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Michael Hiles – CEO of 10XTS Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Okay, I am excited today. So today I’m talking to Michael Hiles. He is the CEO of 10XTS, which is a company out of Ohio that is in the regulatory FinTech space. And he’s also a second amendment guy. So I’ve been real excited to want to get on the show here so we can talk about some things. So, Michael, how are you today? Hey, how are you?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Thanks for having me.
Rob McNealy
Oh, well, I appreciate it. You know, it’s funny when we were kind of connecting on this, I thought it was interesting that you and I have been connected on social media going back to 2011 at this point. So you and I are both old school social media guys way before crypto even existed. And I think that’s kind of cool.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yes, sir. I actually predate the internet. I ran like bulletin boards on dial up modems, some old old dude here. So
Rob McNealy
I wasn’t I didn’t I wasn’t fortunate enough because I didn’t have family that was very technologically savvy. So I didn’t really get into computers much in any way till I was probably in college. Back in the 90s. So yeah, I wasn’t fortunate enough to have exposure to computers at a young age. So I really wish I did at this point, because, you know, I ended up in this space and using it my whole life, but it’s kind of interesting. You know, I’m here now. So that’s all.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I was blessed. I got so lucky. My dad worked in sales for a software company in the 70s. So in 79, I started programming on mainframes. I was literally that kid. I was like eight years old.
Rob McNealy
You and Bill Gates,
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Mmm, yeah, but I don’t have Bill Gates his balance sheet. I made some bad decisions somewhere.
Rob McNealy
I think I think that’s the you didn’t pick the right parents, I think.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah, I hear you. So, so.
Rob McNealy
Well, good. Well, good. Tell me about 10XTS. Yes. What do you What are you doing?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
So, 10XTS is a startup early stage tech company is kind of the product of my background. round my career progression, having been a tech guy my whole life and then seeing the emergence of the technology and from the nascent you know, hobbyist phase like all tech does into, like the enterprise usefulness, that hey, there’s something here I knew, you know, Bitcoin payments, those are all early stage use cases, you know, kind of the pioneer, but being an information architect and a data guy, I recognize the usefulness of being able to use the underlying technology for things like, you know, record keeping notary, you know, other functions that right now require intermediaries and third parties to, you know, give you an assertion that somebody is presenting a claim or a proof and you’ve got some way to validate that from a record standpoint. So my team back before 10 x Ts in the early 2000s we won a Smithsonian laureate award when they were still giving those out for being the first to connect a judicial management system, a case search system, like you go to your county clerk of courts. And we got an award for being the first to connect an old school legacy court clerk system to the web. So being able to go to a browser and do a search. And so I’ve worked with public record for a big chunk of my career and understand the nuances of the workflow of data getting onto the blockchain, which is probably as or more important than the data on the blockchain. So tenex ts really, you know, fast forward. Yeah, we recognize the opportunity to not necessarily be the blockchain, but to be the record keepers that connect real world documents and data to the blockchain for single source of truth efficacy of the data model. So little bit different approach them I’m a crypto guy in the sense that I love cryptocurrency and the emergence and evolution of technology, but we see ways to then, you know, build on top of that core underlying promise. How do we go in? And how do we bring capital efficiency in particular, because our underlying vision is economic inclusion, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. And I think if we can solve a few problems related to that across our population, we can start to break down some of these social barriers and some of these political barriers that has everybody literally ready to, you know, start throwing fast rocks at people from the tree tops, and that’s not going to be the solution.
Rob McNealy
Well, I agree with you. And I think it’s interesting out there, at least in the social media world, when you’re talking about crypto and blockchain kind of things, that people on the left, and I’m not a writer either, but the people on the left seem to be really adamantly opposed to anything that decentralizes yet they still complain that the political process is really corrupt. And so to me, it’s really confusing to me Ultimately why certain that certain kind of politically it’s it’s weird because it comes down to I think that ultimately certain individuals do want the control of government over certain things they absolutely want to control you. And when you say we want to cut government out of this to get get rid of political corruption and corporate corruption, they can’t understand the connection between the two. And they don’t understand the fact that technology can enslave or liberate depending on who’s running it and who, how its applied. And, you know, it’s interesting, I thought of all things that the people on the left would be the ones that would embrace this type of technology that is decentralization, enabling and what..
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I don’t understand it, I you know, I, so I’m in Ohio 8 district so I’m fortunate to have congressman Warren Davidson is my congressman. And so Warren has led some of the charge in DC with the finance Services Committee. And in fact, I’ve been to DC I’ve, you know, testified and participated in congressional roundtable from a policy standpoint on all of this. And, you know, David and I, we’ve talked back and forth about, you know, just the function of automating government, you know, the blockchain out of it, but just, you know, how do you automate things that are human powered processes today? In the past, I’ve had left elected officials, Democrats Tell me, because I actually talked to them, you know, like, I’m not like so polarizing. It’s like, gosh, I probably got as many democrat friends as a Republican friends, it’s like, but in terms of the discussion around the function of government, I’ve had elected officials tell me in the past that government as a social function employs a segment of the population that would deem to be otherwise functionally unemployable. I don’t know if that’s true. I mean, I get it, it’s like, well, if you’re going to give them things, at least make them productive in some capacity from a community standpoint. Now, I don’t know if other of my many government employee friends would agree with that. But I’m sure you know, they would be fairly incensed by it. Because I know on the other side of the equation, PhDs and really brilliant people that are also part of the government and work for the government or have government contracts. And so I don’t know what that dividing line is. Rob, I really don’t. It’s certainly interesting when it comes really down to transparency. I think that’s the big threshold of well, we can get away with things the way it works. Now. We won’t necessarily be able to do that if we’re subject to some other reporting and transparency regime.
Rob McNealy
I think people are very libertarian, when it comes to themselves, and very statist when it comes to other people.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Do as I say, not as I do.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I kind of think that’s how people are. I think they’re wired that way. I think that they want the maximum amount of freedom for themselves, but they certainly want to create rules for other people. Maybe as a form of self defense. Maybe that’s why that is that way.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Emotional intelligence? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what it is safety in numbers? Fight or flight?
Rob McNealy
I don’t know cuz I, I don’t want to control other people. So honestly, I know, I don’t want the response of I don’t want the responsibility to control other people. But there’s a lot of people that do think not only that they should do that, but they’re entitled to tell other people what to do. My mother is a great example of that. She cared. Yeah, my mom would totally be a Karen totally. You know, it’s all about the rules and you know.
My parents. It’s funny because my parents, I grew up in the Detroit area, and we were, my dad was a conservative, like they were conservative. So they were huge rule followers. That was their mindset. But they also didn’t understand that a lot of the rules were designed, they didn’t see how rules screwed them. And I remember this one time, and it was one of the first times I kind of had an understanding of that maybe things aren’t always what I thought they were like when I was 10. And I remember maybe nine, and my neighbor’s dad, across the street, ran a construction company and my dad needed a load of dirt. He had a dump truck kind of thing in the neighborhood. And my dad, and I was really good friends with the sun. And my dad says, one day, you know, your buddy’s dad’s a tax cheat. And I’m like, What are you talking about? He’s like, well, he made me pay him in cash. He didn’t want me to give him a check. So he doesn’t want to pay taxes on that. I’m like, that sounds like a good deal. I was like, and I’m like, why would you want to be deck? And it was?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
It’s call “none ya.” None ya business.
Rob McNealy
But I left it. I mean, I’m 48 this year, you know, and I’d like that left an impact on me because I saw like, Well, why should he have to pay taxes on that? Like I was just a kid, right? But my dad who was like this, basically it was a teacher. He was a he was a rule follower. He was locked in there was an employee miserable in his job. And the neighbor was self employed, had his own business. And it was just interesting to me how I remember what I remember about this. My dad was incensed by it. Like he felt it was unfair, that this other guy didn’t want to pay whatever the taxes were, or whatever, you know, and it’s interesting because I remember that to this day, and I left an impact. But I also see you know, my dad, if you ever read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, my dad was the poor daughter had that mindset. It was very, this this mentality that if someone else gets ahead, they’re getting screwed in some way. And but I look back now and even then, when I was growing up, I saw that my My parents made their own decisions that made their own lives miserable. And it’s funny because even as a kid, I remember going into therapy now, but I remember as a kid, you know?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
We’re Gen X guys, man. I mean, we’re getting to that point, right? We got to confront these things.
Rob McNealy
Dude, no, no crap. But I remember when I was a kid, like I was telling my parents when I was like, in my teens, because I was working, and I was a busboy of all things at one point, making like really good money in a high, you know, high class hotel and stuff. And I was making more money than my mom. Like literally. And I said, Mom, why are you doing this job that makes you miserable? I have security. I’m like, No, you don’t? Yes, I do know you know, you don’t have any security like a fire you tomorrow. You have no control over and I recognize that as a kid. And my and it was interesting how like it made us clash and and so when it comes back around and like, Why do certain people want to control the people and why they reject these kind of decentralized technologies. I always think back to my parents because they’re that quintessential Karen kind of person that wants to do that. And that’s like, Wow, you guys are brainwashed. That’s all I can think of. They’re just brainwashed.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah, I mean, it’s a tough thing when you live your whole life with filters and predispositions and social norms. And, you know, it blows my mind though, because and I, you know, I don’t want to get off on the tangent from a boomer versus younger people thing. But you’ve got folks that are like, counterculture in like, the hippie generation, like, we want to change this, we want to construct a new, you know, way of doing things, which Alright, cool. You know, there were certainly problems that were carried over from before. Then now, like, what happened, guys, I mean, it’s so funny, because when I was a teenager, I saw Peter Paul and Marian concert and their very last tour. And so it was like 87 and I’m thinking, hey, it’s hippie stuff. Let’s dress up like hippies. Well, so I got tickets to this concert, not realizing it looks at Memorial Hall, which is very nice upscale, you know, venue in Cincinnati and You know, I go in there and it’s like literally all these yuppies who were, you know, in their 30s at the time, but they’ve got like their sweaters wrapped around their polo shirts. And if you remember when they drink sweaters down their backs kind of a thing and, and here we are me, my girlfriend dress like hippies and it’s like, a something happened. Come on guys. Anyway, sorry. I didn’t mean to digress off into it people.
Rob McNealy
Well, you know, what happened to the hippies is that they were born at a time where the United States was the only manufacturing power left on the planet. And anybody can throw rock and make a ton of money. So and and you know what, at that point, you know, people like well, I really liked the Mad Men house and I really liked the nice cars and having two cars and, and I think that’s what happened ultimately, is that, you know, life was life was pretty good. Let’s just put in perspective, life was pretty good. And they grew up in a time where you didn’t have to even go to college to make good money, and you didn’t even have to Have a college loan and you could still, you know, because there wasn’t student loans like there are now that you could afford to pay for college and not come out as come out of college with no debt and work your way through. They can’t do that anymore. And, and so I think that, you know, they were launched just from the facet of when they were born, they were able to grow up in their young as young adults in a time when the United States very prosperous and, and I definitely think that skewed their vision and I think that’s also the opposite of what’s I think it’s the same opposite effect happening now millennials and Gen Xers. I mean, I was caught in student loan prep, too, because I was given bad advice from boomers. You know, just invest in any major regardless, you’ll it’ll pay off and, you know, you’ll make 10 times the amount of money that you invest in, like, that’s worship. But you know, you learn, live and learn, but I think that definitely is, you know, made some impacts in society on how we’re viewing these kind of things.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah. Then I did the inevitable. This is what I look at as an entrepreneur. I’m looking down the road You know, from CEO and my crystal ball lens of having several decades of technology experience and multiple, you know, product life cycles and technology cycles and saying, okay, that regardless of what happens, my entire career was built on how do I make things more efficient? How do I create tools? And how do I, you know, deconstruct the silos that drove power bases inside of corporate organizations, for example, you know, when you look at the baby boomer way of management and operation, you bring up Mad Men, all human powered political process. I call that fixed overhead. And so if you want to be relevant in the current market place, as technology people, and I’ve always viewed technology shifts as the opportunity to do a couple of different things first, you can certainly go in and be the Absolute disrupter be Jeff Bezos right? I mean, be the guy. Of course it fully the magnitude of the disruption didn’t fully materialize for a couple decades for Amazon. But you know, His goal was to just go and slaughter it. Hence the saying your margin is my opportunity. The other side of the coin as well, there’s already entrenched channel partners and people that are in these industries. Will they pay you to catch the wave and become more efficient, more competitive, without you having to become that business? I don’t have to be Whole Foods and be in the grocery business to go and help say Kroger be more efficient. They’re already in the grocery business. I don’t start a new grocery. And so back to the crypto space is one of the things that we’ve looked at. From a blockchain standpoint. Well, you know, we’re good. We’re experts in the technology, software and data. How do we then identify the opportunities to go to existing markets, whereas a lot of people are saying, Oh, no, we want to be Come on broker dealer, we want to become an exchange. I’m like, heck with that, you know, that comes with a lot of regulatory overhead responsibility, compliance things that, you know, that’s not what we do. Right? We could, but I would rather be the guy that says, I’m the expert at the tool. I know your problem, probably better than you know, your problem at the technology level. So you go out there and you’d be the bank, you go out there, you be the broker dealer, but recognize that your model is going to have to shift in order to stay competitive in the marketplace. Because if you don’t buy my stuff, your competitors going to, and it’s just a function of knocking on doors, and it’s a numbers game for me and for my company, to go out and find the use cases that are going to onboard and say, Yep, I get it. I get what you’re trying to do. This is a cost cutting measure opens up new markets.
Rob McNealy
Well, I definitely think that blockchain technology has a lot of interesting uses in business. And I definitely think that you can gain some really interesting efficiencies with blockchain technology that maybe smaller to mid tier companies could use them to take some of that market share away from the big entrenched holders. I’m sorry, you know, companies that are in that space, because the bigger the company, the less risk adverse they are, you know, you know, you know, GM, and you see how it is right now, right, GM and all these companies now are deciding they’re going to go into electric vehicles, like a decade after Elon Musk decided to start, you know, do the innovation and now they’re like, okay, there’s a market. We’re going to go in there and try to crush it now. But I think that this, these technologies, whether it’s just for payments with blockchain stuff, I think there’s amazing opportunity now that business people are starting to look at it. I think what was happening before is that most of these crypto projects were led not even by entrepreneurs, but just straight developers that maybe never even ran like their own business before. But they had an interesting idea of how technology could evolve. They created it but they didn’t really understand how to actually get people to use it. Get it out there absolutely adoption standpoint?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yep, absolutely. I mean, you look at the fact that the iPhone was released a year before the white which is basically around the same time as Bitcoin white paper came out and look at the contrast and adoption between, you know, the first smartphone versus this really nascent weird hobbyist technology that involves all these layers tantamount to you know, having to fire up your modem and change your dialing string and get your command line interpreter to telnet and you know, some other computer network. And then you look at the that transition that inflection point of well, when AOL started putting out CD ROM installers with an awesome user interface in every shrink wrap, plastic bag, partnership deal. You know, they could Steve Case could possibly go and sign up at the time right now, and pushing out millions and millions and millions of this really awesome user experience. So that’s where I think that a lot of the disconnect is at for really any technology but in you know, particularly adoption of blockchain cryptocurrency technologies, nobody wants to see how the sausage is made, just bring me a plate of bratwurst right, I’m ready to eat it. And I think that’s where the technologists get so enamored with their own, you know, source code and their GitHub repos that, you know, they forget that the average person can’t even change the windows settings of their, you know, basic visual device on their laptop, right? We’re not that far along, guys, after all these years.
Rob McNealy
Well, well, I can tell a lot because you know, and I love developers, don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti developer. They just have a very different set of skills and a different view.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Oh, of course. Yeah. I lead a bad merry band of developers, you know, I mean, I am a developer. So it’s really interesting. You know, I like in work in development, working with developers as really like managing a rock band. Right. So it really is. It’s the parallels are so you know, you got it somewhere between being your psychologist and, you know, the communicator, the spouse, dad when it’s necessary. It’s this weird dynamic to get true r&d developers, people that know how to create something out of nothing, because it’s all function of motivation. Right is how do I get Stephen King to go into his dungeon and come out with the next best seller? Right? And that’s, that’s really how do you guide that as a CEO of a tech company as it gets interesting.
Rob McNealy
But to use your analogy, right, there is no, no person in their right mind would let the band determine the marketing and promotion strategy for their album either.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
No, no, no, they have no idea. They’re out there on the street corner, just, you know, doing the, you know, minstrel for free with the hat, you know?
Rob McNealy
Busking in busking in the subway. Right?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Exactly.
Rob McNealy
And so that and that’s part of the problem with a lot of developers and engineers. This is just an engineering mindset. I’ve worked in a lot of engineering companies, big companies, and this is pretty consistent is that the build that they will come mindset? Is what it comes down to. And unfortunately build it, they will come doesn’t usually work. That’s right. It’s a myth. And, and it doesn’t matter if you have the best technology. Doesn’t it med the best marketing technologies are the ones that win. And what that means is, even if you have the best technology, if you don’t have a way in a strategy to put that solution in the hands of the people that it solves their problem, it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to get adopted. And and it’s funny because I’ll have this discussion with engineers and a lot of them. They think they’re smarter than everybody else. And that’s okay, because they need to be smart. But if I said, an engineer has to have a certain skill set and intelligence level, and it’s a trained career path, that they’re professional, they would all agree with that. But then I said, you know salespeople and marketers are also a skill set that go through training and experience. Absolutely. And it’s like no, no, that doesn’t matter. Anybody can market I’m like, that’s horseshit. That’s absolutely nonsense.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
The disconnect that I’ve identified is this magical little thing called empathy. Right? It’s like engineers a very rational construct logic, a plus b equals C. And as we know, human beings are also very emotional. And we all share 11 of the same emotions. And you’ve got the, you know, want to be Spock engineers over here. Well, that just doesn’t make sense. So like, Well, of course, it doesn’t make sense because people don’t make decisions particularly make decisions to buy things based on making sense. No, they’re going to absolutely make an emotional decision. And then when the logic comes into play, it is rationalizing their emotional decision and supporting their confirmation bias that we all have to a massive degree. The older I get, the more I realized that, you know, Hey, you know what I thought about the world. I don’t I’m not the smartest guy in the room. In fact, as a CEO, that’s my mantra is I want to be the dumbest guy. And I want to surround myself by awesome people that are hell smarter than I am. Right? And then how do you be the manager of the band and get them to work together and get over their petty bullshit, because when teams on stage and they’re jamming it out, and you got 70,000 people in the stadium audience cheering, and here’s my money, take my money. That’s when you know that things are actually working out. That’s, that’s my metric.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I agree. And I can always tell when a developer is in over their head when it comes to understanding how to promote their solution or their project is one. I’ll use the Linux analogy, and they’ll say, look, Linux is great. It’s an amazing software. It’s open source. It’s kind of decentralized in a lot of ways, but Linux never made Any market share never got market share on desktop. And Linux servers, which are amazing, are still are very niche because the only people that care about them are developers. So, so so Linux is never like I’ve had developers literally Michael, tell me that Linux is mass adopted. And I’m like out of your minds, you’re absolutely out of your mind.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I mean, you can argue that because it’s embedded in the bowels of the apple lap, you know, the Apple device that, you know, the core OS is a Linux variant. So they’re technically not wrong, but they’re not wrong for all the wrong reasons.
Rob McNealy
Well, you know, I think the I think the block chains that win are going to be the same way no one the average person on the street and by the way, I spend my time as an entrepreneur talking to potential customers, before I ever decide to build a business or code a project now, and and to me, you should have a customer first and then build the solution for that individual customer. That’s how you build a business at least my 20 years of being out entrepreneur, that’s what I’ve come up with at least. And the customers in the world right now do not care about the centralization. And so if your big thing in development is decentralization, most people don’t give a shit about it. People want their problem solved. And if decentralization solves that problem, they still don’t care how the problem is solved. They just want it solved. And and I think that’s where a lot of people miss out. And they don’t understand that. I think a lot of developing lead crypto product teams are out there. And they’re trying to basically want to educate you on why you should be mad and only like decentralization. And I’m like, that doesn’t make any sense because I don’t care. It’s like, you’re not going to get anywhere with that kind of methodology of marketing come up with a solution that makes sense for them and just make it work in the background.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, I mean, the problem I found that the furthest throughout it, particularly as an entrepreneur, and this is where you cross over into the VC world where you know, who’s crystal ball and what’s the what’s the time horizon of the crystal ball that you’re looking at in terms of market emergence and development, right? You have to sort of be at that point, which means and what’s the old saying that if Henry Ford would have been completely customer lead, that they would ask him for a faster horse or something to that particular effect. And I think that there’s, there’s an interesting balance in technology cycles. As I’ve studied in my whole career right now, I’ve been front and center watching the emergence of, you know, every technology literally since the mainframe, and seeing how it goes from the hobbyist. And, you know, really the guy that wrote the book on its Geoffrey Moore, I don’t know if you ever read Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore, but I don’t know. I know. I haven’t read it. It’s an amazing read. And if you’re into technology into technology markets and understanding technology businesses, it really is the Zay of the bell curve of the adoption cycle for the stuff. And where do you hit that inflection point, timing the money timing the product, being able to To hit the ground running, that’s our big gamble as entrepreneurs is like, I know all my ideas are good, right? I know that there’s market. It’s a function of living and surviving until you hit that inflection point, right? The cash burn is the cash burn. So, can you stay ahead of the cash burn? Don’t run out of money, right? And then if you’re right there, when the lightning is ready to strike, bam, you know, there comes the bolt. And you know, that’s where the it really is a lightning strike function for a unicorn billion dollar tech company.
Rob McNealy
Well, I think that’s where the entrepreneurs come in. And I and I really think that entrepreneurs are able to see all the pieces like that and but still be able to jump down into the details and the nitty gritty stuff. And I think timing is a hugely important and that’s one factor. We don’t control necessarily when something is ready. But to understand that timing and being able to mitigate the risk and say, Look, I you know, You’re Henry Ford example about trying to listen to, you know, customers and say they’ve come up with a better horse. Well, I think the reality is he’s not right or not wrong there. And I think this is why is that a good entrepreneur can see, okay, I see this new technology, but how to apply that technology to solving a problem. And then figuring out, again, goes back to market segmentation, and then strategy for you know, putting that solution in front of those people. You know, Steve Jobs was amazing at this, like he understood that there was this friction with music distribution, and technology could solve that. Right now, a lot of people went out sit there and complain, oh, a lot, I think in a modern example of music as people would like, I would like, you know, ice cream trucks to have music records going around streets. That would be maybe what people would say would be easier than thinking in terms of digitizing music and distributing music a different way. And I think you’re right. A good entrepreneur, though, will solve that and figure out that thing and tell people look, yeah, your idea might work. But I got a better solution for that problem. And that’s this way, this is the solution. And that’s why i think that i think crypto so far in a lot of ways has been held back by the fact that you haven’t you don’t really have enough entrepreneurs involved with these projects yet. And it’s changing. It’s changed a lot just in the last two years. But so much of it right now has been led by developers who are build it and they will come and I think that that’s changing and..
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Well the definitely don’t know securities laws because unfortunately fun funding and financing a project on a purely decentralized basis and how it was funded, it certainly run afoul of the regulatory regime and you know, that’s why we just filed a Delaware C Corp and sold equity. Like everybody else’s like guys see how it goes. We’ll get there.
