COINS Podcast Speaker Highlight: Erik Voorhees from ShapeShift
Erik Voorhees is a thought leader and serial entrepreneur in the crypto space with his most notable contribution being his work towards encouraging self-ownership and financial sovereignty in the crypto space.
He is the CEO and founder of ShapeShift, a trading platform that pioneered the self-custody revolution that has since proliferated most decentralized exchanges in the industry.
Since he founded ShapeShift in 2014, the platform has grown to support over 750 cryptocurrencies that can be traded in a secure non-custodial manner meaning the user maintains custody of their funds and is protected from counter-party risks.
Erik appears in many episodes of the COINS podcast, including Episode 1: “The War.” In that episode, the guests discuss what led to the eventual creation of cryptocurrency in the first place.
“Under a gold standard, a government can only spend what it taxes and what it borrows,” Erik explains in the episode. “If you remove gold, and you have a purely fiat money like we do today, the government can literally just print as much as they want.
“The reason this is so insidious,” Erik went on to say, “is that when the government does this, they are able to buy goods and services… and over years that money circulates through the economy and prices rise with time —but the government is able to benefit.”
Erik says it would be as though someone built a counterfeit operation and started just printing money to debase the currency. Watch the beginning of Erik’s talk during Episode 1 of COINS below:
ShapeShift has been a centralized exchange for the last seven years and just recently announced a shift towards a decentralized framework that maintains fidelity while facilitating the principles of self-sovereignty embodied by cryptocurrencies.
In his Twitter announcement of the company’s move towards a decentralized structure, Erik said that “centralization has become a liability to the realization of ShapeShift’s vision.”
With a shift towards decentralization, Erik also announced the beginning of open-sourcing the ShapeShift project and re-organizing the platform around a borderless decentralized community governed by holders of the FOX token. In a Twitter thread, Erik said, “tokens, more than equity ever can be, are borderless and immutable.”
“To build a global platform for crypto finance, [decentralization] is the appropriate base of economic arrangement,” Erik added.
Voorhees was previously head of marketing for BitInstant — a multi-signature bitcoin broker, wallet, and payment processor — before moving on to cofound Coinapult (a multi-signature bitcoin broker).
He also studied Business leadership and Political Economics at the University Puget Sound.
