Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Cardano Over Coffee ☕️ w/ @realfi_co
Recorded: July 17, 2026 Duration: 2:07:12Space Recording
Full Transcription
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
Good morning, guys. Can you hear me? Good morning, Marine. Oh my God! Like this new app makes
everything look so weird. Have you guys noticed? Like everything changed. Like the hands,
the the laughing faces, the hearts. It looks more cartoonish. I don't know what you're talking
about. Everything changed on my phone. I don't know. Maybe I have an Android,
and I got this new update like way later. So I think it's a Ted Wald problem, Jenny. I'm sorry.
Not a problem. It's just an update. I don't think it's a problem. But good morning, happy Friday.
Let's retweet the room. We have an awesome guest. How are you doing, Maureen? I'm doing fabulous.
How about you? Wow, that's definitely step above where I feel. Standing on a Friday,
but I'm having my coffee. I just retweeted the space, and I'm here with you.
And I'll see Phil also join us here super early. Good morning. Good morning, Phil. Jamie,
are you gonna hang out or I because I wanted to co-host you? Yes, I like I like I told you I had
some kind of last minute situation here, so I might be in and out. But you can co-host me. You know,
I definitely I have some questions already for the team, but. Uh, you know, life happens,
so I'm here. Every time I want to co-host you, there's always another option just right next to it,
which says "remove from speakers." It's like tempted, and you're tempted. You're so tempted.
I'm like, what if I just do this instead of, you know, so nice that I. I'm just getting used to
the new thing, Maureen. I wish I could like explain it to you. It looks so different.
Take a screenshot and send it in the Cabal chat. GM y'all, my app hasn't updated.
Nothing's changed for me either. But that scares me. I don't want to update now.
It's been like this since they changed the algorithm. I noticed the app itself, like the posts,
everything was just very different. But because I didn't make it to the space yesterday,
I didn't notice the space had also changed. So now I'm like, it looks funny. It's cute,
kind of cuter. But usually when they do this stuff, it breaks for me, guys. So
if you send me a request, Marine, I didn't get it. You see, it might be broken. Definitely broken.
All right, so retweet the room. We have real fire coming in just 25 minutes, and we want to get
more people in here. Bring questions. Your listening ears. Snack, coffee, tea is allowed.
I'm gonna have to discuss your decaf options,
but we might have to allow it because this new generation likes decaf. So I don't know.
Imagine having enough delegation that people thank you when you vote for their proposal.
What what was that? I said, imagine having enough delegation that people thank you when you vote for
their proposal. Oh, I mean, do you do you make a post telling them that you voted for
their proposal? That's how they know, I guess. Oh, you mean without you announcing it,
just reaching out because they know who you are when you vote. I guess, yeah. I don't know. Like
the last couple weeks, I've seen lots of people that had proposals and they would put make a post.
And say, hey, you know, thank X and X Whale for voting for my proposal. Blah blah blah. You know,
nobody ever thanks you for the twenty six hundred that you put into our. Yeah,
your delegates should thank you for voting on their behalf. That will be the most like rewarding.
Thanks, if your delegates think that you know it's awesome that you're doing the job for them,
I'll feel that to be a little bit, probably a little more rewarding. But yeah, you're right. So,
what are you guys doing this morning? What's new in the Cardano world? Bring up this energy.
Come up here and hang out with us. Do some talking, a little banter section. Anybody's come,
welcome to come up and talk about whatever. If there's anything happening in Cardano
that we need to know, this is the time to bring it to our attention. Pin it up at the top.
Let everybody know. Just some reminders: if anything's dropping today,
if people need to move their funds for whatever reason, if you're performing an update, an upgrade,
or something that is going to affect your users, this is a good time to let people know.
Or if you just want to say hi, that's also allowed. So it is Friday. What do you have, Marine?
I think Maureen is having technical difficulties. Oh, she just came back.
Fun to Black Frost in the meantime, please. I just, you guys do not understand.
You are playing with fire, like nuclear toxic waste fire. If Black Frost does not continue to exist,
every app in the ecosystem, something will break. It will cost teams so much money.
It will cost me so much money to have to migrate all of my infrastructure on dozens of apps
that I'm hosting. Two alternatives. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you, Marine. You're back.
Sorry, go on, Phil. No, I'm just pleading. Please, you know, everyone thinks about the cost
of funding things, and often they don't think about the cost of not funding things.
Those are equally important. You know, if you don't, if something doesn't get funded,
and every major team in the ecosystem has to spend tens of thousands of dollars right redundantly,
then you know, if there's twenty, thirty, forty teams depending on Blockfrost,
this is a lot of money, and it's a lot of money on teams that do not have this money. So please,
please consider this while voting. It doesn't just impact me; it impacts. I guarantee,
whatever app you use, whatever wallet you use, it impacts everybody. It will be very, very, very,
very bad if Blackfrost ceases to exist, and this is a chance for the community to get
a community-owned RPC and indexer, right? A public infrastructure indexer.
This is a critical component that Cardano is missing as a chain. In Ethereum,
you know you can go to thousands of free RPCs. So your first experience as a developer
does not have to be: you download a node, you run DB sync, you wait 60 hours to sync the chain.
And then you can finally start testing, you know, Cardano development. In Ethereum,
you just write your app and you plug in an RPC. Or you have an app already
and you just plug in Ethereum using, and one of the 1,000 plus free RPCs. Without an equivalent,
the developer experience is going to be awful. And I promise, new developers will come.