Rob McNealy
Well, it wasn’t that complicated to sort out like when we launched right after the height of the bull run in 2018. Everybody told just do an Ico you can raise money. Money. And that’s why we looked at doing a token project is that we were interested ourselves personally, of doing a startup and we wanted to learn what the Ico process was about. That’s why we were looking at that. And then when we said, hey, let’s launch a project, and we were originally gonna do an Ico because I had an idea for another business. And I thought, wow, as an entrepreneur, the idea that you could raise a whole lot of money. You don’t have to go through VCs and you don’t give away equity as an entrepreneur like hell. Yeah, that’s amazing, right? But through our diligence process realized we realized pretty quick that that’s that’s got to be illegal. What I said, Where did I go? There’s no way we can do this. And we still had lawyers, I was coming and this is ridiculous. I’m not a lawyer, but I worked for a lot of lawyers and my day job. And I was talking to lawyers and like I tell utility took I go, where does the where does the SEC recognize the term utility token they don’t, that’s not even a term that’s just made up. And that’s why we launched Originally the way we did so we’re not a security but it’s interesting like pretty much every IC on the United States was in security. And you and I were talking a little bit about that online about, you know, the securities and the Icos and and where that is right now, what do you think’s going to happen with the Ico world? I mean, going forward, it’s amazing idea that you can raise money this way. But I also think there’s a lot of problems with that, which.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
There really is, and I’ve been fairly prolific about my opinions. And, you know, it’s created a bit of a barrier between me and the traditional anarcho capitalist crypto guys, because they’re all about, you know, all the way up to and including, you know, disrupting government. You know, they see government as an quote unquote, intermediary, I don’t know that I agree with them. And I don’t want to go there necessarily in this conversation, but, you know, in terms of needing new laws that define things that don’t need be find is problematic. We don’t need To change securities laws, the United States of America already recognizes literally a jelly doughnut as an investment contract based on the way I sell it to you, if I promise you a rate of return, that if you buy this jelly doughnut from me today for 100 bucks and a week from now you can sell it for 1000 get in on it now. FOMO, right, that that, in that instance, created a de facto security that’s a problem for people out there on YouTube with you know, their unregistered broker dealer status of pimping a particular quote unquote, opportunity. Right. And that’s where the SEC very adamant and I agree with it, because when you remove particularly in finance, a certain amount of regulation, the bad actors immediately move in. Yes, he doesn’t care, right. The only thing they care about is protecting the actual individual from fraud and inflammation disparity is what creates fraud. And you know, that that’s the reason we have this robust set of rules that is transformed America’s financial market into probably the most stable equity market in the world, consistently over time. So a certain amount of that regulatory framework is certainly necessary based on case precedent and enforcement, which is driven largely by complaint, not because, you know, sec commissioners are sitting around like, hey, how do we screw with the little guys today? Right? I mean, it’s literally, it’s almost exclusively complaint driven. So I don’t know that we need to change it. And then when you look at the other side of the equation when it comes to regulatory crowdfunding, for example, that’s not been adopted since the title three jobs act of 2012. Right. I don’t even think that regulatory crowdfunding was raised a billion dollars combined since it was enacted. So.
Rob McNealy
I think My take is and having not been originally a securities guy, but when we launched two years ago, I took a deep dive and learned as much as I could about securities offerings and at the state level federal level. I took like a deep dive for six weeks and I felt very comfortable at that point of my own opinion that every Ico was illegal under US law at the time. And what I did, but I do think the the area of regulation that no one’s really talking about so much that I think actually is an impediment to adoption is the IRS treatment of cryptocurrencies as property. I think those regulations do not fit. Currently, I do believe that even if the IRS just decided to elect to treat cryptocurrency for instance, as a foreign currency I think would do a lot to speed up adoption. And I think because I think the the accounting, basically requirements that businesses and even individuals have to do What from the crypto side of things to actually use it as a buying, you know, something that’s being used for buying and selling goods and services? I believe the IRS is going to be the biggest part of it not the SEC rules.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah, I mean, right now we pay taxes if we make a profit because we bought, you know, a Beanie Baby at a garage sale and sold it on, you know, eBay for you know, profit margin. Right. Right. We’re supposed to report that as income. It gets really complicated when you get into high volume transactional stuff. And that’s that’s really what the technology enables that the current intermediary status of the market is not prepared to handle right when we change hands for equity ownership. I have a token, for example, that represents shares of stock. There’s no such thing as a bear stock certificate, right? I mean, we, we register our names and our contact information, the DTC handles, the transferor etc. It’s got to be done through a transfer agent. There’s, you know, a very well defined process and be in that’s just simply the validation part of the market right where that trust and those trust layers have had to be abstracted out and human powered process. Once again, this guy says that the sky is a true and valid owner of the stock and he’s truly in validly, you know, transferring it selling it to this other person will write it down and keep the third party record and how the blockchain can do that, right. I mean, but the law is not there yet to support that layer of automation, and it requires somebody to hold a license for whatever reason. It’s like I laugh about custody, you know, everybody argues about custody and custody of digital assets of like, you know, wonderful lights went out. There would be no custody, right? The blockchain has the custody so you banks can go away now, do you need a license to have this particular type of an account to hold something on behalf of somebody else? Because it’s the blend of the existing, you know, laws. I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. I get invited to lawyer conferences, but you know, it’s like this..
Rob McNealy
This, but I think that’s an interesting thing about the custody piece, right? Everybody’s like, Oh, you should just not your keys, not your crypto and the unforgiving nature, I think of crypto is also problem. And as I said, in our conference last, this last March, we hit we do an annual off chain conference, which is kind of a mix of crypto and prepping and preparedness and self defense and things like that. We’re doing the next one in February. And we talked, we talked a lot about this, because what you know, and I think it’s because the typical anarchist is broke, they don’t understand that, you know, if you take away banks, and third party, or third, you know, trusted parties that are holding your 401k funds and things like that. Now, what you’re, what you’re suggesting is people now have the equivalent of their life savings on a little device in their house. And now before you might have had a bank, supporting that with like armed guards and vaults and, you know, backup generators and all that and and now you’re saying the average person is in charge of all that stuff now to at their house. And man, that’s that’s just that’s a reach for me. I think that you know if crypto is going to be adopted, there absolutely needs to be, you know, third party custodians available, because I don’t think the average person can handle it and maybe I’m maybe I’m a jerk. But I just can’t imagine like, for instance, my Karen type mother, being able to handle like her social security, you know, on a blockchain and crypto and and I just don’t think that’s I don’t think it’s realistic to have that expectation that the average person can manage that at this point without like a big cultural and educational shift.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Now, I mean, it gets back to self sovereign identity, which you get a lot of people are working on that particular problem, that particular aspect of connecting to blockchain, right. How do I, how do I assert that the person who’s touching this device that’s conducting this transaction that’s going to be recorded on the blockchain? Because that’s really what I care about is how data gets To the blockchain, not what’s on the blockchain, right? So how do we assert and validate that this particular individual is actually who they say that they are? And so there’s a lot of that self sovereign trust, and how do we create those applications and identity verification? The problem that I see though, is that at scale, it gets pretty draconian pretty quick, because the real ultimate solution is, you know, binding your genome to hash value on a network something that scares the shit out of me.
Rob McNealy
Right? What could possibly could go wrong with that?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I saw the movie Gatica. I mean, I am I am clearly about bioethics. And, you know, this is where I, I think that we have to assert that’s true self sovereign part of the status. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that means in the future. I’m as equally excited for my kids as I am frightened for my kids. And that’s why I’m out for that’s why I’m trying to do what I do. At least with what I know how to With and, and, you know, hopefully we can push back against, you know, the the Karen’s of the world who want to enslave and entrap and, you know, and subjugate and and I don’t I’m not here to fight and argue over policy ever it’s just a function of, you know, can we create technology solutions to stupid human problems because we’re really only like a couple of levels above chimpanzees don’t crap at each other, you know, the trees.
Rob McNealy
I go like this, you know, I don’t you see this a lot in the crypto world and I think there’s a lot of I think there’s a lot of immaturity out there is that when people are like they cheerlead like China getting involved in embracing blockchain, I’m like, dude, you really don’t understand that a government like that embracing blockchain is going to be absolutely leverage to enslave those people. No, it’s not going to be it’s not going to be used to liberate the I mean, all right, that we got the government of Saudi Arabia, right. They’re still chopping people’s heads off publicly, right. I mean, I mean, Still, like Bronze Age kind of shit, and or like Dark Ages kind of stuff. And now you’re going to give them these tools that can, you know, I think could enslave.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Yeah, and the dichotomy with this is that I firmly believe the next global reserve currency will be a programmable digital currency format. Right? You’re basically saying a government accepts the risk of however long of transporting value from point A to point B, using this particular, you know, normalizing thing, you know, whether that’s conch shells, whether that’s the United States dollar or whether that’s, you know, the digital renminbi and, and it’s going to it’s going to happen and it needs to happen because, you know, the, the idea that I can actually carry money in my QuickBooks account, for example, as my actual Treasury or my wallet, that I can just simply pay vendors by transmitting not dollars, but US dollar currency. It’s through a government settlement system. Right. And we know that the US, you know, the Federal Trade. So the Fed is actually working on this, but they claim that their platform is not going to be ready until 2025. So, and I forget the name of the system. I wrote about it in my newsletter a few weeks ago, but they’ve been working on it. But now we got China piloting the digital Yuan, in a couple of provinces. They’re ahead of us, right, from a nation state standpoint. We’re so far behind in the United States. It’s frightening based on where our reserve status of currency is going to go back to France, right. There’s they’re studying it now.
Rob McNealy
Well, I do believe that at some point, the US dollar will no longer be the reserve currency and what that how that plays out for the average American I don’t think it’s going to be positive, to be honest. But, I mean, that brings us into the next phase. Right? We I think you and I both agree that technology is useful, but it can be used for good or bad. I think it’s just it’s just like any tool, right? But just like guns, right guns can be used for events, or they can be used to commit crimes. That doesn’t mean that the tool is bad. It just means that it’s better to have more guns in the hands of good people than in the bad. And I think that’s where we kind of also says, you know, you and I are kind of overlap there politically. So recently, you’ve been leading a little campaign in Ohio, tell me about that.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Well, it’s really an accident. So I’ve got political campaign management experience. I’m a marketing guy, you know, how to, you know, organize things. And so it’s carried me in it a lot of interesting places throughout my career. And so I saw what was going on in particular Virginia, but then Kentucky and Pennsylvania and some other states. Around the, you know, this idea of red flag laws and, you know the the ability for the government to suspend your rights without due process and come in and confiscate anything that you own out of your home, particularly one that has been enumerated in the Constitution, United States of America and defended multiple times through multiple Supreme Court cases. And here, we’ve got people, you know, saying, nope, we’re going to come in and we’re going to take away your gun. And I guess that was really a wake up point for me to see how they’re scrambling in Virginia, for example, to solve the problem, and recognizing that when the argument or the claim that the conservatives don’t know how to organize, right, it’s true to a certain degree, right. And if you believe that all Government is local. And you look at the approach that Virginia is taking, you’ve got the states that are these counties in the state of Virginia that said, okay, based on our government structure, we have a way to push back at a local level, we can have our county pass a resolution that essentially D funds enforcement activities of infringing enforcement is what it’s called. That’s directed by the state. Now, I’m not a constitutional scholar by any stretch of the imagination. So I can’t get into the, you know, is this largely just a symbolic thing? You know, there are other things to take into consideration, consideration, I don’t know, but I know that when I go down to my polling precinct to vote on everything, it starts with local, right. I mean, I have local bond issues. I have local candidates that are being elected to county offices and we don’t have the kinds of networks and communication frameworks, particularly in the state of Ohio, to rapidly organize and coordinate across the state teams that are essentially decentralized, right? You’re talking about a decentralization. But how do you get teams of committed volunteers citizens to work in their county? We have 88 counties in Ohio. And how do we get them to coordinate and work together to also pass model resolutions around this particular second amendment issue of red flag laws? Not just for these things, but then also in the future when somebody comes along and says, oh, we’re going to take this other right. How do we organize and structure and construct our our response in particular, and it goes back if you do a little homework in the war for independence, how the colonial You know, the colonials, the in the individual colonies in the cities and the towns and the villages operated for nearly a decade leading up to the actual war, was they created a de facto shadow government coalition of people and they call it a, they call it a community, or I’m sorry, a committee of safety. So there was a committee, there were several iterations of committees, and it was just regular people, regular prominent citizens in the community, that operated in a fashion to be communicators, to network with each other, and then ultimately to take action at the local level when necessary. But then how do I coordinate around with the other folks? Right? And so it’s the same communication distribution model, right? It’s how do you decentralize a organizational structure and target a particular issue in the Case passing red flag model ordinance line or a model resolution language at the county level, and then leaving the framework and in place, and particularly the state of Ohio, we are a state that enjoys the opportunity to put a signature campaign initiative onto a statewide ballot to even modify our constitution as a state, but that requires all the draconian regulations that they put in front of us, you know, we have to gather so many signatures within a certain amount of time and, and have so many counties represented, etc, etc. So, so I started this little group on Sunday, literally five days ago, just a sort of, you know, trial balloon and I created a Facebook group, it’s private, it’s hidden. You have to know somebody so there’s a velvet rope. We don’t take all comers. You have to literally be invited, invited in, and it’s still this phenomenal chaos but we went from zero to like to Well, thousand members of this group in five days, just people blowing this thing up because it really is a hot issue. It’s a big thing.
Rob McNealy
And I think that’s something you definitely need to work on because that’s that’s amazing that people are that concerned. And here in Utah, we are seeing something very similar happening to getting a lot of the gun rights groups are getting out ahead of some of the RPO stuff that’s coming out of our own state legislature. And you would think a state like Utah, which is, you know, definitely conservative in nature. That gun control bills wouldn’t be something that you would come up but I think they’re later I was told that there’s going to be multiple gun control related bills coming on and state legislature at least coming out of committee that, you know, we’re going to have to face here. And I think that’s what’s going to happen. I mean, in this country, we definitely have multiple cultures in this country from the coast. in the Midwest and the mountain states, where literally, people are very anti gun have never seen a gun before, you know, they’ve never actually shot a gun or been around a gun. But they definitely want to tell the other states what they can and can’t do. And I think Unfortunately, that’s going to change because, you know, we are culturally very different. And I think in the future, and I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think in the future, if there’s a time of crisis where say, you know, maybe it’s an economic collapse, or the US dollar, you know, kind of tanks or whatever, I believe the United States will break up, because I think we’re too culturally different. Now. In many parts of the country, what do you think?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
I mean, I don’t want to see my nation balkanized. Because what that means is, is that the power centers and the resource centers are all going to be concentrated in urban areas. And and I don’t want it to turn into Judge Dredd, right with the mega trop Ulises. And then wasteland in between. If that’s what happens then obviously if we’re in the wasteland in between we are far more suited to take care of ourselves and restore a certain amount of functional self governance and you know community alignment at the localized level. My town has literally my county seat is my town. Now I’m wedged between a couple of bigger bigger metros, but I live north of Cincinnati and my town has 8000 people in a county of like 45,000 right on the border of Ohio and Indiana. And I think that we can probably figure out how to put some seeds in the ground and work together to you know, restore a certain amount of community. But we are at risk we’ve lost a lot of mercantile ability. At the local level, we’ve lost a lot of trade skills that are going to be necessary in order to maintain standard of living and we’ve lost a lot of access to, you know, other knowledge resources. And I don’t want it to be a choice where if you don’t want to live in a mega trop list that you relegated to some sort of feudal, agrarian sort of surf Lord the keep kind of a scenario and I don’t know I just let’s work together Let’s all work together right now to keep these kinds of things from happening. You know, I,
Rob McNealy
I, you know, I agree with you and it’s kind of weird I live it because I even though I have an MBA, last June, I graduated from welding school full year and a half program or two full time school at night for a year and a half just to be a hobby welder, because I wanted to learn an actual skill. And I think that going forward, you know, we’re going to have to go back and be willing to learn things that maybe we forgot, and to be more self sufficient. And I think that’s kind of the ethos of the whole decentralization mantra, but Michael, we’re running out of time here. Yeah, man can people where can people find out more about you?
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Well, um, so the company side is 10 x Ts one zero x ts.com. We’re pretty narrow. So it’s not very exciting. If you go there, we talked about, you know, like FinTech and reg tech, you know, enterprise stuff. And then of course, I’m on social at Michael Hiles on Twitter. Hit me up on LinkedIn on a professional basis. I’m around a pretty easy to find. I’ve enjoyed it. Great conversation, man. I love Love, love the discussion.
Rob McNealy
Absolutely. And you know what, I’m going to hold you to that because we’re going to have more of these in the future. But Michael, thank you so much con today.
Michael Hiles – 10XTS
Thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. See y’all
Rob McNealy
have a great day.
Episode Links
Kingsley Edwards – CEO of Flote Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Today I am talking to Kingsley Edwards. He is the CEO and founder of float app, which is a new social media sharing platform. And I think the timing of this is great given what’s going on in the crypto world with YouTube right now. So, Kingsley, how are you today?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Doing well, just you know, little bit of rest after after yesterday, Christmas, but yeah, glad you got to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Rob McNealy
Cool. I literally laid on the beanbag for 14 hours yesterday.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Did you break a record or?
Rob McNealy
I think I got bedsores, but I don’t know if it’s a record but yeah, I kinda was a complete pig slouch, just kind of hanging out. But you know, me and my, my wife and I, I mean, we both are, we’re both co founders and Tosca, and so but we both have full time other gigs because everybody on our products is a volunteer. So it’s like, we’ve been going crazy. Just we launched this week. And I got on Main net and opened it up and got block producers on the network and stuff. So it was like literally two days before Christmas. We’re like literally been doing tech support helping people sign up and get their nodes on and stuff. So it’s been a little crazy. So we took the day off yesterday.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, well, congrats. I know that’s got to be that’s a huge feat to get over. So,
Rob McNealy
You know, when people say, Oh, you can just you know, make a blockchain just point and click on my get go do that. Let me know how that works out for you. Because, you know, it’s interesting, because, and we’re getting our topic but you know, we launched first as a token, and then we swapped and built our own chain. And it’s funny because people don’t realize how all the little things you have to do to make that work. You know, even just, how do you get your first nodes ready? How do you recruit people to set up servers to support your network in the beginning, it’s like, you know, it’s one thing if you’re just setting up a token or something on someone else’s blockchain but when you have to build up And recruit, and persuade and try to negotiate and get all sorts of, you know, people involved in your project and anyways just to take a risk of their own time and whatever money and stuff to do that that’s hard. It really is a lot of it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of lunches and a lot of phone calls.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I did. I did a token sale in at the, the kind of the height of the market or close to the height of the market in 2017. And yeah, I was it was even just even just doing that was just, you know, crazy. I stayed up for like, 72 hours at at the one point, I do not recommend doing that. But um, but yeah, you know, a lot of things that seem easy to others and just, you know, with technology in general, are there’s a lot happening behind the scenes that a lot of people don’t know about, so.
Rob McNealy
Absolutely. So give me a little bit of background about what you are. Sounds like you’re an entrepreneur. So how did you get involved with starting float?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah. Well, so I started my first crypto startup in, in 2013 actually was a eSports Bitcoin platform where people can play against each other and popular video games for Bitcoin kind of a skill base. You know, being from Vegas, we’re just talking about I’ve always thought that and also playing video games growing up, I always thought that be interesting to kind of recreate, you know, the poker environments and with with video games and how EA Sports is is taking off. So so we we created that it was called leap coin, which later turned to leets. And then in 2015, we ended up getting some investor money from from boost VC and Tim Draper and in Vegas tech Fund, which is run by Tony Shea, and some other angels and VCs. We ended up selling that in 2017 to to a larger startup, and that’s where I actually directed their token sale and then after that, year I did some consulting for four different crypto companies and more recently we’re focused on on floats and really came about which is you know, we we, we we will first of all we’ve you know we’ve been part of the kind of the Liberty movement or what do you want to call it or or at least myself for over a decade starting with with Ron Paul back in the day and and then you know that that kind of led me to learning about Bitcoin and all this kind of stuff in the ron paul forums like in 2010, or something like that. But, but yeah, you know, so so just kind of seeing this the way things are going with social media especially like all the people getting shadow banned, banned, and demonetised especially over the last last few years, and now all of a sudden, you know, just the same that you support free speeches, you know, the mainstream narrative is saying that that’s like controversial or not not the right thing to do. So So yeah, we you know, we have a lot of friends that are that are content creators, independent journalists, on on YouTube and other platforms that have been affected by what’s going on they’ve been D monetized they’ve lost their These are people that you know, they survive off of off of YouTube monetization and in, in their, you know audience supporting them through donations and all this and we’ve seen them the struggle over the last couple of years losing anywhere from 80 to 90%. Some have been completely demonetised hundred percent of their their income just you know, overnights gone for what we feel like is really unjustified reasons. I mean, a lot of times these people don’t get responses from YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and others and and they’ll be like an email response. They’ll say, you know, a little show you’ve been kicked off or have you been banned because of and I’ll just have a blank won’t even have any from there. So it’s it’s like, you know, I think a lot of like I said, a lot of us saw this coming and we just wanted to offer just an alternative. Last year, I actually tried getting off of all kind of this decentralized platforms that are there today. And I went to various other decentralize, you know, offerings. And it was just, you know, is way too confusing. A lot of them have like a lot of these token schemes that are kind of built into just the basic like, feed and stuff like this, that they, you know, this is cool if you want to partake in that, but, but we just wanted to offer something where people can, you know, speak freely, we have chronological time timeline with no kind of deceptive algorithms deciding what content you see or interact with and engage with. And, and so yeah, so we decided to kind of, you know, dive deep into it. And in I’ve been working alongside of a lot of those friends that that have been affected by what’s going on.
Rob McNealy
So it’s float like a blockchain based app or is it not based on blockchain? Or is it crypto related? How is it kind of build what kind of platform is it on?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
So right now we are we are, we are centralized? So we have plans to decentralize Over the next year, we did we went through boost again with this with this company boost VC, which is one of the leading blockchain startup accelerators in San Mateo, run by Tim Draper son, Adam Draper, who’s done a lot of great work in the space. So so we with through boost VC, we got we got actually quite a bit of credit on on various server, you know, like AWS and digitalocean, which isn’t, you know, the best place to be but as it as a scrappy startup where we want to use those those credits, until until we can’t. But we do have plans to to decentralize. We don’t we don’t. We’re not we’re looking at various technologies as far as our decentralization strategy. And we’re not quite 100% sold on a blockchain yet for for social media. There may be an opportunity to like interact with other block chains if a user does want to, but we’re looking at other other distributed ways where we can have different People partake in backing up their own content.
Rob McNealy
Well, I think that’s important. And I actually commend you on that strategy. And I think it makes more sense. Get your MVP out there, start on a centralized system, and look at where the technology is, and then adopt whatever back end that’s decentralized that you want. To me, that actually makes more sense. Because I think you probably are well aware. I mean, with the social media platform, it’s about eyeballs and audience. I mean, that’s why people are on Twitter. That’s why people are on Facebook, because that’s where all the people are. There’s lots of actual alternative media, social media sites out there now. And you know, I’m getting inundated like nobody here go to there. And it’s like, okay, but no one else is there, or there’s not as many people there or this one community like is on this platform and not on your platform. So who would you say your technology closely or is a close resemblance of are you more like a Twitter or more like a Facebook?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
I feel I feel like we look more like a Twitter right now but I would say as far as features that really going for Facebook, we see a large opportunity with with both those platforms and and also including YouTube, where, especially Facebook, where, you know, there’s a lot of studies out there where 66% of Facebook users do not trust Facebook, even though they, you know, they do use it because that’s where the users are at. I don’t know, really anybody who really likes, you know, they’re the CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And so we see a large you know, an opportunity there to kind of go after that feature sets and and that’s really you know, we want to build a place where, where, you know, free speech, can I can live you can engage with you, you know, you follow who you want to follow, you can gauge who you want to do you want engage with, and in Facebook as far as, as features is kind of the most our has has a lot of features that we’d like to, to to implement. So, right now we have, you know, just kind of the social network side, we do have crypto integrated, where every every account comes with a Bitcoin BTC wallet right now. So people can with without wallets, you can you can tip people you can you can do we have a Patreon type model already built built out where you can subscribe to content creators for premium content for for whatever tier they want to set which is really cool. We have encrypted messaging. So you know again kind of going back to to Facebook and Twitter I’ve noticed over the past couple years where now it’s been made public where they actually they can and they seem like they do read your read your messages, your direct messages to other people and people don’t really realize that so, you know, we don’t we don’t want to read your messages. And that’s what we make them encrypted and peer to peer and you know, a lot of lot of other little other things where we’re just trying to make floats a friendly place for for people to you know, create a second account on there’s a lot of studies to how social media, you Users they used to have, I think was like 2.4 accounts couple years ago. Now I believe it’s closer to five. And the next two years, they’ll have up to like 10, or some of that. So we’re looking at different, like, interoperability between us and the major platforms. So to just make it easier switch to, you know, at least use us as a as an alternative.
Rob McNealy
So I have a pretty big social platform, you know, footprint on like Twitter, smaller one on Facebook, sell me on flow, why would I want to be on flow versus these other platforms?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Well, again, you know, I think you notice I I personally, very much dislike the way that Twitter and Facebook feeds been becoming more and more kind of deceptive in the way that they use their algorithms as far as the the home field and timelines. So even with Twitter, you know, you have to constantly change for me, I have to constantly change that. I want to see things chronological as from the people that I’ve seen, or that I that I follow, and and you know, it just we don’t we don’t push any information that you don’t want to see. And, and again, we don’t read your messages, respect user privacy. And we don’t, you know, we’re not out to censor us. So now that’s what we’re seeing more and more on on all the major platforms. And we don’t want to we don’t want to partake in that.
Rob McNealy
So you’re funded through boost VC. Is that where you’re getting the funding to grow this out?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, we Yeah, we receive some initial funding from from boost VC right now. We are in the middle of fundraising right now for our full seed round, but we received Yeah, we went through boost earlier this year.
Rob McNealy
So that was gonna be my next question is, I like what you’re saying. I think we need more alternatives to what we have out there. The next question is, how do you combat that network effect of the big networks? That’s the big challenge. How do you take away their market share, and what do you think your marketing strategy is going to be to onboard some of those new users and kind of pare away some of their market share?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Well, so we definitely wanted to take advantage of the way that YouTube is treating content creators, the way the distrust of Facebook and the other platforms. So that’s one of the biggest things right now we’re actually working on adding ad monetization for content creators so that we can, you know, we can provide a way for for content creators to, to join our platform, and not only you know, receive Patreon, Patreon, you know, revenue from their audience, but also tips but then also add revenue from from different ad networks. And eventually we’ll be implementing our own ad platform that’s that’s fully integrated into our platform. One thing about us as far as for content creators is that we don’t take any percentage of The payments to content creators or or just users in general. So that’s one of the things that you know, we’re really focused on to is showcasing how lightweight crypto actually has a use case here, where when I send a Super Chat, let’s say to a YouTuber, and YouTube takes 30%, or YouTube takes 45% of ad revenue from content creators, we don’t sit as a middleman, as far as you know, in terms of payments. So I think that’s one one place where we’re kind of, you know, placing our bed on and saying that, hey, you know, kind of be the old saying our content is king. And if if content creators can create an as you know, a second account on on on floats, and hey, maybe not the user base isn’t there yet. But I’m making 100% of all my tips on making 100% of my monthly subscriptions from my audience, and I’m getting a larger percentage from ad revenue. While it might make sense to try to start moving by my people over to this, this platform Where I can ultimately make more money with less followers.
Rob McNealy
So you as float up, how do you guys make money if you’re not taking a, you know, cut of the content creators, you know, earnings.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
So we have for, for ad, we have two sets of ads, we have content ads that will be similar to a, it’s kind of unique actually, to we have, we have content ads. And then we have two forms of content ads. Right now, we have video ads, where it’s kind of a we’re just we’re testing this out right now with a few content creators. But a video ads are similar to the YouTube ads that you see that go before and after videos. And then post ads for content creators that can be done on any post which is kind of unique. So if a content creator just doesn’t like a normal kind of Twitter style or Facebook style post, they can have a small ad on the bottom little banner ad where they can also monetize out of that. So we have those sets of ads for content creators where they get 100%. And then we have network ads, which is kind of can be seen almost like if you think of a YouTube video page. Like the top right, they’ll have a little ad you know, post up on the top right. So we’ll we’ll take the percentage off that and then we’re also going to be implementing network ads within within the feed of users. So we’re yeah we’re going to be you know, mostly focused on on ads ad revenue, we are going to implement a premium subscription where will provide ad free experience for users? And we’re hoping that you know, eventually once once we get more more and more content creators on our platform and higher tiers as far as how many people follow them that that eventually you know, we’ll be able to really monetize it monetize it well with with the ads that we’re showing that we profit off of.
Rob McNealy
Very cool. So with a lot of the so a lot of what the the normal big giants in this space. Some of their excuses for censorship and and you know, D platforming people is one they’ll say they’re combating hate or in some other People will say they’re just trying to cover their tail legally in case someone you know, does something stupid on their platform, so they don’t directly get sued themselves for hosting this content. So if you’re a centralized and you’re gonna allow free speech, are there any limits to that? Or are you going to have some basic rules? How does that kind of work? And if you allow free speech, unfettered free speech, are you worried about liability for your group?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
So we do, you know, we are a were a US Corporation, we do have to follow us laws. So if there are things that that uh, that we find or others bring to our attention, or if you know, there’s one of the alphabet, US government agencies that you know, request something or something we you know, we’re not going to go to prison over something over a social media post or something like this. We’ll we’ll do what we have will only what we have to do, but we’re not going to go out of our way to censor people for no reason. Which seems to be where all the other platforms are going. When it comes to you know, the story of you know, advertisers and all this kind of you know, seems like they’re they’re kind of pulling the strings and all this you know, I believe that I believe that that that is the case in some circumstances but at the same time it’s it’s interesting to see that you know, especially YouTube is using that as an excuse why they’re censoring people yet all the major other you know, the the mainstream media that’s that’s on YouTube are talking about the same things that all these independent creators are talking about maybe maybe in different ways and you know, this and that but but you know, they do cover a lot of the same topics that YouTube says is controversial and all this yet YouTube doesn’t take down you know, Fox News, CNBC, talking about crypto, CNN talking about Epstein, all this types of all this type of stuff. So so you know, we’re going to we’re going to test out the waters we’re going to we’re going to roll with the punches, but also Yes, we want to we want to support free speech and we feel that what’s going on right now. It’s just it’s there’s there’s something, you know, seems a little sinister, but happening behind the scenes. And it seems to be maybe politically motivated or whatever. But, but we’re, you know, we just we want to be we’re just really rewinding the clock, just about three, three to five years of where social media was why YouTube became so great why Facebook became so popular and Twitter became so popular. And so we just, we just want to basically, you know, be be what it was before and offer, offer that to our users and respect our users.
Rob McNealy
And I think a lot of people want that. And I think on the other hand, I think there’s also a big market for curated content as well. And I can see both sides of it. The the anarchist part of me is like, you know, what people should do without the want to do, but, you know, if they want to do it on their own platform, you know, if they want to do it their way and not my way on my platform, then they go build their own and you did so I kind of like that and I’m actually very interested to see where this positive plays out for you. You guys float. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of bullshit out there. I mean, there’s a lot of stupid people there a lot of assholes. And, you know, I kind of look at it like, we have a forum, for instance, with Tusk. And we haven’t we have rules in our forum and our groups in our telegram, because we believe like, we don’t allow certain types of spam because we find that spam does make the community suck, you know, all these online groups, once they stop having moderators and admins is just the nonsense takes over. And I’m just putting out my little brainstorming hat here. And it’s like, Okay, if everybody on your in your neighborhood turns out to be a jerk, and people don’t necessarily honest, is that a great neighborhood anymore? And I and I, and I wrestle with these kind of, you know, internally I wrestle with these kinds of, you know, thoughts philosophically, because I always want to weigh my own freedom. My pro freedom orientation with people are still stupid and jerks. He helped Part of the world, right? You got to kind of look, there’s both there. And I do think there’s a nuance and it’s interesting, especially with a lot of folks in the Liberty movements, whatever movement you want to call it, that have a hard time with that nuance that, you know, just because you can be a jerk doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to be a jerk all the time. And, you know, I heard voices coming out and this is supposed to be a new social media thing out on the iOS network, and supposedly it’s everybody’s doxxed and I’m mixed on and I’m actually interested to see how it works. So for instance, on and to me, I docs myself a long time ago, I’ve always been Rob McNealy and everything I don’t have. I don’t have any sock accounts. I am myself out there. So I’m always kind of flying without a net. But I can tell you Kingsley, you know, I’ve had a lot of assholes take advantage of that trolls, doing crazy stuff. And it’s like, oh, you’re you’re an anonymous avatar. And you You’re going to be a jerk. I’m doxxed. You know, I’m myself I’m I’m a target. And, and I and I think there’s a weird trade off there because I one part of me, a lot of people are really anti social non civilized because of that anonymity. On the other hand, I always think that while we still need to have that ability to be completely private, because maybe someone needs to be a Hong Kong protester, right. And so, I don’t know the balance. And, you know, libertarians will have this, you know, they’ll they’ll shred me on this, because I’m not quite 100% pure, but I’m like, you know, but sometimes people lie and say things that aren’t true on the internet because of their anonymous. You know, avatar, what have you I mean, what do you think about that?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Right? So I mean, if you’re, you know, if you’re a public person and you have a public profile, then you know, you’re going to run into this stuff, no doubt, and then it’s up to you to curate, block or mute people who you know, want to are trying to harass you or engage with you that you don’t want to You know, that you don’t want to engage with. So you know, I would say, if you if you’re really against people, you know if you know, coming after you or doing this doing that, then make your account private and then choose who you know who can who can really engage with you, if you’re willing to take the risk of being becoming public and you want to, you know, promote your voice and you want to grow your audience a little bit more easily through through a public profile, then, you know, you take on that risk yourself, and you have to kind of deal with the things that come at you. It’s a, you know, I think it’s no different the online identity versus the real life identity. You know, there really isn’t much of a difference between besides people being are able to be anonymous on are more anonymous, I’d say, are easier to be anonymous online. But But again, you know, there’s there’s there’s interesting features that we’re building out, like shareable mutes and blocklist where let’s say there’s a full list of people. That’s have shown of users that have shown to be, you know, I don’t know, kind of a difficult to deal with online. Well, you know, if there’s an easy way to, to share these lists, and you know, with one click being able to block a full list of users that have engaged in this type of behavior, then, you know, let’s let’s make that easier. Let’s use technology to make make our lives easier, easier, not only to engage with people, but also to disengage with people.
Rob McNealy
And I think that’s actually an amazing idea. You know, I know I’m saying I understand blocking, and I block liberally and I have a pretty thick skin and I me, and I’ve been out there for a long time. So I really normally don’t care when someone says dumb shit, because that’s just the internet. I did have a guy who’s actually kind of pro popular, but he’s, you know, anonymous, and he runs a podcast and he’s a crypto maximalist of one flavor and a year ago we had a problem and he just didn’t like my project because it’s not Bitcoin. Let’s just put it out there. just you know, he’s like anything that’s not Bitcoin is a scam. And I’m like, Okay, well that’s not true. Okay? A Scam is is accusing someone of a fraud or a crime and a violation than happy and a B. And you know, and you know, it started coming up in the search engine results and I’m like, okay, he wrote a blog post and all the saying that I’m a scam and I’m like, Okay, one I’ve never taken anybody’s money. I’ve done everything I said I would do I created something that we gave away that became valuable. That’s not a scam. That’s a gift. But it was interesting. Like he was very toxic and I ignored him for a year but I had to deal with and deal with some of the, the SEO Fallout, right? Because marketing is kind of a thing. And and I called him up and I’ve figured out who he was, I did some digging, and I’m pretty good at finding out some things that I actually know who he is now, like everything about him personally. And I emailed him and I used his first name and now he’s got a public email just for his avatar, you know, and I emailed him by his First Name, and last name, and said maybe we could have a phone call. And we did. We had an hour long conversation, he still hates my project. And I said, That’s okay. But don’t accuse me of being, you know, a fraud or criminal. You can say you hate my project. I don’t have a problem with that. But let’s just be honest. And, you know, here’s the thing, Kingsley, if I hadn’t figured out who he was, he wouldn’t have cooperated with me, because he felt protected by that anonymity. And he felt that he could break the law and call somebody things that aren’t true. And I think, you know, that’s the problem I see out there and I do understand where some platforms come from on that. And and to me, it’s like, you know, sometimes people just aren’t nice. And are mean because of that. And I think that’s the the downside of the whole keyboard warrior thing. But.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
They’re going to be perfect. Just like in in you know, IRL real life. It’s never going to be perfect no matter what you’re going to have people out there that are that hate you and Whatever. And so, you know, and then we’ll we’ll continue to see this you know, I think a lot what’s what’s interesting with crypto in particular is that we’re seeing a lot of people that that were Bitcoin maximalists starting to at least be more open minded to new projects. And I never you know, I, I was more of a I would say a Bitcoin maximalist years ago, but I would never hate other other projects out there because competition is good. And you know, we’re really actually a big one we’re seeing that that as far as advancement and and you know that the protocol and so with that we’re seeing a lot of other protocols that are kind of blowing past that as far as things that you can do on chain. So, so, you know, I think competition is good, whether it’s social media, whether it’s money, I mean, obviously, and and really, you know, let’s let’s really keep our eyes on the target, which is the, what we’re creating is an alternative to central banks and then felician and, you know, this this kind of crazy system that That’s that we’ve been born in.
Rob McNealy
Lost you. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I think I lost you, buddy. Hello, there you are. You’re back.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, I lost you too.
Rob McNealy
Having some bandwidth problems on your side. I think keeps saying that you have low bandwidth. I hate when you have low bandwidth. You got low tea or something?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, it’s weird cuz I have really good internet. Anyway, I’m not sure right cut off but.
Rob McNealy
Okay. So I’ll just pick it up. You know, I think I think competition is excellent too. And I think so the crypto crypto space as well. I’m an entrepreneur and I actually am kind of late to crypto. I don’t click came to I don’t claim to be like an early adopter at all. I’ve only been in this space a couple of years. And it surprises me because I view everything as an entrepreneur and I always look at opportunities and you know mitigating risk and flaws and markets and that’s kind of how I view crypto I just see it even if it’s decentralized, it’s still a market it’s still a product and service and it’s interesting with like, the old maximalists that are so defensive about Bitcoin it’s typically been you know, I think you’d agree it’s typically Bitcoin maximalist it seemed to be the most toxic maximalist. But I think I have a theory on why I think it is, I think it’s that these guys have been like, you know, singing the tune of Bitcoin for so long that it’s become kind of their personal identity. And I think that the competition to Bitcoin and some of it is a lot more innovative and even not only on the tech side, but on the governance side on the speed side on the scalability side are far better.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
I use to use Bitcoin all the time to pay people you know with $20 Bitcoin on on Reddit and you know yeah the speed was was great you know and now like I wait for 20-30 minutes confirmation for this small transactions it’s actually very frustrating.
Rob McNealy
Right, and so then something and I think it just comes down to what the maximalists is that no one likes their baby being called ugly and and that’s what it’s about and I think the the the maximum was just fear the competition that maybe they backed the wrong horse at some point..
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
..to kind of reverse their opinion.
Rob McNealy
It’s human nature and no one wants to admit they’re wrong or their their baby’s ugly. It’s like, but to me, it’s funny because like in my own portfolio, I mean, I own Bitcoin, I own a Etheoreum. I have my own take somewhere. I think they’re going to be an end up and I think some things I think it’s, you know, I can’t make a decision yet because I think there’s a lot of things moving in This space, but I think I have my own theories on how crypto will be adopted. And that’s why we launched our own project anyway. I mean, that is why we launched our own project, because I think that some of the other big projects out there are kind of going the wrong direction. We’ll see if I’m right or wrong. We’re going to work really hard to figure that out. But I think that’s the same thing with social media, right? I mean, social media proved to be a thing, people like it, people like communicating digitally with each other. They like to be able to communicate with groups, they like to communicate with people on the other part of the planet. Social media is a good tool. The question is now, the governance of social media has kind of gone downhill, pretty bad over the last five, six years. And I think this is why I’m excited to you know, talk to you about what you’re doing with slope because to me, we need competition to kind of hopefully push back, you know, on some of those major social media platforms that in my opinion, are abusing their users.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m not sure why I cut off earlier, but I was just saying that let’s let’s remember, you know, whether it’s Bitcoin or other technology, but specifically with Bitcoin and money, you know, it’s not that, you know, it’s great that all these different cryptocurrencies and blockchains are competing against each other, define what what is going to serve the market best. But let’s remember that, that what we’re what we’re trying to replace is central banks. And so just because something isn’t as decentralized as this or this and that or you know, like, let’s focus on on what what the actual goal is, is that’s creating a better technology for money and in whether something let’s in you know, it should it should work as good as as the best thing out there. So, that’s what I like to support. And that’s what you know, kind of the, the foundation is set for as far as social media with flow, is that you know, okay, right now we may be we may be centralized, but hey, we support free speech, you’re not going to get thrown in 30 days. Facebook Jail for posting a meme or you know, you we’re not going to suspend your your Twitter account because you you work for anti war calm. So you know, it’s just like, hey, let’s support things that, you know, may might not be the most decentralized or the most, you know, in our case libertarian thing, but let’s focus on the things that hey, maybe it has easy, good, great UI UX, you know, it’s it offers an alternative, and maybe, you know, they’re not they have they don’t have all the features yet, but on the roadmap, you know, they’re playing this and that and, you know, great team and good backers, and great community. So that’s just that’s just kind of where I’ve gone from, and I used to be kind of one of those more things like, Oh, this isn’t as decentralize or censorship resistant and as is that but, but, but, you know, I would say I’m more of like a kind of a incremental approach myself, where incremental ism has been used against us for, you know, years and years in the past, but now It may be maybe to get the masses to adopt certain things we don’t need to go fully you know crypto anarchists maybe we can just kind of incrementally get there and just use technology as as a way where indeed show people that hey technology can be used for you know obviously obviously very good things that they can they can help us move money you know communicate with each other.
Rob McNealy
For other you’re singing my song you know I say the same thing like with Tusk were delegated proof of stake chain we are we are not quote unquote. So decentralized is say maybe one of the bigger block chains out there, though, the definition of what decentralize This seems to change a lot but here’s the thing. The masses don’t give a shit about something being decentralized. They want something that works. They don’t care that PayPal centralized they don’t get a Venmo was centralized. They don’t care that you know, authorize net is centralized or visa, they don’t care. They want their problem solved. And so it’s funny when you know a lot of the Maxis will argue about Well, it’s not decentralized. And I’m like, okay, but these people don’t care about that. But how about, but what would be better would would a local credit union one cryptocurrency or would a local credit union be a preferred business vendor than maybe a major national bank? You know, there’s a trade off there. They’re very different. I mean, I use I personally like credit unions, I don’t have account at a major bank, because I like the fact that I can vote for the board of my credit union. And to me, I still have more control over that relationship with the credit union because I can go talk to the vice president pretty easily if I want to I have actually. Whereas with the major bank, I don’t have that. So to me, that’s that whole spectrum, right. And it seems like a lot of people that are more libertarian minded seem to have a real difficult time with incremental and, you know, spectrum kind of things. That nuance right. And I agree with you and so what tasks are like, I’ll give you I’m Neil saying the same thing you are as over the top We’re trying to focus on going out and getting people interested when crypto as something that’s going to solve a problem. And then in our roadmap long term, we’re building out more resiliency and more, you know, redundancy into our network. And that’s, we got a big plan on that, if we’re successful with the first part. You know, I think it’s like this, and I think you’re doing the same thing, right? You want to build out, look, we just need to get something out there. So people can start, you know, communicating in a way without immediately being just ghosted. Right. And then you build out those other features that you want. I mean, Facebook can build all this stuff overnight, right? YouTube didn’t build that stuff all overnight, right? I mean, it takes time. You got to have a plan. And you know what, it takes a dedicated team, a dedicated visionary to grow that right and unfortunately, and this is my criticism of really hardcore Bitcoin maximalist and decentralized so that I don’t believe that a lot of these decentralized cryptocurrencies have these structure to get adoption, because they don’t have anybody out there guiding it. And you don’t have those visionaries out there that are out there talking to end users? Well, yeah.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, that’s one of the interesting things too about a lot of these dissension, you know, dials are decentralized organizations is that I have no problem with actually centralized leadership, as long as the leadership is doing something that the users want them to do, or, you know, actually, actually doesn’t really matter. You know, let the leadership do what they want to do. And, and hopefully, the leaders are making the right the right moves, where people will follow them. I mean, humans are made up of leaders and followers and then you know, just depends on the different aspects of your life and the different things that you buy or interact with. So so you know, I, there’s, for most things in my life, like I want to be able to follow to trust someone and follow a leader, that that, that I understand where they’re, where they’re going in their vision and all this when when we talk about all these kind of decentralized organizations and all this. I mean, really, that’s that’s actually like, you know, democracy which actually is one of the worst forms of governance in in organizations. I mean, it’s basically communism. So why well, why would we want that we want we want actually good leaders that are that are doing good things that we can we can follow versus, you know, direct democracy or communism.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, it’s interesting going from a token that we launched, and we gave it away. I mean, we launched it for free via faucet, so we never sold coins or tokens. But it’s interesting going to a project that actually has on chain governance this week, which was the big switch, right? We basically we gave up all this control. And I can tell you as an entrepreneur, that was hard. Yeah. Because as an entrepreneur, you want to control your baby, you spend two years busting your ass kind of trying to create it and then you push it out of the nest and hope that all the vultures out there, don’t eat your baby. But I think you’re Right, I think, you know, good, good leadership is hard. And especially in startups. I mean, the reason people love Elon Musk so much is because he’s rare that Ilan musk of the world are rare that they have that vision and the ability to execute on that vision. And you do need that, I think, if anything, at least, to design the system to design the protocol. And I think with the centralized projects, My take is that no one’s marketing them very well. And no one’s out there talking to end users, no one’s building them, like you would a normal project, or you know, service which means to me, I’m more of a sales and marketing guy, I don’t build I don’t build something anymore until I have a customer. And to me, when you build something, you should be building something for an intended customer. And if you’re just building something and hope there’s a customer, I just think that’s that’s a recipe for failure. And I think with what you’re doing with float, you like look, we see we see a gap in the market, right? You there are people that are really concerned learned about this there are people being before in the of the platform, and you’re trying to fill that gap. And I think that’s why I think you have a good chance of being successful with flow is Is that your understanding that you’re building something to solve an existing and recognized problem with a lot of crypto, they don’t solve any problem. Any buddies recognize problem. If you look at most kryptos do not solve a problem for anybody. They actually create more problems for most people, for the average person. crypto creates problems, it doesn’t erase them. And I think that the crypto projects in the future that are going to be the most successful at cracking that whole mass adoption nut are going to be the ones that are the best marketed. Yeah, and whatever that looks like.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, yeah. I definitely, you know, Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. And I think that for us, you know, we’re right now we do, we do support BTC but we’re looking to add a lot of the other major all coins and trying to just make it you know, as easy as possible for users to not only buy and sell digital contents on our platform, but next year quarter one, we’re looking to also start a marketplace as well, so that people can actually sell real, you know, physical items or even services if they want to. So we’re really focused on making crypto, you know, very user friendly. And that’s one of the things that, you know, I’ve lived off crypto actually for four years this year. Unfortunately, I’ve had to deal more in VR than ended up in banks that I’d like to but but you know, I see there’s, you know, I truly believe that cryptocurrency is the future of money it’s definitely a better money. Yes, there’s a speculative speculation side to it. But But you know, if you do make the right choices over time, it looks like that you can potentially make a lot of money on cryptocurrency and in just but but there’s still a lack of ways to use cryptocurrency and and I think the future of that is not only through all the Other you know, companies and corporations and services where you can already already use cryptocurrency, but enabling people to we see the gig economy growing and enabling people to use crypto on a peer to peer basis in a marketplace where they can sell, buy and sell digital and physical goods and services is the future that, you know, it won’t be the kind of this this full kind of crypto anarchist dream won’t happen overnight. But, but but through, you know, through through proper, proper implementation is very achievable because I think the end result is a more more peaceful, cheaper, a faster way to to do business and then communicate with people. And I think that that you know, the
Rob McNealy
Oh, we dropped out again. I lost you again. Right at the end Now you’re back
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Hello.
