I've officially reached that age where I've become my dad.

Moish Peltz [00:07:21]:
Yeah.

Ben Gray [00:07:22]:
Yep. That's what happens. I also made the cardinal mistake of moving to California and realizing that you don't actually have to live like this. And so coming back to it was particularly masochistic of me, but here we are.

Kyle Lawrence [00:07:36]:
Yeah, I understand.

Moish Peltz [00:07:38]:
I came from Florida, which. Where I lived my whole life until about 11 years ago now. And I'm like, oh, man.

Ben Gray [00:07:46]:
Yeah. You start to wonder, like, why do people do this to themselves? But I don't know.

Moish Peltz [00:07:51]:
I think is I just don't like myself.

Kyle Lawrence [00:07:53]:
Yeah, pretty much what it comes down to.

Ben Gray [00:07:56]:
Exactly.

Kyle Lawrence [00:07:57]:
Well, we can talk about the weather all day because it seems to be top of mind for everybody, but we must get down to brass tacks. And I would like to extend a very warm B and A welcome to an esteemed guest, Mr. Ben Gray, the chief legal officer at Kraken. Ben, welcome aboard and thank you for joining us.

Ben Gray [00:08:14]:
Thank you so much for having me here. Happy to be here.

Kyle Lawrence [00:08:17]:
Happy to have you. So you've been at Kraken for about a year now. Just under a year, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm always fascinated when we have guests who are general counsel to companies besides Kraken or what have you, or if they are on the hill in a regulatory capacity. I mean, I know what my job is like, but when you walk into Kraken on day one, is it just like filling out HR forms and learning where the bathroom is? Like, what do you. What's the first thing you do when you get hired? A clo of Kraken.

Ben Gray [00:08:46]:
Yeah. Well, actually, so the. The funny thing about Kraken, we are. We're probably most well known for our security. It's something we take incredibly seriously. And it's. It's frankly, like a huge part of why people like using our exchange. And that applies to employees, too, I think.

Ben Gray [00:09:03]:
It took me like, three quarters of a day to figure out how to log into my computer. It was like, so. It was like Fort Knox. So that was most of my first day. But, yeah, it's like. It's an interesting world we live in right now, too. Kraken has been around for nearly 15 years, but has been a global company or Remote first company from the beginning. So it wasn't one of the kind of COVID like Transformers.

Ben Gray [00:09:27]:
It's always been like this. And so it's remote first, and they're kind of used to people joining that way, but that doesn't mean that I'm used to it. You know, this is kind of the first company where. Where there hadn't been any, like, in person DNA. Even at Paxos, they had been in person prior to Covid. And so it was really interesting to. To jump into that and to figure out what it means to be a leader of a large organization that's all over the world. And.

Ben Gray [00:09:54]:
And so that's been an adventure for sure.

Kyle Lawrence [00:09:56]:
When you did start, if you don't mind me asking, what was your first priority? What was the first thing you wanted to tackle? I know that's a loaded question, because Kraken is a lot of irons in the fire, a lot of things going on. And of course, it was right after the inauguration, which. Sea change in the industry. So walking in, day one, Ben Gray. All right, here's. Here's what I want to accomplish in my first hundred days. Something like.

Ben Gray [00:10:21]:
Like that. Well, look, I mean, it's a combination of things, right? I think the. The obvious thing is mostly just listening and trying to figure out what's going on in a new organization. I think that's just how I approach being a leader.

Ben Gray [00:10:33]:
And a leader of a big team is not kind of presuming that I know what. What needs to get done. So. So that was a lot of. It was just getting to know my team, getting to know kind of the biggest issues from the CEOs perspective. We've got CO. We had CO CEOs. And so getting to know them, I think at a macro level, you really hit on it, Kyle, which is that, you know, Trump had been elected, and everyone kind of knew that that meant a significant shift from where we had all been.

Ben Gray [00:11:02]:
I had spent, you know, the better part of almost four years at Paxos in a very much. I call it my, like, turtle years. It was very defensive. You know, it was like kind of like, go into your shell and just, like, hope that. That the industry can navigate through it. And all of a sudden, it was like the seas had parted, and everyone's like, okay, now what do we do? How do we capitalize on this? How do we launch products? How do we clear the decks on things that had existed very publicly? Kraken had an open SEC lawsuit that it was fighting, and so obviously that Was sort of very top of mind to me was to figure out kind of what was going on there and how to clear the decks, which I and the team were able to do successfully, which we're really proud of. We always felt like that was kind of an unprincipled, unfair action. So that was kind of really huge for us to be able to kind of leave that.

Ben Gray [00:11:55]:
That historic baggage behind. But it was. It's sort of a. Like I said, it was a combination of kind of clearing the decks on that. That history and also accelerating quickly into the future and figuring out, okay, where are the areas where we're competitive? Where are the areas that we have strength, and how do we capitalize on those things in this new world?

Moish Peltz [00:12:15]:
That's great. I didn't think about it until right as you were answering the question, but we're actually, to the day, exactly one year after the inauguration. And thinking back exactly one year ago, I'm curious your thoughts of, like, okay, we've been in this defensive posture. I mean, not just Paxos, but the whole industry and the people that advise the industry and so forth. All right, we're just playing defense, making sure, you know, stay out of trouble, to, okay, this is a new, you know, playing field, new opportunity. And thinking back a year from a year ago and projecting forward, like, what were you expecting might happen over the next year versus what has actually played out? And I'm curious, like, if you could compare and contrast what you expected versus what's actually happened. Is this, like, roughly in line with your expectations? Have things kind of, like, surprised you and in what ways?