They will see that they need to install DBSync, and they will leave forever. So yeah, be careful,
right? I I think I definitely see the importance of broad. Sorry, I wanted to say
broad frost of block frost. The issue that I personally had with the proposal was how the funds
were allocated. When I look at the the staffing, it takes at least eighty percent of the money,
and the rest of it goes to infrastructure. And since I don't know what goes into, you know,
like The work that goes in to keep this running, I can't say for sure that it's expensive,
but at the same time, the proposal doesn't give me much information in that regard.
So I guess it's a bit something I I struggle with as a D rep on passing the proposal.
That's totally fair. If if if you guys want to provide feedback to them
and make you know make it into a and I wish that more D reps you know would act that way instead
of being binary you know no I will not vote for this because you know we have alternatives
or whatever. Instead of doing that, you know, you you make it into a negotiation, right? You say,
well, you know, I like the idea in general, but there are these specific things that I want clarity
on, or you know, maybe we can negotiate the price or things like that. That's
how governance is supposed to work, and that's doing a good, being a good steward as a D rep, right?
You're you're considering the best interest of the chain, and you're saying, okay, well,
I'm going to negotiate on behalf of the chain, as opposed to just being like, no, never buy,
you know, this is useless. We have something else. Can you guys pin up something?
I pinned up the top regarding this, Marine. Please. Is that funny thing?
I made a post about it this morning, Phil. I was just like, I keep seeing like people saying
like we have alternatives. Alternatives to what? Like bring bring it on.
Like just tell me exactly what. How are we gonna get all the bases covered if we don't have
block frost? Because I feel like nobody addresses that. They just say we have alternatives,
and it's like alternatives to what? Do you even know what's going to be missing?
And can you like bring it to the conversation? You know. So I'm with you.
I I think that what Marine said is valid. I think you know valid concerns,
or you know there there are plenty of them. But yeah, we have to we have to be careful, man,
because I feel like we're just falling into this like I guess what I you know this perfectionism
of like oh yeah no we're just not gonna focus on the proposal itself and it and then
and I see it in a lot of proposals actually like people. Just giving all these reasons
why they're not going to vote, which are completely outside of the scope of what the proposers
can actually do. They're just, you know, they can't fix any. Oh no, no, no incentives for DREPs.
Then why we shouldn't fund this? And it's like what? So we have to be very careful, guys.
We can find a lot of reasons why we. It becomes a bias at the end of the day.
We're just not being objective, and we think we are. But yeah, thank you, Phil and Marine,
for bringing your perspective to Marine. I think it's it's very valid. I mean, I think. So. So go.
Yeah, go on, Ben. I was gonna recognise you. You've been recognised. You know what?
I've been waiting for that all week, and my wife hasn't, and now you have,
and I'm gonna take this recording back to her and and and ask her to get some pointers from you.
You know, I don't want to come home like you've been recognised, Ben. Um, I mean, my opinion,
like the whole governance, the the bud, and you know the the entropy, like the energy sucking from
all of this, but like I just take a step back from it, and I feel like, look, the treasury is.
Getting spent one way or the other. It's either getting spent because the value
is decreasing relatively, or it's going to get spent on whatever gets voted on.
And so I just think we have to have a much more aggressive. This is personal opinion.
I'm not wearing the hat of any project, by the way. We have to get aggressive,
but obviously we need to get pragmatic and we need experts in the room to try
and solve some of the kind of commercial marketing problems. Kilana has got.
I you know agree with Phil that the developer experience is critical, and I think
that because we have all been waiting for so long, it's really easy to kind of.
If it's not a scarcity mindset, it's it's a risk mitigating mindset, right? And and that's rational.
I'm not like, of course, you should be mitigating risks, but this game is like you have to compete.
You've got to get out there, right? Like, and how we do that is is the most important question.
And I think people are very focused on like the the number on the screen getting spent.
I'm not justifying any specific proposal, but I wanna I wanna go out and like conquer
and see Kadana do really well. And for that, we've got to get a war chest,
and we've got to be able to actually use it appropriately. You know, so that's my two cents.
Quick correction, Ben. We don't use scent here. We only use love laces. Love laces. Two love laces.
That's right. It wasn't that like Lido's like rebrand to love laces. I think rebrand from Lido.
Yeah. What? That's that doesn't sound good, Jenny. I don't know. That was like something that was.
I don't know. They've been working on it. We're gonna have to ask Lido when we see him next time.
It's. You know, rebranding is always a problem, right? If you do something and you have to rebrand,
like your Roy, rebranding to Second Five, and then completely shutting it down, well,
or rebranding is is tricky. Sometimes it's absolutely necessary, but when it's done,
when it's not necessary, it can become a problem, and you can, you know,
it can hurt you more than help you. So yeah, rebrands careful. I definitely.
I definitely know some companies in my country that have rebranded, and that did not go well.
And there is also like government agencies. We had this government. The government
provides electricity, right? So it used to be some name with "Cam" in it,
and then they rebranded it to Enio, and then they brought it to some other name,
and then back to Enio. And it's a shit company, obviously, because electricity always gets cut.
But We have that a lot with government agencies. I don't know why. It's stupid. It's stupid.
It's not about the name, guys. Just make it work. Come on. Ah. Anyways, um, I see.