Rob McNealy
Oh there you are you’re back now.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
I you know it’s weird because I don’t have issues I’ve had like one issue with zoom before but my on my internet is really good so I don’t know what’s going on
Rob McNealy
Oh we’re close enough but I think you’re right i think it is the future as well and you know I really enjoyed our time today and I want you to keep me up to date on when you got things rolling out with slope because I I think this is something the market needs.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
I really I really appreciate you having me on and appreciate the chat.
Rob McNealy
Where can people find out more?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Find us at Flote.app F L O T E dot A P P or JoinFlote.com. Again Flote is spelled a little differently and and also my I’m King King on Flote. So I was able to grab that username somehow. But But yeah, so you can you go to Flote.app/King. That’s where I post most of my stuff. And we actually haven’t so that you can like share to Twitter and all this kind of stuff we are going to be implementing so that you can share to Facebook too. So we’re trying to make it as easy, like I said, as easy as people to switch over, and at least create a second account on Flote.
Rob McNealy
Perfect. Kingsley, thank you so much for coming on the show today. And if you like this content, folks, make sure you subscribe to our social media platform channel that you can find listed at RobMcNealy.com.
Episode Links
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge.Club Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Today I’m talking alright. Today I’m talking to Darryll DiPietro, he is the founder and CEO of Coincierge Club. How are you today, Darrell? doing? Well, Rob, how are you doing? I’m glad we finally got to connect here because we’ve been hanging out for a while now. And it’s glad that you know, I’m glad you’ve taken the time because I’ve been trying to get you on the show for a while now. So before we jump into some of the hot topics of the day, and trust me, I think we got a lot of fun stuff to cover today. For the people who are not familiar with you, which I can’t believe there’s anybody that’s not familiar with you. Who are you? And what are you doing?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I am Darryll DiPietro. I am the founder and CEO of coin Sierra Club, and we built a mobile private key wallet with 30,000 different digital assets on it and a point of sale which allows users to use those assets, very simple to use. And we’re just here to try to help the crypto industry and kind of bring a bunch of different projects together along the way.
Rob McNealy
Wow. Hello. got that down. I guess you’ve been practicing your elevator pitch. So how did you get so good at your elevator pitch
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
up pitch to at least 200 250 times already. I’ve pitched from, you know, just anybody that wants to hear me talk to some of the biggest VCs in the valley. And they get the same pitch every single time.
Rob McNealy
So the valley, so I know that you’ve been doing a lot of entrepreneurial education kind of stuff. Tell me a little bit about kind of the stuff you’ve been working on to help grow what you’ve been doing.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah. So in about two years ago, we started our journey in Silicon Valley. It started off with a Google event called Startup Grind. They have it in Redwood City. And that’s when we started meeting VCs and finding out that there is a way to get funding if you fit in a certain mold that these venture capitalists are looking for. They want to see revenue, they want to see growth, they want to see percentages, and they want statistics. They don’t care about height. They don’t care who’s backing your project. They only care about the actual fundamentals of the project numbers, employees growth, things like that. So we started this journey. We are You know, ended up going to Martha’s Vineyard did some stuff out there with some other VCs but brought back to the valley for launch 2018. And that’s when we really started to focus on how to build this brand in the way that a venture capitalist wants to see it. We’ve done a bunch of deal clubs. We did a deal club in New York became partners with Rob Charles and Goldfinger, which is a cryptocurrency back deal club on Wall Street. We did got six, seven months in New York, beginning of 2019. And then we came back around to San Francisco through an event at the end of June out there I was moderately successful, but it allowed us to establish a brand up there and then we got into a VC accelerator program in Santa Clara. And that was eight weeks of non stop work. We produced over 80 documents during that time. Things like we just talked about the elevator pitch or hone. Our pitch deck was honed our business plan was honed all these things that we maybe had but no one professional that ever sat down and said hey, you know what? This is okay. But it could be great or this is not okay. But it needs to be great. And so We went through and we developed all these items we develop, you know, fleshed out, our business plan fleshed out our five year, you know, goals, three year goals, HR plans, fundraising goals, where we’re going. And then at the end, they helped us build the perfect pitch deck, which we’ve been able to go out and pitch to a few different VCs in multiple locations, including Silicon Valley. We also pitch to an accelerator out here in Nevada. And so that’s really where we’re at. We’re trying to be that actual crypto company that follows legitimate rules. We’re trying to follow the way that you would build any other type of tech company. Whereas if you had a social media platform that has nothing to do with crypto, if you had the next Airbnb, the next Uber, these guys all went through the exact same programs, the exact same training and got the exact same, you know, feedback and built the same pitch decks just relevant to their own projects. And that’s what we’re lacking in the crypto space right now is you know, in the beginning or right around the time that I got into It, it seemed as if it was anybody with a white paper could raise 510 20 $40 million. And most of those projects have gone to the wayside was a lack of knowledge in the industry. So as we watched this happen, we said, you know what we’ve always wanted to be on the ethical side of everything that we do. So we’re going to follow traditional VC funding, a lot of people don’t believe in it. A lot of people think that we’re dealing with the enemy in you know, the people that have the money shouldn’t have access to the crypto, but in the end, these are the guys that are funding unicorn companies. And I think that that’s everyone’s goal in this space is to have a highly profitable business and we know that that’s the way we need to go. So we’re doing a lot of stuff up there.
Rob McNealy
So why didn’t you do an Ico that and why didn’t you try to fundraise just by selling off your own coins?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Well, it’s interesting. We actually did have a small raise less than $10,000 less than what the SEC would have any concern about and it wasn’t about getting rich, like a lot of these projects did where they just raised a bunch of money and didn’t know what to do with it. We had a set set of goals we needed to be Build a server, we needed to build out our mobile applications. And we needed development funds. And so we did, we raised enough money to build a server to get a static IP and to be able to actually host this application. And we hired my friend Michael hue, who is a subcontractor for the US God to come in and build out these two nearly bulletproof applications. And that’s what we needed the funding for. But we never asked for anything more. We never tried to raise money that you know, we just go into our pockets or pay for lambos or, you know, these expensive parties or some of these crazy things that we saw in late 2017, early 2018.
Rob McNealy
No, so you don’t have a Lambo. So what you’re telling me, I’m kind of bummed. I bummed by that.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I’ve got an Acura. Everybody’s seen it. It’s
Rob McNealy
$200 a month. So what exactly specifically is what problem is your, your product? What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do with your project?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
It’s interesting that you asked me that because if you’d asked me that about a year ago I would have given you a different answer. And the reason for that is the industry has evolved. So currently, right now we’re trying to help liquidate coins that have no value. But the overall idea and what I would have answered a year ago is we’re trying to bring everybody to one wallet. We’re trying to get everybody with all these multiple different chains and multiple different coins in different wallets, with with their own private keys are not only in their own private keys, and we’re trying to get everybody to move towards a mobile private key wallet where users hold their keys. And they have a vendor network where they can spend this crypto, because if you’re not spending crypto, then what the heck is the point? Most of these coins, the values been lost? Most of these projects have dissolved and people hold this value in these one off wallets. Why can’t you spend that at the gas station? Why can you spend that at the grocery store? So we looked at that problem. But the issue we ran into instantly was like I said, there is no value on some of these coins and people aren’t willing to take that hit. So we looked at kind of modifying it into a coupon style liquidation of these all coin values where users get tangible value in tourism. And it seems to be working well, you know, we’ve thrown a bunch of events where people have come in and spent different all coins on different things. You’ve been a few of them, or at least one of them. And so, you know, we’re trying to, we’re trying to evolve with the industry as the industry evolves. But the underlying technology has really not changed in two years. It’s a mobile privacy wallet, a point of sale, users hold our own keys, there’s no information that gets sent to the devices. It’s built by us due to subcontractors. So the security is number one. But again, you know, it’s it’s difficult to stay relevant in this industry. So you constantly have to look for new ways to reinvent your product to stay relevant.
Rob McNealy
So, you’re saying that you’re basically taking existing tokens from dead projects and then recycling them into something that has value?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
That’s right.
Rob McNealy
How?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
By knowing how they hosp..exactly by knowing hospitality industry works and attacking the soft costs associated with that. So for example, out here in Las Vegas, we get complimentary bottle service that bottle service does not cost us anything the venue comps it out. Why can’t we tip in cryptocurrency? Why can’t we tip the door guy that lets our people in in cryptocurrency Why can’t we pay for that complimentary beer that we get at the bar and cryptocurrency and so a light bulb went off and said wait a minute, this this whole industry of really its cash its cash driven industry right now that is undocumented. There is no you know, record of you throwing the door Guy 100 bucks, or the door Guy $20 or the cocktail server $50. Why can’t they accept crypto?
Rob McNealy
Well, I think they can, I guess the I understand
Unknown Speaker
No, because their venues the venues won’t allow it. And gaming won’t allow it. And so that’s when we come in and we circumvent the gaming laws that prevent them from doing so and allow these users the Your businesses to accept these coins.
Rob McNealy
Right? And I understand I’m gonna I’m gonna play hardball with you because I’m trying I don’t understand it like I understand. If you create your own brand, your own coin that works on your own platform and integrate that that makes those economics I can understand. I don’t understand the economics of taking other people’s dead projects that may not be traded that may not have value, how you using them in some way creates value with them where they’re already considered dead or not really being used. That’s the part I just don’t understand. Why would you Why do you want to take these other coins that are out there are tokens that are dead? Why not just work with your own token?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I’ve got the perfect answer for you. So that is on CMC that has a dead project, like a verge or something like that.
Rob McNealy
Verge actually got a pretty robust community so I wouldn’t say Verge.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I’m just naming names name a coin on there that
Rob McNealy
SALT.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Great SALT
Rob McNealy
SALT, Pac Coin.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Either one doesn’t matter will take SALT because it’s the first one you said. So salt is on CMC and you can see what their market cap is. And you can see what one coin is trading at not having that knowledge in front of me. I’m assuming you’re maybe googling that right now. But let’s just call let’s just say one salt coin goes for $5 a coin. Okay?
Rob McNealy
Six cents.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Okay, even better. Okay, so six cents a coin. So in order to have $6, that’s 100 coins of salt coin. Correct. Correct. So if you take 100 coins and you go to one of our vendors and you buy a $6 beer, you now got $6 worth of that coin. You weren’t able to sell it on an exchange because there really isn’t anybody banging at the door to get salt right now. The vendor who did not pay for that beer gives you that beer and also gets $6 worth of salt, which may or may not be worth something down the road. So are the arbitrage value here is actually reestablishing a value for these dead tokens connected Physical tangible assets that users can hold. So you’d say are you taking their coins and then converting them to your own token and then on your platform, you’re basically doing the trading with your own coin or token, we don’t do any trading for the we don’t do any, we literally have a hands off approach to this. So, the vendors that we work with hold these coins, we can show them how to liquidate them through the waves decks or through other means, but we do not liquidate to feeha we don’t exchange the currency errs. This is simply they they would normally not be getting anything for this competition value. Now they’re getting something that could potentially worth a lot more.
Rob McNealy
So I get so I download your wallet. And I go in there and do I just have to then buy on that on through your wallet. I have to buy whatever the whatever these tokens that I want, or do I just buy
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Most of the time users already have the tokens on other platforms and they just migrate them over remember, we have 30,000 digital assets on that platform. So there’s except for the big except for a lot of the ERC 2720 tokens, we can onboard those coins. And if there is a coin that isn’t on boarded or a platform TUSC, we can make that, yeah, we can make that happen in about 15 minutes. So it’s not a hard process. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not like we’re sitting here being like, Oh, you have to buy $20 $100 $200 of our coin to use our platform. You literally don’t, you literally have to have at least one Coincierge Club coin trading at about two cents right now in order to try to do the transaction.
Rob McNealy
It’s interesting, I need to wrap my head about it, to be honest.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Understand we make money off the transactions. That’s how we make our money. We’re very clear about that. We have a premium SAS model for our vendors, which they pay us also monthly. So for the user, it’s exceptionally cheap and it’s just The traditional type of transaction you’re used to sending in crypto, where you pay user generated fee.
Rob McNealy
So how So basically, at this point, then you didn’t do an Ico but you did do a small raise. Where are you on the funding of it right now?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
We’ve raised $72,000, traditionally through convertible note, and equity swaps. We started off doing equity, then we incorporated in March of 18. Switch to a convertible note offering. We’re doing a late seed round raise right now, which I don’t think the SEC would like me to say what the amount is or how that is, but if you’re interested in finding out privately reach out to us and have this conversations, we try to make sure that we follow the law. It’s kind of interesting that this space was bred out of the opposite of that, but uh, we try to make sure we follow up.
Rob McNealy
You know, I think that a lot of people got into crypto not because they necessarily wanted to get around the law. I think, well, there’s some people that are just straight up criminals, but I think a lot of people Got into this space because they didn’t like the existing power brokers that are being very centralized. And I think there’s a nuance there, right. Like, I don’t want to break the law. And before we even launched with our own token two years ago, you know, we spent a lot of time talking to attorneys. I personally talked to the SEC attorneys about securities offerings and and understanding that I didn’t want to launch any legal security. And here’s the thing, not that I really care that much about laws and government, everybody who knows me knows I’m pretty, I can be pretty political at times. But the thing is, to me, if you’re launching a project, you know, in the startup, and you understand this, because you’re going through this accelerator stuff this whole, you know, regulatory risk is what it’s called right? To me. If you’re a startup founder, and you’re not out there hardcore, trying to understand what risks your startup faces and then having plans to mitigate those risks and regulatory risk is a huge piece of that, then your friends as a founder, you’re a moron. And you’re probably going to lose people’s money if you don’t care about regulatory risk. Now, you can say you hate the government all you want, that doesn’t mean that they’re still not relevant to what you’re doing. Right?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Exactly. You have to make sure you stay on the correct side of the law. And it’s difficult because like you said, a lot of these people I know, you know, you have a token that is for sorry, coin, that’s for the Second Amendment. And a lot of people will look at that and say, Oh, he must be anti government. No, I mean, the second amendment is part of the government. It actually is one of the like, founding principles of what makes our government work. And so you have to look at stuff like that. You can’t just be this rogue person out there in the space trying to, you know, change. I know, disruption is something that they connect with the centralization and the blockchain, but the FinTech side of it is highly regulated. And if you want to play in this game, I mean, you’re playing with the people that have all the money in the world. For example, you know, I’m sure You saw that we signed with Wilson Sonsini. That’s one of the biggest law firms in Silicon Valley. They handle everything from a pre seed to an IPO. So for our next round of raising like we’re in, we’re in the process of onboarding. We’re going to be moving our cap table over to kartha. We’re going to be doing the things that the Draper’s do, we’re going to be doing the things that Erik Voorhees does, we’re going to be doing the things that the VCs that are in our space are looking for so that we can scale this thing the correct way.
Rob McNealy
So what is the correct way? What is your kind of long term goal for your project?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
We’re, we thought we were ready for a series A after going through this accelerator, we realized we weren’t quite there yet. We need to find a product market fit. That’s our next goal. So we have about 600 or so wallets on the system. We saw 14% uptick last month and we’re doing about 1000 transactions a month on the coin. So we just seem to do a lot of AV testing. It’s probably going to take us maybe about another six months of AV testing for product market. Fit To find out how to get this thing to scale. And so that’s why we’re doing the smaller raise of that. And then we’re going to go after a traditional series a raise, we see this thing through, we see this thing growing and scaling through a series C, we’ve talked to a few different firms that have given us, you know, verbal commitments on Series B. So we know what we need to do to get to that point. We have specific, you know, metric intervals that we need to hit. But, you know, there’s, there’s really realistically The sky’s the limit, because there’s not a lot of people that are building multiple chain wallets right now. And there’s a few and we’ve outlined those as competition in our business plan. But realistically, cold people are still trying to figure out how to launch coins on their own wallets. And the ones that are out there that hold multiple chains, hold the users private keys.
Rob McNealy
And you’re doing it without holding their private keys. Correct?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Correct. We never not only do we not see your private key, we can’t even reset your password.
Rob McNealy
Well do the other ones reset your password?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah. I mean, if you look at the competition without trying to throw shade on anybody that’s out there. What will Coinbase for example, Coinbase has how many coins on there that six or seven. I haven’t been a coin base in a minute, but I know they have the GD x as well. And they’ve got a lot of different tokens on there, but they hold your keys if there is a DDoS attack on that platform that’s gone. And people think that’s a wallet. And people have confidence in it. And they say, Oh, I have FDIC insurance. No, you don’t. You have FDIC insurance on your US dollars, not on your Bitcoin that’s in there. A lot of the exchanges that are out there that people are using like a crack in, although we do like those guys who met those guys up and walk out Wyoming. They hold your private keys, these wallets or exchanges, hold your private keys. And anytime a hacker wants to go in there and walk around they can and they can take that money out of your account. And there’s literally nothing you can do about that.
Rob McNealy
You got me kind of stressed out to be honest.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Why is that? Don’t you
Rob McNealy
Now I actually naturally don’t. You would not believe I’m not the one in charge of that though. So the the wife is the she’s the keeper when it comes down to cracking the whip on the detail stuff like that I’m not allowed to touch the money, you know, so, but she’s much smarter than I am. So it’s okay. I don’t even know where the private key actually I know where all the private keys are. But we, we have a workflow per for our own personal finances. And we’re very, I guess you would say where we have a lot of redundancy plans for, you know, it’s really, you know, it will look how many people are dying out there and then they, you know, they don’t need their their spouses don’t even know where their keys are, they lose millions of dollars. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I actually think that’s a problem with crypto that needs to be addressed.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Not only about like, third party custody, I mean, obviously, I was looking into doing something with that children and trying to leave some sort of like, you know, will or some sort of crypto Trust Fund, if you will, and the only thing I could really come up with is low the private key on a USB drive, put the USB drive into a security box at a bank, and then a studio that has access to that. And that’s not the answer.
Rob McNealy
I actually think it absolutely could be an answer. In fact, there’s private safe deposit vaults that are out there that are Safe Haven Vaults is a new franchise. Vegas.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I didn’t think about that until you said it.
Rob McNealy
Yeah. And so like for safe haven, for instance, there’s no AML KYC because they’re not a bank. And they have full biometrics, they don’t know who you are. And unlike a bank, who does know who you are, so there’s a lot of privacy that’s being retained. And then what happens is, you have a customer you have like a next of line, basically data card that you put on top of your box inside their box, so that if you they ever have to drill your box out, your box is still locked, but now they have the person to call Say, Hey, your contents are here. So they got a good solution for that. And I think that’s an excellent, you know, something to look at out there for that besides just normal personal handling, I don’t have an issue if you want to, you know, put information on jump drive, and that’s encrypted, and then someone else has the key for that. But you need to have backups. And I think that you see a lot out there that you know, the husband is the one who does all the finances and there’s no instructions on how to deal with it and he dies and the wife’s you know, the widow was left in the dust and, and that’s a problem. But we have a problem with that now, even with bank accounts and things like that, that’s why there’s 10s of millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost funds that different states hold right because that exact problem they forgot about bank accounts and things like that. But I think that’s that I think that going forward is something that’s going to have to be fixed because the public the I think right now the public isn’t ready for crypto because it’s so because of its unforgiving nature.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah, it’s very, you know, finite When it comes to those keys, I mean, if you do not have them well, on the platforms that would like we’re building and what other you know, our competitors are building. It’s very finite when it comes to that.
Rob McNealy
Well, I will absolutely i mean, i, we’ve even have, you know, we’re an open project that we have lots of volunteer dabs, and we’ve had developers lose their keys. And you’re like, you’re the developer, and you, you know, misplace your keys. Yeah. And we had one of the early developers that was working with us when we were still in ERC 20 token, he put his private keys on a text file on his hard drive, and his hard drive failed, and he couldn’t recover it and lost a lot of money. And there was nothing we could do. There was just nothing we could do about it. And I felt bad but and it led to him leaving the project because he didn’t have any and he didn’t have any skin in the game at that point, which just kind of sucks and to me,
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
it’s completely cannot recover from that hard drive the totally fried out the hard drive?
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I don’t understand it was a platter failure. Something.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I fried a hard drive on a MacBook and I hired a nerd to come in and he was able to recover everything.
Rob McNealy
Yeah. And I understand that I’m just he said he did everything he couldn’t he couldn’t do it. So I don’t understand that. But I know that it didn’t, his tokens didn’t make the swap. So he didn’t he was not able to recover them before we became a coin and did our swap. Because at this point, it doesn’t matter anymore because we’re not a token anymore. So wherever we have our own coin, on our own chain.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Could you just create those tokens for him, and then I guess, because you guys never recovered the coins that were on his hard drive, you couldn’t issue.
Rob McNealy
What we ended up doing is there was some coins that we knew that were lost that were recovered and they were put back into the worker proposal fund for costs. So the ones that we could valid verify that did not make the swap, because when we swapped we had to create a supply of TUSC to accommodate The supply of OCC.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
We’re doing something similar with ERC 20 Coincierge, so..
Rob McNealy
Yeah so so we had to create enough in that when we did the Genesis block for our block chain. We had to create 50 billion coins to match the hundred billion OCC because we swapped it a 2:1 ratio because we brought her we shrunk our supply a little bit. Half you know so we’re up and then when we created the blockchain we had to initially essentially pre mine those 50 billion so..
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
What happened to my question, excuse me think what happened to my OCC coins that were on? What’s that game you walk around the Pokemon
Rob McNealy
AirCoins?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah. I haven’t even looked.
Rob McNealy
Yep, they are TUSC. So we we work with. So we work with Aircoins on that. So how it worked with air coins was the same way. Because of our swap. Our swap was a manual process. We created a dap where you had to manually move your OCC tokens. You had to create a task account. Yeah, then You had to manually on your own dime, move your OCC tokens to an Omega address, and then a tab, basically attach your account name and then your account credit. And then you had to download your own keys. And then when we launched, essentially, your account was created and credited with the correct number of OCC.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
And it worked in the background, or did you automate that process?
Rob McNealy
Or no, it was completely manual process. We made a Dappthat you had to it was a website, essentially.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
That’s why I’m asking because we’ve got I
Rob McNealy
We’ll talk I could I’ll tell you everything we did offline. Yeah. Essentially, yes, we did create a system that worked and worked very well. And it was a very slick system, actually, because we researched a lot of swap, right. This isn’t for interoperability, or there’s no OCC.
I really well, I don’t know if it would be the best way to do it ongoing because I’m not a developer. But I know that we spent a lot of time in our dev team spent a lot of time looking at There, you know all the major Icos that did the same thing. Most of them did a really bad job. Some Icos, even some big ones literally had your own private key.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
I know and its EOS will never work. And that’s why Ethereum will never work because there’s half of that EOS are part of the EOS network stuck on a theory I’m still and well in that
Rob McNealy
Yeah, so we actually made it so you had to login with meta mask. Okay, so you so you controlled your wall, we didn’t control any of it. And there’s a little trick I’m not going to tell you what they did. But our our guys figured it out. And they figured out a brilliant I’m work with our swap went almost flawlessly. And you guys watch like two days ago, right? Or? Yes, no, not yesterday, like couple days ago, right?
