Note: The original video interview is from GlobalStake, published on August 1, 2025!
In the final episode of Season 4 of GlobalStake, the team is honored to have William E. Quigley, co-founder of WAX and Tether, for an interview. This conversation covers William's past experiences as an investor and how he applied those experiences in the early blockchain industry. He also presents a unique and novel viewpoint that blockchain technology is not intended to solve problems in numerous application scenarios, but is only suitable for a few specific situations. At the end of the conversation, he particularly emphasized the advantages of stablecoins and shared his views on the future development of the industry.
Ryan Haczynski: Hello everyone, welcome to DecentraLounge brought to you by GlobalStake. GlobalStake is a truly decentralized bare-metal staking service provider certified with SOC 2 Type II. Today, we are honored to invite a special guest—William E. Quigley. William is the co-founder of WAX. WAX is a custom layer one blockchain designed specifically for NFTs, Web3 games, and digital collectibles, having collaborated with numerous brands like Funko, Street Fighter, Topps, AMC, creating over 500 million NFTs and becoming a leading force at the intersection of culture and cryptocurrency. However, William's impact on the industry extends far beyond WAX; he is also a co-founder of the stablecoin Tether (USDT), the most widely used stablecoin in the world, laying the foundation for liquidity and trading infrastructure in modern cryptocurrency. Before venturing into cryptocurrency, William had a brilliant resume in traditional technology and venture capital. He helped kickstart PayPal, was an early supporter of MP3.com and NetZero, and held executive positions in other companies. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and has over thirty years of experience in scaling breakthrough technologies. William brings a rare institutional insight to the decentralized space. William, it’s a great honor to have you here today. Shall we start with your background story, for instance, how you transitioned from the Web2 domain into this wonderful world of Web3?
William Quigley: Of course. Let me clarify one thing first, I was the first institutional investor in PayPal; I was not directly involved in its founding, just wanted to make that clear. As for the shift from venture capital to cryptocurrency or blockchain-related fields—I actually don't like the term "Web3"—it mainly stems from my intersection with video games. I co-founded the first consumer internet venture capital fund with two other partners, and we made many of the investments you mentioned at the beginning. Meanwhile, I am also an avid video game player, always thinking about ways to make money in the video game space. Ultimately, I collaborated with a friend who pioneered the first way to convert virtual items from video games into fiat currency (real money), and he invited me to join his board, and we became partners in that company, along with another partner. In fact, we worked together for seven or eight years, and although it is not widely known, the virtual goods business in video games can be said to be a precursor to cryptocurrency. The reason I say this is that by the mid-21st century, virtual goods in video games had effectively become a substitute for currency on a global scale. There are billions of young people who cannot access credit cards or bank accounts—from a U.S. perspective, we might think everyone has Venmo, PayPal, and credit cards, but that is not the case in much of the world—they use these virtual goods to purchase items, of course, but also to play video games; they are treated as substitutes for currency. We operate the two largest markets, facilitating transactions across more than 100 countries. When Bitcoin emerged in 2010, 2011, and 2012, many early adopters in this industry came from my field—the virtual goods trading industry. For us, the appeal of Bitcoin was very natural because we had been helping people trade these things. You might know that sometimes comparing things can give you a clearer perspective than someone who is completely clueless. We were used to the hassles video game publishers caused for people wanting to trade virtual goods because these are private companies; they don't like you trading their virtual goods, and oftentimes, they would ban your account and kick you out of the game. Of course, some publishers are open to this, but many do not support it. Later, my partner introduced me to Bitcoin and explained that it was operated by a distributed team and compensated through cryptocurrency. Anyone can use it; it can be transferred peer-to-peer to others, and there is no central authority deciding whether you deserve to have it, right? That was very appealing. But I had to overcome the psychological barriers from my experiences in the 90s; all venture capitalists have scars, and my scar was related to "magic internet money." There were several attempts back then to create internet currency, and we didn’t know it at the time, but one issue was the lack of blockchain to control the issuance of that cryptocurrency. In early versions, there were some private companies, you know, it was a bit of a "trust me" situation where they claimed to issue a certain amount of this internet digital currency, but there was no real way to verify that. So many times, these companies would let their own currency devalue, and at the time, there wasn't enough e-commerce environment to support it. But Bitcoin seemed to solve all the problems I experienced, which is why I accepted it. However, it took a year and a half from the first time I heard about Bitcoin to truly diving in because I didn’t really understand what blockchain was. For others who might feel similarly confused, I want to say don’t feel embarrassed because I spent three years building blockchain before I truly understood what it was; I really didn’t get it before. Then we spent several more years exploring it, trying to explain it to others, and I would think, wow, I really struggle to explain this. Later, at some point, I suddenly got it; I completely understood the magic of blockchain. Since then, I could easily see where blockchain was useful and where it wasn’t, because there were many experiments going on at the time, but most of them shouldn’t have been because they didn’t leverage the value of blockchain. When I help people build projects in the blockchain environment, the first thing I do is explain the power of blockchain to them. I like to tell people that blockchain is the worst choice in almost every way, right? It is the worst choice in almost every aspect, but there are a few things it is unparalleled at. Once you understand that, you can focus as an entrepreneur on what I should try to build to leverage this unique capability. But first, you need to understand that, and that requires some effort, which many people are unwilling to put in; they just want to jump right in.
Ryan Haczynski: That's quite a crazy and fascinating backstory. We had a guest before whose mother was actually playing (World of Warcraft); she said her mother was 11 years old at the time and asked her if she could learn more about Bitcoin because it was said that someone was trading items with Bitcoin in (World of Warcraft). Given your background in digital asset items in video games, is that the inspiration for WAX's birth? WAX is quite unique compared to other layer one blockchains; could you explain it in detail?
William Quigley: Yes, it certainly is. First of all, it is purpose-built. This goes way back, but you know, if you pitch to venture capitalists, even now, if you say, "I have a platform that can do what? It can do everything," that's not a good pitch, right? We don’t like "Swiss Army knife" things because they mean you don’t know how to sell it; you want customers to figure out how to use it themselves, which is not a good situation because we are all competing for the mindshare of users in business. If you can't precisely target your customers and clarify the specific benefits, then likely no one will pay attention to it. So when we were considering how to tokenize items—today we don’t have time to discuss what tokenization is in detail, but for simplicity, let’s say it’s a way of putting some record of something (possibly a physical item) on the blockchain—when we tried to figure out what we could do, video game skins (virtual items) were what we most wanted to do because we thought, "Hey, if we put a lot of skins on the blockchain, you know, no video game publisher can mess with that anymore because blockchains can't be censored." But back then, around 2013, blockchains were very clunky; they were all forks of Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin blockchain was very clunky. Then Mastercoin came along, and we played an important role in helping to build Mastercoin, which was the precursor to Ethereum. So Mastercoin was the first attempt to use a smart contract to add a smart layer on a blockchain, and then, because it was designed to interoperate with Bitcoin, and I think the core Bitcoin developers were blind to the need for a smart layer on the Bitcoin blockchain, they didn’t support it. So the core team of Mastercoin then created a native chain in 2014, which was very risky, and they called it Ethereum, saying, "Hey, we will have a native blockchain integrated with a smart contract system." But before that, when it was still Mastercoin, we launched Tether on it; we could create something fungible, which means it is the same as every dollar bill, fungible things are the same cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, which is much easier than non-fungible cryptocurrencies where each one is unique. So we thought, "Well, skins are unique; each skin is different, but dollars are fungible." So we decided to create a cryptocurrency representing the dollar, and we launched it on Mastercoin, and from there it expanded to many other blockchains. But the idea of tokenizing video game items still mattered a lot to us. Then in 2017, an early and very prolific blockchain designer proposed a way to speed up transaction processing, which we called a consensus mechanism, and his name was Dan Larimer. We saw it and thought, "Oh, maybe the speed is fast enough now that we can actually launch unique items on the blockchain." That's when we decided to launch WAX. So many people, by the way, in 2017, many of them had never used blockchain, right? Most people were just trading things on Binance or Coinbase; they weren't really using blockchains. If you had used a blockchain, you would know how terrible they can be. Usually. So they would ask, "Why do we need a special blockchain? Why can't we just use Ethereum?" I said, "Because Ethereum has congestion issues; it doesn't process transactions fast enough." But you know, what shocked me was that in 2017, Ethereum had been out for two years, but almost everyone using it didn’t understand its major limitation, which was how fast it could process transactions. It wasn't until the NFT craze in 2021 that people said, "Oh, Ethereum is slow." Right? But we recognized this back in 2017, so we said, "Oh, let’s try this experiment; let’s try to do something video game related, including NFTs." NFTs really started to become popular around 2020, and I think that was because we collaborated with Topps trading card company to release one of their IPs called "Garbage Pail Kids"; we issued 50,000 NFTs of "Garbage Pail Kids," which was the first truly branded NFT, and it sold out. I thought it would take about 30 days, but it sold out in 24 hours; that was in April 2020, and it made me realize, "Oh, people really want to do this, so it’s going to get big." A few months later, six or seven months later, 2021 came; you might remember if you weren't in the space at the time, NFTs became a phenomenon. Like everything that becomes a consumer phenomenon, they became excessive and silly; people put some silly things on the chain as NFTs, and people paid excessive prices for them, and the market crashed, just like that. I just want to say one last thing, NFTs are not pretty pictures or video clips. NFTs are just a way of recording information on the blockchain, so they cannot be altered, edited, or anything. They can be a driver's license, a passport, a birth certificate, so I say NFTs will be something that consumers will interact with a lot in the future, even if they might not know they are NFTs. But an immutable, non-reproducible tokenized item is very valuable in today's world where everything has fakes.