I see Ben put his Discord for real. Five. He's here for business. Well,
John's gonna join in about ten minutes, I think. I damned didn't tell him no. Um,
but for anyone that doesn't know, I'm not part of IO anymore. So, um, I was like five
and a half years at IO, which is. For me personally, you know, the amount that I learned—it was
a personal transformation, you know. So I've just got gratitude for that journey.
But it was crazy coming out of five and a half years,
where like that that whole time you you've been really focused on, you know, playing your role,
and to do that you have to, well, you try you try and round yourself off, right,
to be to be the best cog that you can to be able to work with all the different teams.
So I kind of went through like a mini death, you know, like an ego death,
where where like I wasn't part of IO anymore, and I came home was like, oh, what am I going to do,
right? And then I was pitching RealFi about bootstrapping the community with staple operators
and making the argument that I think it's a really good idea to give the community a stake
in RealFi, but to do it through staple operators and, and in that sense,
help especially single pool operators offer something extra to their delegates, right? So
that you're really helping secure the decentralization of the network is one part of it.
And you know, single pool operators haven't got a lot of love recently. You know, so that's
where like this kind of proposal came from. I'm just setting up. I mean, interrupt me any moment,
Jenny. I'm giving you the context. I'm giving you the context of John's going to join the call,
and when he's here, I think it'll be great to hear what he's got. But I'm giving you
the prior context of having worked five and a half years in IRK and in
Kadana Foundation before that. You know. And I'm really excited about RealFi.
They are trying very hard to be boring and compliant and regulatory and follow the regulations.
You know, but there is like a lot of alpha. There's a lot of value in RealFi. I'm excited about.
That I'm going to let John articulate so that I. Don't get
the fame—the famey one—but it's a you know stablecoin infrastructure and IWS,
and it's really exciting. And so to come back to the point, and you interrupt me any time,
but so I put this proposal forward to John and the team, and they've just been like super receptive.
Do you know it's really, really refreshing to be like, oh wow, like people really want these ideas,
and they're going to move really quickly on them. We we have like a mirror board workshop
with the stable operators to help co-create this kind of campaign. So you know it's their community
as much as as ours, and one of the ideas is about um. A stateful operator page, right?
To raise the profiles and like the marketing teams on it and turning it around within like
twenty four hours. I'm on a call with the website designers, so like the the pace is
just so much quicker. Um. Anyway, I'll stop there. But I'm just trying to give you flavor. Team,
are you like part of the the team? I'm part of the real part of the real fight team. Um. Yeah.
Awesome. Like like long term, you know, I I just basically pitch this like, hey,
like let's bootstrap. The community, I've got a really good idea of how we could do it.
I was inspired by the ISPO model, so I just jumped in. Really, I haven't, you know, people like,
"Are you part of the team?" I'm part of the team. Discord, I'm part of the team.
I got a realfire email. You know, do they want to marry me and walk me down the aisle? I don't know.
You know, so we'll see. But, but that's what I've been doing for like three weeks, right?
And we've gone from zero in Discord to like over 700 now and over 600 verified wallets.
What they care about, right? Like what I don't know if anybody, nobody probably who reads
my link Twitter articles. Maybe Phil does. Phil reads my ex articles, and I talked about numbers
being before strategy, and you need an axis around which ideas and suggestions
and proposals can kind of orientate, right? So the real fire, what matters is TVL
and staking ratio around seventy percent, and those are the two numbers that are important. And
the first couple of weeks, like the emphasis with the team is they only want legitimate,
verified activity. You know, they don't want vanity metrics, and so. I think there's
a really interesting kind of a community launch program that's kind of emerging out of this SPo
accelerated program, which effectively is like it's on chain and it's verifiable, right?
So we can look at which of the staple operators are in the program. How many of their delegates
actually claim points that are accrued? Right. So that's a verification on chain.
You can then look at like, okay, how many of the state pool operators' delegates actually complete
the quests and the testnet activity and actions? Right. I think like if they get ten,
then they get some some swag and like that kind of thing. Right. So it's really interesting to me.
This isn't like a vanity metric. Ambassador program stuff. I've complained about them in the past,
where it's like you're just you're just rewarding output, not real performance. But if it's on chain
and you can verify it, and really it's about the activity, then I think that's really interesting
to be able to build something like that. So I'm not saying it's a product yet,
but I'm saying it's something that other people may be able to use if we were to write it up.
You know, I'm waffling. So yeah, Jenny. No, I mean, this is cool. I can't wait to like get into
the whole conversation. I was totally going to ask you something very different, unrelated,
but because you're here, and I'm dealing with all these changes on on my Twitter Spaces
right now that I'm trying to navigate. Do you remember when you were hosting like some of the first
Twitter Spaces that ever existed, and you worked with this girl that was on the
when Twitter actually had a Spaces department? You work with this girl, and she was like helping,
and we were like trying to make the the whole experience better. She'd. I remember those days.
It was just so. I totally forgot. You're right. Yeah, we we were trying to get like, was it?
We're trying to get verified. We're trying to get, um, and she had. She was part
of the verification process, but then she moved from there to to this like pioneering
these X spaces. It was like a. Do you remember Clubhouse? Do you remember?
Do you remember Clubhouse was a was a big thing? You know, this kind of audio conversation,
and now it's just become part and parcel. I mean, like the the whole world's changing. That's like.
What I think everyone has to kind of get right. I remember those times, and you know,
there's like a nostalgia. It's like a currency, right? Like you almost want to get back into like
building something that's exciting. Can we build cool shit? Can we like stop arguing?
