For The Future Indicative, Ep 4 Part 2
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is Crypto.
STEVE ESTRADA
“I think that it’s important at the top, we should distinguish between blockchain and crypto.
Blockchain is an underlying technology. It’s a decentralized, digital ledger that records data securely over a network of computers. It’s an infrastructure product. Blockchain can be used for finance, AI, supply chain, healthcare, voting. You can build a lot on top of it.
Crypto is a financial application layer that’s built on top of that technology—that technology allows for transparent transactions and a programmable, decentralized model. And when you talk about decentralized finance, or DeFi, it enables transparent transactions. And it eliminates the reliance for these traditional intermediaries and gatekeepers.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Steve Estrada, an attorney who has spent the last 10 years living in the world of emerging technology. And what a decade it’s been….not just for him but for all of us.
While the first Bitcoin transaction took place almost 17 years ago, I didn’t learn about “cryptographic currency” until 2015, when I helped produce a report on its possible significance and applications relevant to insurance.
Ten years later and the applications of blockchain and crypto reach well beyond insurance into our everyday lives. But the future has not yet arrived for crypto the way it has for AI, and so I wanted to talk to someone in the industry about our perceptions and its possibilities.
If you watch The Weather Channel, then you’re familiar with the name Jim Cantore. Cantore is a meteorologist that The Weather Channel sends to severe weather events, and the audience witnesses first hand their impact as Jim stands against hurricane winds and high tides.
Let me tell you a little bit about Steve Estrada. Looking to apply his law degree to something different, Steve joined a plucky young workspace company called WeWork as their first IP Counsel. That was before the company claimed to be a lifestyle, and the future subject of documentaries.
Then at the start of the pandemic Steve joined a growing connected fitness company called Peloton, and was front row when the death of a fictional “Sex and the City” character led to a drop in the company’s very real stock.
A couple years after that he entered the world of crypto to help balance innovation with regulation in a rapidly changing Web3 landscape.
When I tell you that I think of Steve Estrada as the Jim Cantore of emerging tech, it’s because these three stops in his career are publicly disruptive highly visible industries. But Steve frames it differently.
STEVE ESTRADA
“I really like to focus on using technology in ways that actually bring us together, whether it’s WeWork in co-working space or Peloton streaming fitness content built around a community, or now in crypto and leveraging technology to create a sense of community.”
ALEX EFFGEN
I want to make a lawyer joke, but I know Steve incredibly well, and he’s earnest. He’s a lawyer who’s interested in the communities that develop in nascent tech verticals. And when it comes to crypto, he wants to think philosophically.
STEVE ESTRADA
“Philosophically, crypto can democratize finance. Anyone can participate in the risks and the rewards of global finance, in a way that was previously only available to institutional players. It brings yield-generating opportunities to people who previously may not have even been able to get a bank account.”
ALEX EFFGEN
But it’s not just philosophy.
STEVE ESTRADA
“From a practical and technology perspective, it’s just faster, cheaper, and more secure than traditional systems. Transactions can settle instantly on a 24-7 basis without cross-border constraints. And that can happen at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Now to be clear, I don’t crypto. But I know plenty of people who started as newbies and now have diverse portfolios of cryptocurrencies. I’m willing to accept the impression of crypto as a fringe market impacted by lazy reporting, a handful of bad actors, and a regulatory environment that has been conservative and hostile to what’s new. But that’s starting to change.
STEVE ESTRADA
“You’re really starting to see that from a numbers perspective. Just five years ago, 65 million people globally owned some form of digital asset. That number now in 2025 is 700 million. That’s over a 10x increase in a five-year period. You’re looking at an industry that has somewhere between 40 and 70 million active users every month. That’s a 10 million increase from just a year ago.
And so you think, Wow, that’s a huge increase. But 700 million people is still only a fraction of the population. We are just scratching the surface.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Let’s scratch that surface with a couple more S words. If every business must address my four S in business, how does crypto address:
SPECIALIZE: What is this?
SELL: Who needs this?
SECURE: What can disrupt this?
SCALE: How do we expand this?
These four categories turn disruption into industry. Steve’s provided us with the current definitions and components. He’s outlined the philosophy and practicality. And now he needs to explain prediction markets.
