When Rayne Steinberg was growing up everyone in his family had to read a book a week, which they would discuss around the dinner table. Steinberg, the co-founder of the ETF provider Wisdom Tree and digital asset investment firm Arca, has finance in his blood. His father Saul graduated Wharton at 19 and became a billionaire by 30. A voracious reader, one of the elder Steinberg’s heroes was Benjamin Franklin.

“Some of the life advice from Benjamin Franklin was from Poor Richards Almanac,” Rayne Steinberg said to me recently (his father passed away in 2012).

“This concept of doing the things you like to do least immediately,” he said. “Every day pretty much in his life, he made a list in the morning of the five things he wanted to do least.” First on the list was the absolute worst task, to be dispatched first thing.

“Tackling that hard thing and just doing it, not procrastinating, that was incredibly powerful,” Steinberg said.

He followed in his father’s footsteps to Wharton and started a business with his brother Jonathan when exchange-traded funds were gaining popularity. At the time, well-known financial products like the S&P 500 stock index were used as the basis of an ETF, which is a large collection of stocks, bonds or commodities that can be bought like shares.

“Our idea was, ‘could you create your own intellectual property that you’d base ETFs on?’” he said. That’s what Wisdom Tree did, offering ETFs on things like a group of high-paying dividend stocks or Japanese equities while hedging Japanese yen currency risk in the same fund. The firm hit a sweet spot and under Rayne’s tenure its asset under management grew to $15 billion (it now has almost $50 billion in global assets and is still run by Jonathan).

A recent market recap by Arca

In 2011 Steinberg decided to leave Wisdom Tree. He’d read the Bitcoin white paper by then and bought some when it was below $100. He’d just been through the financial crisis while at Wisdom Tree, whose stock fell to 70 cents from $10. Bitcoin seemed like an answer.

“I was very aware in being caught up in systemic risk and how you’re just floating on this giant system,” he said. The white paper was “an elegant answer to systemic risk and dealing with double spend and how you’d create an automated money.” The user interface, though, much as it remains today, wasn’t very good. Steinberg didn’t like the hassle of paper wallets and the operational risks associated with Bitcoin, so he sold his 150 coins just before the Mt. Gox theft was revealed in early 2014.

While Mt. Gox triggered one of the many Bitcoin crashes, the price has always rebounded and is now trading for $39,500. The loss isn’t lost on Steinberg.

“I congratulated myself on my incredible timing over that trade,’ he said. “Ha ha.”

Part of striking out on his own without his brother Jonathan involved moving to California where Steinberg started looking into legal cannabis businesses. Very much like crypto, legal weed shops and many associated services were barred by the banking system from having accounts. Payments were incredibly hard to manage and came mostly by way of cash.

Image courtesy of Unsplash

“And then you could use crypto to pay, receive, immediately liquidate it and pay your taxes,” he said. “That was my kind of ‘ah ha’ moment.” Crypto could now do some things better than the traditional financial system, he believed, so he spent several years researching how digital assets work and what kind of infrastructure was in place for investors. What he found wasn’t pretty.

“Our thesis was, that if this truly was an Internet-like revolution, the Internet of money or Internet of value, and the fully realized idea of web3, that those institutions and the really large asset managers – the people who would need to come in to make that a reality – there wasn’t anything even close to that for them,” he said. “There was a huge white space for companies and groups that were taking that patient, operational and risk management, regulatory-first approach in this space. There was just nothing like that there. Not even close.”

Read more: Arca Gets SEC Approval to Offer Digital Shares for Treasury Fund

Arca Investments now has over $600 million in assets under management and has received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to create digital shares in a fund that invests in U.S. government bonds. Speaking of patience, Arca has been wowing a $30 billion pension for three years to try to get it to invest with the firm. Only now is the pension close to pulling the trigger, Steinberg said.

He doesn’t mind. He had to explain how ETFs work to thousands of people when trying to get Wisdom Tree off the ground and he’s doing the same now for digital assets.

“There was nothing that I was getting back from market feedback that this was not a good idea,” he said. “People were interested.”

As for his father Saul, Steinberg said he thinks he would have deeply appreciated the possibilities afforded from digital assets and web3. Saul famously acquired in 1968 Reliance Insurance Company, a firm ten times the size of Leasco Data Processing Equipment Corporation that he founded. His bid to take over Walt Disney Productions in 1984 failed.

“I think he would’ve loved it, I’ve often thought about this,” Steinberg said about his father. “He graduated very young, he’s always been a passionate pursuer of education” who “was always interested in the forefront.”

“He was always interested in new technology.”