Can we get like really excited about the the tech and the use case? Um,
this is probably not for this chat. I'm writing this. It's a really big rabbit hole,
but I'm basically writing. A five-part subsect series, maybe it's an e-zine or something.
I don't know, but it's about how the intelligence revolution is going to be decentralized. And oh,
John O'Connor is here. So should we invite John up? Hey, John, see if we can invite him as speaker.
But while we're waiting for John to come up, the point is that. We need to have like a vision
and understand where we're going with the with the ecosystem, and if you look at things
like Eigenlayer or Near, they're very good at pivoting the narrative on what they're for,
and I think that's something that Cadana could really benefit from. John, if you can hear me,
you need to request to be speaker, or Jenny needs to request. Yeah, I don't have a co-host,
and I think that Marines have an issue sending them to me. I This whole Twitter space changed for
me today, so that get weird. Last time, yes, there was a conversation about something else,
and I was talked the entire space about in Cardano over coffee about RealFi
and how excited I was for it, um, for the DeFi opportunity that it presents,
especially to a lot of people that don't care about or engage with the sort of day trading,
or meme coin or degenerate gambling type DeFi activity. Like me, and I got excited, Phil.
But then I realize I'm in the U.S., so I need to ask those questions too
and understand what that means and to me in the future as well. Yes. So one of the big things
is U.S. You won't be able to mint directly. Now, this is something that's relatively common.
It's the same with Athena, for instance. But it doesn't impact secondary markets. And so, you know,
it's sort of similar to USDC in that you can't mint USDC with Circle unless you are
a KYCed private client of Circle, and you can't redeem it with Circle,
but you can get it on Coinbase or you can get it on a Dex. And so, as far as only that part,
for some reason I thought it was the app itself that I couldn't use. But yeah, yeah. So,
for instance, you would be able to go on Sunday Swap or MinSwap and buy USDR.
And then you should be able to stake it in in a vault. Although that I'm not certain about.
One of the things, for instance, like Jed, Jed had the same restriction. Jed,
the you cannot use the Jed app from the U.S. But the Artifacts Labs team published an application
called Open Jed, which just interacts with the smart contracts directly,
and you can use this application anywhere. And you you have similar websites for Athena
and so forth. So workarounds. Ooh, I like it. I see John is finally here. Yeah, sorry guys, I was.
You were correct in saying that Spaces still has some problems. I was joining
and I was just hearing like a DJ loop of band talking. It kept saying John O'Connor has joined.
John O'Connor has joined. But thank you very much for having me, everyone, and also thank you, Phil.
Yeah, that that is completely correct. Ultimately, we have to face off to institutions.
We have to KYC those institutions and. You know that sort of prohibits us from working directly with
U.S. Counterparties, but Phil's completely right. It's the same setup as Circle or Athena.
So I just have one question. I need to get out of the way. Is Cameron in or out? Cameron's in,
actually. Ooh, that's funny. So I I feel like they so. And without meaning anything bad,
it's a you have you guys have to stay compliant, right? It's like instead of banking the unbanked,
we are unbanking the banked. If U.S. Is not involved, it's a lot of people, right? Yeah, look.
When you're dealing with real world assets, it's you have to have fund structures. You need to have
regulatory regimes. You need to have all of these things. So when it comes towards
us holding assets, we have to be compliant, and we have our Cayman fund structure
and our Cayman foundation. We have obligations and responsibilities that go with that.
On the other side of it, you have regulation happening in the U.S. Clarity Bill, Genius Act.
And similar ones in in Europe over Mika etc., which also make it harder for people to go
and have access to products like this. So ultimately, you know, we have to sit where we have to sit.
But you know, there is a there is a large portion of the world who can interact directly
with us directly through our through our app. And you know, as Phil said, you know,
crypto has a certain structure, and you know, there's ways there's ways in which You know,
dexes ultimately operate. So, anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that we we have to do what
we have to do, but we still believe that our product will be useful to a lot of people. Jenny,
with the hand up. Yes, I was just wanted to say since it's already like ten
and we're getting started with the interview, there's like forty-some people in the room
and only ten retweets. So, if you can please check the bubble at the bottom right.
You should find a little share button, something. I don't know exactly how it looks on your end,
but sharing the space makes this space available to more people, and it's one way you can support
the show. It's free and it's accessible. It's right there, and we can get
more people in here to participate in the conversation. So, yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. Uh,
Chad, would you like to do a mid roll? Mid roll for the middle. This is. No, I want it now, Jenny.
It's my show. Thank you for tuning in to Cardano Over Coffee, everybody.
This is your decentralized morning show coming to you live every Monday through Friday at 9:30
Eastern Standard Time, and we like to talk about what's being built on the blockchain. So
if you have a business that's being built on Cardano, midnight, what have you, click the cup,
go to our calendar link, and sign up for a spot, and you can come on the show
and talk about your business. You can also be a person that offers questions as a listener.
Feel free to request and come up if you have questions for our guest at any time,
or drop them in the comments bubble at the bottom. We like to remind our listeners to stake to
a stake pool, delegate to a D rep, and please do not keep your funds on central exchanges.
Once again, thank you for tuning in, and we're going to get into it with the RealFi team.
That was fantastic radio voice. Can I just say? I mean, that's really special. I love that.
