Peter Smith’s two-year Bitcoin detour is still going.

Peter Smith once looked for engineers by wandering through GitHub projects on his iPhone late at night. He admitted that the method would not scale. It is a pleasingly small detail in a career usually described with very large numbers: the chief executive, the glowing screen, the possibility that the next person he needed was quietly making something interesting elsewhere.

He had not set out to become a venture-backed CEO. Nor had he expected Bitcoin to become a permanent occupation. When he first became involved, he imagined working on it for a couple of years before another subject caught his attention. By January 2024, he was explaining why the departure had never happened: crypto kept changing. There was always more to understand.

In a business fond of declaring the future every Thursday, Smith has accumulated a less theatrical distinction. He became Blockchain.com’s CEO in 2014 and has kept the job through expansion, a lending crisis, staff cuts and a new arrangement that shares leadership across the Atlantic. His education has included the awkward discovery that a company can grow much faster than its founder’s original job description.

The attraction was on the other side of the border

Smith is American, based in London, with a working life that has taken him through Europe, the Middle East, East Africa and Asia. Those places matter to his explanation of Bitcoin. He describes becoming interested while living in emerging markets, where the ability to move value directly between people seemed more consequential than another interesting piece of software.

His starting question was practical: what happens when the financial choices available to someone depend heavily on where they were born? Access to dollars, a functioning banking system and straightforward international payments can feel ordinary from one address and remote from another. Smith’s attraction to an internet-based form of money grew from that difference.

He has returned to this idea as the company has become more complicated. In a February 2025 conversation, he called the problem he wanted to work on “economic freedom and choice.” The phrasing is expansive; the underlying ambition is specific. He wants people to be able to transact across borders and choose which financial assets they hold.

There is a useful tension here. Smith runs a business with institutional customers and a substantial product menu, yet his account of its purpose begins with an individual trying to do something with money. That gives the corporate story a human unit of measurement. A transaction eventually belongs to someone, even when several layers of financial machinery have gathered around it.

“economic freedom and choice”

Peter Smith, February 2025

First, make the money visible

Blockchain.com’s roots lie in Blockchain.info, the Bitcoin explorer project that began in 2011. Ben Reeves built the original tool; Reeves, Nicolas Cary and Smith are identified as the company’s co-founders. The early work answered a wonderfully plain question for a supposedly revolutionary technology: where had a transaction gone?

The explorer made Bitcoin’s public records searchable. Developer tools followed, then wallet software that let people use the currency while retaining control of their private keys. The sequence is worth lingering over. Looking up money and moving money are adjacent activities. A useful window into the network could become a useful way to participate in it.

In a 2019 conversation with Laura Shin, Smith described the effort required to make control of one’s own funds convenient. The work included rewriting encryption libraries. A slogan can fit on a conference backdrop; making the software behind it usable takes longer. His early product argument depended on people being able to keep control without having to become specialists.

Outside investment widened the company’s possibilities. Blockchain raised $30.5 million in 2014, followed by a $40 million round in 2017. The business expanded beyond its original tools into brokerage, exchange services and institutional finance. Each new activity brought another kind of customer and another kind of responsibility. The person who once helped make Bitcoin understandable was now overseeing a company that had to execute trades, manage relationships and judge financial risk.

A CEO who wanted people to say no

Smith’s advice on hiring contains an instruction that deserves to escape the interview room: “Hire People Who Will Say No.” He wanted colleagues with integrity and the ability to take a difficult stand. On reference calls, he suggested asking when a candidate had last done exactly that, and why. Agreement was an insufficient qualification.

The same essay pushed interviewers to have definite views. A neutral answer can conceal a reluctance to defend a judgment. He wanted hiring decisions that exposed those judgments and made it possible to learn whose assessments proved useful. Beneath the late-night GitHub browsing sat a fairly exacting view of how a team should decide.

By 2019, his published lessons had become more personal. He warned against recruiting the most impressive-looking executive simply for the satisfaction of announcing the appointment. Commitment to the mission and willingness to do hands-on work mattered more. He also urged founders to build strong finance and talent functions early, rather than treating them as additions to be made once everything else was settled.

