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Justin Drake warned that ECDSA, the cryptography securing Bitcoin and Ethereum, could break before Q-Day, in the worst case “in months, not years,” and an attack on Ledger devices sold through a third-party reseller has led to about $100 million in losses. Lorenzo Valente, Director of Research, Digital Assets at ARK Invest, says both threats speed up a trend ARK already saw: self-custody is slowly dying.

He tells Laura Shin why ARK favors a barbell of exchanges that own the user and infrastructure like Solana, Uniswap, and Aave, and why he would point a first-time Bitcoin buyer to an ETF. They also cover Satoshi’s coins, why Ethereum’s L1 accrues so little while Robinhood makes millions, and why he calls the buyback craze irrational.

Plus: ARK’s tokenized venture fund, Cloudflare’s agentic commerce plans, and why Binance has never swapped out its USDT despite earning no yield. If he’s right, crypto’s next wave of users may never hold their own keys.

Host:

    • Laura Shin – Founder, CEO and Host of Unchained

Guest: