Mike Belshe has worked in crypto since the industry’s early days, founding his firm BitGo back in 2013. He is a strong believer in the power of blockchain to transform finance, yet when the time came to take BitGo public this year, Belshe found the entire IPO process is built entirely around legacy practices. On the latest edition of Fortune’s Crypto Playbook vodcast, which you can enjoy on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, Belshe shared the experience of going public—and how he thinks it could be improved.
“The technology can start to change how we take [companies] to market, and maybe more interestingly, it can break up just having the large incumbents that currently run the IPO processes to other more innovative types of markets that may be very different,” said Belshe.
The current IPO process typically involves banks lining up wealthy investors to buy a company’s newly public stock at an agreed upon price in hopes of gaining a “pop” when the stock begins to trade among retail investors a short time later.
Belshe made the case that this is not necessarily the most efficient form of price discovery for a new asset, and that other models such as Dutch auctions or direct listings likely work better, but that Wall Street tends to look down on such alternatives. He also observed that the process of listing stocks for the first time is similar to when blockchain projects issue new tokens.
