Episode #80: Xapo Bank: A Look Inside Bitcoin's "Swiss Bank" with Seamus Rocca

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Episode #80: Xapo Bank: A Look Inside Bitcoin's "Swiss Bank" with Seamus Rocca

Founded by the legendary Argentine Wences Casares, Xapo Bank remains a critical piece of bitcoin financial infrastructure globally

Aaron Stanley

Dec 13, 2023

Transcript

Olá pessoal!

Seamus Rocca is CEO of Xapo Bank, which has been a pioneer in the realm of "bitcoin banking" for 10 years since being founded by the iconic Argentine entrepreneur and bitcoin promoter Wences Casares.

Xapo kicked off its journey as a bitcoin custodian in 2013 with as much as 900,000 bitcoins in safekeeping for institutional investors. It was one of the earliest Silicon Valley-backed bitcoin companies and has been a stable bitcoin infrastructure play ever since. (It even transformed an old Swiss military bunker into the world’s most secure bitcoin custody vault)

Over the last few years, the Gibraltar-based company has transformed itself into a full-service bitcoin banking platform called Xapo Bank.

Some key themes from our conversation:

After selling its institutional custody business to Coinbase in a $50 million deal, Xapo Bank repositioned itself to provide banking services for retail and high net worth customers, acting as a bridge between crypto and traditional finance. The platform allows easy onboarding, Bitcoin custody, earnings on holdings, and spending.
While many competitors have come and gone over the last three years, Xapo Bank has followed its "Swiss bank of the future" approach to provide honest and transparent services to more conservative bitcoin investors around the world
How Xapo's retail bitcoin-based savings accounts provide an offshore banking alternative and a dollar hedge
Seamus’ experience at LaBitConf in November and his thoughts on bitcoin’s grassroots emergence in Argentina and LATAM
Xapo Bank's new partnership with Lightspark, the Lightning Network startup formed by David Marcus (ex-Facebook, PayPal), which will enable instant, cheap remittances on bitcoin-native infrastructure
Why Xapo Bank has chosen to maintain its focus on bitcoin products and services over the years and has generally resisted the temptation to dabble in altcoins and high-risk DeFi products

I really enjoyed this conversation with Seamus and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on Linkedin if you’re interested in learning more.

Have a great week everyone,

-AWS