Episode
Rootstock Labs – Beyond Digital Gold: Making Bitcoin Productive Collateral
- Podcast
- The Crypto Conversation
- Published
- May 24, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1389
- Processing state
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- https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/podcasts
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Summary
Richard Green is Director of Institutional and Ecosystem at Rootstock Labs , a core contributor to Rootstock, the Bitcoin sidechain that has been quietly running for eight years and now anchors a growing slice of institutional Bitcoin DeFi. Based in London, Green came to crypto through fifteen years in traditional finance — a decade at Bloomberg working with banks and high-frequency trading desks, followed by a stint at Circle building out the European stablecoin business — before going further down the Bitcoin rabbit hole when emerging-market clients made clear they wanted something more than a dollar wrapper. Why you should listen Green's central argument is that the digital gold narrative, while true, is incomplete and increasingly expensive to leave unchallenged. There is roughly $260 billion in Bitcoin sitting idle on corporate treasuries, ETF balance sheets and miner books, paying 10 to 50 basis points a year in custody fees and earning nothing. That, he says, is what pristine collateral looks like when it has nowhere productive to go. Rootstock's pitch is to change the denominator: keep the security model of Bitcoin, but give holders the ability to borrow against their stack, run it through tokenized real-world asset vaults, or deploy it into native yield strategies without selling a single satoshi. The first product out of the new institutional unit, launching in the next month, is a Bitcoin-collateralized loan aimed squarely at miners who are sitting on inventory but still need to pay the power bill. The proof points are no longer theoretical. Mercado Bitcoin recently deployed $20 million of tokenized private credit on Rootstock, with a $100 million target by April, giving Bitcoin holders Brazilian receivables and corporate debt exposure they would otherwise s…