Ben Gray [00:13:11]:
It's a great question. I mean, I think. I think it's probably been better than we could have expected in a lot of ways. I mean, I think part of that was also just colored by how brutal those years were. And now we had sort of just become accustomed to the fact that, like, there was no. There was no engagement. I mean, in the U.S. you know, I'll speak just from the U.S.

Ben Gray [00:13:33]:
like, there was no engagement. That was not enforcement. You know, the door was just closed, which is. You become used to sort of being in this world where that's not even a possibility. And then I think what we've seen. I'll use, like the sec, for example, they. They formed the crypto task force. The crypto task force was actively inviting people to come in to talk through issues with them, to talk about how we can get clarity for the industry, which is ultimately a positive for the American people and for the markets.

Ben Gray [00:14:04]:
And so that was just such a sea change in approach that I don't think anyone could really wrap their heads around how quickly that shifted. It was really like it was overnight. I mean, it was like you sort of went from like an agency that was. That completely had their doors shut to an agency that. That threw them wide open. And so that, I think was and has been incredibly productive. We have been deeply engaged and really have been encouraged by sort of seeking them, seeking a clear regulatory framework that doesn't rely on enforcement as kind of the mechanism to get there. And we've always felt like at Kraken, kind of market integrity and effective regulation, right sized regulation, right size enforcement, as well as are all ultimately good for the consumer.

Ben Gray [00:14:58]:
And they're not like. I think sometimes people look at industries and they say, oh, you just want to be unregulated. It's actually not our position at all. We want to be regulated because we ultimately think it's better for the market and for the consumer. And so that's been great for us. And I think it's also. The other kind of big thing I would say is that the US Is now sort of getting its act together with respect to kind of catching up to the rest of the world, which had sort of left us behind in a lot of respects. And that meant that you saw a lot of talent leaving, you saw a lot of flight of kind of founding members who are going and saying, well, if I can go to Singapore, I can go to Europe and I can get clarity, that's where I'm going to go.

Ben Gray [00:15:42]:
And so that's. There's. We've seen a lot of that kind of flow back, which has also been great. So I think maybe to sum it all up, like, you know, we felt really optimistic about it, but I think that it's been. It's been even kind of better in a lot of respects. Now, look, there's still a lot of road to hoe here, right? I mean, no, we're going to touch on this later, but market structure continues to wind its way through Congress. And, you know, that's something we're deeply involved in. And so I think, you know, there's more work to do, but we're really happy with, with the first year here.

Kyle Lawrence [00:16:13]:
You hit the nail on the head. And that's a perfect segue to. To talk about the Clari. You know, thank you for. For bringing it up. Obviously, the news came out in the last week that Coinbase has withdrawn its support due in, you know, for a couple of reasons, but One of them being, you know, the bank, you know, the bank stepping in and making yield. The, you can't issue yield with respect to stablecoins, which is a problem for them. Kraken is, is the second largest exchange in the United States and obviously it's not a direct one to one in terms of your business models.

Kyle Lawrence [00:16:42]:
And I'm not going to ask you to speculate as to what Coinbase's thought process is, but when you see Coinbase withdraw its support, and I know Kraken is very involved on the legislative front, where do you guys go from here with the backdrop of Coinbase stepping back? Not that they're like we're walking away from the table, obviously you've said there's work that needs to be done. We don't want to let perfect be the enemy of the good with these things, but where do we go? What's Kraken's position? How do you view the next couple of months with respect to this legislation that's going to make its way through Congress?

Ben Gray [00:17:14]:
Yeah, look, I mean, I think we are, we're incredibly supportive of the process. You know, we've, we've been at this for three plus years, for longer. You know, I think we, you know, and Arjun are one of our close CEOs is very public about this on X that, you know, we, we really kind of believe you have to come to the table and to work through those challenging issues. And it's not a perfect bill. Like, you know, I think I, you know, understand where, maybe where Coinbase is coming from, from their perspective. But you know, the interesting thing that, that I think people forget is the crypto can, the crypto sort of market and companies involved in the space are not homogeneous. You know, that the business models are different, the way that they generate revenue is different. The, the regulatory structures, their customer bases, all of that is different.

Ben Gray [00:18:09]:
And this is a huge bill, very complicated bill for anyone who's sort of in the weeds on it. It's hundreds of pages. It's trying to touch on so many different aspects of the space that we're in. And so we kind of wouldn't expect that everyone would have perfect alignment at all points. And also we would also expect that different sort of specific issues, whether it's yield on stablecoin or staking or defi or whatever it is, would be kind of more critical to different participants in the process. But that doesn't mean that we can't all sort of align around the fact that we all want it to move forward. You Know, we want it to move forward because again, kind of going back to sound a little bit like a broken record, but we really believe kind of that financial innovation, investor protection, effective enforcement, all of these things are grounded in having regulatory clarity which ultimately drives adoption and sort of growth of this market for consumers. And so this, it is the right thing.

Ben Gray [00:19:09]:
The process is right, the process is messy. That's legislation in the United States. But I think we're optimistic that as long as people stay at the table and continue to have these conversations that there's a path. You know, we really definitely believe that it, you know, it's going to happen in 2026. Who knows exactly what the steps are to get to that point. But there's still a lot of will to get it done and people are having those conversations.

Moish Peltz [00:19:33]:
Yeah, it's great that you're optimistic it's going to happen in 2026. I hope you're right.

Ben Gray [00:19:39]:
But I do read, I have to tell you, I was on a call the other day with a number of my peers in the industry and it was really funny to see the spread of probabilities that people had of likelihood of passage. It just sort of goes to show you how, how much it's sort of out of individuals control like just because there are so many different things happening at the same time. But yeah, I choose to be an optimist here.