So we did the swap ended in October. So we did the swap in October. And then we just brought the gooey wallet and the gooey block explore online and brought our block producers in this last week. So we went through the whole process this week. So we are now Live real boy. And our first exchange listing will happen within the next couple days. They’re working. He’s working on. Thank you. I’ll tell you his work in the integration as we speak. So we’re it’s been an interesting process, but I’ll tell you, we’ll talk a little bit later about, you know how we did the the swap, but we spent a lot of time trying to figure that out in a way that was secure that we didn’t control keys. And that was a big thing that I said, I don’t want to be responsible for their keys. But I’ll tell you this. So even now, people that went and swap their OCC for Costco have already lost their tuskys it’s unforgiving. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Like we I mean, we put I mean, when we did the swap, we went through and we created a whole lot of videos and instructions and say copy this, copy this, do not lose this, do not lose this blah, blah, blah, you will lose all your access to friends. And we’ve had several people already come into the group and say they lost their keys.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Well, my heated how many times you download somebody else’s wallet at like a conference and they go download our wallet and you’re like, Okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, and they want you to backup the keys, you know, you’re really getting like $5 with a Bitcoin from them for downloaded the wallets. You’re like, All right, I’m not gonna use this wallet again. I mean, I can only assume that that happens to some people sometimes, but they’re just so excited, or in just such a rush to get through the process of setting up a wallet that they don’t factor in. I’ll never forget this password. It’s my password that I use for everything, or it’s, you know, in a significant thing for me. And then a week later, you’re like, password.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, it’s bad. And I think this is going to be an impediment to adoption. But I think it’s, it’s something that can be fixed. I think it’s something that can be created or corrected and dealt with. But at this point, it’s scary when even the people that are like the developers in this space are having the same problem, right? I’m like, I mean, can you imagine Grandma, who has a little bit dementia has, you know, a million dollars in crypto which is equivalent, her life savings. And then she, you know, delete off her one letter from her private key hash. And now she can’t access that ever. I mean, this if anybody who thinks that system is going to work for mass adoptions insane, right, it’s just not going to work. Something has to be done there needs to be a recoverability things. And and with our project, and maybe with viewers as well, we’re already looking long term, how we’re going to have to correct that and deal with that issue, because I know it’s an issue. And technologically we need to fix that. And so we’re working on some ideas. I’m not gonna save because I can tell you what our secret sauce is yet, but we got some ideas that we’re going to be working on. It just takes time.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Most of that because it’s interesting to see what you guys come up with. I know you guys have a pretty solid team and what you guys have been able to produce so far, it’s been pretty impressive.
Rob McNealy
So well. Well. Thank you. Um, so the latest news we were talking about this the other day, the crypto media purge. Have you been you know, it is
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
So Christmas came early for me. You know, we’ve seen a lot of people posting online recently that there’s been a crypto purge, especially on YouTube over the past couple of days. And, you know, I think that we share the same sentiment where it’s, you know, a lot of these guys were pushing projects that were shady sketchy, you know, ponzis, multi level marketing, affiliate links, or blatantly taking endorsement money from projects that shouldn’t have been endorsed and seeing this purge. I know it hurts people. I know, it’s the wrong time of the year. I know we should, you know, want everybody to succeed. But some of these guys, they have zero technical skill, zero technical ability, and they’re making money off of projects that myself and yourself and other people in our positions have worked hard, and sometimes they’re making more money off of promoting the projects that we’re making off of the projects. I saw somebody post something about like, Oh, this is a somebody’s like, Oh, this is freedom of speech. And then someone came back to him which I retweeted very similar thing, which was like that’s not freedom of speech. So third party company, you don’t have the right to freedom of speech on YouTube. And then the guy was like, I beg to differ. And then the guy was like, Oh, why don’t you build your own? You have a problem with censorship on social media platforms, build your own, and I was thinking to myself, because this guy has no technical skills, because he has zero technical ability. And you know, if you do have technical ability, and you’re an influencer, like my friend, Kingsley, and Aaron have built float, and I know you just follow me on float, not to give like some random shout out, but here’s the thing. Just give a shout out. Float is a platform for you. Float is a platform that’s not going to censor you. Flow is also been VC backed by Draper. You’re not Draper University, boost VC, which is Adam Draper’s, you know VC fund, and they built something they’ve come out and said, we’re not just content people. We’re not just native In the space that talk about crypto, we’re going to build a platform and they believe they have over 1000 users on there right now. And I can only imagine that they saw a huge uptick over the last couple of days. But if your sole basis of your channel is to interview people to make money off of that off of paid content, or sponsorships, and you’ve got some, you know, robot logo for your, you know, newest wallet promotion, it’s, it’s time for you to go, it’s time for you to you know, just hold your Bitcoin and go to the conferences and be that person, but you don’t need to keep profiting largely off of our hard work.
Rob McNealy
Well, I think one of the I think the two problems that I see here and having been a project in this space for two years now I’ve run into this a few times, right? And you have to I’m going to bet one, there’s a the guys that are being purged right now, are not just any old I’m a nice, honest to goodness Jerry analyst in crypto world YouTuber, these are guys that are pitching scams. These are guys that have been pitching bit Connect. These are guys that I’m pitching, literally full blown ponzis and not really adding a lot of value. By the way, it’s funny, I don’t even know a lot of these people. It’s kind of funny. They’re not even they’re not even as big as they were before. Like, now it’s like, a lot of the crypto guys these people aren’t even that great anymore. But these guys literally were pitching criminal fraudsters and unrepentantly. When these you know, fraudsters are out there. So I think one, this isn’t some wholesale, you know, attack for YouTube. Again, it’s all crypto. That’s nonsense. And I know lots of people that try to do good content out there that aren’t blantant
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Did your YouTube channel get purged or not?
Rob McNealy
Not a single Not a single problem, not even a notification. Not even a notification. I haven’t had any problems with crypto or I’m sorry, my crypto related content. In fact, I put out I uploaded a video today and it’s already, you know, ranking in Google and it’s about got crypto in it so so it’s not just all crypto that somehow it’s it’s the scammers are the least. scam enablers, and I don’t and honestly no folks are given, I don’t really care that these guys that are making money off costing people their life savings on the shit they were recommending. They are part of the problem. And if people are getting all defensive like Oh, poor crypto me, dude, and you’re part of the problem too. If you think that those kind of guys getting pulled out of the ecosystem is a bad thing.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
It’s like this man. If you’re a sports reporter, are you really part of the sports team? No, and we need to get more. There needs to be more work and more effort done on the projects to kind of regulate this thing. Like we can’t sit here and say say, oh, we’re gonna let you know, we’ll let this guy post about this, let this guy post about that we got to start calling these projects out. And I know you know that I have a whatever with with Nathan Hawkman. But I’m going to say this right now on this put on this podcast, he posted something brilliant. I don’t know if it was yesterday or the day before, but it literally was what we just said it was no fucks given sorry, but not sorry. Like all these guys that all they’re all they do is go out there and talk about other people’s projects. And it’s not about the code. It’s not about the security. It’s about how much money you’re making and shout out to this sponsor and shout out to that sponsor, and he ripped up and I don’t remember verbatim what it was, but I remember reading it and being like, yep, I agree. I didn’t like it because you know, me and him were we had a bit of a falling out but respect to that post. I just had to say it was spot on and it it was the overall sentiment. I kind of cooled off over those two days of Christmas because I was doing the Christmas thing. But today hit it hard and I was like, You know what, it’s time for It’s time for these guys that are crying about their product of crime on their YouTube channels getting censored or crying about their social media getting censored that has zero technical skills that are literally out there just going to the conferences to party and just going around and doing all these crazy videos about nothing to be purged. It doesn’t help guys like you, it doesn’t help guys like me. We’ve had influencers in our circle for a little while we had some of the bigger names wearing our stuff, it doesn’t help our brand. It actually hurts your brand when somebody is wearing a T shirt and then they’re running around Vegas eating mushrooms on video. It’s not good for your company. And so these are the guys that need to see the purge. I don’t know if you’re are you pulling up that tweet?
Rob McNealy
No, I’m not. I’m just I’m just listening because I couldn’t agree more. I’m to be honest.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Well, I mean, yes, it’s going to pull up that tweet because I think it’s worth being mentioned. What do you What were you? What are your thoughts on all that?
Rob McNealy
My thoughts are that there are still a lot of quote unquote influencers in the space that are in violation of US law and are taking commissions to promote people and they’re not disclosing it. And they’re recommending things and I think personally, I think that’s unethical. And and the federal government, you know, established this years ago Not that I care about the fads and not a bootlicker. But the fact is, not only is it unethical, but because you’re misleading or potentially misleading your your audience by your own moral hazard and conflict of influence, or conflict of interest. With some of these recommendations. You’re not telling people you’re being paid. And to me, I have an issue with that. And because you’re not necessarily you’re going to be biased. You’re not evaluating them based on what you really feel you’re you’re evaluating them and promoting them based on how much they’re paying you and you’re not telling your audience this, and to me, it’s disingenuous, and there’s still people around them are still active influencers that still go to world crypto con and, and everything else and they’re not telling people they’re getting paid. And you know, I’ve run into these and I got my own, you know, I’m not going to sit there and bad mouth people necessarily because they, you know, I don’t necessarily have a dog in that fight. But there’s still a bunch of them out there. And until the crypto world comes to terms that this is bad for the industry, and this is bad for mass adoption. I think it’s still going to hurt us as an industry.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
You know, that’s what I liked about elevate. There wasn’t any influencers there. There weren’t any, you know, media boosters, like what two, maybe one? I think there was one that was for the event and then one that was like a crypto PR something like that. But realistically, there was some pretty solid projects. There’s some pretty solid names block watch. I’ve seen it for different conferences in the last two months. And that’s what I like but I’m gonna I’m gonna read this tweet because it deserves to be read. In 15 hours ago, he goes I don’t consume media related to cc so cryptocurrency or blockchain, many of you know that I see influencers as an unnecessary byproduct of the lack of advertising platforms. I couldn’t be happier about the YouTube purge, your accumulated viewership is less than many make up in video applications or makeup application vids. I couldn’t agree more. And I know that there’s hundreds of people that have projects that have literally sat there and go, you want what first for a shout out, you want us to pay you how much and that’s, like I said, part of the major problem in this space is that for us, we we took a status, we’ve taken a very interesting approach to sponsorships. And it’s helped and hurt us along the way. And we haven’t gotten as much traction as we could have. Because we didn’t do one thing that these guys all want us to do. And that’s paying us dollars. They all want US dollars. They’re crypto influencers who want to get paid in something that they can liquidate to US dollars or get paid directly in US dollars. And we don’t do that we only pay and our coin from the reserve of the profits that we’ve made off of transactions and You don’t want to do that, then that’s fine. We just don’t work with you. But you know, world crypto con did. We paid him 50 K to speak at their event, Brock Pierce and Justin Wu and Jeremy Gardner did. And that’s how we were able to secure our speaking spot at the NASDAQ, I think was like 25,000 or 30,000 that we paid them. But we paid him in Queens Sierra Club coin. And what does that do? That gets our small little brand exposure on a major stage, it gets our circulation of our coins into the hands of people that are influential. And it gives them a little bit of knowledge about a product that they might not have had any interest in but now their token holders and I can say the spillover from that is I’d be I’d become you know, closer or friends I acquaintances or however you want to put it with Justin. We’ve seen each other at multiple events. we’ve hung out at multiple events. He’s done a panel for us pro bono, and it’s because he sees the hard work and he has a connection to the project and if more people that want to take sponsorship money, or want to take you payment for services started working with projects for their own native currency. And that would actually help the industry. But it’s when you say no, it has to be Can I liquidate that what we your coffers? Well, I remember one conferences like, Oh, I can’t liquidate it. We don’t have room for you. But you were a last minute call for sponsors, meaning you already secured your location, you’ve already paid your people, you, you’ve read paper, I mean, everything’s been paid for it. So week before the conference, why do you need more money from us? That’s liquid. And that’s the problem that I have. And that’s one of the things we stood by.
Rob McNealy
Well, that’s one of the same things with exchanges too. And the more established, you know, more legit exchanges don’t even have a listing fee, because they’re picky about who they have coming on their platform. And they they only allow products on the platform that they believe they will be able to have enough of a community to actually make money on the transactions on their trading on their platform. Most exchanges out there have listing fees and they don’t even take listing fees in your own native token. Virtually either. And those exchanges are also the ones that tend to be the ones that are faking their volume. And it’s because their actual marketing or that sorry, their actual revenue model isn’t transaction fees on their trading because they’re trading volumes fake. It’s the listing fees from the actual projects. And since they themselves don’t even give a crap about your project or have any faith in it, they only want you know, Bitcoin cash or a theorem. And so that’s the that’s kind of the problem you have with, you know, being a project as well. And you know, this as well as I do is that you’re having to deal with this is like, Okay, how do I establish a market value? And how do I get a more legitimate exchange to look at me and take a seriously, and I think that’s a tough one. And, you know, I think you guys are figuring it out. And I think we have a good plan to figure that out as well. But a lot of people out there don’t know that that’s what’s happening. Right? They think, Oh, this this exchange has this big number. It’s tracked by coin market cap and coin Gecko, so they must be a legit exchange and this coins on their exchange and has all this volume. So it must be a legit project. And unfortunately, a lot of that’s all bad. It’s all nonsense. It’s all fraud. And so the end users, the investors out there are the people that are interested in the project. They don’t know how to make good decisions, because they don’t have good information. And then you have all these pimps, I call them pimps, right? You got these crypto pimps out there, going out and pushing these projects. And it’s all fraud. The whole chain is fraud. And that’s why I give a hat off to, you know, Google or YouTube, however you want to look at the hierarchy.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
You know, I don’t know if you know this, or maybe you do, I used to take phone calls for the Google Play Store. And I worked on Google operations for the Playstore third party applications and all of the verticals. And so people will call in from all over the place. It will call in from different countries they would call in and I think what We’re seeing right now is people are realizing that, yes, YouTube and Google are US based companies. But these companies follow the law of multiple, multiple nations, there’s a multinational company. And so you have to really kind of realize you’re dealing on a bigger scale than what we know here in the United States, which is, you know, quote, unquote, these quotes because the land of the free, but as we find out more information, how free Are we really and that’s a whole nother conversation. But you know, people need to realize that you’re playing ball with something that isn’t in your backyard. And or it’s like you’re playing chess with somebody via, you know, male, whereas you’re dealing with other rules, other regulations, other cultures, and your videos are viewable in those countries, and they have to be able to follow those guidelines. And you know, one of the biggest things to think of is Where are all the Samsung phones made, are made in, you know, Google is the big Google puts their software and Samsung phones. So if They want to make sure that the manufacturing stays low and on the pixels and and all the other devices on the Android system, of course, they’re going to follow laws that are more relevant to that if we opened up the largest Android manufacturing plant in the world in the United States, then we might see a trend might see a difference. But yeah, it’s it’s interesting, man. These guys are just just sitting back here with my popcorn like, okay, maybe you should have skill.
Rob McNealy
And you know, if it was a complete ban on the word crypto and blockchain Yeah, I can understand that. I mean, and you know, this like, what the focus of our product task is, you know, the, the lawful firearms industry is kind of, you know, our main market that we’re working in, and they’re not allowed to advertise on Twitter, Facebook or Google. Already you and they’ve been completely de platforming and be monetizing the gun industry for over the last year and a half, two years now. And these companies don’t even have the ability to To market other than
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
NRA is like a dirty word in the United States.
Rob McNealy
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Especially, you know, in Silicon Valley, and it’s interesting. Instagram just announced in the last week and a half that they’re going to like banned gun influencers off Instagram. And what’s happening there is that because the gun industry didn’t have any they really are locked out of like pay per click and things like that. They’re just not allowed to market that way. What they were doing is they were paying social media influencers to then promote their projects. And now Instagram is going to cut that off. So now the crypto people are like getting all pissy but the fact is, there’s other industries not only just conservatives but the gun industry and some other industries, the cannabis industry, they’ve been completely locked out of these you know, different.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
You know, when they did the Facebook blanket ban, it wasn’t actually a blanket ban. We are approved. We have been approved for the last year. half, almost instantly after they made the marks we submitted, we had approved, we had to take a line of code, we had to put it in the header of our website. We have been able to advertise and Chris star, you know, some of them get flagged, but not all of them. We’ve been able to advertise on that platform since. And my business partner, Chris is the one that handles all that. But, you know, it’s interesting, because even when Facebook said no more crypto advertising, if you did the right thing, if you had a legitimate project, if you were able to answer their questions when they asked you, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with that? Then they go, Okay, here you go. Take this line of code, put it in your header, once you do that, come back to our platform, hit a button, if that can ping back and forth. And it’s legitimate. You get the green light, and then you can advertise again on the platform.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, we’re still waiting for our approvals for our conference. from Facebook. We never got it. Conference even though I mean, because it’s because it’s partially crypto, they wouldn’t let us advertise the conference on Facebook. And yeah, So I mean, it’s it’s goofy. I mean, you know how it is. It’s just playing goofy out there.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Well, yeah, I got booted, we got booted off MailChimp, for that exact reason. We had like an 800 person mailing list, we had sent out a happy Thanksgiving outfit, we started to do a collection form, and all of a sudden, it’s like, you are dealing with content that’s not allowed. And then I looked at their CEOs. And their CEOs had like nine things that they didn’t allow. But then at the bottom, there was an asterisk that said any crypto related products, like it wasn’t even part of the list of things like you can’t promote. It was just an add on to their to us.
Rob McNealy
It dropped I have my own issues with the politics out of Silicon Valley and the tech industry.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
You said actually hold on. You said that a second ago and I want to kind of touch on this really quick. I just want to make a point as liberal and anti gun. And you know, socialist as California is. Just remember, Silicon Valley. Those guys are capitalist. Those guys are for capital. ism, those guys want money. And so if it makes money, it makes sense in Silicon Valley. And so it’s an anomaly out there because yes, you’ve got snowflake them all up and down the coast. And I’ve been, you know, in the California lifestyle since 2003, you know, on and off and living out there and then traveling back and forth. But then when you start to talk to some of these fund managers, these guys got guns. These guys have branches, these guys have, you know, Jackson Hole retreats, and then if you think about that, that’s another one that’s right near you, you know, and that’s right up there and in gun country. So just, you know, Silicon Valley is part of the bigger part of California, but the people that are investing in these projects, you know, Peter teal, a, you know, big time Trump supporter, you know, so you’ve got these guys that are out there that are labeled one way, but realistically, when you get into the nuts and bolts of it are the complete opposite. And that’s, well no, you know, you know, think about I know somebody that runs an accelerator in Santa Clara and you would think again, liberal socialist. Nope. Got a pot farm with us just on the other side of the valley in Santa Cruz.
Rob McNealy
Nice. Yeah.
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
That’s that’s venture capitalism right there.
Rob McNealy
Well, people like to make money and definitely, money just definitely makes the people change their politics and their values probably faster than anything else next to alcohol. So, Darryl, this has been really quick. It seems like you and I can jabber on hours and hours and hours. And I can’t wait to talk with you more about wonton soup. Next time we get together. Where can people find out more?
Darryll DiPietro – Coincierge Club
Yeah, so right now, you can go onto Twitter. I’m at Daryl D. We’re really helping out float. So if you want to go to float, backslash Darryl Darryll D. What we did if you have a project or you’re a VC and you want to get deal flow, join our pay channel $5 a month. We’ve already got three or four projects that have launched on there. We’re doing a fun thing where, you know, my being so into the VC world, I’m giving you the Twitter channels to follow. I’m giving you the people that you want to follow. I’m bringing in the right VCs for deal flow. We’ve got, you know, sports analytics companies, and we’ve got fake news aggregator companies, and we’ve got stuff that’s important. That needs to be spotlit in there. And so we’re really focusing on that also quite serious club on YouTube, for any of our up to date pitches. You can see us on This Week in Startups. with Jason Calacanis on there, we’ve done probably probably about 40 videos on there, not a single one that got flagged. But yeah, that’s you know that Daryl D on Twitter, flowed at their LD. Or you can find me on Facebook at Facebook.com/Darryll.LasVegas. Coincierge.Club, website, all that stuff, all that fun stuff. I’m sure you’ll drop a bunch of links in the bottom on post.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, all those links will be up at Rob McNealy calm when we post this and Darryll, thank you so much for coming out today. I do appreciate Your time and we’ll talk to you soon.
Episode Links
Crypto Wendy – Interview Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Today I am real excited that we’re going to a really good show. I am talking to someone who I’ve been a fan of for a long time and that’s crypto. Wendy. She is a very well known. I don’t like to use the word influencer, but she’s an influence in the crypto world. So Wendy, welcome to the show. How are you today?
Crypto Wendy
Thank you so much for having me on. Rob. I know we were supposed to do this a while ago and I know that we were both at Las Vegas blockchain week I was there with my husband and baby and I was running around like a crazy person. You were too so we didn’t get too much. Uh, I know you’re chatting with my husband, but we didn’t really get to sit and talk like I wanted to. So I’m happy to be here. Thank you.
Rob McNealy
Well, good. And actually, I really like your husband. You know, you can tell a lot about people just based on their family. Yeah.
Crypto Wendy
I totally agree. Yeah, he’s a he’s a good guy. And he’s even though he’s kind of likes to be by himself and whatnot. He is a people person.
Rob McNealy
I’m a people person that hates people. So it’s very complicated. So I’m a misanthrope, but I like people. I think what that means is I really like Some people a lot for most people not.
Crypto Wendy
That makes sense.
Rob McNealy
And I sound like a big jerk, but
Crypto Wendy
no, not at all because they’re especially in crypto, if you want to just kind of look at crypto, that’s a very diverse community, and you get a lot of different intense personalities. And a lot of times you just don’t want to deal with some of them. But you know, it’s you gotta, I feel it’s good to try to include people and try to be cool with people and whatnot. And sometimes it just can be a little hard at times.
Rob McNealy
I absolutely agree. So tell us a little bit about your background. How’d you get into crypto?
Crypto Wendy
So I actually initially heard about Bitcoin in like, 2011 2012, I had a family member come to live with my husband and I and he was super into gaming, I want to see he was like, 16 at the time. He’s super intriguing and super into tech, and he’s like, Can I borrow your guys’s credit card to buy bitcoin on the internet? And I’m like, you know, like, no, because I don’t know what this is. And it probably is a scam. And we were trying to save it for a house and I’m like, I know I know for a fact that we you lend somebody money, you’re not supposed to accept it, or expect it back. So I just like, you know what we need to save, whatever. So I was like, no. And then I kept hearing about it on libertarian radio. And I was during that time, I was interested in like making a change with my life. I was working, I worked in health care for seven years prior. And I was at my old company, which was the largest HIV AIDS nonprofit in the world. And I was there for 10 years in total. And I really wanted to change because at that time, my commute was it was three hours round trip four days a week, and I didn’t see my baby girl. So I would wake up at five leave the house by like, six 630 take her to my moms, and then get to work by like, I want to say by like 830 and then my shift was from like, nine to seven. And then I want to get home till like nine o’clock. So I had a newborn I was still nursing and pumping through and all that fun stuff. And I never saw four days out of the week, I would barely see my child so and I was in school part time, the whole the whole time while I was working and I just told my husband I was like I’m gonna quit. I’m going to start looking at some entrepreneurial stuff. I had a pretty successful eBay store selling us designer clothing I used to the income I used to pay for Community College. And he’s like, Okay, fine. And so I did and then I kind of I bought my first part of a Bitcoin because you don’t have to buy whole entire Bitcoin most people don’t know that. And then I quit my job and started doing that. And then a couple months later, my husband quit his job and opened his he got his contractor license and start a business. So we’re both just kind of just kind of here and yeah, that’s that’s how I got into crypto. And then once I, I first got into crypto to make money. And once I realized that there was more than just making money, I figured that I can learn a trade because I saw people posting content and stuff on Twitter. And so I kind of taught myself how to navigate trading just a bed and then things just kind of exploded from there as far as you know, having a YouTube doing events and all the other million things I do in the space.
Rob McNealy
So what I like about that story is that it wasn’t just about making Money, it was about changing your life to take control of your time. And I have a lot of respect for that.