STEVE ESTRADA
“Prediction markets…these are platforms where people are buying and selling contracts tied to the outcome of future events. Whether it’s elections, sporting events, economic indicators, anything that hasn’t happened yet.
And they differ from gambling in the sense that they move on coordinated crowdsourcing and collective market dynamics of what people think is going to happen. They’re not based on fixed odds set by a centralized bookmaker.”
ALEX EFFGEN
It’s not gambling, but they sound like prop bets. Proposition bets are made regarding the occurrence or non-occurrence of an event not directly affecting a game’s outcome. The length of the National Anthem before the start of a game, or what team wins a coin toss are examples of common prop bets.
But prediction markets SPECIALIZE by not being centralized. And their value comes from crowdsourcing.
STEVE ESTRADA
“We’re starting to see that they’re more accurate barometers of what’s going to happen. A great example of this was the New Jersey governor’s election from a couple of weeks ago. The pundits in polling saw it as a neck-and-neck race between Mickie Sherrill and Jack Ciattarelli. They said Sherrill had maybe a 1% edge going in.
Meanwhile, if you were looking at the prediction markets, they were showing Sherrill as having an 80% chance of winning. Very different from what the pundits and experts were saying. In the end, she won by 13 points. A much larger margin than experts predicted. And that’s not a one-off.
You’re starting to see Google and Yahoo looking to integrate these prediction markets. DraftKings. I may not have the numbers exactly right, but the bigger ones out there are Polymarket and Kalshi. And a couple of months ago, Kalshi was looking at a $2 billion valuation. I think right now they’re looking, just a few months later, at a $10 billion valuation.
The technology in the industry allows for these platforms to dynamically move based on that crowdsourced information in a decentralized way that doesn’t rely on those centralized bookmakers. You’re able to do this on these decentralized rails, these platforms like Polymarket who are running decentralized platforms and putting up these scenarios. They’re not putting odds up, they’re putting scenarios up and people are buying and selling into these contracts and moving the odds based out of a decentralized model that doesn’t rely on a centralized actor to set the odds, set the market. The market moves itself.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Centralized vs decentralized came up a lot in our conversation. A centralized infrastructure comes with conventional safeguards of protocols and people. But conventional safeguards cost money, and they take time to process. Decentralizing reduces and removes these impediments, to attract the attention of new markets.
STEVE ESTRADA
“Instead of paying 3% to 5% or more for a transaction, that’s going to settle cross border three days from now, you’re paying in some cases as low as a 10th of a percent. And these transactions are settling instantaneously.
So if you’re a small business, that margin is huge for you. Going from 3% to 0.1%, that’s huge. You’re saving all those costs. Instead of those going to credit card fees, that’s money that for a small business makes a huge difference.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Decentralizing transactions removes the financial borders between countries. That means crypto provides value to emerging markets. Money sent from the US or EU to developing countries gets there faster without the high transaction costs. And Steve says that value not lost to intermediaries goes to the people who need it the most.
STEVE ESTRADA
“My wife is from England. When she moved here, she would not have been able to rent a car because she did not have a credit profile in the US. Someone in that situation who doesn’t have the credit profile because they haven’t lived here long enough to be able to rent a car.
What if they needed to get somewhere? If you look at where crypto is going, you’re starting to see companies offering crypto-backed credit cards. Someone coming from a developing country who moves to the US—maybe they couldn’t get a bank account—but by being online, being part of a Discord group, having a little bit of Bitcoin or ETH or SOL or what have you, they were able to get into DeFi and into the crypto world and starting to build assets.
Now you have some of these assets that you can then use as the collateral for a crypto-backed credit card. They can come here and almost instantaneously have access to a crypto-backed credit card built on an airdrop from a project that they were following on Discord. And now that person has the ability to go and rent that car.
And they didn’t need the traditional large-scale banking system to tell them yes or no, whether or not you have access to a car that gets you where you need to go. In an increasingly global world, something like that is a perfect example of the value that crypto brings to people who were debanked otherwise.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of The Future Indicative’s Crypto episode. In Part 2 we’ll explore the role AI can play in securing crypto (and vice versa). And how a combination of regulation, user experience, and privacy will help SCALE this decentralized product.
While opinions expressed are solely our own, like democratized finance anyone can participate in the risks and the rewards of further discussion. Let’s eliminate the reliance on traditional gatekeepers and share the wealth you find in this topic. On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we value your time.