Kyle Lawrence [00:20:09]:
So is there a pool? Like a baby pool?

Ben Gray [00:20:11]:
There was no pool. There were no bedding. We're not, we're not engaging in betting. But, but informal. Informal.

Moish Peltz [00:20:17]:
We had to go to Poly Market for that.

Ben Gray [00:20:18]:
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. Well, you could probably find odds on polymarket or Kalshi, I would bet.

Moish Peltz [00:20:28]:
I think you're unfortunately right. Well, I guess. Okay. There's one window. I mean. Right. So time in Congress is valuable. Looking back a year, it's almost incredible that this much time of just the mind space of what legislation is going to be passed to that point.

Moish Peltz [00:20:48]:
Right. If we couldn't have really imagined this a year ago, this is what Congress is spending their time doing is engaging with the industry. And so from that perspective, I think it's well worth being optimistic. But I think the flip side of that is if it doesn't happen pretty soon, and it's unclear if it will, I've read some analysts saying, well, just in terms of when it would actually get time on the house of the center of the floor, it might not happen until two or three years from now. So I'm just wondering from a, from Like a defensive legal perspective. Okay. If it passes, you kind of know what that looks like. If it doesn't pass, you know, is it just two or three more years of this, kind of weird in between? Like, how do you think about that from like a, A business planning perspective of this? Or do you just.

Moish Peltz [00:21:35]:
We're being optimistic. Let's just move forward that it's passing.

Ben Gray [00:21:38]:
No, I mean, we're definitely, we're definitely not sort of putting all of our eggs in that basket. I think, you know, Kraken sort of quietly is one of the, probably the most regulated exchanges around the world. The most regulated exchange around the world. We have licenses kind of across every asset class that you can think of, across every sort of type of regulator, whether it's state, federal, international. We sort of have all of that. And so I think the way we're thinking about it is we've built this huge regulatory stack that we have invested a tremendous amount of time and effort in. We believe that there is sufficient clarity today to operate that business around the world as we have been. And what we're looking for is to sort of enshrine that in law.

Ben Gray [00:22:25]:
And of course, I don't even want to speak it into existence, but let's say it doesn't happen. That's not the end of the road. Right? We are, as I said earlier in the discussion, we're engaging deeply with the sec. They're working on rulemaking. There are paths for them to drive clarity through kind of administrative processes. Ditto for the cftc, which we recently acquired a couple of different entities that have both have CFTC oversight. And so we're deeply engaged with that regulator as well, and state money transmitter regulators in the US and then of course, we've got licenses with the Central bank of Ireland and so many other regulators around the world that I think our perspective is this is one piece of our large global platform which spans both crypto and TradFi. And so it's an important piece, no doubt, but it's.

Ben Gray [00:23:18]:
We're going to sort of run the process and we're going to continue to build our business and scale it. And if this isn't the path, then we're going to find, you know, another path to keep working towards clarity.

Kyle Lawrence [00:23:28]:
You mentioned, you mentioned tradfi. I mean, I'd be fired if I don't bring up tokenization. Here we are. It's a natural pivot or natural segue. Again, you're hitting my segues before I can even get to them. I mean, look, here we are January 2026. And I can't turn around without hearing the word tokenization. It's coming at me from all angles now.

Kyle Lawrence [00:23:50]:
It's great that we're doing it. It's going to make all of these financial institutions work much more efficiently. You're seeing the New York stock exchanges embracing it, and that's all fantastic, but is it, is it going to be some sort of bubble and it's, is it happening too fast? Because I, from my perspective as a securities lawyer by trade, and I talk about this a lot on the show, I feel like you have everybody trying to get in on this and when that happens, it's not the best structure around it. When everybody's trying to benefit from it, everybody's trying to capitalize on it. Now you guys are at the forefront and you guys know what you're doing. So how do you feel, what do you think is in store for the push to tokenization of real world assets in 2026 and beyond? And what is Kraken doing to kind of harness this new process?

Ben Gray [00:24:38]:
Yeah, it's funny to hear you say that. You sort of think the competition is like a potential risk. I think I see it differently. But maybe it's because we've been sort of fighting for this kind of mass adoption for so long. I would love to have people competing in this space. I think innovation kind of comes from healthy competition and from people sort of experimenting in this space. I think of tokenization as sort of combining the best of blockchain technology with financial services. So if you think about, I'll start with stablecoins because I actually think people forget that stablecoins are actually kind of the paradigmatic example of tokenization.

Ben Gray [00:25:17]:
You're taking the US dollar and you're tokenizing it. And the US dollar is the world's most popular financial instrument. And it's actually, if you live outside the United States, incredibly difficult to get your hands on dollars. And people want them because they're stable, because they're a hedge against inflation, because they're an easy way to send remittances at low cost. And so there's a lot of value proposition to the US dollar. And so we've seen real world utility for people primarily outside the United States. You see stablecoin utility in the US but it's largely the engage in crypto transactions today. I think potentially it'll be more valuable as like a payment rail.

Ben Gray [00:25:58]:
And of course there's, there's yield. But people often in the United States have a hard time wrapping their head around stable coins because they're like, well, why would I want a dollar on the blockchain when I can just hold it in my wallet or hold it in a bank account? And, and so I, I think it's an easier to paint the picture of kind of the value proposition of that outside the United States. But if you like extrapolate away from the US dollar, I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on X Stocks. So X Stocks is the platform that Kraken launched. It's the leading tokenized equity offering globally today. It's exploded in popularity and if you think about it like, how cool is the idea that someone could be sitting somewhere, I don't know, pick a random country like Sri Lanka and they want to hold exposure, financial exposure to a US Equity, the fact that they can do that in a self custody wallet, that they can trade that outside of trading hours on the secondary market and that they can build their wealth against maybe a company that they really believe in, you know, maybe they, for whatever reason they love Nike or they love Tesla or whatever it is. Like that's an incredible innovation.

