The Lobbyist at Safe: Julian Grigo Knows "True" Crypto

After a stint with Germany’s Free Democratic Party, he developed a taste for proximity to Berlin politics (and for the German capital’s techno scene). It was a job with an investment bank lobby firm that, surprisingly, would set him on a path, via leading European FinTech, to the center of blockchain innovation in Berlin. He is now the institutional liaison for Safe, which happens to provide the ultra-secure infrastructure –  their smart accounts are the EVM ecosystem’s most battle-tested and most used – to Coinshift’s products. 

Touching on banking regulation and the nature of “true” blockchain finance, Coinshift’s interview with Julian was an apt prelude to the conversations he would have the following week at EthCC in Brussels, where he was the keynote speaker at the first-ever OpenFi summit. Taking the tagline “where degens meet bankers,” the event was a call to “unbundle” accounts from banks, placing them onchain while integrating TradFi and DeFi services. That’s a mission dear to Coinshift’s heart, too.

CS: You got into finance through an unusual path: lobbying. What was that like?

JG: It’s tough. You’re basically always in defense mode, constantly blocking punches from politicians. You’re lobbying for products that are heavily regulated – quite rightly. And they’re not necessarily targeting financially literate audiences. No one, no matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, wants their uncle or grandma to be sold a complex derivative without knowing the mathematics behind it. Those mathematics are usually good for the bank or the issuer, and bad for the investor. The people who do understand the risks would not buy the product. So the work wasn’t always aligned with my values.

 
CS: How did you deal with that tension? 

JG: I quit. After a year and a half with an investment bank lobby in Berlin I moved over to Bitkom, which is the biggest tech lobby association in Europe. It has 2,200 members – big cloud and telecommunication companies; core tech players like Google, Microsoft, Apple, SAP; plus verticals on agritech, aviation, tourism, insurance, automotive, and finance. Finance was the biggest. That’s where I was for three years, from 2017 to 2020, heading up the FinTech department.

 
CS: They hired from outside of tech for that role?  

JG: Interestingly, Bitkom wasn’t looking for someone being very “techy.” They wanted someone from finance, and by that time, that was me. They figured I’d adapt to the tech stuff. Plus, I had a political touch. Whenever there was FinTech regulation, I’d been down at the Bundestag speaking in front of parliamentarians. I got exposure to payment regulation, cloud outsourcing, authentication – all the hot topics in digital finance. 

CS: What made you move on?

JG: When you’re pitching at the European Commission or Parliament, there's a new topic, a new agenda, every time. You don’t get the sense that you’re building something. It’s like you’re working horizontally, not vertically. But after being the lobbyist for N26, PayPal, Google, you’re being quoted in newspapers, you’re on radio shows and podcasts. You get noticed. One day the CEO of an online bank asked me to meet. I had no idea what he wanted. At some point he asked me if I liked living in Berlin. I thought, what kind of question is that to ask your lobbyist? Long story short, I joined Solaris as MD for digital assets in October, 2020. The next summer, we became a unicorn. 

CS: Peak Covid era. DeFi Summer. 

JG: There was a lot going on in those years! When I started we were 350-400 people, and at the peak we were 900. They already had the banking license, so that was my first time working in a regulated bank. As a lobbyist, you’re working on top of the regulation in its genesis, before it becomes law. At a bank, you’re working under existing law. It’s painful: you get to see exactly how the system is slowing you down.

CS: What were the biggest pain points in FinTech at that time?

JG: The seizing of funds and the termination of customers. These are really painful, because the bank has to do it, not the regulators. As a bank, you are always at the risk of having your license withdrawn by the supervisory authority. And a bank is nothing without a license. So you will always, always adhere to regulations. You can fight them in lobbying stage, but once they are in place, you comply. You don’t think twice to report a customer or seize their funds.  

You can’t ask the customer what they’re doing, either – that would create an opportunity for them to get ahead of it. You have to spy on the customer and ultimately kill their access.

This system is also massively exclusive. There are entire countries whose citizens aren’t allowed because of sanctions. If you want to, you can ban someone because you don’t like their face or the sound of their last name. Banks can do anything they want to control for risk. It’s stifling. 

CS: Was that irritation productive, in terms of showing you what wasn’t working – or inspiring you to try to fix it?

JG: When I started at Solaris, I read all the [Andreas] Antonopolous books – Mastering Bitcoin, Mastering Ethereum, Mastering the Lightning Network. As a non-techie, you skip the source code, but you get to know the mechanics of mining, staking, and so on. It really clicked with me. I discovered this middle layer of tech, where you don’t keep the keys; that's done by FireBlocks for the crypto unit. The front end is done by partners. You don't really have a B2C direct product that you can touch. You may think that gets you around regulation, but the opposite is true. Outsourcing agreements are highly regulated, and the Solaris business model is outsourcing. So that makes you a regulated bank – which restricts what you can do. That’s just on the fintech side, without even getting into crypto-specific issues. 

CS: And those were the issues that were drawing you in? 

JG: When I moved from FinTech to blockchain in 2020, I saw this vastly different, massively innovative ecosystem that I’d be sitting just outside of. I became passionate about crypto and wanted to be fully on the other side, truly in web3. That’s exactly where I am, so the story has a happy ending.

 
CS: This is a phrase that comes up quite a bit: “true crypto” or “truly onchain.” These terms mean different things to different people, but to many, hybrid models don’t meet the criteria. What does “truly onchain” to you? What are the necessary conditions?