One boardroom anecdote gives these lessons some texture. Antony Jenkins, then a board member, had threatened to make Smith’s time away from work a board-meeting metric. Even taking a break apparently required governance. Elsewhere, Smith’s author biography asked anyone approaching him about a difficult project to include a book recommendation. An introduction, ideally, should arrive with something to read.

The expensive part of the education

In April 2022, Smith stood alongside Jerry Jones as Blockchain.com announced its Dallas Cowboys partnership. The agreement put the company inside the stadium experience through branding, events and fan activities. Smith spoke about growing up in rural America, where football was part of the culture. For an American who had spent much of his adult life abroad, the association carried a personal resonance.

The following months were considerably less celebratory. Blockchain.com had lent to Three Arrows Capital, the crypto hedge fund whose collapse left a reported $270 million shortfall. In July, the company cut about 150 jobs, roughly a quarter of its workforce, and reduced executive compensation, including Smith’s. Argentina offices were to close and expansion plans were curtailed.

The contraction continued. Another 110 jobs were cut in January 2023. These are necessary entries in any account of Smith’s longevity: a company’s survival and its employees’ experience of that survival can look very different. Earlier enthusiasm about growth met the consequences of a lending decision and a market that had turned.

By November 2023, Blockchain.com had raised $110 million in a round led by Kingsway Capital. The following month, Smith was discussing plans to expand in Turkey and Nigeria and rebuild staffing. Continuing required fresh capital and revised plans. The story had acquired a cost that no wallet-creation milestone could cancel out.

London keeps the product; Dallas gets a co-CEO

The next significant change involved Smith’s own role. In November 2025, he announced that Lane Kasselman would become co-CEO, working from a new US headquarters in Dallas. Smith would continue as CEO and executive chairman from London. He had first met Kasselman in 2015; their relationship had developed through advisory work and senior operating roles.

The division of work was explicit. Smith would concentrate on strategy, customers, engineering, product innovation and infrastructure. Kasselman would lead areas including capital markets, business operations and brand strategy. A business that runs around the clock would spread its senior responsibility across people and time zones.

It is an interesting arrangement for a founder who had written about learning to let other people do their jobs. The new structure formalized a distinction between the work closest to his product interests and the work of running an expanding financial organization. He retained authority while acknowledging that the company needed more than one center of attention.

The title of executive chairman might have encouraged speculation about an exit. His announcement closed that avenue directly: “I’m not going anywhere.” A founder’s promise to keep working can be routine corporate language. In Smith’s case, it also answers the old assumption that Bitcoin would be a temporary stop. The stop has developed its own management structure.

The detour now includes the regulators

The company’s next phase has brought Smith into more formal financial institutions. In February 2026, Blockchain.com secured UK Financial Conduct Authority registration as a cryptoasset business. That registration was distinct from full authorization under the forthcoming permanent regime. Two days later, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission named Smith to its Innovation Advisory Committee, alongside executives from crypto companies and established market operators.

On May 21, Blockchain.com announced a confidential submission of a draft registration statement for a proposed US initial public offering. Share numbers and a price range were still undetermined in that announcement, and the offering remained subject to review and market conditions. For Smith, who was discussing public-market ambitions back in 2019, it marked a concrete step in a long-running plan.

In October, the company announced applications for CFTC registrations that would let it offer US customers regulated derivatives and prediction-market contracts if approved. Smith’s stated aim was to bring activities now spread across different apps into one experience. The filings were applications, with permission still to be obtained. Building the next feature had become inseparable from securing the right to offer it.

Today, Blockchain.com reports more than 95 million wallets created. The number describes the reach of its software, rather than 95 million individual active customers. Smith’s own story is harder to compress into a counter: early curiosity, years of management, a costly failure, relationships that lasted and responsibilities that kept changing. He expected another interest to take over. Bitcoin has been unusually good at supplying the next problem.