Today marks my three-year anniversary with Brale. It’s humbling for various reasons and exciting for far more. I didn’t really think about it until someone brought it up, and it did give me some pause to reflect.
When we started Brale, we knew it would be 2.5-3 years before we knew if the idea was working or if we had a shot at working. At the time, there were 3 major risks that we could kind of control but accepted and none of them could really be rushed, and there were no shortcuts we could think of that were conceivably good ideas to shortcut them. The ideas to shortcut the big challenges either meant handing someone else the keys to our future (financially or technically) or increasing legal or compliance risk to such a degree that it was too easy to find ways for them to fail. Accepting a 2.5-3-year window before starting the work was very much accepted.
Our journey has been a bit atypical, and it’s certainly been unique in that way. This may be familiar to others building healthcare companies (which could be blocked at any time or have their drugs not approved) or hardware projects with high capex (tons of cash up front, but maybe the product doesn’t ever sell).
The 3 things we had the opportunity to do were:
- Acquire the licenses. No renting, no borrowing, no tricks.
- Stablecoin issuance has a straightforward regulatory structure in the United States. It was/is very expensive, very slow, and very complex. It also varies by state, and between the filings, audits, team to support, and other challenges, it is a hard process to complete. Maybe it’s hard for good reason, but our general feeling was that a lot of people talk about the lack of clear regulation. However, our sense was that it’s pretty clear for stablecoin issuance. At times, we went a year or more without even getting a response to certain things. This is fine, it takes time.
- Build the core system & correspondant relationships. Onchain and offchain. No renting. No borrowing.
- This was the most alarming realization once we got into the weeds. We initially thought there were infrastructure providers we could just rent wallets from. While they do exist, we found there were a number of complexities with regulatory mapping (we had our own concerns), costs for b2b transactions (broke the business model for large transactions), and future blockchain or signing processes required getting their permission to implement or paying massive sums of money to get it prioritized (fool’s errand). We ended up building it ourselves, and it took a long time, but it could someday be another company.
- Build the interoperability layer. Maintain full optionality.
- Brale has, right or wrong, maintained the opinion that all ecosystems have their advantages, and our job isn’t to pick the winners; it’s to enable movement between them. The surprising outcome is that this also allows different (and emerging) ecosystems to grow faster when there are reliable connections between more established ecosystems. Suddenly, you can build a business on one chain and finance it on another. This convergence of ecosystems plays out very slowly, even if it feels like it’s fast because of news cycles and whose PR engine is fired up this week. Maintaining optionality also meant building enabling core infrastructure for EVM, non-EVM, and TradFi. So we did that too.
A good friend described this to me as needing a miracle to align everything across a timeline of a few years and control whether or not anyone wants a stablecoin by the time we get it all done. Now, we accept what we control, but his point was well-heard from a timing perspective and certainly inspired various thoughts and discussions as time passed. I.e. Timing is hard. We tried to think about whether or not our timing was going to be right and decided to pull the trigger because of a few macro trends and a lot of hope. I gave a talk at M2020 a few years ago that focused on the macro trends; thankfully, all turned out to be correct.
In all three of these scenarios, there was a multi-quarter or iterative multi-year build. In all three cases, we couldn’t buy what we needed from anyone else, and we accepted that it would take a long time to accomplish it.
So, when I think about the three years, I feel quite good about it. The intent of that three-year investment was to set us up to execute our actual plans, support the market and the various ecosystems, and understand the various use cases and macro trends that made it possible for stablecoins to find mass adoption.
We did all that, and that’s exciting because we spent three years building the framework to set us up to build on it for the next decade. That’s the opportunity of a lifetime, and it’s exactly what I signed up for.
It took an enormous amount of work to get here. I’m grateful to everyone on the team (past and present), the families of our team members, and our partners across various vectors (infrastructure, banking, venture, legal) who have tirelessly contributed for all 3 of these years with our team to give us the launchpad to the future.
I can appreciate the last 3 years, but for the first time in my life, all I can see is what comes next, and I’m over the damn moon thrilled to be a part of it.
If this phase was a Mt. Everest climb, the next phase is Mars.
Ad astra.
Gaudens maximus.
Meliora sequentur.
All that.