Crypto Wendy
Thank you. Yeah, it was, I loved what I did in health care because I like to help people especially people that do need help and a lot of people that you know, do live with HIV AIDS I like to call them kind of the underdogs of society because people don’t understand how hard they had to fight to get a lot of the rights that they have today and a lot of the healthcare and everything with medication I had to I’ve had so many clients that shared really cool stories with me but at the end of the day, I wanted to be happy and you know, spend time my family and I wasn’t able to do that at my old job just because I because of the commute and yeah, it was it was good but I you know, I’ve always kind of had like an entrepreneurial side to myself like that’s why I started the eBay store because I worked at a thrift store prior and I was like, Oh, you can make money from selling you know, finding designer goods that are people are their stores are selling for like couple bucks and I can flip it on eBay. So I went ahead and did that and that was fun for a while and just kind of been focusing on crypto since then. Just because I feel There’s bigger, there’s a lot. It’s such a new industry, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to make money and to kind of grow and to kind of help other people. And at the end of the day, even though we may say that people are a pain in the butt, it is good to give back and hope when you can, and even if you can, if you can, my thing is, is if you can change somebody’s life just by smiling at them or being kind to them or showing them something, then it’s a it’s essentially a win for me.
Rob McNealy
Well, I agree with that. And I think that’s kind of why we looked at crypto ourselves. But you know, going and doing an actual project was because when we started investing in crypto, we saw the amount of not only scams, but ignorance among people. And we saw a lot of people lose a lot of money, just because they didn’t know any better. And that’s what we originally started our original project about when we were a token was to try to help educate people in the crypto space. And then it went on and got a lot of legs and it morphed into something a lot bigger and different than weird. ended over the last two years. But that was where we came from as well is that my wife and I have been very entrepreneurial for decades since I mean, we’ve been married 19 and a half years. And we were I was an entrepreneur before I met my wife. And so when we were dating, she was helping me on little side hustle projects back in the day. And so we always worked good together. But we learned a lot about business over the last two decades. And you know, a lot of that just to how to how to assess risk. I think that’s the one thing that I think is a skill that entrepreneurs have that people that tend to have never run a business have a hard time with. And I think investors, especially with early stage, investors have that same problem is that how do you mitigate risk when you’re looking at an early stage startup in most people who have never had experience running a business don’t really have those skills, because there’s only the only way I know you can learn how to mitigate early stage startup risk, or at least assess it is to actually run a business and so when we came crypto, we started looking at some of the early projects. And we’re like, that doesn’t make any sense to me. And it’s interesting. And then that was before the crash. And then it was kind of funny how many of the projects that we said that’s going to fail, all dead? Yeah. And so it was just interesting. And so that’s where we came from. We wanted to see people not lose their money. And unfortunately, lots of people have lost lots of money with crypto.
Crypto Wendy
Yeah, I mean, when I first started, I invested You know, my my best three investments are probably like when I first first started, when I knew nothing about it was like probably Bitcoin, a theorem and Litecoin because, you know, they, they tend to hold their value a little bit better than some of the smaller cap stuff. And what a lot of people don’t understand. And I think it’s, I don’t know if it’s American culture, I don’t know what the deal is, but a lot of people don’t know how to budget. I want to say there was a study done that showed that over 50% of Americans didn’t have $500 in the savings account to pay for like a flat tire or whatever. And I grew up very poor. After my father passed away my mom’s instead of going back into the workforce She stayed home with us and me and my two sisters to make sure that we, you know, had that we were okay and whatever. So one thing my mom did teach us, though, is about budgeting and the importance of saving and putting away a little bit of money and creating a budget. So when I invest in something, when I’m investing in crypto, or when I’m trading, I understand that whatever I put out there to invest doesn’t mean that I’m getting a 10 x back or that I’m getting something back. And I think a lot of people, they see crypto as Oh my God, I can make all this money. But they don’t really they don’t know how to mitigate risk, like you said, and they they’re just assuming that they can get it back. And when they don’t get it back, they start to kind of blame it on other people. And there’s just this whole the ecosystem is just kind of crazy now and I think it’s probably because of the lack of regulations which I’m kind of on the fence about regulation just because you know, everybody’s out here calling everybody a scam, but then you’re in crypto for decentralization and here for your supposedly freedom of speech and whatnot, but then you can’t take responsibility for your own actions and that’s kind of part of being a libertarian. So it’s Kind of, I feel like we need some sort of regulations because people are stupid. And I’m not saying I’m the smartest person, but I know enough to know that if I’m going to invest in something that that I could lose all my money, so don’t take my money that I’m going to pay us for my mortgage to toss it all into a project or low cap, jam or whatever, or to margin trade with. And I also understand that most of these crypto projects, they’re all entrepreneurs, and even though they have good intentions, when they set out, many of them may not know how to run a business. And even taking a step outside of crypto. Most entrepreneurs, they fail. Most small businesses fail and a lot of people don’t see that take that into consideration. And another thing is that a lot of these crypto projects are claiming to do all these great things. But at the end of the day, the people that are encrypt on our pretty tech savvy for the most part, and the majority of people in the world are not tech savvy. They’re not engineers. They’re not mathematicians. They don’t know about ta they don’t know about tech, they don’t know about all these things. So if you’re making platform homes that are built for people that are tech savvy, you’re missing a whole part of the market share because most people are not tech savvy. I
Rob McNealy
couldn’t agree with you more on all those parts.
Crypto Wendy
I talk a lot.
Rob McNealy
So do I. So we’ll go on well, so I’ll start off with the one thing that hit home with me is the fact that most Americans and or at least I think it’s just Western culture, we’re materialistic consumerist, and we are financially illiterate. And and that that stretches all demographics that i i can tell you how many people that make really, really good incomes. I know doctors and lawyers that are living paycheck to paycheck because even if they get an increase in the amount of money they make, they just spend more money, they don’t put it away or invest it and save it. And that’s a really, really big problem with our education system. I think I’m a big believer of the Dave Ramsey, you know, kind of program where the Financial Peace University stuff I think it’s a Great start for people who want to get out of debt and and learn, you know how to manage their money because once you’re out of debt, you really have a lot more freedom to invest and if you want to invest in things like high risk investments like crypto is a high risk investment at this point then you have that ability to do so and you’re less likely to you know, be out on the street if you make a mistake.
Crypto Wendy
Yeah, I mean, my portfolio Yeah, I do have quite a bit of money in crypto, but I also have how I have a property on the home My husband and I live in and then we also have like for one K’s and different types of stuff. And, and I love that you said Dave Ramsey because I love Dave Ramsey. He’s we my husband, I we didn’t go through the Financial Peace University. But when I first met my husband, he liked to spend money and I came from a really you know, I grew up poor. I came from a very financially conservative family. My mom was like, you get $100 for Christmas $100 for birthday like and all my friends had like, you know, brand new cell phones, all these things. So I didn’t have that growing up. So I knew how to save and I knew that I wanted to Buy a house and stuff. So I just had I kind of pushed my husband to get into Dave Ramsey and he would listen to Dave Ramsey every day on the way home from work from his commute. And he, you know, we both got out of debt. I think I didn’t have a whole lot of credit card debt, but I did. Because that was you know, you’re you’re when you’re young, you’re stupid, you do dumb things, but he had some debt that he was able to take care of. And then we were both debt free and then we started we were finally able to go on vacations and to do you know, some do some really cool things. But then ultimately, we’re saving to buy our home and we were able to buy a home and yeah, we have we have money in the bank. So God forbid there’s an emergency I want to say we got three months of emergency money, we can cover everything and not have to worry about like, Oh my god, how are we going to pay our mortgage, how we can take care of our daughter like it’s it’s important to have those things and then if you have additional money, like you said, you can invest it or go on trips or do whatever it is want to do.
Rob McNealy
Well, it’s surprising me and then shocked me to see how many people that are in crypto that have absolutely no investments outside of crypto Whether it be for one K’s or rental properties or anything and into me, I’m not dissing anyone who wants to invest in crypto if you if you have the tolerance to for the risk, and you have the appetite for it, I fully support investing in crypto. However, in my opinion as someone who’s financially fairly conservative, and I and I’m a big believer in being financially literate, that you should probably have all your other bases covered before you start dabbling in high risk stuff.
Crypto Wendy
No, I agree because crypto is just really volatile. And one of the things that makes it kind of scary when you’re investing in it is a lack of regulation from the government. The government can come in and anytime and say, because I know Bitcoin and Ethereum, they’re not classified as a security I do. I also have a YouTube channel and I talked about I my favorite segment is to kind of have attorneys Come on crypto attorneys come on and kind of go over what’s going on with the law because at the end of the day, I feel like they’re the real experts. They’re they’re the ones that are able to interpret this stuff the best for us, but the government come in at any time and say this is legal or not You guys can’t do it anymore. And if that happens, you lose, you can lose all your money.
Rob McNealy
Well, it was interesting because my day job, I’m an expert witness. So I know lots of attorneys and my brother in law’s an attorney. And, and before we launched, I took like a deep dive into securities law, just personal research, because before we launched, I wanted to make sure we weren’t into legal security. And I wanted to find out where all the edges work around that. And I was shocked at how many lawyers were kind of pitching this whole utility token thing, right. That was like the big thing couple years ago. And I’m not an attorney, but I did a lot of reading and even called the SEC myself and talk to their attorneys directly. And there’s no sin. There’s no such definition of a utility token right. And everybody was saying you can launch this as a utility token and it’s not security and I’m like, that doesn’t make any sense to me. And I found something in my my digging one day I found that back in the dot com 2000 2001 era, the SEC prosecuted multiple internet companies for giving away free stock because we gave our crypto away originally via faucet. So we didn’t sell any tokens. We didn’t do an Ico or anything like that. And I didn’t want to be a security. But what we were planning on doing is maybe making a an internet basically an email database, you know, a marketing database. That was kind of what we were thinking that okay, we can reach out to these people and you know, basically provide them more of our educational content. We weren’t trying to sell it, we just wanted to be able to communicate with them. Because when you are have a token on a theorem, you can’t actually communicate with anybody. Which seems ridiculous to me that there’s no communication channel there, but that’s just me. But when I found out that the SEC said that if you create an if you have someone give you personal information, like an email address, and you give them a free stock, it’s still considered under the howey test and investment of money right? And I went and talked to a couple attorneys and they didn’t even know that. And I said, if I can do a few Google searches, and you know, look up some things over the course of a couple days and figure out that there’s some precedent in law about this, and you don’t know that, that I’m not talking to the right attorney yet. And so for our point of view, we work really hard to diligently to abide by the law because I think you hit the nail on the head is that it’s called regulatory risk when you’re dealing with startups. And if the project you’re looking at and you want to invest in is not paying attention to regulatory risk, then there are bad investment probably.
Crypto Wendy
Yeah, I mean, I that’s crazy that you’re talking to attorneys and they weren’t able to, to answer that for you. But everybody that I’ve had on my show, at least they’ve been very knowledgeable and they’ve been pretty helpful. So I try to I try to send send them to people that need them when it’s needed. So that’s, that’s kind While though it’s it’s scary at the same time, and that also goes to prove that just because somebody does have a degree doesn’t mean that they are good at their job.
Rob McNealy
Absolutely. And that was two years ago. So I think that there’s a lot more knowledge and I think there’s a lot more guidance that’s been out since then. But at the time in crypto circles, you know, it’s like anything else, like you get the people coming out of the woodwork to catch a wave, right? They want to be in the leading edge of something new. There’s a lot of people that were pitching that and taking a lot of Ico money for that bad advice. And looking back now, I’m glad we went against the grain because we were advised by numerous people. Yeah, just do an Ico you can raise a bunch of money, do whatever you want. It’s all good. It’s like the Wild West. And I’m like, that doesn’t make sense. Yeah, you know, I’m just gonna put my business Hat Guy hat on, right. And I’m like, that just doesn’t make sense. You know, and on top of that, I’m not that lucky. So I’m not going to get rich quick overnight, and I never thought I had never, I just feel like I’m not ever going to get rich quick overnight, so I just assume they’ll just be longer. lot of hard work if I ever get there, right?
Crypto Wendy
That’s okay. The hard work is done.
Rob McNealy
I agree. And so I think it’s interesting, you know, how much the landscapes changed just in the past two years crypto as a project, you see things a lot differently to I know you’re you’re in the space as well but when you’re dealing with trying to negotiate with exchanges and dealing with scammers and dealing i mean it’s it’s pretty intense. You know, how much how much rot is still in crypto.
Crypto Wendy
Oh, yeah. And I honestly people that community drives me crazy in the sense is that everybody’s a scammer like I’m a scammer, because I have a YouTube channel I’m a scammer because I trade I’m a scammer because I do disclose sponsored content, which is part of marketing I’m, you know, I’ve been called all different types of names. But at the end of the day, it’s like kind of crazy. It’s like, not just because you lost money. You’re just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean that you’re a scammer. So I think that word gets thrown out or thrown around a lot. I do think there are bad actors in the space there’s bad actors in every space like if every every profession you go to you’re going to you’re not you’re not everybody is good and pure like like you look at the churches you look at Tech you look at even people from McDonald’s like no not not all people are good people and but I think in crypto it’s a little bit more prevalent just because there is there is you can make a lot of money very very very fast.
Rob McNealy
I think it’s the part of this the anonymity too I think when I’m talking about I don’t use the word scammer lightly by any stretch I use it for people that are committing illegal acts or immoral crime so I’m not one of those guys like a Bitcoin maxy that says anything that’s not bitcoins a scam. I’m not one of those guys. In fact, I don’t like those guys. But But I think with crypto I think because of the quote unquote trustless nature of crypto, it does tend to lend itself toward the people that are trying to take advantage and I it’s funny even today I got like three people this morning on telegram trying to hit me up for stuff. And I’m like, just go away. Yeah. And so it’s that’s the tough part because that’s actually in a lot of ways holding, I think holding back the industry in because it keeps the it keeps normies out. And what do you what do you think about that?
Crypto Wendy
So I have I have a lot of thoughts and opinions about what’s kind of hindering crypto. I think one of them is the lack of regulation because people don’t, or they just don’t know what’s going on. I think another thing is the fact that it’s very heavily tech face right now. And all one of the product products and services that we have like like to use a ledger, for example is not easy. It’s not some people may say and I get called stupid and all kinds of stuff for saying this but using like a ledger or using you know any of the tech that we have or old sometimes it could be pretty complex to use it and even copying and pasting that long address to send like let’s say I want to send you a Bitcoin to copying and pasting and sending that over that can be a little scary and for somebody that’s not tech savvy, they’re not going to do it like my mom she would never do that ever she’ll write you a check. And and then also to like you mentioned with the Bitcoin maximalists I have friends that are Bitcoin maximalist. But they are very toxic, like you said, and they there’s a lot of people in the community outside of Maximus as well that if you ask a tech question, you’re like, Oh, hey, what about this? You know, I’m curious about this. They’re like, You’re an idiot. Like they, the way the community is set up, they will make you feel not. They don’t know. They’re not always very inviting sometimes. And I think that’s another thing. That’s another hurdle that we haven’t like you said with the anonymity. A lot of people are not doxxed and it can make it a little uneasy for somebody else. Because if you go and you look at you know, top 10 companies in America, everybody, like all the CEOs, all the presidents of VPS, everybody, everybody’s has their face out there. You can, you know, they’ve got LinkedIn, you can see who they are, but when you’re dealing with a project and you have these people that are don’t have the face out there, they’ve got they’re going by like a Bart Simpson avatar something it can be kind of weird for somebody that is a normie. I talked to my girlfriends and my friends about this all the time. And they’re just like You’re so weird for like being so trusting and being in the space like I couldn’t do it.
Rob McNealy
I’m not trusting at all. And but I do talk to a lot of retailers because the nature of our project, we’re very marketing focus, we’re trying to solve a problem, a very specific problem in a very, very narrow vertical market. And before we ever started coding, we went and talked to retailers that were having a problem with current online payment systems and, and bank accounts and banking and things. And so we asked, ask them what they needed, what was what were the problems they were experiencing before we ever coated. And I think that’s one of the differences with task versus a lot of other projects is we’re not developer LED. We’re not an engineer led project. We’re entrepreneur LED, and to me, I’ve been an entrepreneur for Long time and I am one of the co founders. But as an entrepreneur for a long time, I know because I’ve had failures I’ve had successes is that I will never build a company unless I have a customer already. And then you build the company. Basically, you build the company to solve that customers problem. And I just kind of applied that kind of logic for building out a decentralized project is how do you build a project that solves a problem? You go talk to your customers first. And and I know a lot of people say their users, and I’m like, I think people’s customers, you know, whether they’re an internal customer, external customer, I don’t think I’m as a users. And because I think it changes your thinking about it when you like, these are customers. Are these people willing to pay you to use your project or pay to use your project in some way? That’s a customer, not a user user could be anybody. And to me, I wanted to know what the users thought. And then that’s how I view and when I go talk to users, you know, they’re they have a lot of concerns. And believe it or not, volatility is not been the major concern for the people that have a recognized problem with banking. Really it’s no because think about nobody’s really using crypto for buying and selling goods and services anywhere yet no project. And the the main things that they’re talking about is legal and the scams, those are the things and I think it goes back to the Bitcoin maximalist thing too, right? Say you’re a retailer and I used to actually own a brick and mortar retail store to along the way. And if you don’t know anything about Bitcoin, or you don’t know anything about crypto and you’re thinking, Hey, you know, this might solve my problem, or I’m interested in this technology and you want to learn about it. Well, there’s no 800 number to call Right, right. And so you’re where you’re going to go you can go to social media, going to our forums, and now your face with a mentor. I’ve heard about this Bitcoin thing, but there’s about a dozen of those Bitcoin things out here now, which ones which and then you go ask a question, which Bitcoin should I look at? And then, oh, you’re just going to and you’re going to unleash the wrath of the hell, right? And to me that maximalist mindset i think is detrimental to adoption.
Crypto Wendy
No, I am Because, like I don’t come from a tech background, I come from more of a healthcare background and more of a people background that was part of my job. What I did is I work with people to kind of problem solve, they came used to come into the pharmacy, and they said, would say I need this, or I need this. And I would kind of help them navigate and figure it out. And no question is a stupid question. And especially when you’re dealing with tech, when you’re dealing with these complex ideas, just how Bitcoin works in general can be complex and kind of like I was I had saw old friend, I had said, I went out to get Italian the other night. And when I saw this little girlfriend of mine that I grew up with, and I was she’s like, he’s still not the quintic. And I’m like, yeah, I’m still in that Bitcoin thing. I was like, You’re, you’re just like, what are you doing? She’s like, you know, I’m in beauty and blah, blah, blah. I was trying to explain to her what it was, and she just did just went over her head and she’s like, well, you make money and she’s like, how do you make money? I was like, Well, I was like, you can there’s different ways you can make money. You can invest, you can trade. You can. You can use it like you can use basically money but with no fed or with no bank. Like, Oh, that’s too That’s too much. She’s like, I just want cash and I was like, Okay.
Rob McNealy
It’s kind of funny at the holidays, we don’t even we don’t talk about money with our family. That’s just not a topic on, you know, part of our family. They don’t talk about money and so I don’t even push it on them. Like it’s a mazing to me, even with the holidays, you know, just past the, you know, last week, is that how many people like I’m giving crypto to everybody in my family? I’m like, That’s awful.
Crypto Wendy
Yeah, don’t why would if you want to get divorced, you will give your wife and Bitcoin
Rob McNealy
But the thing is, it’s like one I’m a big believer that gift giving should be about giving something that means something to the receiver, right? It’s not about you, forcing your weird political ideologies and economic ality ideologies on the other people. And it’s very intangible. I just think it’s a horrible gift. It doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t appreciate and value at some point. That’s not what I’m saying. But I think it’s horrible gift giving at a kit to give something that no one’s interested in that no one wants it may not turn it. Either way you can give someone something like you know something that loses value right that’s just not very fun.
Crypto Wendy
Well i mean if it’s something you’re very passionate about like get somebody you know spend half on Bitcoin and half on like a teddy bear or something that they want you know but I mean for us at our like in my household my husband and I talked about it I’m more of a more into it than he is because he’s busy with his you know with his job with his company and whatnot but it’s like when when the market when we dumped down to like three k i started DCA and and from like six K to three K and I took my daughter savings I had a couple thousand in savings or in her savings account I took it and I bought a Bitcoin and you know, put away safely at the bottom of Mount Sinai wherever that is just kidding. But I have you know, I want to have it ahead and have that for her. I’m going to hold on to it for the next you know, the next she’s three announcements so for the next 15 years and then if it appreciates in value great if not, that’s fine, but you know, we’re still doing other things for her as well as far as you know, saving and putting away if she does decide she wants to go to college or Whatever it is that she wants to do.
Rob McNealy
I think that’s sound. And we have four kids and all my kids, we’ve been teaching financial literacy to from time they were born. So for instance, anytime I kid any of my kids get any kind of gift in money or any kind of work, we don’t really give allowance, but they all work and get paid for tasks and things and a couple of them have jobs now. And we make them save half of whatever they make regardless. And then we go and invest it and each of my kid has, in their savings have savings accounts, precious metals, and crypto nine and and we go and pick those things out together and have them look at things. So even my nine year old has a portfolio it’s kind of funny, it’s not a big one, but it’s good enough for most not compared to most nine year olds. But to me, I think instilling those habits from the time that kids are really young is important and the most thing I can tell people and we stress this with our kids, stay out of debt, and don’t get into it in the first place. Don’t Go to the student loan debt if you don’t have to, and then save. And I think if we just told our kids to do that stay out of debt, and then save money. And if you can raise your kids with those two things, they’re they’re way ahead of like 90% of the population right now.
Crypto Wendy
I agree my husband he was married before he and I got together so he has two kids from a previous marriage he’s a bit older than me so the boys are bigger. But you know, it’s kind of hard because his ex wife she was very into spending and very into like new cars and this and that and being into debt so when the kids would come stay with us and they would want like a new pair of beats or a new pair this and that I’m like well you got to work for it. They’re like oh, well I’m just gonna be here for a weekend I there’s you know, I can’t work for and I was like, Well, I’m not going to buy you these things. If you want headphones all we go the dollar store we can go whatever. And so the oldest has is not good at saving. And it’s already gotten himself into debt. No man, we bought him books. We’ve tried to sit and talk to them all kinds of stuff. So with that kid, it didn’t work. But with my other steps on the younger one, he had He’s not in debt at all. And he’s really good at saving and managing his money. So it’s hard with your kids when you’ve got all these different personalities. And you know, when you come from, you know, a split household, it’s hard when one parent does things one way and the other parent does things another way. And it’s it can be complicated. But with our daughter, we talked to her about saving. We talked to her about charity, like for this Christmas, she’s three, and I explained to her that there’s kids, there’s kids, and there’s babies that they don’t, they don’t have toys, they don’t have things. So I made her go into her room, and I made her pick a toy out that she no longer wanted to play with. And I explained to her, we’re going to give this to a kid that has no toys for Christmas. So we went she went and picked a baby doll and we went and donated it. So we’re trying to instill those things in into her now. So that she gets it and so she grows up and has an idea like you know what’s right and wrong and, you know, the importance of giving back as well.
Rob McNealy
I think that’s really good parenting, to be honest. And I think what I think what you just explained is a great example. The fact is that we learn habits From our families, whether they’re good or bad, and in I grew up, I would say, I grew up from financially illiterate parents. So I grew up and I was bad with my money. Even when I’ve got married, I was the spender. I’m the spender to lie, you know. And it took me a long time to like, get over that and learn better money management. My wife, on the other hand, doesn’t ever spend money. It’s ridiculous. And it’s funny. We came to a couple of agreements on how we handle our own personal finances, and it actually saved our marriage, when we finally came to some agreements on how we deal with money. And it’s interesting, like the rate of divorce in this country, a lot of it’s driven by just financial stress. And the part of it is that people don’t have general agreements on how they operate with one another. I think families are essentially businesses, and you and their partnerships, so you got to think of it in terms of like, like a real business partnership, like how do you make decisions? How do you what do you do if there’s an impasse on a decision, and I think if people would spend a little more time Now, before getting married, trying to figure that all out before they get married, how you’re gonna raise your kids, you can do religion, how you can handle money. If people just figure that stuff out they have far, we’d have a far lower divorce rate, I think in this country.