Ben Gray [00:27:12]:
If you take a step back and think about it like these are walled gardens that typically have not even been exposed and available to lower income Americans, let alone people all over the world. And so like I think that just gets us so excited because you, you see and I mean you hear my enthusiasm but like you can actually see beyond all the bluster and everyone saying like, oh, I want to get involved in this and tokenization is the future, like that is a very, very real world use case where, where the innovation that we're building is actually driving improvement for people's lives. And so it really kind of you're taking crypto. And the best of what is great about crypto, which is that it's open, it's permissionless, it's 247 access, it's instant settlement, it's self custody, it's unlimited composability, all of those things. And you're combining it with traditional financial instruments, whether it's real world equities, ETFs, you know, people talk about real estate that's probably further along, but it could be anything. And you're mashing those things, those two things together. I really do think there's a reason everyone's rushing into it. It's because people are realizing that there is actually tremendous utility to it just to go back and I'll end here.

Ben Gray [00:28:38]:
But to go back to stablecoins for a second, genius passed, the GENIUS act passed. And then all of a sudden it was like every single institution, including every crypto and tradfi was like, what's our stablecoin strategy? That is why we think the Clarity act is so important is because it creates this safety and this regulatory perimeter that then allows people to jump in with two feet with certainty. And so that's why it's important to us. But absolutely, I think we feel tremendously bullish about tokenization broadly, of course, that.

Kyle Lawrence [00:29:10]:
Was probably the best answer I've ever gotten when I asked that question that way. And admittedly part of it is a devil's advocacy kind of thing. Obviously you guys know what you're doing. I guess my, my trepidation just stepping back a little bit is you guys know what you're doing, but these guys don't. And these guys are louder, you know, or you know, have, have a big marketing arm and that, that's always my fear with new technologies. It's just defeat becomes a feeding frenzy.

Ben Gray [00:29:36]:
Yeah.

Kyle Lawrence [00:29:36]:
And I hope that people like, like Kraken and the bigger players in the space are the ones driving the bus, not the riff raff, you know.

Ben Gray [00:29:45]:
Well, I mean, I think one thing that we, that we have been really intentional about at Kraken is we're building an infrastructure platform. I think people often historically have sort of thought about Kraken as like an exchange, but actually what we're building is, is this sort of idea of super infrastructure we are building. We're building, whether it's liquidity or we're building access to exchange technology or yield or all of these different feature sets of the products are composable. And so to your fear, rather than someone having to go out and build all of that, they can come to Kraken and they can say, hey, we want to tokenize this thing, but we don't want to build all the infrastructure and we can do all of that for them. So that's why we feel like Xbox is a brand and obviously it's something that we've launched. But you can kind of imagine different institutions coming and working with us, whether it's tradfi, banks or fintechs and saying, hey, we want to offer this. How do you use the pieces of infrastructure you guys have built, which is this global liquidity and all of the technology that we have custody. I could name a million different things and sort of, how do you put all of those things together into something that works for the Customers they want to serve.

Moish Peltz [00:31:07]:
That's great. I think it's really fascinating you mentioning the GENIUS act and then you having the background at Paxos and being in that seat and now seeing it from the acts passed, now we're implementing it. There's everyone kind of rushing in. Stablecoins in general, I agree with you. It's almost like the maximization of the dollar. Now we can export it everywhere. You're seeing, even with all these geopolitical events, you know, people in Venezuela, for example, can use, you know, can they can use USDC or whatever else while, you know, their Venezuelan dollars get liquidated. So that's fantastic.

Moish Peltz [00:31:44]:
So I'm wondering from your perspective then, okay, GENIUS act passes, how does that actually on the ground change and make it easier for you guys to implement your stablecoin strategy? And then I wanted to ask the same question, just comparatively. You mentioned other jurisdictions in Europe. You said you qualified for the MIKA license and just how. Same question as you're getting these licenses in different jurisdictions and you're seeing that, okay, now this is kind of the baseline. Now we know from a place of confidence we can do business in this way in this jurisdiction. Just talk a little bit about what that unlocks and the benefits of participating in those markets with that legislation behind you.

Ben Gray [00:32:25]:
Yeah. So, I mean, I think to take the first part of your question, like, how does GENIUS help? I mean, I think the sort of knowing what the rules of the. Of the road are. You know, it's interesting. My experience at Paxos. Paxos was a New York is a. Has a New York trust, and so had a New York trust, I think, prior to transferring over to the occ. But New York had done a ton of work to actually establish a stablecoin regulation framework.

Ben Gray [00:32:53]:
And so in many ways, the rules of the road that were established, established there were kind of adopted ingenious. And so I think what that did is for people who didn't have that New York overlay, all of a sudden it was like, okay, now we know the core tenets of what it means to have a regulated stablecoin, which is one to one, backing bankruptcy, remoteness, all these different things, high quality liquid reserves, backing the stable coins, all of those things became kind of enshrined in law. And that meant, okay, now we can drive adoption of the stablecoin that we're most interested in. We can kind of figure out, well, how do we drive adoption of that? How do we build it into all of Our different partnerships are there different banks that maybe in the past wouldn't have been willing to partner with us on that and all of a sudden they would be. And so it sort of allowed us to very quickly integrate that into products in a way that we hadn't been able to before. And so I think that's probably like the biggest thing from a Kraken perspective. And you know, we'll continue to do even more there. On the international side, I think your question was sort of what is the benefit of having the licenses in the different markets and sort of how do we capitalize on that? Was that the gist of it?

