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When Lane Kasselman moved to Dallas in August 2024, he was Blockchain.com’s only employee here. The company’s global headquarters was—and remains—in London. Its U.S. outpost was in Miami. The co-CEO hadn’t necessarily set out to change that.
As Kasselman puts it, his whole life was in California. But when his wife took a buyout at her company, “there was no reason why we had to stay put,” he said. The couple built a spreadsheet comparing 14 cities where they seriously considered moving their family, from Bend, Oregon, to London—where his fellow co-CEO Peter Smith lives.
“I was convinced we were moving to Bend,” he said.
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Lane Kasselman
Dallas made the list because Blockchain.com had established a partnership with the Dallas Cowboys a couple years earlier. The Kasselmans weighed everything from lunch spots per capita to the number of youth baseball teams in each community. “Once we weighed the data, Bend ranked dead last,” Kasselman said with a chuckle. “Dallas was hundreds of points higher than any other city.”
And that was that. Through the Cowboys partnership, Kasselman secured office space for Blockchain.com at The Star in Frisco. Slowly, his co-workers started taking notice. Next, the company’s general counsel followed him from New York to North Texas.
“Then we asked, ‘Why don’t we just start hiring here?’”
Kasselman enlisted Leon Capital Group founder Fernando de Leon to help find a permanent office. After a search spanning downtown and Uptown, Blockchain.com landed at Parkside Tower at 3500 Maple Ave., one floor below Leon Capital’s headquarters.
Today, nearly 30 of the company’s 450 employees work in the Turtle Creek tower, which Blockchain.com now calls its U.S. headquarters. Kasselman envisions another 100 jobs coming to DFW, with hiring focused on functions such as compliance, legal, communications, and accounting. The region’s financial services workforce has become a major draw.
“When I moved to Dallas, I thought everyone was going to work in oil and gas and wear a cowboy hat,” Kasselman said. “The fact of the matter is, everybody works in finance, and the only person that wears a cowboy hat is Aaron [Pierce]. When I realized that, I thought, ‘Oh, we can poach legal, compliance, accounting, and finance very easily from these financial services firms.’ That’s really where we’ve focused our efforts.”
Blockchain.com’s Top Business Priorities
Those hires will support three main business lines for Blockchain.com, which takes its name from the technology behind its business: a shared digital ledger that records transactions across a network of computers. The company brings in revenue through transaction fees, subscriptions and services, and trading and venture investments.
The first vertical is the one most people associate with the company: buying, selling, and owning cryptocurrency. Kasselman said its retail business has 44 million customers worldwide. The second serves institutional clients, like hedge funds, market makers, and wealthy individuals, with trading desks in London and Singapore facilitating digital asset trades.
The third is more behind the scenes, but it helps explain why Dallas matters so much to the company—and the place where Kasselman believes the company fits into Dallas’ Y’all Street boom. Blockchain.com builds technology that other businesses can use to offer crypto services under their own brands. For example, a bank that wants to let customers buy and sell cryptocurrency could use Blockchain.com’s products rather than build the technology itself.
Regional banks are showing interest, including potentially one or two in North Texas, according to Kasselman. He declined to name which ones, but said, “Texas banks tend to be a bit more risk-on and interested in doing that first.”
At the Intersection of Cryptocurrency and AI
Next up, trading. Kasselman said the company is working through its Texas licensing process and plans to add a trading desk once it secures the necessary approval. To understand what he feels is the most overlooked story in crypto right now, he said to consider a pair of Lucchese boots.
Imagine asking an AI assistant to track down a pair you’ve been hunting for, Kasselman noted. It finds them—but the seller is in Buenos Aires. Finding the boots was easy. Paying for them, not so much. If software is going to handle the purchase on your behalf, it must also be able to get your money to the seller.
“That is the crux of commerce,” Kasselman said. “How do you move value from one person to another?”
In his vision, an AI agent would determine the fastest, cheapest way to complete that transaction. The buyer could pay in dollars, the seller could receive Argentine pesos, and cryptocurrency would carry the value across the border in between. Neither person would need to worry about what happened in the middle.
Kasselman said Blockchain.com is talking with AI companies about all of this. He believes crypto will become the underlying payment mechanism for those transactions.
Another opportunity he sees is tokenization: representing stocks and other financial assets as digital tokens recorded on a blockchain. Kasselman believes technology can make investments easier to buy and sell around the world. The format, however, does not void securities rules or guarantee that every token carries the same rights as a traditional share.
For Dallas, the immediate opportunity is the people needed to run these business lines as they grow. The lawyers and accountants arriving at Parkside Tower may be several steps removed from an AI assistant buying cowboy boots. But Kasselman bets that both will be part of the same financial system.
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