My guest today is a guy named "Jon."  Jon wouldn’t tell me his last name or where he’s located.

Jon isn't a mysterious figure I met on an underground Telegram pump-and-dump group or a darknet market operator.

To the contrary, he's the COO of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world: ShapeShift.io.

Over time, ShapeShift is becoming somewhat of a crypto conglomerate. They recently purchased Hardware wallet maker KeepKey. They also run the pricing website CoinCap and the do-it-yourself index fund creation tool, Prism (currently in private beta).

In this episode, I wanted to speak with the person in charge of end-to-end operations at ShapeShift. This conversation yields an inside look at one of the cryosphere's most influential companies.

Topics include:

• The thesis that ties together ShapeShift's products, brands, and websites.
  
• How ShapeShift is similar to decentralized exchanges, and how it’s different.
  
• ShapeShift’s product for creating your own crypto hedge fund, called Prism.
  
• The mechanics of how Prism works, and how Prism creates Ethereum-based smart contracts.
  
• What ShapeShift's organizational structure looks like.
• Why people who run exchanges tend to stay out of the public eye.
• ShapeShift’s relationship with other exchange operators
• How running a non-custodial exchange differs from running a custodial exchange.
• Why cryptocurrency exchanges get a bad rap.

Note: This Episode of Flippening is Made Possible by Nomics' free Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin API.

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