Crypto Wendy
I totally agree with that. So my husband and I, we were, I wouldn’t say we dated like five years before we got married, and we live together first. I know some people do frown upon that, and that’s fine. But that is what we decided to do. Because there is no way in hell, I was going to marry somebody that I didn’t actually live with. And it took a while for us to kind of start to agree on things because he was, you know, he grew up with no financial literacy at all, like, at all he grew up very poor as well. And it was just, you know, you you’d have to spend money to make more money and he had all these weird, like, like sayings and things and I was like, No, it doesn’t work that way. So we, you know, for the most part politically, we agree on a lot of things and money wise, the way we dealt with it is we just keep in its mother. You might think this is crazy, but we keep our money separate. And we talked about Things that we want to save for and will pitch in. And we have budgets and you know, goals and stuff like that, but we just keep our money separate. And we both spend X amount of dollars a week on, you know, whatever we want, just as long as you know, we have, we have money allocated for bills and all that stuff, but we try to keep our things separate. And that’s what works for us. And some people may say, that’s crazy, that’s on a marriage. But you know, at the end of the day, you’re, you have to you have to be you got to get along with the person that you’re married to. I don’t necessarily believe in divorce. And, you know, sometimes you have to, you have to make concessions, and you have to negotiate and you have to kind of compromise with people. So it just we’ve been doing that and we haven’t had any problems, and we were able to buy a house so it’s working so far.
Rob McNealy
Well, that’s good. I think the main thing is not that there’s one rule or one way of doing things for everybody. But the fact is that you actually have an arrangement or an agreement on how things should be done. And I think most people spend more time trying to plan their their wedding And plan their dress and all this other stuff, rather than spending that energy trying to figure out how they are going to manage their relationship. And I think looking back, if I had to like do things over again, I would do more financial planning and things, counseling and things like that and get that stuff better under control on my side before I got married, and I think I would recommend and I will recommend that to my children. And I think it’s interesting because all my kids I my oldest just turned 17 and she’s man, she she our kids are homeschooled. So she’s been able to work I got our job a couple years ago with my friend of mines company, and she’s done a great she they love her to death and she just sacks away or money she’s got a ton of money in the bank and and you know, she’s well on track. She’s a sophomore in college, it just turned 17 last week, so for. her
Rob McNealy
Excuse me. Um, so I think that success isn’t that hard, really. It’s just that we’ve lost our way, the way we’re educating. I think our families and our kids, I think somewhere in the last 40 years, we’ve lost something like we stopped figuring out, we threw away the things that worked. And now everybody’s just, you know, I want to buy this. I want everything my way. I want it now, you know, when we lost the, I don’t know, I’m getting off on a tangent, but it seems like we’ve lost a lot of ethics and values, and values. I yeah. That’s what I tell people. You know, I tell my team that I’m the project because we’ve been where we New Year’s Day is our two year anniversary with our populations. And and it’s funny, and I tell everybody, my our group and our developer teams and stuff like that, I tell everybody, Look, don’t expect anything like we’re not going to get rich overnight. With this project I go before don’t even think we’re going to get anywhere for another two years. I just say just wait two more years. And let’s just keep working at it and we’ll chip away at it and But it’s going to take time. And I tell people that and a lot of people it’s interesting, don’t like to wait like, it’s interesting there was when we started our project, originally two years ago, there were six of us. of the original six, there’s only three of us left that are even involved. And really, no, there’s actually only two of us that are actually active. So three quarters of our team like bailed, it’s kind of interesting, or two thirds of our team bailed along the way, because they got impatient. They weren’t interested. It was too much work. They didn’t want to show up. And I said, Well, I’m in it for the long haul. And, you know, on keep trucking away. And so it’s just kind of interesting. So we ended up recruiting. Before we built our blockchain, we ended up having to go through a full recruitment process and like, get a whole new team, essentially, that are actually actively working on it.
Crypto Wendy
I don’t know with me, I just think that I appreciate the technology that we have in today’s society, but I also don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing, because we’re so used to having everything now, and I feel like it’s kind of you know, or the The same way with not not necessarily you but I feel like the same way with the most majority of people in their kids is like, like we go out to eat and I see people, they have their they give their kids tablets or cell phones at the dinner table out to eat. And I’m just like, to me that’s like crazy. I’m like, No, we don’t do that in my house. But it’s like, there’s like we make my daughter Wait, we make her Be patient. And you know, we talked to her about that. But I feel like everybody just wants everything now now now. And they don’t they don’t they don’t want to save for it. They don’t they don’t they I don’t know if they don’t understand it hard work or what it is. But like when I was growing up I wanted I remember those Nokia block phones, those gifts came out. And I had a pager and I was like I want to be I want to have a cell phone like my friends because my friends did. My mom’s like, No, you have to get a job. And I’m like, okay, so I went I was 14 and I got a job at a pet store picking up animal poop. But I got a job and I worked really, really hard and I was able to buy a cell phone and a plan and one of those prepaid plan so I remember that but I just I also remember all my friends having All these their parents are just buy them stuff all the time. And they’re just like instantaneous. And I don’t know, I just that’s, that’s not how I grew up. And that’s not how I want my child to be raised. I want her to understand that you, you know, it’s nice to get things, but it’s even nicer. It’s more rewarding when you work hard for them.
Rob McNealy
I agree morn again, I think we’re on track. We don’t give our kids allowance our kids have to work for what they get. Our kids have to save, we limit screen time in our house. In fact, our oldest didn’t get her own cell phone till she was full time college student and I figured well, if you’re a full time college student going to college with adults, you can probably handle a phone. And but we said we reserve the right to snoop through any of your stuff at any time. We still don’t really allow social media for any of our kids. And then for the younger three, we have a checkout cell phone because our kids go 17 1412 nine and then the bottom three share a checkout phone and yeah And it’s interesting. It’s we just got this one for we just got a new one for this purpose, but it’s from gap wireless. And it’s a completely locked down smartphone. So there’s you can’t send pictures, there’s no internet browser. It only allows non picture text messages. It has a calculator, and phone calls. And so and to us that felt a lot safer. In fact, I interviewed the CEO or the vice president of the Vice President of gab wireless few months back, and it’s actually been a really good phone. I’m not getting anything for it. There’s no referral or affiliate thing but
Crypto Wendy
You scammer you.
Rob McNealy
Exactly. I wish I wish there was an affiliate thing because I actually liked that product cuz I’m really using it. But I actually know one of the guys who runs a company and so he gave me a good deal. But I found what that I feel safer. And so but we also homeschool our kids so we’re not we’re very non traditional, but think about what’s normal in the America and United States today, right? It’s we’re overweight man. I’m do that myself. We’re in debt. And we’re miserable. That’s that’s where and we don’t have close families. That’s what normal is. Now, if you look at the numbers, the statistics, everybody’s in debt, they’re overweight, they’re miserable. And to me, you got to want something different and you have to train your kids differently if you want them to be different than that.
Crypto Wendy
Now, I totally agree and that’s why like raising well I can say for because we had my cousin come live with us when she was 16. She gotten a lot of trouble. So she came to live with us and we got her to graduate school high school because she had didn’t graduate prior and where was really really strict with her but she needed it and she graduated and went to do whatever it is she’s doing. But when you’re raising when you’re raising kids and the hard thing for us was the was co parenting with with their mom and you know, the hot new husband and stuff because we all had different ideas of what was right and what was acceptable and whatnot, but with our daughter It’s a little bit easier because you know, we my husband I we live together and we have a lot of the same ideologies like we do. We do the same thing we have tablet time, like I when I wake up first thing in the morning as I’m on my phone because I have work to do. I do a lot of different marketing and consulting and crypto. And I’ve got companies that need things and people that need things for me so I gotta be on my phone. So like the first half hour we both have our morning beverages and my daughter gets her tablet and she can watch like YouTube videos of like Stevie Ray Vaughan Williams, Willie Nelson, those are her favorites and she’s right by me so I can see what she’s watching. And then she had watches like pepper the pig and some like elf show that’s on PBS or something but she gets a minimal amount of time to you know, watch stuff so she gets morning time and then when we get home in the evening to wind down she’ll get like another half hour there and whatnot. But we’re pretty you know, we’re pretty honor about it because I don’t, I don’t want her to I want her she’s got a lot of toys. She can use her toys and play make believe or you know, she wants to put on a Disney movie, let her put on a Disney movie and I’ll watch it with her and we do a lot of reading and seeing it playing instruments, my kids probably got every single instrument ever made in the history of the world. But there’s other things besides social media and whatnot. And I’m kind of guilty because I am on social media a lot, but it’s part of its part of what I’m doing for work right now. I mean, I’m very thankful for for Twitter and for YouTube and that stuff, but I do I do spend a lot of time on social media and it’s something that I am going to work on to cut down a bit.
Rob McNealy
Well, speaking about social media recently, we had this whole quote unquote crackdown on the crypto space were you impacted by knew that
Crypto Wendy
I was not and I think it’s because my channel is a lot smaller than a lot of these other guys and what I my personally what I think happened, YouTube was pushing really hard there COPPA co PPA, and it’s the basically the child protection protection law. And I think some people that I think their algorithm got screwed up with that with the Copa law that got changed because YouTube is always changing their algorithm and it just makes it harder for small content creators like myself, but I I feel like some of the people got caught up in that. I feel like in there they YouTube did come out they did say that there was an error with it, but my channel was not hit. I’m thinking either because it’s very small and I’ve complied with all the Copa standards, I have all my videos set to not suitable for minors just just to be on the safe side. And I also do have legal disclaimers written by an attorney that kind of disclose everything, like if I do sponsored content, I disclose that and I’ve got got all kinds of fun, fun disclaimers, just, you know, just in case to just to comply with the SEC and also to comply with the FTC.
Rob McNealy
So it’s fun. Well, that’s good. It’s interesting. And I think that’s another one of those things where I think you’re probably way ahead of a lot of people because there are a lot of influencers that don’t disclose that they’re, you know, sponsored content or they’re getting paid for pitching and I think that was really frustrating for us in the beginning, even two years ago as a project, you know, that, you know, I know a lot about blogging world and the FTC, you know, 10 years. ago was really cracked down on social media gurus and the social media world and bloggers, that’s where that came to came out of actually, because so many people were doing quote, unquote, paid reviews, but not revealing that then, you know, the FTC crackdown on that, but didn’t make it over to the crypto world. In the beginning, at least, and so it’s good that people admit that in that way. To me, I think, you know, the undisclosed influencers. The problem with that is that they’re giving advice, and they’re not disclosing their conflict of interest. And so then the the average person who may not be very technologically savvy or not very entrepreneurial, so they can assess risk themselves themselves very well. They’re relying on those people. And the problem is you can’t make good decisions if you don’t have good information. And so I kind of mixed on that one personally, because I don’t like seeing people getting ripped off because people are taking advantage of them. And I see, you know, unfortunately, if the crypto world doesn’t regulate itself and call that out in its own right That the government’s going to do it for us. And no, I’m going to be pleasant.
Crypto Wendy
I totally agree with you. And that’s why when I first got approached to do sponsored stuff, I had no idea that was the thing. And crypto I just started doing like meetup, like local meetups and stuff. I’ve done over four dozen free meetups for the community, you know, for networking, different things, and I kind of branched out into doing paid events for different companies. But as far as like when I first got my first sponsor thing, I made sure that it was sponsored. And I might take a little bit of a different approach from other influencers. I actually, like what I do a project review, I make sure to say that it’s either sponsored in the beginning or if not, it’s down in the disclaimer, and one of the things I tell companies is I only take like Bitcoin or cerium. And I don’t like to take their native tokens and the reason why I don’t like to take their native tokens is because that makes that gives me kind of, you know, that may make me biased as to the project. And I don’t want to just give me Bitcoin or theorem Give me something that’s not related to the project so that when I’m talking about It’s not really going to change my, my opinion of it’s going to be the same and I do I do my best to stay unbiased. But I one thing I don’t do that I see other people do, this is going to be the next 10 time this is going to do this, this is going to do you know, X, Y and Z. And that’s not okay. Like my sponsor reviews are, this is what the project is, this is what it does. If you want to find out more, find out more here, it’s sponsored and this is how much I was paid. And this is what I was paid in. So I’m kind I’m very strict and stern about you know, some of the projects that I do take, but I do also understand a lot of these projects, they’re, you know, they’re entrepreneurs and they’re trying to market and they’re trying to get their project out there so I get it but at the same time I won’t take everybody and I do everything is disclosed I’ve got a disclaimer on my website and you know, cuz I gotta eat too if people want me you know what my time for stuff that I’m willing to give it but I you know, I do deserve I do deserve to be paid for my time but at the end of the day, I do have standards that I do hold and I will never I’ll never chart your your coin for money. So don’t ask me, not you but just in general.
Rob McNealy
I’m not asking,
Crypto Wendy
I know, but I have had, I’ve had companies approached me like charter coin will pay you I’m like, No If you guys want, you know, like a, like a sponsored tweet, then I have to put ad or I have to put something, whatever. And then like, you know, everything’s always disclosed on my YouTube because I always most of the stuff I talked about or sponsored it goes on my YouTube and I’ve got the disclaimer and I said what I was paid for if it was a tweet or if it was this or that I kind of pull it up on my channel so everybody’s everybody’s clear as to what I’m doing
Rob McNealy
well i think that i have a lot of respect for that and and i don’t try to monetize the podcast at all and I’ve always been up front I actually started the podcast because I got sick of influencers wanted to charge me and so that’s what I said I’m going to do this but but how I am benefiting from this is one I like the networking because I like to talk to cool people, but to I put an ad for task in front of the camera in front of the show, and that’s how I and that’s how I monetize it. But it’s interesting I’ve had a lot of people approached me because I got a lot of Twitter followers now and and I have had him actually for a long time. But I’ve had a lot of followers on Twitter. So people like have approached me on a regular basis wanting to basically pay me to pitch something and I said, I’m not taking money to pitch your stuff. How about you pitch me on whether your ideas good or your projects interesting, because I talked to people for free, you don’t have to just pitch me, right? And it’s funny because they don’t want to do the work of like, giving me a pitch. They just want to pay me and I’m like, Look, I’m trying to save your money. Just give me a good Tell me something cool that you’re doing. Because I mean, I interview prod people that are in projects that, you know, they may consider their competitor tactically, but you know, I love the verge community, I think the dgb community is really active. And to me, I like to talk about those guys. And I like to see what they’re doing. And to me, it’s like, just kind of funny because I’m like, I’m not even charging. Just tell me to tell me you want to come on the show. You know, but but I understand that but you know, that’s not how I’m trying to monetize this, but I think it’s it’s good that you’re pointing that out so you do the charging the T/A And I’ll be I’ll be straight up I’m I am totally ta DOM. I don’t know a darn thing about it. Tell me about what it is because it looks like tea leaves and Voodoo to me, and how did you learn it?
Crypto Wendy
Okay, so really quick before I get into that, when I’m one of the things I do when I’m setting a company, I asked them to give me two to three sentences summarizing the project, their favorite things about it. And I can tell if it’s authentic or if it’s not authentic and it kind of gives me helps me determine if I want to go forward and continue to research it because if you can’t give me two to three sentences, I just don’t want to touch it. But so with ta so when I first got into crypto, I before you found the crypto I wanted to kind of get involved with stocks and I looked into it and I went into like a TD Ameritrade and I was like, Oh, can I invest your Yeah, they’re like, yeah, you need 20 the minimum deposit is $25,000. And I was like, I don’t have 25,000 I don’t know if it was that it was someone was like I don’t have $25,000 so I was like, Okay, I’m out of here and then I tried to read and do it on myself, because I do have a Got a small little tiny math degree have taken like over nine math classes. So I went to go ahead and start teaching myself about stocks I couldn’t figure it out. So I was like, Okay, I’m an idiot. But then when I got into crypto, I saw people posting charts and stuff on Twitter, I was like, I can do this I can draw a line. So then I went on eBay about to use books the idiots guide to technical analysis and the candlesticks charting with for dummies or something like that. So I went ahead and I bought that and I just, I just just like how I would study with my math homework, I would do the same with ta when I started charting Bitcoin every day and using some of the methods out of, you know, those silly little books I got. So I just I just learned that way, but it was with technical analysis. So it’s a lot of repetition. It’s like the same thing every day, if you’re going to solve a math problem. Let’s say you’re going to take a derivative, you have to do the same thing you have to look for for specific things in the project or the math problem. And you just you take you take, you take what you need to take out and then you just set it up the same way that you would in this repetition is the same thing over and over and over and over again. And that’s kind of the same thing with technical analysis is you look for a couple things. There’s some, there’s some analysis that they look for, like three things that they can have Confluence between like three to five things in their chart that go ahead and take the trade. And it’s kind of similar with math. It’s just doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Rob McNealy
So you’re not gonna say I’m going to do a backwards flip Penguin, Ali and then I’m going to buy it. No,
Crypto Wendy
no, no, no, I don’t do I Tara cards and all that stuff. We can have that topic a different day, we discuss that topic a different day. But it’s, um, well, the cool thing about a lot of these indicators, it’s, it’s a lot they’re all mapping. They’re all math fact. They are based off math like moving averages, it’s based, you know, regular moving average, depending on what the length of your, your ribbon or whatever is. And with the RSI and MACD and bollinger bands. You know, they’re all based on math stuff. So math is pretty accurate, in my opinion, but it’s just you know, but the point The hard part with trading is emotions and taking your emotions outside of what the market is doing because when you’re betting with your own money, you obviously want to win a trade and sometimes you’re you want to get emotions and human psychology in there it can really mess you up. So you gotta be gotta be really careful. And if you’re able to take those things out you you will do you will do pretty well.
Rob McNealy
How accurate Do you think ta is? Or how at least how accurate Have you been when your own personal charting,
Crypto Wendy
I think the best month I had was I won like 80% of my trades when I was trading pretty heavy. I’m trading a little bit less now, just because my schedule is so hectic with like work stuff and with content and my baby and with school. So I am trading a little bit less I’ll do anywhere between like four to six trades a month, but when I was trading, like almost daily, I did pretty well but I was also just focused on just trading and not anything else.
Rob McNealy
I got really lucky. My wife and I did when we were first getting in and learning about projects and I got I made a lot of money and all things tr x and it was completely by accident and and I joke I we bought it a half sentence Olivia 15 cents and we made a lot of money and in the reason we sold it at the time, and is that we watched an announcement an announcement and and I said to my wife, I go sell whatever we have in that now she’s like, why I go, if you met that clown at a party, would you give him 50 bucks for his business. He’s like, not in chance on how I go sell it now. And it was really funny because it tanked after that. It was real, it was just really funny. So that would that’s my like, that’s my best trade ever. With crypto.
Crypto Wendy
Some people are able to trade like with their gut feelings like I know some some long term oh geez. And they that’s what they’ve done is like they’ll buy in the hottel. And they’ll they’ll do that one of the one of the other strategies that I do is I’ll do like I do enjoy margin trading. I and one of the reasons why I like trading is it challenges me mentally, it’s, you know, within with discipline and all that stuff, but I also little do Is I use bigger amounts than I spot trade. So I’ll go ahead and buy bitcoin at X amount, you know, when it’s dumping, I’ll set like a bunch of bids, and then I’ll try to get get dumped on, get all my bids filled. And then I’ll go ahead and hold it for a longer period of time and flip it later, but without without using leverage or anything, and that’s a little bit so it’s a little bit more easy to do and it’s less taxing mentally.
Rob McNealy
So how much training Do you think the average person would have to do starting like you did for nothing right reading a book before they should probably be competent enough to make some of these trades? How long was that learning curve look like?
Crypto Wendy
So with me it I just I started trading right away. And I kind of picked it up pretty fast. But then you know, when you have when you’re stressed out, or if you’re tired, or if you’re hungry, we got other emotions and things going on that and if you’re not dedicating 100% of your time to trading, it can be a little bit hard, but each person is different. They say that you become an expert after 10,000 hours, I believe there’s a book titled deck. I don’t know who was buying I did not read it i i i buy know about it though.
Rob McNealy
Malcolm Gladwell.
Crypto Wendy
See you know, who wrote that Yeah, I learned something but yeah, I had a client that recommended to me and I just I never got a chance to read it which I need to one of the things I’m going to do is when I’m when I’m done with school, reading all that boring college stuff, I’m going to go ahead and get you know, get my read on and start reading more stuff. But really every person it depends every person you can, it’s different but there’s some cool platforms that you can you can pay per trade on without having to invest your own money and kind of teachers you know, essentially kind of learn that way and kind of test the waters out so that’s a that’s a cool thing. I always recommend that people go do and you know, try for themselves before jumping in there and risking money and always, you know, never invest with more than you’re able to lose and paper trade. You can go ahead and you can charter a charter project you can write down your entry exit your stock or whatever it is, take a step back and watch it play out and you know, kind of record your your trades that way to
Rob McNealy
Is there a good system that you can backwards down as well to see if if you would have done something hot would have worked.
Crypto Wendy
As far as I mean, you can go back and see if I would have done this this would have happened. That’s kind of the cool thing with with charts is because it’s got all that data on there. So you can go back and see like, okay, I took this trade on December 14, and I went long but in fact the market dumped and then you can in your trading journal, some people set them up differently, but you can write down you know why you took this trade? Was your MACD bullish? Was your RSI bullish like, were there were there three items that had Confluence, like what was you know, what was the market sentiment? You can write down notes and different things and then kind of go back and look at it and see what actually happened and how close you are or what you did wrong.
Rob McNealy
Wow. Let’s see. This seems like a lot of work.
Crypto Wendy
It is but I I enjoy it and there’s people that enjoy it. And if you’re good at it, you can make a lot of money.
Rob McNealy
I’m happy to wait on that sounds like gambling to me. I’m very conservative. It’s kind of funny, everybody jokes. I’ve never sold any of my own tokens. from two years ago with our project never sold any of them. So I’m just kind of a lazy holder, but I believe in what I’m doing. So I think the longer I hold the better off I’ll be long term. But you know, we’re almost out of time. It’s been a while this is going really fast. It has. Well, that’s good thing. Where can people find out more about you and your charting and all your content creation?
Crypto Wendy
So I do a lot of different things. I have my website I do. I do marketing, I do consulting. I do. I’ve got YouTube, I do events for crypto companies and if you’re a non crypto company, I can take you as well. Do a lot of different things but I’m all my handles are at crypto india.or crypto and do my website is crypto video com youtube is crypto do somebody reaches out to you on telegram and asks you for money or something like that they’re claiming their me I will never ask you for money. I do not have a paid group. I will never have a paid group. I will never I literally will never ask any of you guys for money. I may ask you for a slice of pizza or a burrito with guacamole. But other than I won’t ask anything.
Rob McNealy
Thank you so much one. I’ve had a great time today and you have a great day.
Crypto Wendy
Thank you, Rob.
Episode Links
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Today we’re talking to mark Wittenberg. He’s with the core team of verge currency project out of Canada A. So I just want to welcome him to the show and let’s see what they’re doing up north in snow Mexico. Mark, how you doing today?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Um, it’s very snowy, and it’s about minus 18 Celsius. I think right now, I’m literally looking out my window and can’t see a car because all I see is white.