Moish Peltz [00:34:16]:
Yeah, and like thinking about, you know, the Clarity act and like hoping this gets passed and that's going to enable, you know, market certainty and then just comparing that to what a lot of people complain about is a bureaucratic, you know, difficult to operate market in Europe. But they have the legislation there, they have market structure bill that's been passed and so you've now had about, you know, I don't know, about six months into having licensure there. I'm like, well, is it still like, you know, is this just like, well, Europe's weird and slow and bureaucratic and it's great that there's a legislation but you know, where we're doing what we can or is that like, hey, now we've got like the same way as genius, like all right, now we're going to start integrating everything into our product because we have certainty.

Ben Gray [00:34:59]:
Yeah, I mean, look, I think everyone's always going to grumble a little bit, right? It's sort of people don't want to be regulated and they want to be regulated. That's just sort of the nature of, of technology companies frankly is that like everyone wants to move fast and there's always a little bit of friction that comes with it. But net, net, it's absolutely a positive thing. And I think we have invested a tremendous amount in our European market, our customers, our regulatory footprint there. You know, we're regulated in both Cyprus with a MiFID license as well as in, in Ireland we've got Mika licenses as well as electronic money, institution licenses and others. And we're regulated in the UK and so it's a really core market for us or set of markets. And I think, you know, the way I think about kind of the MICA regulatory regime is that it is, you know, a pretty straightforward disclosure based approach to secondary market trading. You know, it's, it's putting out white papers, it's Giving people, like, the proper disclosures on the assets that they're trading in.

Ben Gray [00:36:06]:
And it's a high regulatory bar and one that we're very happy to meet, but it's pretty straightforward. Is it perfect? Of course not. I think this is a complicated space to operate in, but I think we've found overall that you can operate effectively there if you're willing to really kind of go into the regulatory perimeter. And then in the uk, they're deep in the consultation process right now. And so we're obviously very involved with the FCA and providing feedback there to make sure that the frameworks that they come out with imminently are also kind of aligned with what we're seeing around the world. I think I've talked a lot about regulatory harmonization in the past in various circles. I think, like last year, for example, prior to when Genius was passed, everyone was talking about harmonization, harmonization of stablecoin. And the reason for that is that crypto doesn't operate with traditional borders the way that traditional banking has.

Ben Gray [00:37:04]:
And I think it's hard for people to wrap their heads around that. But if you have a USDC that's sitting in, or a usdg, let's say, a stablecoin that's sitting in the United States and you want to transfer it over to a different country across the ocean, you may be moving from one regulatory regime to another, but ultimately the user isn't going to know that and isn't going to feel it. And so I think it's our responsibility to try as much as we can to work with the regulators, to have some semblance of similar experiences that ultimately trickle down to the customer, because from their perspective, they're like, well, I don't want to be asked 10 different things in this, this country and then 100 different things in this country. Like, I just want to be able to use my crypto wherever I am. And so that's, That's, I think, how we approach it is we're willing as the exchange, to engage, to get the licenses, we want to meet the high regulatory bar, but we want to abstract away the complexity as much as we can for our customers.

Kyle Lawrence [00:38:09]:
That's a great observation, and it's something I encounter all the time as a securities lawyer, because we have clients who are all over the world. And I try to explain to them, it's like, all right, well, if I'm offering this here and the investor is located here, what do I have to do? And it becomes this, you know, like Charlie Day from It's always sunny with the chart and the string. That's kind of what it's like. Yeah, and it's interesting and you've mentioned it a couple times, this concept of one, you're working with the regulators, obviously, Kraken being what it is. But there is a, there, there is a segment of the crypto population that's, you know, it's naturally attractive to people who lean libertarian. You know, for example, like, I just want my crypto. I want to be left alone, I'm not harming anybody. And that idea of like, you know, what is harm is what makes that impossible in some ways.

Kyle Lawrence [00:38:57]:
And what I've always, you know, sort of proselytized, for lack of a better word is, you know, people say to me, it's like, well, you know, how do we do this? I say, no, we want regulation. Regulation is a good thing because if you're doing a real estate syndication in a traditional security sense, that's easy. You just do this, this and that and you're good and you're compliant and all the laws are good and you checked off the boxes and there's not going to be any problems. But without that, without that roadmap, it's, you're trying to fit a, you know, square peg into a round hole. And part of what we do as part of our practice and as part of this show, and it sounds like you, there's some element of that in your job as well, is educating the people and trying to teach everybody, you know, this is how it's going to work. It's impossible to be homogenous. You know, we've had these talks with people all over the world. It's just, I don't see how it can possibly happen even with something as borderless or nonpartisan as crypto.

Kyle Lawrence [00:39:51]:
So I think you've made some really salient observations there and I really appreciate it. There's no question in there. I just think it's interesting that you brought up.

Ben Gray [00:39:58]:
No, I appreciate you saying that. I think, you know, we like, I'd sort of be remiss if I didn't say like we are core principles, you know, and, and you sort of mentioned this like libertarian part of, of crypto. Like our core principles as a company are security. We're on our security trust and kind of a long term commitment to that crypto ecosystem. So that's core to who we are. When I talk about regulation, it's not, it's not mutually exclusive with people having private access to their financial sort of well being. And I Think that's why we've been such advocates for the DEFI ecosystem. It's why we've built a lot of products in that space.