Myles Jackson: Your last point leads me to my next question, which is a hot topic in the industry: How do we attract the next billion users to use blockchain? Sometimes, it is also a marketing strategy; for stablecoins like Tether, it has already become a way for institutions to venture into cryptocurrency, such as faster transaction settlements, internal fund transfers, and so on. Do you think gaming will be a mechanism to attract the next billion users? Just as you said, people may not even know they are using cryptocurrencies or blockchain, but it helps the things they use daily run faster and provide a better experience.
William Quigley: The only thing I want to say is that it doesn't make things run faster; blockchain is a terrible database in all dimensions except for one aspect, which is reliability or security, and the certainty that something is authentic. In creating a type of digital item that can be freely distributed peer-to-peer without effort, cost, and instant certainty of its authenticity—this is a type of digital item called a tokenized item—there is no other way to do this. This is the magic of tokenizing items on a permissionless blockchain. So I want to say that blockchain, in its current form, is not a mass-market phenomenon. I worked at The Walt Disney Company for several years, and we had a philosophy that consumers worship the god of convenience. Consumers always choose convenience over any other attributes, whether it’s price, security, or reliability. If you give them a convenient option and a better but very inconvenient option, they will choose the convenient one. And blockchain, in my lifetime, is the most inconvenient technology I have ever participated in for consumers. They are hard to understand, very slow, and even with the improved consensus mechanisms I mentioned, you can still only reach thousands of transactions per second, nothing more. So I don’t think blockchain will become something that involves billions of people. But you can use blockchain as a component of a system, so you can bulk process records onto the blockchain, so if you want to verify something is authentic, you can do it yourself. But databases used in most consumer environments are very good at processing quickly because they don’t need those cumbersome security protocols, and they don’t need those protocols because they are controlled; these databases are kept in highly protected places like Amazon data centers, so Amazon trusts that what is on its database is not fake, right? And it’s hard to put fake things on its servers. This is a longer point, but I just want to quickly note that Amazon can do that, right? Amazon can give you very fast processing speeds, and because this is a controlled database, they can modify it at will without your knowledge, right? Because they control it. But because they control it, they can charge you high fees for using things that rely on their brand, which has a trust marketing element; the brand is essentially a trust node. So by using a blockchain operated remotely by a large number of decentralized participants, you don’t have that brand overhead, but to gain trust in this distributed system, you have to go through more safety checks, and that’s what slows it down and makes it hard to scale. So I think you can use blockchain in certain elements of video games, but I don’t foresee a completely blockchain-based system reaching consumer scale. When venture capitalists entered the blockchain space in 2021, they were completely clueless about it; they kept telling me, "We don’t want just partially blockchain-based things; we want fully blockchain-based things." I said, "But that can’t scale." They said, "Well, maybe we can make it scale." But you know, there’s a lesson here that not understanding what you are investing in can lead to huge financial losses. I’ll leave that for later.
Ryan Haczynski: I want to keep an eye on the time; it feels like our conversation has gone by quickly. You mentioned some things you did not foresee; what are your predictions for the future of the blockchain space?
William Quigley: Clearly, the most used cryptocurrency on Earth is Tether, with an annual trading volume exceeding $30 trillion, all because every cryptocurrency settles with Tether, as people want to settle in terms they understand, like dollars. So the biggest contribution blockchain will provide humanity will be stablecoins. I believe that in the next decade or so, all major economies in the world will tokenize their fiat currencies and use stablecoins. All the major consumer companies in the world, like Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, all of them will have their own stablecoins. All banks may form alliances, as JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are currently doing with several other banks, to issue their own stablecoins, although I don’t think that will be on the blockchain, but that will be the biggest benefit brought about by stablecoins. Then there is the tokenization of real-world assets, which I think is also a very productive area that is taking longer than I expected, but I am confident it will happen. Part of the reason we created WAX was for this. Tokenizing assets is a great way to trade. So I think these two are the biggest areas. I believe DeFi, which needs stablecoins, is also a very large field. To be honest, if we hadn’t faced the oppressive regulatory environment that people like me have had to deal with over the past 15 years, we would be much further today. Many countries are doing everything they can to stifle Bitcoin, then stifle Tether, and then stifle other cryptocurrencies. So it seems we have won this battle, but I still remain cautious. But now we can begin innovating without the constant threat of new regulations shutting these things down, so I hope we will see more innovation in the next five years.
Ryan Haczynski: I know our conversation could continue five times longer than it is now, but for those who want to keep following you, learn your insights, and get updates on WAX, what social media accounts can they follow to stay in touch?
William Quigley: You know, I rarely do these. To be honest, I do podcasts, I speak at conferences, but I mainly like to build things. I do have a Twitter account, @WilliamEQuigley, but I have to say I don’t post much; maybe I should post more, and perhaps once I stop building things, I will start posting more. But there are many podcasts where I talked about various things, especially about cryptocurrency, and people can search on Google and find great content.
Ryan Haczynski: Thank you very much, William. Perhaps we will invite you again to discuss cryptocurrency in depth, as this conversation has been fascinating. We know you have to go. To everyone watching or listening to DecentraLounge today, thank you for tuning in. William, thank you once again for being our guest.
William Quigley: Thank you, goodbye.
*Warm reminder: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice!