Hey, Joe. How is it going? Good hearing you.
Good here and you too, all as well. Thanks everybody for being here. We'll just wait for a few more people to join us on our end. Hako, tell me how are things?
Very excited to talk to Nami today. We're going to kick her off in a couple of seconds.
Hakao Bo is anybody else going to be joining on your end?
seems like a HocoBo might be having some technical difficulties. Brian, can you hear me? 100% dude. Do you want to just give a background on AlphaGhost and kind of what we're working on while the HocoBo kind of, you know, we ping them in the background and make sure that we rejoins
Yeah, absolutely. Alpha Growth is currently working with a couple different ecosystems to basically just kind of help with everything but the blockchain. So whether that's
go to market support, bring in new high quality teams into the ecosystem, fill in all sorts of needs that might still be such as infrastructure and things like that, and then on the retail side and
investor side too. We've got the number one crypto due diligence platform that's totally open to the public. You can do things on there that you can't really do elsewhere. So definitely check that out if you haven't already.
I thought I heard a Yucobo jump in.
Good day, good day sir. GM.
Hey guys, how's it going? I'm really sorry I don't know what happened at my hand, but I was definitely struggling with the two spaces. When, as you invited me to talk and I started talking for so reason, my, my three spaces froze. So, been trying to reconnect. Can you guys hear me okay now?
Perfectly crystal clear excellent music to our ears a big bun music to our ears. Oh, I thought Twitter was gonna rug up again Like was like was this a bread. How have you been by the way? Oh, it's like
New year, new goals, new ambitions, you know, it's good. Excited for 2023. Bags are going up into the right. I'm not too sad about that. I think we should all be happy. I think I do it through the
is going to be a good year. We've had a doubt. And same here, I've just returned from a business trip. We are only January 20th, but we have had three rather intense weeks with planning and a right execution and setting goals.
and speaking with the entire crew. But 23, I think it's going to be a good year. We look forward to it very, very, very much. In fact, most of the work we did in 2022 should pay back in 23.
We're feeling the exact same way. Super excited to have you up here today. I'll go, but you want to tell everybody what you're personally doing on the NAMI team and then the role that you play and then also a little bit of a background of what NAMI is and what you guys are up to. Absolutely. Happy to.
Thank you, Joe. So, let me say, we're three companies started 15 years back, long before blockchain was the thing. We did a content aggregation business and we focus mostly on content distribution and we work with large companies like
and Mozilla Panasonic and many other large companies. We served about 50 million users a day and in late 2016 we shifted towards blockchain with the intention to build a content marketplace and focus on micro payments. One thing led to the other and soon after that we realized that Ethereum
was far from perfect from scaling point of view so we started focusing on scalability. We were one of the first things building layer 2 which was only supporting payments and that was in 2018 when we were live. And since then we have deployed a second version and now we're about to deploy
the third version, Nami3, which will support Nami2, generalize smart contracts, but unlike Nami2, we'll have some slightly better solutions to the, some well known problems of Nami2 with regards to contract sizes and upcodes and few other things.
And also since January last year, so a year ago now, we have been building entirely a bunch of products, mostly targeting with three users, but also work very nicely as a showcase for, let's say, Web2 companies
to get into work three. And that's the else say that of course we can dive into a bit more detail because as it's a very beginning when we started building Nami the infrastructure play which is a layer two we had in mind the objective of bringing mass adoption to
blockchain technology. So because of the way NAMI is assigned and so forth, we have been peeling quite nicely to retail companies and especially financial institutions. So we have been working now for eight months with the original central bank helping them to build their
CBDC sandbox. And the last few months as well, we have been working with some of the institutions that we have not yet mentioned publicly because we're not allowed to. You're skipping over, you're skipping over something like really clear here. Like you're working with a nation state to run their
that's right. So we have built their recipes and books. That's unbox is actually not running on Nami. It's running on a different network. But yes, we have been helping them build it and we have built it, which we're very
proud of and we are also working with some of the large, let's say, financial institutions that we have not yet announced. But yeah, that is also part of our pedigree. That's right. That's Hagoble. Can you go ahead, man? No, you got to get it.
I was just going to ask that even to our team especially, that's really, really cool. I'm sure that a lot of people in the audience are wondering a little bit more about that process. I know that there's probably some stuff you can't talk about, but we would love to hear more about the actual process of what that's looked like and maybe some mistakes
you've made and some things that have gone well and not so well through that process and what that might look like moving forward for other nations that are wanting to get involved in this. Absolutely. So the process has been at least the very first, let's say, partner or client that we signed. It took us five
years. So it was a long tedious process or actually for four and a half years. It was a long and tedious process. And consistent on really doing a lot of hand holding and spending plenty of time with them, helping them to basically build the trust on you, keep in mind that
central banks are, we've had a doubt, one of the most important, if not the most important entity within a country, like in the US, the Fed is, I know that it is not labeled a central bank, but if you, I think if you look at Wikipedia,
He's labelled or he's a scientist. He's a fine, there are some central banks. But nonetheless, these guys do require a lot of hand-hoaling to require a lot of patience. And you need to show a high degree of empathy. You need to earn their respect.
I had to say that it was a good process. It took plenty of time. Now, once you are working with them, you of course have got the ability to
to really show them how good you are at what you do. And I'm lucky that I've got a superb team next to me. So we felt one thing to lower Trump. I have to say that we have done a pretty good job. They're very content. And of course, that has also led to
extra exposure because as you can imagine and especially through the experience we'll have had in 2022 where to say all the top crypto crypto brands have have fallen down to their knees right and with some absolutely brutal scandals like yes and
be even more careful on how you build those relationships. I think this might be a layup sort of question for people in the industry, but just kind of like in general, it's almost so obvious right now that it's almost clear shades are like an crypto, but what is
What's the value that these banks, the CEDBC, the central bank are seeing on why they want to utilize blockchain? That's an excellent question. So, you know, of course, if you would ask generally, the crypto-trita, all the skeptics,
say, well, you know, central boxes want to use the CPC to control the nation or to screw people and so forth. And I am sure that there are eight bad acta. There is a bad acta somewhere who might be behind a central bank that might have not
always good intentions, but our experience is very, very, very, very different. So the common denominator tends to be things like adding extra transparency to the process and the trust of our people.
having a simpler method to bank the bank, having methods that will help us to also send time roll out digital identity and make money which is ultimately the tool we all need and we make use of every day so make money more
more accessible to old parties and more inclusive. Some of them are even going as far as saying they would like to, within quotes, disrupt the industry, entitling the industry, right? And open up opportunities.
for all the setups to come into things because keep in mind the central banks, I mean we only hear about what the central bank might be doing when they raise interest rates and we'll complete about it very few times you will hear more about the central bank and when they bring the interest rate down. We don't think about it but
The kind of work they do or at least the kind of work I have seen and I'm not preferring one to know what the other places is really phenomenal and Difficult very very difficult. So they see a blockchain as an artifact of a tool and by the way, we should all see that way. They see that's
a tool that it can help them to leverage and get solutions differently and solve current problems that they deal with. So far we have only come across really, really beautiful thoughts and intent
like private security is a must for these guys. And again, I'm speaking only from my point of view, I cannot speak on behalf of any central dime or any other financial institution that we might be working with. But our experience is precisely that, which is absolutely superb.
That's amazing. I'm surprised and I'm glad and I'm very very hopeful. A little bit scared to be honest about the whole CDC thing like as well. I was at a birthday party. I live in the DC area and randomly got and was talking to another mom of a child there.
And she was like, we got into it and we're talking about FTX and we're talking about everything. And it was just like, I saw this to you. She was like literally writing the laws and the rules of like how to handle a CBBC in the US. And I was like, oh my gosh, like, she's like, I've never even talked to somebody like you in crypto. And I was like,
What you're literally writing the laws and the rules for the American CDBC and you've never talked to like crypto entrepreneurs. So it's just it's just the juxtaposition and what you guys are doing for that and pushing that conversation. It is so interesting because in one
conversation at a birthday party with screaming kids in the background like I was able to tell like we were able to communicate on a level in like 10 to 15 minutes I was like cool you want to regulate custodians you want to regulate C5 go for it but you gotta leave an innovation sandbox and and I just it's
just think I know what you're going through with that and I really appreciate it so I just want to say thank you on that. Thank you so much I mean this is it's very nice to hear as well you know your point of view and your experience speaking with with some of the you know individuals that are also involved in this project
I have to say as well that some people that we have met that work for Central Bank that has been literally thrown into the CBDC topic, you know, it is pretty complicated when you think about it, right? I mean, so if we look alone in crypto Twitter, which is where you can find
find more English experts. We're capita. In that, in that crypto tutelang, still there are very few that really comprehend in detail what the hell is this bad, right? And I'm not talking about synchitis, I'm talking about the technology in general, or how defy words, those sort of things. The amount of
coverage, the topic of media is very high, but it has good very little substance, right? There's very very difficult for third parties like this lady that you were talking to, to really dive into individuals and really fully comprehend it. So mostly they tend to
So, initial guidelines given to them by management saying we're looking and doing x, y, and z, right? And those x, y, and z are particular KPIs which are very often, or most of the time are related to items that they want to improve within their country.
And then from there, they need to pull from experience. They experience generally comes 99% of it from in the bag of from in the financial industry. They don't know much about about the CBD, about how blockchain works. And of course they will, they will rely on their peers as well. And their peers are probably equally, you know, highly
high-profile professionals that come from the webinar background and industry, but they might not know a lot about blockchain. That is why if you spend a new investment for a lot of time working with some of those individuals and you get their trust, then
that can work very well for you.
We're definitely we're definitely really excited to see I mean at least you know for starters the future of Nami and what you know because you guys are you're kind of pioneering in that space and that's it's going to be so awesome to see the outcome of that but I would love to I would love to dive in a little bit more on
on the product and what makes you guys special in the products and the dApps that you guys are excited about whether or not those are the ones that are coming from in-house or third-party devs would love to dive in on that. Absolutely. Let me go first and live a little bit about the product world. I'm sure that
But this last couple of years, most of the attendees to the space might have come across the so-called layer tools. And then might be wondering, I mean, some of them will know very well about the layer tools. And some of the ones might be really wondering how it works and so forth. So let me just skip quickly how it works. Let me just, at least some of the
the mix of importance, the synthesis apart from the competitors. So the very first version of NAMI that we built, we built from scrap and from zero all the way up. And we focused mostly on things like having instant finality of the transactions. So you don't
have to wait a number of minutes as it happens in Ethereum or in the other layer too. And having predictable fees, so you know exactly how much something is going to cost you before you initiate a transaction. And also the latency in this transactions had to be as low as possible.
Well, that is kind of some of the unique properties that Nami offers. And in terms of the products, well, before we dive into the products, I think it's important as well to understand a little bit of our mindset. So we run a for profit company.
We don't focus on dumping tokens in retail. That is not what we do for a living. Give the mind we have been in the industry now for nearly six of the big years. We have, I would say, pretty, yeah, pretty
open background so you guys can look and find out who we are and the kind of work we have done in the industry. We have always been very careful and very caring of our communities, a small community, but supervised community. We run away from
from the issues that most of the other projects have listed before are separate from. But back to the point, so we're under for a profit company, so we need to make money. And how do we make money? We make money from transaction fees. That is our business model. So we have a token and
that token plays a key role on the security of the system, but also it is used to claim the fees of the system. So, said differently, we need to get a lot of fees going through it. That is why, for example, if we would ever be lucky enough to launch the CPDC,
the country-wide nation solution on top of the army that would help us to make money. But equally, back to the products, Joe, we need to make sure that we get plenty of fees running through the protocol.
Then what is that we have focused on? So with that in mind, initially the most of the efforts we have put in, in terms of building products, following to categories, D5, and I'm at peace. And we believe that the one that is going to
help us to make more money and only us, but of course token holders is going to be defy. So we have currently a small deck that we launched about a year ago that we haven't really promoted to go nify, but we also have got over 100.
full of products built in shelves that we built through 2022 and couple of other ones that are being finished now. So these products will be the bare minimum that we think a layer 2 needs to
to have a healthy defy ecosystem where basically people will be able to do the same as doing on the base layer of Ethereum, but again fast chip and instantly pretty much. And I'm more particularly within the, within the deepest space, we think that NAM is pre-weld to different trading.
And also we think that Mami is very very well suited for gaming, which we think is something that through 2023 is really going to take off within the Web Through Space. And in terms of the states, we have also been building and
And again, as I mentioned, I know we have a fair amount of community members in the space and some of them have been sniffing our network for some time, particularly as the agent of whose name I don't know.
every time he finds a little gem on our network, he will pick me up one to one. He's really loving. I'm not going to say what he's handled is that he knows I'm talking about him right now.
So some of the community members have already been saying some little bits and pieces on our Explorer, on our test and Explorer. But yeah, DeFi, NFTs, and within DeFi particularly, training and
and gaming is what we think.
It's going to help us make our money. Awesome. And is there anything I know in your native products suite that you are allowed to talk about?
So, of course, I can speak about everything, which I really want to blow our party just before it takes place. Plus, some of our community members sometimes accuse us of speaking
speaking without giving a lot of detail. So I'm sure I can give an off-situp and I'm sure we can go through the MA and I'm sure that some of the questions will be pretty direct.
I have no doubt about that. Because as I said, some of these guys have already been saving them in the role for some time. I have got plenty of cues. So I will be super happy to answer as much as possible.
That's awesome. Yeah, I'm more I know you have you have some products that you mentioned that are going to be coming out in you know with version three and in the in the upcoming year So you know, it'd be it'd be cool to get some alpha on maybe some of those projects if
if you're able and willing, but if not, I totally understand if you guys are trying to keep it on the down low. No, I think I can speak a little about that. I mean, before I get into that in case some of your community members have
wondering, but why are these guys building so much? First of all, yes, we're building a little bit too much at times, but sometimes I kind of feel like we really need to do a whole thing. But the main reason behind it is because
how the industry works. So we are somewhat allergic to pay third party teams just common deploy on your network. I just think that that is
that is obtuse and I don't agree with the fact that the industry has been set up that way. But there is a reason for that, right? I mean, building this up is hard and it is easier just to get people excited by just paying
to Fedparty, making a lot of noise on crypto Twitter and PR levels, basically, and not really building long-lasting IP or long-lasting products. Polygon is a good example of that, so they haven't paid in time of money to bunch of things.
We check in, another have plenty of money, so they can afford it, so good for them. But yet at the same time, that doesn't really, that doesn't really state, right? Enough. So what we wanted to do was to bootstrap the network by building initially those products ourselves, right? And then eventually we
we have no doubt that there is plenty of liquidity going through the product, more liquidity will come naturally. And that is on our current comment, by the way. That is just rather a faceless pavement. So we have spent plenty of time with market makers of the Trejez and liquidity providers.
who actually don't really care about the notifers so much. They care about where the money is because you have a network with money. They can make more money. Hence they come in for that liquidity because liquidity. So back to the product.
So we have a, of course, an exchange that's indicated before has been life of on-mainly for a year. And some of our community members, especially, have said that maybe we haven't indicated enough love, enough time enough. So sometimes they have asked us if we have abandoned the project, which is absolutely not the case. The project is very much alive.
will be the first product that is ported to Nami3. Also, we're looking at having some more trading platform because I think they get it before.
for we believe I'm very able to do for it. Of course, it will have different properties than what NIFI offers today.
Also, we are looking at simply fine sum of our daily tasks. What do I mean by that? I mean that we are running probably the longest reward program in crypto, which is a 10 year
monthly or drop and we are 48 months into it. For some bizarre stupid internal reasons we have been running most of that all of that manually for about five years and now we want to simplify it. How are we going to simplify it?
of an on-chain product and also a farming product that will help us to also not need to earn the trust from the liquidity providers, but instead
They're knowing that they can claim the their worst any time from from the farming protocol So on that note Yuccabo sorry for can you off on that note like where does where does nommy Get most of its liquidity from?
So now are you bridging or is it or you like generating token on chain or like how does that work? So the way we're going to liquidate him on Nephi is by offering some Nephi rewards every month and and again for some reason we have been around for a while and we are not that well well well known
So we don't make a lot of noise. But that is where we give a liquidity from. And of course, I think about a year and a bit ago, we've been talking how to get run and how to couple of billion dollars and full little market cap. So more and more eyes shifted towards or turned towards Nami and
And they and then they close some capital but still I don't know how much equity to win my hell in the network right now But I would be surprised if he was above $2 million so very very very little Yeah So when you start to like work into those defy games there's kind of like two or three different strategies to bring liquidity one in spring
Another one is creating your own kind of ICO type of boom on chain right so generating a lot of market cap for token generation events and the other one is Fiat on ramps or asset on ramps right so in terms of like generating the
equity. Which ones are you guys looking at? Are you looking at like, you guys have like bridge and bridging bridges from the layer one to layer two? Which one did that if you? That is correct Brian. And I'm sorry I didn't answer your question properly before because after that you meant we got the existing number two platform
So in terms of Nami 3 and all these products, we are absolutely looking at having very sweet deals with the users in terms of rewards because basically all the products we are building are tokenized.
We're going to have a ton of apps for those early adopters who will not only come in for a while, but those will hang around for a long while. So ultimately, the more time you will hang around, the more reward you will get. And yeah, basically,
I guess that the key item to answer is, well, Joe's previous question, with regards to these products. Is that so much about what each product does, Joe? It's more about the fact that all these products are going to complement each other very, very well, and naturally.
something as well that we have personally been observing from within the industry. And of course, from many discussions, Brian and Joe, that we have had with you, you have been so kind to also educate us on some of the insights of how we, how some of the players work, right? But yeah, but all these products have to complement each other. So,
users will realize how good it is to use them. Ultimately building products is about building what people want. So they need to have the right tools that they are disposal. So once they bridge their ethos, they use the seed from the Ethereum on-tronami and by the
way. Yes, we do have a bridge. Then there will be able to do bunch of things. Currently today on NAMI 2, they can do literally nothing other than swapping tokens and providing liquidity, which is a little bit of a shame. But NAMI 2 was also a closed beta network for us.
But we need more games, man. We need your products like ASAP, right? You know, you get some games and as they work together, that's the whole ecosystem thesis, the Disneyland, the Disney World Explanation, right? >> I agree. I agree. And I will go further. I would, I mean, of course, you're --
your community members would like. I would say that maybe in a few weeks we could have a, instead of a, to the space we could, we could have a little Google meet where we invite everyone to show up to it and then we can give a demo of some, how some of these products work. We're going to be deployed. Yeah. Soon enough. That's a very cool idea.
I'll go by, yeah definitely we can definitely do that. That would be a blast and a new kind of a new form of content in the space I haven't seen that before but I just wanted to add something that I've kind of been thinking about and we've been talking about as a team this
week. Basically, what happened with the video game crash of the early 80s, there were too many games and none of them were wanted by the public. It was all permissionless essentially. There were no licensing requirements
for these new games to come in. Which is a cool thing and, you know, permissionless blockchains are, you know, a cool concept and they have there, they have their place at the party. However, what it sounds to me like, Nami is kind of doing is what Nintendo ended up doing and they kind of solved the problem and ended up winning.
They came and said, "We're gonna bring games that kind of work together, that are a little bit more relevant and high quality." And that's, it sounds like that's what you guys are doing. And I'm seeing a lot of parallels with that. And I'm, you know, hats off to you guys for doing that. And I really hope that it works out as well as it
did for Nintendo. Thank you Joe. I think that that is a very, very good way to put it. I can't allow it to live in more on that. So, you know, historically we have been pretty, pretty solid engineers, so we have been good at building stuff. We haven't actually pre-shipped with marketing stuff.
Like today I was speaking with one of our employees who said that we should be making waves and noise all day long about the CBDC work that we do. I get it and we will soon enough. But back to your ponjos. Yes, so building products are a tension a minute ago.
ultimately about filling what people want. Now when we talk about a web free in gaming and by the way I'm not a gaming expert, she has a plate of it but I'm not a gaming expert but what I've said so far in the web free space is a ton of intent to spend shit ton of money.
I'm going to be doing a very, very flashy, good looking game, which again, I've got no problems with. But it barely touches the blockchain. So, you don't really work for again, just because you need to start with the Metamask or do these every now and then. I don't think so.
Our approach, and I think this would be classified as a 501 to as an alpha, has been scratching our heads for some time. And then figuring out a way, how can for example, we can combine elements of basic gaming
and DeFi or basically NFTs or maybe both of them. And what could we achieve by that? So first of all, although we are well funded and we have years of runway, we don't have 100 million dollars at our disposal in some of these.
were three projects have, which by the way, the company in the minutes it turns to be that they didn't have much technology, a lot of money but new technology came to be on the other end of the spectrum. But what we could achieve by following that approach. So our hypothesis is that
With three geeks like us, we'll go like, wait a minute, this is actually something real, it's making use of the blockchain and this is where the value comes from. If you can demonstrate value and the people can really comprehend where the value is, that's
can create or generally turns to create a huge degree of sticking up. So you don't need the flesher graphics. You don't need 10 millions of dollars in years of development. What you need to focus on is what people want. And then we're lucky enough
that there are hundreds of successful examples, like you have just mentioned in the Internet, where they focused on what the industry was missing at that time, while at the Finthani were conscious of their limitations, and they actually build the keycast products. So I'm not saying that the things can happen with us, I cannot guarantee that.
But certainly that is the kind of approach that we think we should be following Absolutely. Yeah, let's hope so I have a I have a question here from the community that I was not aware of this and this could totally be false But I'm curious is Nami still working with Microsoft in any capacity?
No, we're not working hands on with them. We worked with them back in 2018 and in 2020 if I remember correctly. And we've explored a ton of different opportunities together. We still have, by the way, some
the time we have to do the same thing.
Amazon. He pinged us some weeks ago. Maybe the narrative now will be, "Oh, are you going to work with Amazon?" I don't know either. The team has grown from six of us to 20-odd in just barely a year. We're building half a dozen
and products plus the version of the protocol. So we are busy enough, trust me. Now, do we want to spend time in these depths where we don't know what the outcome is going to be, but yes, we need to get a lot of time to, while we have some many other interesting opportunities that are developing
quite rapidly, we need to pick our fights. I'll look at our time where we can get the bigger output. The answer is, I don't know. I'm not doing any work with them. I don't have that in mind. If it turns out, that's a bit of a lie.
It was it was brought up this week earlier this week. I was struggling and then and the positive thing of having a multi multi cloud infrastructure solution it is required by some of these large financial institutions. So we might you know
Thank you, that would be red. Okay, so we'll start wrapping things up here, but curious in the coming year, what kind of partnerships and collaborations are you guys looking for at NAMI?
them already signed up and they worked on which we have an announced. But I would say they fall in different categories. One of them is of course financial institutions or institutions that would like to make use of our technology. On the other hand we have other sort of partnerships that
related to key core infrastructure that we think is needed in Web3 or that we need to work with to be able to offer better faster, cheaper services to our users. And we have as well some two announcements over the next few weeks. And that we're
working with for a few months now. And then we also have other sort of partnerships which are more related to all the sort of web three services like with the bridges, we have the ramps and so forth. So again, mechanisms for us to use it to have, you know, just to make your life easier. So you can easily move money from
Hi, pathetic, speaking, Arbitrum, tsunami or not me to, you know, one's where a dummy, we will you do hang around, right? So give a different example from optimism to now me. So those are sort of the key core infrastructures that we think need to be put in the