Ben Gray [00:40:38]:
It's why we want to open that up to our customers. Actually, if you look at, we have a couple of really interesting products that have been launched or that are launching, that are really designed to. Again, I keep talking about this idea of abstracting away complexity, but like, defi is complicated. It's like for the average user, it's hard for them to understand how do they access it, how do they understand the risk associated with engaging in different protocols, et cetera. And so I think for us, that's another part of what we're excited about, is how do we bridge that and sort of bridge all the different worlds of DeFi, of centralized exchanges, of tradfi. For us, the idea is like, you have assets, they should be able to freely flow across all of those different platforms as you please. And this sort of concept of privacy is really core to what we do. And so I guess again, not necessarily a specific answer to a question in there, but just sort of like a reflection on what you're saying.

Ben Gray [00:41:43]:
I think is my perspective is you can have all of these things coexist and frankly we should, and that's how you see the maximum value of crypto.

Moish Peltz [00:41:53]:
Yeah, it's really interesting because I've been reading Vitalik Buterin had a few posts over the past week. I think he's come out of 2026 with like a renewed fervor and, and one of the points he was making was that, you know, we need to take background in terms of self sovereignty, trustlessness, improving private payments, lowering barrier to entry for users to run full nodes, decentralized apps and some, you know, I think these are all things that from like a decentralized Ethereum and then DEFI perspective are part of the ethos of this industry. And this is something think a lot about is like, well, how do centralized actors like Kraken, like centralized exchanges, what is their role in the ecosystem to support those kinds of endeavors? Unless like, okay, now we have federal legislation which is fantastic, and that's going to benefit from the centralized services you provide, but how does that expand into the broader ecosystem and these other kind of crypto unique viewpoints?

Ben Gray [00:42:58]:
Yeah, I mean, look, I may sound sort of like redundant, but I think it's a core part of the ecosystem. I think it would be a mistake to say that the Clarity act is designed to kind of only bring a certain part of that into the regulatory perimeter. It's why DEFI has been such an interesting kind of flashpoint in the debate right now. Because I think people, us included, feel really strongly about making sure that that continues to be a vibrant part of the crypto ecosystem. And the interesting thing about DEFI is it is again, just this tremendous, really interesting innovation, like you're allowing people to engage in traditional kind of financial transactions without an intermediary involved. And that is something that is an innovation. And the fact that you can do that with smart contracts and you can control for counterparty risk and all of these different things that typically an intermediary is responsible for, for managing the risk around, but you can use smart contracts to do that is an innovation. And it'd be, it would be like a, a huge problem if we didn't also allow that to continue to flourish.

Ben Gray [00:44:13]:
So that's, it's, it's a core part of how we think about it.

Moish Peltz [00:44:16]:
I mean, it's fantastic. And I know, you know, many people in your organization have been very vocal about those principles and, and the efforts that you guys are taking to do that. So we celebrate that for sure.

Kyle Lawrence [00:44:28]:
Yeah, I'm all for removing the banks as intermediaries. I don't know if you can say that, but I certainly can.

Ben Gray [00:44:36]:
I mean, look, I actually, look, I was a banking regulatory lawyer. Like, I. It's a space that I feel fondly towards. It's like, I actually think that there's space for everyone to be involved in it. And there's like a, there's a, there's an important role for all of the different parties to play in the financial services space. And I actually think what's encouraging is you're seeing a lot of traditional financial institutions are now looking at this and saying, actually this technology could be really valuable and interesting for our customers. And we don't have to look at this as sort of eating our lunch. It's just we need to evolve with it.

Ben Gray [00:45:16]:
I think about it a lot, not to go off on a tangent, but as a lawyer, I don't know if you hear this from other people that you bring on, but AI is absolutely fundamentally changing our, our profession. And I think you'd be really, really foolish to not, like, embrace that versus, like, if you're going to sit there and just say, like, oh, this technology is going to eat my lunch or whatever, like, that's actually going to be a losing strategy, whether it's in crypto or whether it's as a lawyer or whatever. Like, you got to kind of figure Out. Okay. How do I harness this and how do I adapt?

Kyle Lawrence [00:45:53]:
You said the magic words. Did you see him like perk up in the chair? Got all excited. On a prior episode, we actually had AI Moish deliver a part of the.

Ben Gray [00:46:02]:
No way.

Moish Peltz [00:46:03]:
Yeah, I did. I did have my avatar.

Ben Gray [00:46:04]:
That's kind of. That's kind of scary. I don't know. There's.

Moish Peltz [00:46:07]:
That's really him though. This. This is me. I think. No, I'm. I'm. I think a lot about this. And I'm curious from your perspective, you know, what role you think AI has in.

Moish Peltz [00:46:22]:
From your perspective, right, in the role of a chief legal officer of a large organization in on the one hand, perhaps making certain processes more efficient, internally making the work that you do more efficient, the work people in your team more efficient, perhaps giving more decentralized legal kind of people out in the field. Like a salesperson now has, you know, things they can query and get immediate feedback about, like legal boundaries and principles on the one hand. Right. So like internal legal operations within the company, but then also in terms of the way, you know, you interact with outside counsel. The way outside counsel, you know, may or may not be displaced or made more or less efficient by this usage. I'm just curious how you're thinking about that. Just because it's all happening in real time influx and you know, changing from week to week, basically, I'm sure.

Ben Gray [00:47:15]:
Yeah, it's. I mean it's. It is a wild time to be in, in our profession for sure. I think. So I. My remit. So I lead our legal team and then compliance also rolls up into me and risk and internal audit. So I have different kind of constituencies when I think about this.

Moish Peltz [00:47:33]:
But they're all AI now.