Thank you. It sounded like like you were on an airplane. I don't know,
like you were like passenger seatbelts. Thank you. And when you eat, when you go to the toilet,
flush the toilet, guys. Don't be nasty. Do they say that to you guys there, Jenny? No, no,
they don't. I'm trying to. I would say something like that
because of the the whole central exchange thing, and so we don't draw it out any longer
than it has to be. If I would talk on the plane, I would make sure to mention
that they don't mention it. Okay, so my hand stayed up. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to.
Now I realize my new app makes me undo my hand up. So, all right, let's get in with a guest.
Thank you. Yes, let's get in. Banter is over. So, I I did welcome welcome to you guys.
I see someone else joined. I'm guessing it's Ryan is part of the team. John, is he? Ryan.
Ryan is not part of the team. Not yet, at least Ryan. Okay. Okay. Just making sure.
So Ben is in the listener. Okay. He's run away and left you here alone. It's just us now.
So I looked at your website, and I think the first thing that caught my attention was that you guys
are you your your USDR is in direct like you you're anchored in direct lending,
but you're stabilized by treasuries. So I don't know. I want to understand.
Can you break down down for me, like what percentage of your reserves is direct lending
into real economies? And can we do a breakdown of the the product first
before we dive into the yield? Sorry, sorry, my bad. Sure. Yeah. Let me. So let me start.
I suppose by talking about what the product is. You're right. It's a good place to start.
So ultimately. RealFi has a number of different tokens. The first token is USDR,
which is a stablecoin, which is backed by as liquid assets as you'll see in the portfolio.
So typically, this is treasury bills as well as CLO ETFs, which are deeply traded ETFs,
which are very easy to liquidate within a short period of time. So this is really
the the liquid portion of the book. And this is important because there is no lockup right
on a stablecoin dollar, right? So if people want to redeem back to USDC,
we have to be able to honor that. And as a result, we need to make sure we've got very,
very liquid assets against that. And then we have our second product, which is staked USDR.
If you've got USDR through your Lace app or through our DApp, you can click the stake button,
and then you get given sUSDR. Alternatively, on aDEX, you could buy sUSDR directly.
You don't need to go through the the staking model. So staked USDR similarly also has A number
of liquid assets. These are once again collateralized loan obligations, ETFs.
But then you also have some of the direct lending, which is the work that we've been doing for
the last few years. At the moment, this is predominantly emerging market direct lending.
This is lending towards fintechs that do impactful lending. Typically,
this is working capital finance for small businesses. It's mostly companies that we've lent to
before, which have a really good amount of equity in the business and perform very well across time.
And as I say, are also driving essentially growth, job opportunities, etc. In a lot of markets.
So that's kind of how you should think about the product. USDR, highly liquid asset,
normal stablecoin. SUSD R still important to have a good amount of liquidity in there,
but also having some of this direct lending, which in our view, you know, is impactful,
drives very strong returns, and ultimately makes the the product quite exciting.
The final token we have is RFG, which is our governance token, which will be issued later on
in the year, probably closer towards December. Which also acts as an incentive to do various things.
So we can offer people RFG in order to be able to hold USDR, to be able to create liquidity
around pairs, and it's also something which I think you know SPOs can.
We're giving away to SPOs in in order to do a variety of things,
and also offering us incentives, you know, for the testnet, etc.
Thank you very much. That was very well explained. Jenny, did you have a question? Is my hand up?
Not sorry. No. Okay. So I wanted to. So you said that it's mostly borrowers you've learned to
before who have like strong equity and good track record. So so what I have. Okay, two things.
What have? What is the the historical default actually looking like? And who is verifying all
of those? Is it you, or is there someone else? And the second thing I am curious is that when you
when you talk about past performance across like a few years, does it mean that you have like a like
a how do I phrase this? Let's say let's say you have like a a real emerging market credit shock,
right? Or maybe like a currency crisis. How does that look like? Do you understand what I'm asking?
I absolutely do. These are great questions. These are the the kind of questions which
I think you get asked in diligence. So let's let's I suppose talk about what happens
when things go wrong. So this is what you typically call a loss waterfall, right?
So who loses money fast and who loses money last, and how does that work?
So the order at which these things would happen would be Starting off with a first-loss tranche,
so this is capital that we're, you know, raising at the moment and trying to close out
at the moment, which would basically mean that before anyone else loses anything,
this part of the portfolio, this this particular group of people, would lose money first,
and this ultimately acts as cover to everyone else, anyone holding SUSD R and USDR.
So we haven't quite closed this, but you know, I'm hoping that we'll be able to talk about it soon.
But ultimately, this will give a lot of confidence to people that. You know they can participate,
and they have a good amount of coverage in case anything goes wrong. After that,
you have the protocol buffer. So the protocol itself will build up a stability fund,
ultimately from you know performance of the protocol, which basically gets filled up
and acts as a small insurance pot in case things go wrong. So this would be the second place
in which losses would then go towards. Then thirdly, what you'd have is people who are stakes
SUSD R holders. If you had, you know. Big losses, then it would be these people
who would be hit next, and then finally the normal USDR holders. So that's the order
in which things go wrong. One of the things that's really important to us is transparency.
So you'll be able to see all of the assets on the transparency portal.
It should be very easy for people to independently model out the risks of this.
