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 Non-public? Non-public
How do you make a bitcoin-only brokerage worthwhile? The reply isn’t sophisticated.
You supply the very best high quality companies to as many individuals as doable for an excellent value.
That is the technique Alexander Leishman and the crew at River make use of.
And River’s high-quality companies 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 sluggish, laborious manner, which allowed us to construct our personal custody methods and really custody our shoppers’ Bitcoin and function as a monetary establishment,” Leishman instructed Bitcoin Journal.
Constructing on a robust basis is clearly essential to Leishman, somebody who operates from his personal notable academic {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 sort you’d need somebody who secures hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in bitcoin on behalf of shoppers 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,” mentioned Leishman.
“Individuals actually underestimate that that does not occur by default. You must actively spend 50 plus p.c of your assets to comprise entropy and ensure you’re at all times bettering methods and procedures, constructing the automation and constructing every part you might want to comprise 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 trade that has a fame for exchanges going bust and/or dropping consumer funds. And Leishman is conscious of this.
“It seems on this trade there aren’t a complete lot of reliable individuals,” mentioned Leishman.
“We have seen even essentially the most regulated belief corporations go bust. They’re going to inform you, now we have 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 a few years in the past,” he added.
“That is why we do issues ourselves.”
Why Bitcoin?
Given how tough it’s to soundly run a Bitcoin firm and the truth that, along with his credentials and expertise, Leishman may make an excellent residing in plenty of fields, why did he gravitate towards Bitcoin?
“The explanation that I obtained 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 ultimately learn The Denationalization of Cash by Friedrich Hayek.”
He was drawn to the thought of difficult central banking as he grew to become extra conscious of the risks of centralized energy constructions of every type — 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 could have been centralized,” he mentioned.
“I could not actually work out how you can do it with out going to jail, and I didn’t know how you can make a enterprise out of it,” he added.
“Once I got here throughout Bitcoin I used to be like ‘My gosh this fulfills the prophecy — that is going to alter every part.’ 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 trade 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 occurring, 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 house with a Taiwanese Bitcoin change referred to as MaiCoin, which specialised in bitcoin buying and selling and funds.
At MaiCoin, Leishman recognized and stuck safety vulnerabilities and constructed APIs used for service provider companies.
Past his expertise at MaiCoin, Leishman remembers his time within the Bay Space fondly.
“The tradition was very completely different again then,” he mentioned.
“There wasn’t actually this idea of Bitcoin maximalism. Nobody was offended by new cash as a result of individuals would mainly 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 element and with out creating this dichotomy between scammers and legit individuals as a lot.”
From one angle, these would possibly sound like unusual phrases from somebody who runs a bitcoin-only enterprise. From one other, one may think that Leishman realized 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 mentioned that “everybody knew Bitcoin was king — nobody was making an attempt to come back 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 realized about crypto safety and funds, Leishman got down to construct a Bitcoin platform that not solely featured a top-notch multisig safety mannequin for consumer funds at its core but in addition helped customers extra readily make the most of bitcoin as a medium of change 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’ll supply their shoppers.
“They will solely use no matter their third-party decides to construct,” mentioned 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 carrying the hats of CEO and CTO, River has a definite benefit in forging its personal path.
“Considering like an excellent engineer results in an excellent enterprise,” mentioned Leishman.
“I am the particular person 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 Identical — 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 extensively accepted medium of change.
Plus, River’s bread and butter is its brokerage service.
“We make most of our cash on our bitcoin brokerage,” Leishman mentioned.
He additionally famous that River makes cash off of its different companies, like operating 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 may be doing to make the method less complicated and better high quality to enroll, purchase — and custody looks like you might have all of your safety wants coated,” Leishman mentioned.
“Additionally, actually the place the laborious 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 grow to be, 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 forwards and backwards between Bitcoin and fiat is the place we’re centered.”