JG: “Real crypto” is what Coinshift’s building. It’s infrastructure that gives access to self custody. Sure, there's nuance to it, but true, true crypto is self-custodial. It’s permissionless. It’s smart contracts where the user really controls the account, has the private key. A user can be kept out of a bank, but in “real” crypto the funds cannot be taken away. 
 

CS: Do you feel like people working in crypto are more personally invested than they are in fintech or traditional banks? Not necessarily financially, in terms of owning crypto or digital assets, but an ideological personal investment.

JG: I wouldn't say everyone. I'm sure that in Fire Blocks and some DeFi protocols there are tech and product guys who are in it for the money. That's totally fine. But yes, the amount of people who are passionate about what they do and will explicitly tell you they'll never step foot into a bank office again is crazy high. I’ve seen a few industries, and in all my different jobs before in internships, I've never ever seen people as passionate as they are in crypto.

CS: Does everyone need to share that passion if we’re going to see widespread adoption? 

JG: People say they “don’t understand” crypto, and hence it doesn’t click with them. The concept is such a paradigm shift, so you really need to drill down into the tech to become passionate about its superior infrastructure. But I don’t think that passion is necessary for everyone if we want to have mass adoption. We don’t need everyone to get deep in the tech stack. We just need a better product than what web2 offers. It’s just that for now, we don't have those superior applications. 

CS: Can we go back to the psychology there, given your experience?

JG: I'm German, and it wasn’t so long ago that we had hyperinflation here. We also had two dictatorships – and the one in East Germany until only 30 years ago. People saw a complete misuse of power here, and an environment where technology was used for surveillance, for deplatforming. Now we have a new paradigm that would actually insure us against these abuses of power. That’s why crypto has a special relevance in Berlin. You don’t need to be German or to have lived through hyperinflation or oppression to be aware of that past.  

Even now, you can look at what’s going on with conspiracy theory and fake news and AI and censorship. It’s understandable that it’s hard for people to know what’s true. But cryptographic ownership, cryptographic proofs – they can give us that certainty. Nothing else can. That’s what distinguishes this from web2, from everything that’s come before. Blockchain gives you a timestamp. That’s what Vitalik is talking about when he talks about cypherpunk values.

CS: So the idea that you need to be able to nerd out on the tech stack is potentially a gatekeeping mechanism? And the real thing is we need interfaces that are accessible while also delivering on the conditions of “real” crypto – instead of making good UX synonymous with centralization? 

JG: But it’s not a linear approach. Decentralization is a journey. Or something like that.

Even if you’re encouraging self-custody, you might be building some things on top of centralized infrastructure. You might have smart contracts onchain, fully decentralized, and have a centralized front end. Maybe there is some fragmentation, but we can still strive to have as many of these pieces as possible be censorship resistant and to uphold those values. It's going to take time, and I think the industry is aware of that. Thought leaders and evangelists need to continue to think critically about what we are doing and how the industry is shifting. 

CS: If we make those compromises, are we more liable to simple re-create the institutions we’re trying to evolve past? In other words, how do we resist the human urge to centralize? 

JG: Solve that and you’ve solved a huge planetary question! Take FireBlocks. They take security very seriously and they’re extremely good at it: to date, they’ve never been hacked. They’re enabling mass adoption. They’re also a great example of the danger of the risk of centralization when you get too successful. You could say the same for Coinbase and so on. For years we’ve been talking about allowing permissions on permissionless blockchains. In my view, it’s a headache – why use a blockchain if you’re going to centralize? Just use the centralized tools. All those pictures from your last vacation on your Apple cloud? There’s no need to decentralize that.

 You see BlackRock with their ETFs organized onchain and investing in tokenized T-bills. That’s a centralized intermediary with all the power to build on something given to them by Deloitte or Accenture – everyone wants to go to bed with BlackRock – and yet they are building on a decentralized tech stack. What does this tell us? That even institutions like BlackRock – and that's probably not the biggest investor – are opting for the most decentralized, disintermediated tech stack. Why? Because they cannot be fucked over by anyone. They cannot afford to take that risk. Look at Russia: when the ECF and the Fed seized funds from the Russian central bank, it taught the whole world that everything can be seized. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a nation state. When value is onchain, it cannot be taken from you. If you can memorize those 12 words – and if you can’t, you can write it on your biceps and cover it up with your t-shirt – you can hold the keys. 

So yes, we are creating centralization risks, but as long as we are decentralized at a fundamental level, we can still stick to our values. But anyone can understand that if we allow centralization on layer 1, if we’ve got censorship on here, then we’ve got nothing. Even BlackRock sees that.

CS: A big part of the mission at Coinshift is to make compliance easy, and error-proof, for peace of mind. Achieving that, in our view, involves connecting to existing institutions. You can’t operate in a bubble, and ignoring existing infrastructure makes it more likely that we’ll simply repeat our mistakes. Are you an optimist, Julian?

JG: I am. 

CS: Even about standing on the shoulders of institutions past? 

JG: We know from psychology research that the biggest driving factor for happiness is inclusion, interconnectedness. This is ingrained in our DNA, in our nervous system, as human beings. It’s also just a practical approach: everyone wants to have a good life. 

All images of Berlin Reichstag courtesy of Ank Kumar (via Wikimedia Commons).

All other images courtesy of Julian Grigo.