We think it's a you know a really nice risk-adjusted return, but this isn't something for you know
just us to be able to go and say. Other people will be able to go and verify this. And then,
when it comes towards the verification, how do you know we actually hold the assets? Well,
a large amount of the assets we are holding are actually tokenized, tokenized T-bills,
and then tokenized our CLO ETFs. The ones which aren't on chain, the more direct lending stuff that
we're doing, the way in which you know that's real is by the the fund auditor.
So we have a fund auditor. If you look at all of our Cayman books. They'll publish at the end
of each month what the NAV is. So this is what the net asset value is of our assets,
and this is basically a regulated function. These are people who do this for thousands
and hundreds of thousands of other funds, and they'll be able to say each month that this is what
that fund is holding, and this is the value of it. In addition to that, we have actual auditors,
financial auditors, at the end of each year who will go and check absolutely everything,
and then go. And publish an audit report. So we have multiple different levels of controls,
of transparency, of audit. But we'll push all of that information into our transparency portal
for everyone to be able to go and look at it. Oh, that's a that's reassuring. So, so if I'm if I'm,
I keep seeing Jenny's hand up. I don't know if anyone sees it. No, I just raise my hand,
but just just go with your question, and I'll jump in there when you're ready.
I saw it when you started talking earlier, and then you said you don't. No,
you don't have your handle. It's weird. Okay, so what was I asking? Uh huh. So you said
monthly valuations from like an outside auditor, and you have like a full annual audit.
That's a. I think that's a very. That's good. I think. So what? The other question I have is
that does it also show like the default rates? Like maybe, and also like,
how many borrowers are paying back? Like the ones that are falling behind, and like, if if you get
monthly reports, are they public for everyone, or just for the token holders? No,
I think we're going to make it public to everyone, right? I I don't think there's really any need
to to sort of gatekeep this. I think the thing you have to remember is that um,
the the direct lending is actually a contract between our fund and a fintech.
That fintech is then doing additional loans. But the good thing about this is that, you know, even
if let's say some more loans default than have historically happened to that fintech,
the fintech itself has a balance sheet. It also has equity. So our job isn't to just look at
the underlying loans and performance. It's also to underwrite that fintech because they're the ones
who are on the hook to repay. And that's great because it's another line of defense
between the people who are participating in realty and ultimately what's going on
with those individual borrowers. So even if let's say they had a bad quarter or even a bad year,
by having enough equity in existence for these fintechs, that also gives us protection
because it means that we still get paid back no matter what, or at least. You know,
within a large number of circumstances. So that's really our job to make sure
that when we're underwriting these fintechs, that even if the credit book is amazing
and the loans they're doing are super, super, super performing, very low defaults,
we're still not going to lend to them unless they, as a business, are in a solid enough position
with enough equity, with enough everything, right? So it's even if you have
the historical default rate, by the way. Was two percent over the book,
over all the loans that we've done historically. I think we achieved sixteen,
seventeen percent return across the years that we've been doing this, and very, very,
very low defaults on the book. But even if that increase, you know, we have to make sure
that our underwriting is good enough that that's not going to impact on people getting,
on us getting our money back, right? And as I say, the way in which that happens is by making sure
you're lending to fintechs, you have very strong. Equity position in that business already. So yeah,
the the real underlying part on the individual loans, we're not going to surface
that because frankly it's too much detail. We do we do ourselves track that, but yes,
an increase in the default rate does not necessarily mean
that you're going to have any trouble when it comes towards realfied assets or realfied portfolio.
Thank you for that, Jenny. You can go now. Thank you. So let me just bring my hand down
before I forget. Okay. So. Okay. In an attempt to kind of make this easier to follow,
because that's what we're trying to do here in Cortana or Coffee, trying to make sure
that you know we reach more people. And when you have new products and complex products like this,
that has so many new concepts, let me just break it down in a few few little questions. So,
can you walk us through a one dollar from the beginning till the end when it enters RealFi,
becomes USDR, gets staked, reaches real world asset, produces income. And eventually returns to
the user. Can Can you help us kind of like understand how that process goes? Yeah,
that's a great idea. And I I I'm going to apologize to anyone that I lost there
in those explanations. It's always like that. We're in tech. Yeah, you know
when when people start asking me about you know how do you underwrite credit et cetera,
I think you know you gotta you kind of gotta answer seriously about it.
But I also appreciate maybe we've jumped jumped too far too quickly. This is a great way to get into
it. So um, someone gives us a USDC right, or let's say a hundred USDC.
We have a minting contract on Cardano, which receives that 100 USDC, and then mint 100 USDR
against that, which then goes back to that institution who went and minted it. Now,
we have in realfy 100 USDC now on our balance sheet. So what we do is we go and buy,
and this is approximately right because, as I say, it depends on the ratio of
how many people are holding USDR to how many people are holding SUSD R,
which really determines our portfolio composition. But for the purposes of this,
let's just say that we immediately take that 100 dollars. And we buy twenty dollars worth of Ondo,
right? A tokenized TBL provider. Then we'll go and buy maybe fifty dollars worth of Janus Hansen CLO
ETFs. These are tokenized CLO ETFs. And then with the remaining thirty,
let's say I can't remember what I said before, but let's say it's going to be
around thirty dollars of USDC. We'll actually off-ramp that. And go and lend that out directly
to these fintechs that we've been talking about before. So they then go and get
that those thirty dollars, and now we have a credit agreement, right, or a loan contract between us
and those fintech lenders. Those fintech lenders will go and lend this out into the real economy.
As that principal gets repaid, and as that interest gets repaid, it goes back into the foundation.
