Interview with Xtrade.io Advisor: Lex Sokolin

Lex Sokolin is a futurist entrepreneur focused on the next generation of financial services. He directs Fintech Strategy at Autonomous Research, a global research firm for the financial sector. Lex spoke to us about where he see’s xtrade.io going and the landscape as a whole.

You have a large following on LinkedIn and are a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, CNBC, Reuters, Investopedia, American Banker, ThinkAdvisor, and Investment News, among many others. What are you passionate about and how did you develop your voice?

I am deeply interested in the creative destruction occurring at the intersection of finance, media and high tech. We are at a unique moment in time, where the vectors of innovation, technological change and global community are washing away the defences of traditional financial institutions. The underlying platform shifts — from blockchain and crypto, to artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, and the Internet of Things — keep accelerating. And this in turn fuels creativity and entrepreneurship.

I love the Fintech space because it lets me combine multiple shards of interests into a coherent voice. I’ve worked on Wall Street at Lehman, Barclays and Deutsche, lucky to experience both the ups and the downs. Afterwards, I founded, built and sold a roboadvisor company, and then helped build a wealth tech platform for financial institutions called AdvisorEngine. I’ve also been a practicing visual artist, a web and graphic designer, and am now exploring the VR space. But all of a sudden, it’s possible to talk about all these things as one, because software is melding all the pieces together.

At Autonomous NEXT, I’ve focused on refining a point of view about the different trends in the space into a coherent framework that explains the symptoms, and where things are going next for finance. And if you can articulate clearly a vision that turns out to be consistent with reality over time, people start to listen.

How did you first get involved with cryptocurrency? What problems and opportunities in the market currently stand out?

I went to the Future of Money conference in San Francisco a few years back, considering myself a fintech entrepreneur that was generally up to speed. One of the presenters asked how many people in the audience had a Bitcoin — about 33% of the hands shot up, and mine didn’t. So I bought my first Bitcoin the next day, and, as everyone, wish I bought 100x more! Since then, I’ve been looking at crypto currency from a research perspective at Autonomous. We mapped out the developments in the ICO space in mid 2017 in a deck called Token Mania, and have been figuring out what infrastructure needs to be put in place for crypto and traditional finance to meld together.

And this is one of the biggest opportunities of our generation. While some prefer true libertarian techno-utopia, we still live in a world of humans that have agreed on societies, laws and markets. Blockchain is a new lego piece of infrastructure, like electricity or the web. Crypto tokens and coins are new asset classes. The challenge of connecting both of these into the existing world will create the road to digitize $80 trillion of global equities and $500 trillion of all real and financial assets. That’s bigger than $7 trillion of gold (or “digital gold”), thank you very much.

You’ve had a successful exit in the FinTech space and worked at some of the largest financial institutions in the world. What drew you to XTRADE.io as a board member and Advisor?

XTRADE.io makes sense to me, as a company and a thesis for crypto more broadly. There are many investors in crypto today speculating on small-cap coins, or Asian versions of various protocols, or ICO presales for short-term gains. But the real progress in the space won’t come from those speculators, though their capital may certainly help. The real progress will come from building technology applications that are used in the course of business by thousands of people and institutions. And we are still at the very beginning of that journey.

The vision of creating a trading infrastructure that allows today’s institutional investors to use the tools they know in a new market is compelling. The first rule of designing good software is figuring out how to remove friction and improving the user experience. For trading, that is plugging into the FIX protocol already used by thousands of firms, and creating best execution and liquidity. And if the financial infrastructure becomes more mature and fair, more investment and creativity will flow into the space.

What excites you most about the industry today? What is your outlook for 2018?

A correction in 2018, from either regulation or increased investor experience, will be great for the space. Really interesting projects will keep getting funded, the smartest people will keep choosing to work in this area, and capital will still be available for the right moonshots. Hopefully we get to enjoy it all before the singularity arrives!