Rob McNealy
You know, that’s how it is in June, typically in Canada. That’s how I first see it, or I can imagine it happening. I actually grew up in the Detroit area up in Michigan. And so I spent a lot of time in Canada when I was growing up. A lot of people don’t know that Canada has a lower drinking age than the United States. It’s 19. And so a lot of people in the United States at least it used to be this way. It’s a little harder now. I think. Now you need a an actual passport. Go to Canada. But when I was growing up and just in my late teens, you just needed a driver’s license to go across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario, and go drink at 19 versus 21. So it’s like in Michigan like I when I was growing up, you went from 19 to 21. You spent every weekend in Canada party and then drinking away and stuff. So I don’t know if it’s quite that way now, but that’s how it was.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
It’s like, it’s still 18 in Alberta here. So I mean, I remember like, you could actually smoke a cigarette. I think it’s 16 way back in a day. But yeah, it’s 18 to drink in Alberta. So a lot of people even from BC and East they come here to drink. So that’s that’s kind of funny,
Rob McNealy
It’s like, you know? Yeah. You guys are just different up there. But I guess it’s colder, so you need to warm up more. I don’t understand.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
That’s right.
Rob McNealy
So Mark, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into the crypto space? What was kind of your idea was like to know, I want to know what people’s you know what brought them to the crypto world?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
It’s I think my family was in crypto. I think they got into bitcoin at like 2010 or something at eight cents or something I don’t know. But that’s when I first learn to vote and then fast forward I think I opened up my first exchange account in like January of 2016. I think I think I can’t really remember anything like when I was like $3 and something I don’t know. But I’ve been following kind of ever since and it out just following online and was following it kind of moving forward and then I really jumped in and boat the middle of 2017 is when I really jumped in. And then when we had that false Bull Run, I was all the way in and I picked up on the verge currency as a project and thought it really fit Kind of who I am as a person as far as the privacy aspect goes. So, I mean for me my everyday life is pretty private. My everyday business is based on you know, privacy and stuff like that. So I think for me it really verge currency really, really fit who I am as a person. And of course the non Ico non pre mine, all volunteer aspect, definitely fit with who I am. You know, I always figured if, if, as a project, if your non Ico non pre mind volunteer, you know, in your privacy focused, then everybody’s going to work hard. There’s no there’s no personal gain right from from being you know, what people call a staff member, which we’re not that there’s no personal gain from it. We’re going to get out what we put in so and I noticed the community at that time was really large too. So I thought you know what, like this projects great and I started talking into some of the core members online and that’s kind of where it went. So I think I became part of core and beginning of maybe April or March or April 2018 is when I officially became core member to help try to drive verge currency forward. So, yeah, so
Rob McNealy
So, verge is a fork of Bitcoin, right?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Yeah. Dogecoin Dark. Yeah, it’s it’s bit core, but Dogecoin dark. It’s a phone. Yeah, it’s a it’s a fork of Dogecoin dark.
Rob McNealy
You guys have been around for four or five years that I think so you guys are almost like oh gee, in this space as far as crypto projects go. But you know, I always joke around as a I bet in the space as a project, not even two years and like I bet I’m like an old dog. Now. You know, in crypto because crypto such a young industry, right. It’s like everybody is new. And you know, there’s not like experts in this Space is as far as I see it. And I think people that put them out put themselves out there as experts are just kind of nonsense, you know. But, you know, it’s like, it’s funny, like you go on like some of these people’s LinkedIn. And like they have they’re like 40 years old, and they got like three years of experience. And it only goes it’s only goes back three years and it’s only crypto related. And you’re like, Okay, you scrubbed your LinkedIn, you didn’t do anything for the last 30 years. You know, and I always joke around like my LinkedIn looks like pretty schizo frightening because I didn’t delete anything out, you know, it’s got you can see where I’ve been my whole life. I’m old, you know, I would expect someone who’s 45 or 50 to have a pretty extensive LinkedIn, you know, but you guys started a while ago and so tell me what’s different about verge currency say than, you know, dose or you know, Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
I mean, as far as Bitcoin goes, we’re more scalable. I think, you know, Bitcoin per Suddenly I see Bitcoin is a store of value, possibly. It’s not scalable. It’s not quick. It’s not cheap. No, it’s not cheap. And, you know, verjus based on transaction speed, I don’t know what the exact speed is. But we’re quick. We’re quick. And you know, we’ve got the privacy option where we’re kind of branding towards the whole digital payment arena now. So yeah, we are crypto, but I kind of like to refer to us as a digital payment option. Because I think generationally, I think people will get that a whole lot more than crypto. So when I when I look at us, I kind of I speak to our potential partners that you know, like we’re a digital payment option for sure. But yeah, definitely quick, definitely quick and cheap. So that’s a big benefit to us.
Rob McNealy
I think that’s a good point is that, you know, crypto right now has like, you know, a really bad stigma out there. Thanks to the news media and thanks to all the scammers. In the space, you know, they they really have a lot of ways a lot of crypto people have brought it on themselves, you know, especially some of these toxic maximalists that are out there that are really, really negative and hostile to anybody that they feel is competition to their, whatever their favorite project is. But I think that’s smart to like, you know, explain it like, we’re just a payment system. We’re not, you know, you don’t risk pipe the crypto piece, whereas I think a lot of maximalists really want to push the crypto piece not realizing how the general population seems to see it at this point.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
I totally agree. And I mean, I, I don’t, I’m not that guy to get along with maximalists. I don’t go to a lot of local meetups here just for that reason. I know there’s a couple of G maximalists in Canada here that I don’t, I don’t typically talk to you know, when you look at the whole market, you know, when you take the whole population of the world and say 3% is aware or 3% is has heard of cryptocurrency or Bitcoin? And then you get the maximum was what percent are they know? So who are they marketing to? You know, it’s i, i don’t i don’t agree with a max list, maximalist way of thinking I really don’t i don’t i don’t understand it. And I don’t know why they just can’t embrace these people that think that Bitcoin is going to be the only one.
Rob McNealy
It’s kind of like religion, you know, I mean, and I’ve seen this with like any political activism out there, I’ve been a political activist, good chunk of my life as well. And I think the problem is, is that so many people that are really tie up their identity with something you know, they they you know, it’s like the Bitcoin activists that have been around who have been pushing for 567 years Bitcoin this Bitcoin that and for a long time, Bitcoin didn’t have any competitors. There wasn’t really substitutes for a long time. And then what happens is, as When these guys put, you know, they put their ego out there. And they’re the ones that say, Bitcoin will take over the world. They make these crazy, you know, proclamations, and then they have to dig themselves in. And then when things change, they they just dig in further, instead of recognizing maybe they were a little wrong, or maybe they weren’t 100%. Right, or, you know, what have you. And I think part of that’s just ego, I mean, more than anything, they’ve tied their, their identity to this one prediction, or this one way of things that they want it to be this one way. And then I think when they get challenged on that, they get really defensive. I mean, to me, that’s what it is. And it’s like, the problem is that they’re going to lose out if they continue down that track. You know, I’m an entrepreneur, you know, I am not a developer, our projects a little you know, we’re a developer or non developer, but we’re an entrepreneur led team. So we have multiple entrepreneurs on the team, and we view it as a product, even though we’re decentralized project we also we feel crypto is a project. It’s a product that needs to be marketed. And it’s a it’s a product that needs to be, you know, you got to view the competitors to your product, you know, the people that are currently the substitute systems that are in place. So to me, Well, I give a great job last night, I was actually filling out an application to get list asked on an exchange. Right? And one of the questions is it says, Who are your competitors? And they wanted us to put like, what other crypto is our competitors and I said, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, are our competitors because that is who our competitors are, and how we view it and it’s just our perspective on things and I think the maximalist out there you know, they’ll overlook things that are just ridiculous. You know, you know, I take it like the people that still think that you know, I still believed in the original Bitcoin white paper where it is supposed to be digital cash, but the biggest core team, you know, they veered from that they they went down one track, they their community said, you know, they dropped the pretense of being digital cash, because they, they, I think they recognize that the scalability issues are insurmountable at this point for their project. I think it’s more politics than anything. But I think what’s happened now their store value, but to me, the killer app for crypto is payments, that is the killer app. That’s the thing, you have the biggest market for people who use digital payments. And to me, you know, trying to focus on d phi or whatever some of the other products are out there. I think, you know, as an entrepreneur, you know, you have to look at the the market size. You know, I think this is one of the things that a lot of it just outside of crypto, too, is that one of the big reasons businesses fail is that there’s not a big enough market for the idea. Right, you know, and that’s a lot of that and entrepreneurs think like this developers don’t, right, yeah, and just because it’s a cool idea or the technology is neat doesn’t mean that it’s a sustainably sized market. And the unicorns you know businesses and startups like the Amazon comes they look at the biggest how big the market is for that product or service and then they start looking and doing analysis and can they reach them and how much of a you know share can they take out of that market? And so we always looked at if you’re going to do a crypto project payments is the number one biggest market right and and so to me to veer away from that and go to store value because Think of it this way, like store value, right? What’s a current what’s the currently the store value in the world?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
What is the store gold?
Rob McNealy
Yeah, right. It is. That’s the biggest, most widely accepted store of value in the planet right now. And how many everyday people care about gold. Now, I like golden silver. I still I’m not as a as a crypto guy. I still think I like all asset class. I like real estate. I like art. I like startups. I like precious metals. So I’m not anti precious metals either. But the question is how many people out there care about precious metals right now? Um, you know, everyday person on the street? Not very few. Very right. So to me, goes back to the size of the market, what’s a bigger market a store of value market? Right? Or the the market that is for payments, and me goes back to market size there, the store value markets, a very small community, and if you’re basically trying to argue with, you know, student, you know, gold bugs, and there’s not, I mean, obviously, there’s still millions of those around the planet. But yeah, gold bugs are also very tangible, oriented, they like they’re very tactile, they want to feel something and I know a lot of gold bugs. And the gold bugs that I know don’t like anything digital. They don’t like cashless society. So I don’t understand it. So to me strategically, I don’t know where bitcoins going to end up. But I think the store of valued direction is not a good direction for the project. I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball. I’m not making predictions on that. But I just say, from a market size and and I just don’t like it. I just don’t think it’s a great market size to go after. And I think it was an admitted an admission of failure from their original, you know, kind of killer app, the original, you know, mission of Bitcoin was to be peer to peer digital cash and store value is not that. So you guys have been around for a while you guys are a community based project. So what is verge done up today? What is what is what would you say verjus niche market or where are they trying to position themselves in the whole space these days?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
I think for me, personally, and I can’t speak to the other core team members because we’re all we’re all independent. There, there is no market for myself, as far as I’m concerned with virtual currency. So we should be accepted as a currency whether it’s mine geek, one of our partners accepting us for their online platform and and, you know in their live streams and stuff like that or whether it’s the Manny Pacquiao foundation accepting verge you know for donation Avenue were currency so the way I look at verge is if I if I have fi out if I have a $20 bill in my pocket and I can spend that anywhere, then I should be able to spend virge anywhere as well. And that benefit does is you know, everything is our market. So you know I’ll touch every industry because we want to be in every industry. You look at the way cashless payments are going now with I think even the the next Olympics are trying to reduce their cash. I think they’re trying to reduce their cash like 40% or something so they’re going cashless everything. is going cashless you go, especially in Canada here, everything’s tap, tap, go tap, tap, go tap this tap that tap everything it’s like, this is this is absolutely the perfect direction for a project like ours and to be quite frank, it’s it’s perfect for many projects, but you know, 26 or 2700 or 2800 projects out there, it’s going to consolidate for sure. You know, there’s going to be a lot of these projects that had Icos there. Maybe they’re not going to be around anymore. Maybe they went dry. Maybe they spent all their money, maybe they bought whatever they bought it because they thought they’re going somewhere different, I don’t know. But being a community based project, I think we’re, you know, maybe I’m a bit wrong, but I think we’re about 800,000. Now supporters worldwide, and our reach is huge. And you look at other projects, and again, there’s other projects that have great communities too, and they’ll be there. First to say, Did you bite has another great community? You know, and they’re, they’re in the same space we are. But back to your question, what have we done up to now? I mean, we’ve partnered with mine geek we’ve partnered with the Manny Pacquiao foundation so we can offer donations he can accept donations and virge and of course Bitcoin and Litecoin and aetherium you know, for Manny Pacquiao to go out and build some homes for the less fortunate out in the Philippines and hopefully worldwide you know, where else are we accepted Excel trip pay sent like there’s, there’s not an industry that we shouldn’t touch. It doesn’t matter what that industry is. Again, when you take your $20 bill or your credit card or whatever you’re going to do and you some guy wants to go buy a gun with his money, he’s going to go buy a gun with his money if he wants to go buy adult content. He’s gonna go buy adult content with his feet so fat so if virge wants to be a replacement or run alongside or like a rail to fat, then we should be accepted in every industry.
Rob McNealy
Totally agree. So as you guys get you guys are also a decentralized project. How do you guys I mean, just on the I’m always curious how the projects kind of work day to day, you know, how do you guys deal with partnerships to do have a foundation? That’s kind of doing the outreach for that, or how do you guys structured as far as managing your projects?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Oh, boy, that’s a great question. Um, we have a very large core team. And we also have community outreach team. So we have different layers, I guess you could say, of, of outreach. So you know, typical day to day I mean, I’m known in our in our core team to talk a lot so guys like to put me on mute because I I’m usually in every channel all the time but so that’s just Say we have 2025 core members. We’ve got a dev team and an outreach team. We’ve got a graphics team, we’ve got a video team. As far as outreach goes, we’re all because we’re decentralized. We’re all kind of working on our own thing on our own time. Some some guys going to have one hour a week, some guys going to have 20 hours a week, some guys going to have 60 hours a week. It’s all going to be different. So when we get into these layers, we have our group chat and discord. And then we have, you know, like an admin mod group and Facebook chat. So, you know, that’s another layer as well, where we, we can talk to our admins and mods of like Facebook, Twitter stuff, like you know, of our different online platforms and relay stuff that way. So, you know, right now, we have I think 11 different Facebook’s that I’m managing worldwide. So when we push to our main one, I’ll push to I think, maybe about nine 910 or 11 different Facebook’s that I’ll push you then we have Instagram then we have Twitter. Main Twitter accounts and then we block folio, stuff like that. So and then we have another aspect to verge as well which is fueled by verge. So that’s when we’re bringing on say somebody with some talent that wants to support us like Gil. He’s a NASCAR driver. he’s a he’s a really big first currency supporter. So we have that fueled by virge aspect. Especially Danny. He’s our little 10 year old MX moto MX racer, so he’ll go to the US or to Canada and do a bunch of races there and he’ll spread the word about verge currency as well but through a different you know, as a through 10 year old and be through moto Moto X. So we have that aspect and we do eSports as well and Adam night shadow, he he typically does this esport stuff. So a typical day to day with us. I mean, it’s it’s craziness. It’s full on craziness, it’s everybody’s working on different stuff. We got different opinions in our core team, and we’re not all going Get along at all times. And it’s it’s, it’s, you know, I guess you want to say in a we’re in a bear market right now whatever you somebody wants to call it you know if you’re if you’re focused on price alone I guess you can say we’re in a bear market, but we’re working harder right now. Then I think we were when when the coin was or when the currency was pumping I think we are certainly working harder now. We’re more focused now then then we are so than we were when it was pumping.
Rob McNealy
So where are you guys right now in your roadmap? What would be the next thing you guys are trying to accomplish with your project?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Um, I think more collaborations, more partnerships. Awareness is key for me. So we were fortunate enough to join a telegram group. I’m in a telegram group with change Angel. So I don’t know if you’re familiar with change Angel, but lots of people are so they’ve brought in a whole bunch of different communities projects. into one telegram chat. And man that that is like that’s one of the best ideas that space could ever come up with is somebody to take the reins, and bring 10 or 11 different projects into one telegram chat where we’re all pushing each other for awareness. So for me, it’s going to be about awareness of digital payments. That’s, that’s what’s next for myself. Anyway, I know the dev team, Justin, Mark and swen and manual, they’re working on their respective wallets right now. So you know, I just let them be I’m not a deaf guy. So I try not to get involved too much in the deaf talk or outside. It won’t let me focus on what I’m doing. But moving forward, I’m just trying to bring awareness to this space in general and I think it’s important that for me, I bring awareness to to to Bitcoin as well, because this is what people are going to know. In fact, they may know a theorem they may know like coin as well for me. It’s been bringing awareness to the space in general. And then also bringing awareness diverge currency while I’m bringing awareness to the space.
Rob McNealy
So when you’re talking to say retailers, what’s your pitch? What do you guys say? You guys should accept Verge why?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Oh, my pitch, I just jam a pamphlet down on their table and say, let’s go. No, I mean, they’re, they’re accepting digital anyway. So these retailers are already accepting digital. They’re accepting tap, they’re accepting NFC Apple Pay, we pay whatever pay, they’re doing Google pay credit, they’re already accepting digital. So all it is is is trying to find the right avenue to accept something like verge into their system. Now retailers is a whole different game because of course there’s so much with settlement and they’ve got to have the right the retailers have to have the right partnership. Well, it’s not just, hey, walk in the door, and these guys are going to be like, hey, there’s verge. Yeah, let’s just accept it, I’ll hook up tomorrow. There’s partnerships that they have, they have to have dealer agreements with the settlement company, they’ve got to have retailer agreements with whatever POS terminal they’re using. And then that POS terminal, wherever they’re getting it from, they have to have an agreement with the app that they’re downloading. So it’s not just as simple as saying except for its currency because we a, we need an off ramp, we need to sell it, we need to have a settlement company on our end to that’s going to be able to handle the liquidity and settle with us real time. So and that’s still a challenge in this space as well. So as far as a pitch to the retailer, I think for now, it’s about awareness that when I sit and talk to people, it’s right now it’s about awareness until the space grows.
Rob McNealy
My I definitely think that’s a huge part of it. And you know, it’s interesting because I actually spend more time talking to retailers then I have spent trying to talk to end users because To me that that is the the main place to start and you know down here in the states you know the the biggest concerns that you know I’m seeing from retailers besides once you get past like the stigma and the potential legal ramifications because some people think crypto is a legal it’s it’s interesting when I’m but one of the things that here and I don’t know how it’s handled. You guys are Canadian based though right your project is most of your core team is in Canada, am I correct?
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
No, incorrect so we have two core members in Canada, myself and Harry. Harry is in. He’s in BC, so he concentrates on some other stuff that he concentrates on for verge currency, which, you know, really get into that but he’s he’s, he’s deep into what he’s concentrating on. But we have core members worldwide. I mean, we’ve got core members in Australia, US, Asia. European countries. I mean, we’re everywhere. Now, the founder, Justin, he was he’s originally from Florida. But based out of his, I mean, we’re not based out of anywhere because we’re feel like we’re sorry, we’re we’re a digital payment option. So we’re not based out of anywhere. I just happen to be in Canada.
Rob McNealy
Gotcha. I always ask, you know, but down here talking to retailers and and I think this is going to be more of a problem as adoption starts to occur. Is that the way the least the United States that’s those are the retailers are mostly focused on right now or American retailers. And most of the problem is that I see going forward the biggest impediment regulatory wise to crypto adoption by retailers is how the IRS the Internal Revenue Service in the United States treats crypto transactions and and they treat it as property and so the accounting piece for a retailer is a huge challenge. And I’ve told this to People that most people in crypto that I talked to even activists, they don’t even seem to understand this now I actually have my, as an entrepreneur, I’ve actually owned a retail store. And so I know a lot about point of sale and I know a lot about the accounting and and running a retail business. And I can tell you unless someone gave me a super compelling sales pitch and solve some problem, I think I wouldn’t probably accept crypto as a retailer if I didn’t have a recognized problem with other systems. And and so and I think that going forward, that’s going to have to change for retail adoption to really happen, at least in the States. And why I think that you’re not hearing about that right now, is because people really aren’t using crypto down here in the states for buying and selling goods and services yet, you know that it’s a small amount of transactions out there and they’re usually experimental or one offs, but there’s no serious industry that’s adopted crypto yet, and I think that That’s going to be a problem and you’re going to hear about probably over the next couple years is people got to start adopting crypto, because that will be the biggest pain point for retailers accepting it, but no one talks about that. And I’m like, Dude, this is the problem that we need to be focusing on, not the SEC. We need to be focusing on the IRS. I don’t know does Canada have similar? I don’t know how Canada treats you know, crypto as far as you know, taxes and stuff. But is it similar to the US or do they just deal with it differently?
I think we’re yeah, I think you nailed it. We’re pretty close to the same I mean, Canada, the government here. I think they implemented something like a questionnaire or something where they’re asking people if they own digital currency, digital currency, or cryptocurrency or whatever, but they’re not. I think it’s still a volunteer thing now but I believe regulations are coming in in June or July or something. I think there’s some bigger regulations coming into play but in June or July up here in Canada, but you absolutely nailed it with The retailer in two things as well with POS and stuff like that we we see videos on Twitter of you know like this store accepts XYZ cryptocurrency now and this furniture store accepts this and this restaurant accepts XYZ cryptocurrency now it’s like they may accept it but it’s like how many transactions a year are going to happen on cryptocurrency right now very little worldwide very very less unless you get into some of these other countries Venezuela Argentina I believe Philippines is probably pretty big on cryptocurrency now. But But you nailed it the we can go out there and send videos out on Twitter all we want about signing up some 25 seat restaurant that now accepts crypto but the only transaction they’re going to get in a whole year is going to be that guy that signed them up I’m thinking.
Well and you know another Lot of axes we really pissy about us pointing that out. But I agree. And I think the the bottom line is, is that a lot of crypto projects do a really poor job of stimulating demand for people, you know, to create the reason for retailer to do it now. I mean, we have our own strategy with how we’re, you know, positioning us to do exactly that. Because I do believe that’s an issue and and they’ll change over time. It’s just I think, you know, I’m always trying to think three four steps ahead. I you know, I’m not just looking at I’ll sign up this one Uber driver for this one video for this one tip I’m giving him and now he is a Bitcoin lover and it’s like, okay, that’s that’s not really, you know, in my mind, that’s not how you seriously get substitution and create a paradigm shift you you have to solve a problem for a lot of people and and you need to be able to have a plan to get your solution to somebody’s problem in front of a group of people. And to me that that’s that’s basically business and marketing and market segmentation and things like that. But hey, this is uh, this has been a really good chat. I mean, I don’t know enough about verge and so I’m glad you took the time to come on the show today and tell me a little about and you know it and and educate me about the project because I like to hear more about these community projects that are doing things behind, you know, behind the scenes and actually growing right now and it’s not all about the hype and clear pricing things. Where can people find out more about Verge.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
VirgeCurrency.com that’s going to have everything probably you know, that you need on that website, of course, follow our main handle on Twitter, we’re releasing medium articles. I think we do a dev update on medium every couple of weeks and then an outreach or a marketing update every couple of weeks. But you know, I again, for us, it’s all about it’s about awareness. And I want to point out really quickly that you know, it’s not all about when moon when moon when moon when moon you know for us to get serious in this space and for To get serious with digital payments and you know I’ll say for myself too we need to mature up you know this whole space the whole people following it we need we need to add a little bit more maturity to this space. Get the bear market is hurting a lot of people, it’s hurting myself too. But we’ve got to push past that work as work as digital payments together. Let’s not work on Hey, I’m number one. I’m number one. I’m number one and I’m the best because I know more people than you. But let’s let’s work on the best out of each project push together as one space. Let’s get it to that point where were the awareness and the adoption is there and then and then focus and fine tune our projects, you know has verge had its problems? Absolutely. It has. But I don’t know when business out there and you’re you’re an entrepreneur, I don’t know one business out there that hasn’t had problems. It’s bring, have a problem. Bring a solution. That’s what it’s about recognizing a problem. How do we push past this problem? How do we move forward? So that problem doesn’t happen again. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about the problem that happened. It’s about how do we not have that problem happen again? Take every cryptocurrency project out there. I think every single one of us had problems. So let’s not focus on the negative. Let’s focus on the positive because the true people in the cryptocurrency space are going to focus on the positive.
Rob McNealy
I couldn’t agree more mark, for coming on the show today.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
Yeah, awesome, Rob. I really appreciate the opportunity. I really want to learn more about your project as well and I hope we can chat again soon.
Rob McNealy
Anytime.
Mark Wittenberg – Verge Currency Core Team
All right.
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