This is now dollars essentially that we have, and we go and mint. More USDR against that increase
in NAV that we have, and then essentially what we're doing is we're we're returning that value
into back into the the pockets of those people who are holding staked USDR. Right.
So just to run through this again, just to be crystal clear, a hundred dollars come in of USCC,
we mint a hundred dollars of USDR. This person then stakes their USDR, so they now have staked USDR,
which means that they have a claim against the assets which we are going and purchasing.
And when we talked about those assets, that was twenty dollars worth of tokenized T bills, maybe
fifty dollars worth of tokenized CLO ETFs, and the remainder being the direct lending that
we're doing to the fintechs. So hopefully that makes sense. It does. So when you say staked,
Let's just kind of like talk about that part. Are we talking about staking as we are used to here
in Cardano? Staking to stake pools. Take it to what exactly does that mean?
And does that tie into the the program that you have now going on with stake pool operators? Yeah.
So it's it's that's a really really good question. So it's not actually the same thing, right?
Because typically when we're talking about staking, we're really referring to the fact, right?
Like in Cardano, that it's some form of security function for the protocol, right?
That you are Putting your resources, be it ADA or whatever, for any other network,
and through this sort of staking mechanism, you're somehow basically providing the security
for the network as a whole. That's not really what's happening here. What's really happening is
you're locking up your USDR, and that money then is going into getting a bunch of different assets,
right? And then when you un-stake. There's a one week cooldown period. What that one week's
really doing is making sure we can go and move around some money to make sure we've got
more liquidity in case you want to exit the system. So you stake, you get your SUUSDR,
which is a fungible token that you can go and do cool stuff in DeFi with. Ultimately,
you're gaining exposure to this portfolio of assets. And when you unstake, one week later,
you're going back into USDR, and we're using that time to change the assets that we're holding in
order to make sure they're more liquid. Awesome. Yeah, just wanted to clarify that for people,
and we can get into like the stake pool operation. Situation that you guys going on right now.
You have a program, but I do see KB with a hand up, and I don't want to hold the mic,
so I'll come back to you. Hi, KB. Hey guys. Hey, I've got a question about like the the.
I understand the working capital issue, like especially across Africa. So I live in Zambia,
and run a impact focused honey business here. Um, what? So I understand you'll lend to fintechs
or third parties that then lend on to businesses like mine. Um. What is the incentive
for those fintechs to reduce their rates that they're lending at? Is there like a mandate
from Realfy for them to lend at certain rates, just so that it? You know,
one of the challenges is that interest rates are very high across Africa because the risk
can be high in, you know, the views of traditional finance. But yeah, that's really my question.
Is really about how do we reduce those rates for working capital and other types of lending
that go through the fintechs? Yeah, it's a it's a really good question.
So I think what I'll start off by saying is that we try to only work with fintechs where we're
comfortable with what they're doing, right? So don't get me wrong; there are
some really great financial opportunities that you sometimes see in this space in terms of fintechs,
but. Are really, really operating very, very profitably, but aren't really doing the kind of lending
that we like or believe in. So we basically just pass on, pass on those. Right.
Another way to put it is that sometimes the highest risk lending, if you've got a very well set up
fintech, can be very lucrative. But it basically into the you know exploitative lending areas,
also not interesting for us. So we try to work, and we spend a lot of time looking for
and finding fintechs that that sit in the middle ground. Right. They're doing lending that
we believe creates economic value that isn't creating. Over indebtedness. Ideally,
not doing any kind of lending, which is basically just supporting, you know, consumer indebtedness.
You know, lending to people who are just taking on more debt. Right. So yeah,
we try to stay away from that kind of stuff. Then, when it comes towards the actual rates,
ultimately we don't have control of the rates, and that's a good thing, right? Our job isn't to go
and tell the fintechs that if you take our money, you have to go and do things this way.
What we'd much rather do is just find the fintechs that align with what we're trying to do
and work with them. I think things get really messy once you have. Edicts coming from
capital providers on how the actual business can run, because that's when things start going wrong.
So it's a bit of a cop-out answer. We don't tell fintechs exactly how they should be doing things,
but we do try to find ones that we believe, yeah, we believe kind of match with what
we're trying to achieve. Maybe as a more positive spin on what you're saying,
if we can grow realfie to a sufficient size and scale, then ultimately more capital will drive down
rates. You know, you're based in Zambia, so you'll probably understand this. But you know,
almost all of the finance in this space is coming from DFIs, right?
Large development financial institutions that basically are the first capital into all of this kind
of lending stuff. It's not really being done from a private sector. Yeah,
from a private sector lens, our hope is with RealFi that we can crowd capital into this market
without having to rely on the usual TFI names that are normally involved in this space.
And if we grow large enough, I have no doubt that you know within the specific places
which we're providing capital, that rates will start to come down because there'll be more capital
available, which is incredibly scarce at the moment, as I'm sure you're aware. Perfect.
Yeah, I think moving it as a market is way better than mandating rates. So cool.
So John, I have another question. Thanks for the question, KB. That was a great question.
My my other question is also around, you know, operating here in Africa.
You said that Cameroon is in, which is nice. But now my question is, how does a Cameroonian
get USDR? Like, do I need to have crypto? Yeah, I think that the you know remember that this is
a global product, right? So the way in which you get USDR from a natural technical standpoint,
right, means that we need to be given USDC or USDT or another stable. Then, you know,
the way in which retail permitted retail gets access to it is through a Dex or through a Sacks.