Ben Gray [00:47:34]:
Yeah, well, you know, it's like I actually give like such tremendous kudos. So like compliance functions have a large operational component in financial services industry for people who aren't as familiar. You know, you're doing primary, a lot of anti money laundering kind of reviews of transactions. You're doing filings, you're doing sanctions reviews, those kinds of things. Kyc and there's a heavy operational component of that. And I think we have done an unbelievable job of leveraging AI to really make a lot of those decisions in an automated but auditable way and also allow for. It's not about eliminating people. I think this is the sort of red herring everyone thinks.

Ben Gray [00:48:20]:
Oh, it's about we can just get rid of people because we're implementing AI. It's actually about shifting them towards higher Leverage work. And so that's how we think about it is like, how do we shift away from low complexity or from repetitive work and shift people to higher leverage, higher comp, higher complexity work. So we've been really successful there and continue to do more work there and really innovate. On the legal side, in an in house function, there are some functions that are a little more kind of operational in nature. For example, like in a big corporation you're executing tons of NDAs, like tons. And that's a very repeatable kind of form based process. And that's something that, you know, you can use AI to kind of do a quick first pass of the NDA if it's coming from someone else or your own NDA.

Ben Gray [00:49:12]:
And kind of, you can, you can make some really great strides there with the sort of the more like bespoke legal advice that you're giving. You know, you're still going to want a lawyer sitting there, thinking about it, thinking critically, kind of weighing all the different pros and cons. But a lot of the research on these things, you know, it's not going to be perfect, but it is going to get you 50% of the way there, you know, which like in some cases is what you need to like start. And so I think that's okay to acknowledge by the way. You know, like, I think, like, I think we all have to sort of recognize that. And of course you don't just take it and not double check things, but like, absolutely, there are moments where you just want to get a gut check or you want to be able to get a very quick, high level sense of like, are you on the right track? And it can be incredibly powerful for that. One thing I'm like really proud of. We've been pushing this across my whole team as like a real strategic imperative.

Ben Gray [00:50:13]:
And one thing that we've done that's really cool is we've created these custom GPTs. So you have like, for example, I created one which I call Clobot, the Chief Legal Officer robot. And it's basically I trained it to think like me and to tend to communicate like me. So I said, you know, communicate in very direct terms. You know, don't overcomplicate, whatever. Like, I gave it a bunch of different rules and parameters. I said, this is your expertise. Train on these regulations.

Ben Gray [00:50:42]:
Here's what you need to be able to do. And I ask you questions all the time. You know, I'm like, hey, you're like, you're dealing with this thing. You're, you Know, I'm like, it's a weird thing, it's like you're talking to yourself. But, but, but you know, we like another great example, like have a few really talented folks who, who are passionate about this and we had someone who was going out on leave for a little while and their expertise was in the regular regulations for a specific country. And we said okay, well we'll create a specific custom GPT that's trained on the regulations for that country. And so when the person was out for a few weeks, if, if a question came up on that country, we could go and ask the like, you know, the lawyer from that or the, the bot from that country and get like a gut check, you know. And so like there's some really cool interesting ways to, to get around what I would call like people's initial reaction which is oh chatgpt, like it hallucinates and it doesn't know what it's doing and it's not trained on the right things and it's like, yeah, but like think a little bit more critically about how to, how to get around those things and it can actually multiply the effectiveness of the people that are, are using it.

Ben Gray [00:51:58]:
And that's, that's our goal. So lots more to do. And I think there's like, I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface on it, but it's definitely something I'm like a, I'm definitely a booster of it. I think it's something we ask people about and we optimize for. We want people who are excited about.

Kyle Lawrence [00:52:15]:
It, as are we.

Moish Peltz [00:52:17]:
It can detect your passion for it and that's something that I think the thing I'm really excited for and it's awesome to hear what you're implementing is the collaboration among people using AI and the idea that I have a well informed client that already asked the 50% question and it's up to speed and now wants to get into the weeds on like, all right, here's this really minor issue which now I understand. Like I don't have to spend the first half of the call like all right, here's like getting up to the same speed on like the basics and then you can just like jump in and dive. Here's where something. I think that part's really cool. And then the tooling around how both internal teams and like diverse like cross part, like, like different inside outside teams can collaborate on different like that's where I think like it's really interesting and there hasn't been a lot of like the collab space kind of discussion happening. So I think that's really, that's a really exciting spot.

Kyle Lawrence [00:53:13]:
I mean, I, I, we, we love, no question there.

Ben Gray [00:53:15]:
No, I'm like, no, I'm like, I'm like, agree. Hard, hard, agree. I mean like, I think adoption is like the hardest part. It's a skill. Right. And that's the other thing is people. Yeah, it's like we are trying to graft our Google usage onto ChatGPT people. Like, if you haven't had even a basic training in it, your first instinct is to go ask it a question the way that you would ask Google a question.

Ben Gray [00:53:41]:
And like, that's actually not nearly the most effective way to engage with it. So it takes a little bit of training and kind of people getting up to speed on it, but it's a.

Kyle Lawrence [00:53:50]:
Great, it's a microcosm of fears of the new that we've seen throughout history. I mean, history shows us. I mean, people were afraid of cars, people are afraid of the Internet. You know, I'm not putting my credit card. Are you crazy? Everyone's going to steal it. And now, I mean, the thought of practicing law without the Internet makes me want to cry. I don't even know how you would do it, honestly. I know, but yeah, my dad did it, but sucks.

Kyle Lawrence [00:54:15]:
This is way, this is a thousand times better. And, and I would think that with mass adoption of the new technologies of blockchain tech, of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, AI is, is just another tool like that. And we have a lot of clients, even people that we work with, that feel about AI. You know, as you were saying, I don't like this. It's fake. I'd rather do things the way I would. And you know, it's a, it's a new tool in our tool belts and I, people should be at least open to seeing what the fuss is about as opposed to just seeing the high profile things that don't work. The, the lawyer who walks into court with hallucinated cases and that person got injured.

