Rootstock Labs – Beyond Digital Gold: Making Bitcoin Productive Collateral
About this episode
Richard Green discusses how Rootstock Labs aims to make Bitcoin productive collateral beyond its digital gold narrative.
Richard Green is Director of Institutional and Ecosystem at Rootstock Labs , a core contributor to Rootstock, the Bitcoin sidechain that has been quietly running for eight years and now anchors a growing slice of institutional Bitcoin DeFi. Based in London, Green came to crypto through fifteen years in traditional finance — a decade at Bloomberg working with banks and high-frequency trading desks, followed by a stint at Circle building out the European stablecoin business — before going further down the Bitcoin rabbit hole when emerging-market clients made clear they wanted something more than a dollar wrapper. Why you should listen Green's central argument is that the digital gold narrative, while true, is incomplete and increasingly expensive to leave unchallenged. There is roughly $260 billion in Bitcoin sitting idle on corporate treasuries, ETF balance sheets and miner books, paying 10 to 50 basis points a year in custody fees and earning nothing. That, he says, is what pristine collateral looks like when it has nowhere productive to go. Rootstock's pitch is to change the denominator: keep the security model of Bitcoin, but give holders the ability to borrow against their…
More episodes of The Crypto Conversation
- Shufti – Fighting AI Fraud With AI
- Margin Trade – One Account, Every Market
- Ouinex – Getting Retail Out of the Shark Tank
- oneBanking – The AI App For Finance
- Cherry Servers – Building Decentralized Cloud Infrastructure
- Mitrade – Trading the Great Convergence
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Crypto Conversation podcast page.