I really enjoyed seeing this Wall Street Journal headline yesterday about the Stocktwits launch of crypto trading:

As a founder of Stocktwits way back in 2008, working with Stocktwits CEO Rishi Khana the last few years has been very fulfilling and rewarding. Rishi has the uncanny ability to take all my ideas and leads and follow up and integrate the ones he thinks will work best.

Way back in 2008 when I was starting the company, I would head to Etrade (now Morgan Stanley), Ameritrade (now Schwab), and Schwab (still Schwab) to talk about integrating their API’s to allow the Stocktwits users to trade. It was a huge time suck for me and I won’t get into all the terrible reasons incumbents don’t move quickly or care.

As an early investor in Robinhood, I did convince them to integrate Robinhood into Stocktwits and it was a huge success, but they eventually shut down access as most big companies do. I won’t get into all the reasons I think that was a mistake.

For crypto, I approached Sina Nader the head of partnerships at FTX to both invest in Stocktwits (they did) and offer/integrate FTX trading infrastructure. Sina has been a great champion of Stocktwits and has great instincts around growth and partnerships. FTX has been a growth juggernaut in crypto around the globe most recently raising $400 million at a $32 billion valuation (full disclosure – I am a personal investor in a previous FTX growth round). Rishi, Sina and FTX President Brett Harrison did a great job putting it all together and the trading launched yesterday.

Here is my tweet from yesterday announcing the launch:

Note how Sina is always the gracious partner which is why FTX is lucky to have him and how the best people in that role get deals done and create growth and partnerships that last.

You can download the new Stocktwits IOS app and quickly open an FTX account to buy a wide range of the most popular coins. Give it a try.

You can expect to see a lot more great features come much quicker now in the Stocktwits platform.