Kyle Lawrence [00:54:53]:
Yeah, well, but that's no different than if his associate gave him fake cases. Like, it's, it's, I don't see the difference.

Moish Peltz [00:54:58]:
You know, what's your advice for, you know, either junior people that are actually joining your legal team or other aspiring lawyers out there, like, all right, this is the new landscape. Everything is changing. Like what, what should they do?

Ben Gray [00:55:10]:
Well, I mean, I guess I'll like, I'll answer that question in two different ways. Like for crypto Lawyers, I think it's really, really important to be, to deeply understand the products that you're advising on and that you're working with, because they're really complicated, you know, like. And I think if you don't understand them, it's very, very hard to meet your cross functional partners and stakeholders where they are and to give creative advice. And so I think we have like a, an aggressive culture of what's called dog fooding or using our own products. And and so I think that's like a big part of it. The other thing is you need to be up on what's going on and from a policy standpoint sort of be engaged in that way because that kind of like the products and then the regulation and the policy are all happening at exactly the same time. And so your ability to provide effective legal advice across all the different functions, whether it's employment law or whatever, is all of these things are going to be colored by how are the local regulators looking at things, what is this sort of policy like aura that's happening at any given time? What are the products, how are they operating, where are the innovations and being able to kind of couple all of those things. So we really encourage our lawyers to be engaged in the business, understand how the business works, understand how the products work, be engaged in the overall crypto ecosystem and know what's going on and be sort of passionate about those things.

Ben Gray [00:56:43]:
In terms of like AI, I think it's about, it's about embracing it, you know, and sort of being open to figuring out what like the best use case is going to be for you. I think it's, I don't know that I have, I've spent like a fair amount of time looking into like solutions and things that are out there. I think it's very early on the legal side, candidly, like, there's a few kind of leaders in this space. I'm not sure anyone has kind of emerged as, as like the killer app or the killer use case yet, but I think just kind of tinkering and thinking about like the question I always ask myself is like, what do I hate doing in my day? And is there. And then like, if it's something I hate, then like, how do I have AI do it for me? It's incredibly, incredibly effective question. So that's my tip, is like, ask yourself when you find yourself like doing something you really hate doing, is there a way to have AI do it.

Moish Peltz [00:57:40]:
For you or have Claude code build an app that does it for you?

Ben Gray [00:57:44]:
Yeah, exactly, yeah. Or Build an app to do it for you. Exactly.

Kyle Lawrence [00:57:48]:
Well, funny enough, I mean, you're in house, so you don't remember the hell of having to fill out a timesheet. But we now have an AI timesheet keeper, and it's the best thing ever that's ever been invented ever on the planet.

Ben Gray [00:58:01]:
Totally. For sure.

Moish Peltz [00:58:03]:
The killer app for timekeepers.

Ben Gray [00:58:05]:
Yeah, it's the smallest stuff. Like, one thing that I. I find to be like an incredible time saver is I do a lot of interviewing and not having to sit there and take notes for the entire interview and being able to actually focus on the conversation you're having with people and then have AI turn that into a summary of your feedback and the conversation is like a tremendous value add. So, yeah, there's stuff all over the place.

Kyle Lawrence [00:58:31]:
You've been looking at what we've been doing. Well, we only have a couple minutes left, Ben. Any final thoughts you want to share before we. Before we let you go continue conquering the world?

Ben Gray [00:58:45]:
No, I mean, I think we've covered a lot of ground. I think. I think that, you know, from our perspective, having strong partners with, you know, in. With outside council expertise in these areas has been kind of critical to our ability to scale quickly and to operate globally. And so we always love to spend time with folks like you guys. And I appreciate you having me here.

Kyle Lawrence [00:59:08]:
We appreciate everything you've done in the space. We appreciate your time. And when the Clarity act gets passed this year, before the midterms, we will have you back on and we'll give you your dollar in the pool.

Ben Gray [00:59:21]:
I'll hold you to that. I appreciate it.

Kyle Lawrence [00:59:23]:
Fantastic. Ben Gray, chief legal officer at Kraken. Thank you so much for stopping by, man.

Ben Gray [00:59:29]:
Thank you.

Moish Peltz [00:59:30]:
I want to let you know that we relaunched the Block and Order website, which was vibe coded by yours truly. I really love the way it came out. If you have any suggestions, let me know and I will tell Claude to make them. And you can go on a blockandorder.com to see our latest episodes, our latest blog posts, and also the weekly docket which features the weekly news that is most important to all of you. So, again, love any feedback or suggestions for articles or guests that we have not already covered or interviewed. Thanks.

Kyle Lawrence [01:00:01]:
Well, that wraps up this episode of Block and Order. Very special. Thank you to Ben Gray, chief legal officer at Kraken, for stopping by. He shared some just wonderful insights in the space. I know we've been very excited to have him on the show and he certainly did. Didn't disappoint Remember that this show is meant for informational purposes only. Nothing on the show is meant to be construed as legal and or financial advice. Please.

Kyle Lawrence [01:00:24]:
Please consult your own representatives if you're going to take the plunge. Please remember that any assets that we discuss during block and order is purely for discussion purposes only. It is not in any way than to be an endorsement of such assets. Please proceed with your own risk. Special thank you to OG producer Abby. Without her, this show would not be possible. So on behalf of Moish Pelts, I'm Kyle Lawrence. Keep fighting the good fight, everybody.

Moish Peltz [01:00:47]:
See you next time.