So from how do people get into it? There needs to be some onboarding mechanism for anyone to be
able to go from their local currency into crypto. And you know, you know,
if you're talking about Africa and literally every African country now,
you have a variety of local exchanges and ways to be able to go from your local currency
into crypto. But that's the starting point. Of course, you can see a world right where you wrap all
of this experience together, where you've got like an app where you can immediately onboard
from mobile money directly into the app, and then it just swaps directly into USDR.
That could be bundled together, but the sort of technical process of this is through crypto, right?
Ultimately, issuing a crypto token, and we need to accept another crypto token in order
for this to work. Yeah, the reason I asked is because it's it's not very straightforward
to get crypto here. You know, banks are difficult. You you have your mobile money wallet,
but it's like if you could go on an exchange, you could try. And on Binance, there is they have P2P,
which sometimes you can get someone who wants to sell their Bitcoin, and maybe they they let
you pay them through the mobile wallet, or maybe you don't find them. So it's a Yeah,
that's why buying crypto here. Most often, you know a guy who has crypto,
and he just sells on WhatsApp. So I think it would be something interesting for you guys to think
about. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. It that sounds incredibly valuable is to be
able to to work on that space. Let's let's stick it in the the future future product kind
of category. And like, I'm sure you're right. And the way I saw mostly this happening in Ethiopia
was the P2P market, right? Was was very active, but I also know those periods where there wasn't
a lot available. There not a lot of inventory. So yeah. Anyway, we're gonna we're gonna start
where we're starting. You know, launching the main net, trying to build some demand for real fiber.
But we are interested in kind of extension projects to make things more usable for people
in specific countries. Just to just to add to that, you know, the minute we've got a workshop open
where we're co-creating a campaign with SPOs to help them attract delegation
and ultimately ensure Kaduna's network is decentralized. That's what RealFire is supporting
Kaduna SPOs. But John, you know, I've been talking to Clay about later on there being
innovation workshops where you know we can bring people in with with ideas like this,
and so it doesn't just have to be RealFire as a product. It can be RealFire as a platform that
people could build on to increase utility and TVL. So it's definitely in the pipes and.
And if you come into Discord, I'll be able to invite you personally into that workshop
when it goes live. Thank you, Ben. Yeah, I mean, I'm not asking. I'm I'm not greedy, you know.
I'm I'm just I'm not asking it to be available right now, but I definitely it's something I I'm
really interested in, you know, because when we always talk about banking the unbanked,
it's the there's usually talks around oh you can do this with your crypto, you can.
You can get this here, but then how do you get it? It's it's how the whole process of getting
that token, all that crypto, is where the banking happens. So I just wanted to know you guys
are thinking about you know along those lines. I see Jenny has her hand up. No, funny
because I was actually going to talk about the bank and the bank part because you know,
and I mentioned this before. A lot of us like remember fondly as we talked about Ben. Like,
take me back to those days of nostalgic memories. When Charles used to do his videos,
and he will end them and with a kiva, right? Like he would like go and fund somebody, and he's like,
"Oh, I can't wait for for us to have something like this, Cardano, where we can, you know,
do lending to people without, you know, financial identity and all this stuff, right?
" So it used to be kind of like one of the big things that I will get excited about.
So every time I saw Charles in person, I will ask him. And lately, every time I see him, it's like,
oh, real fight's coming, real fight's coming. You know, it's like, okay, so real fight's here,
and it's like, I'm looking into this, and it looks amazing. But it, I, and correct me if I'm wrong,
but it almost feels like there's kind of like going to be a couple, like two phases to this
for that to actually happen, right? For the bank and the unbanked, like,
like first we have to attract capital from people who already have it,
and then we'll be able to move into the phase two, which is deploying the capital through lending
and credit partners, and then creating, you know, on and off ramps and things like that,
as you know, to kind of grow that network. Well, is that is that kind of like assumption?
Does it make sense? Yeah. Look, the way like is this right? So, I would say that our product
currently supports the growth of, let's say, the underbanked. Maybe not unbanked, right?
Predominantly, the lending that we're doing is supporting successful, you know,
great underbanked businesses and providing capital to them, right? And that's the kind
of starting point here. As I say, it's lending with partners that we've been lending to
historically, that perform well, that you know are impactful. But that's the kind of category
where we can do both of our jobs, which is one, doing something impactful and interesting, but two,
operating in a financially prudent manner, right, and making sure that the portfolio
that we're building is robust, is strong, and also delivers the right yield. So that's kind of
how my spin on this, right? That we're starting with the underbanked segment here, because at
the end of the day, if we're trying to crowd people into using USER, we also need to make sure
that this portfolio is super strong. And that's also the reason why, you know,
all of these TLO ETFs that we have, these are all investment grade, they're all AAA.
We've got all of this US T bills in this, because from a portfolio approach. You can't just have,
you know, 100% emerging markets, right? That's not going to make sense.
So we believe we've sort of trod, you know, done the interesting middle here,
where we built a really robust portfolio that has all the liquidity we need to be
able to handle redemptions and make sure we can maintain our peg, whilst also basically sharing
the economics that happen with stablecoins back to people, which is kind of the opposite
of the Tether and Circle model, right? Where that's all held by the issuer. And you know,
by treading this middle path, we think we do a good enough job in every area to build
a really interesting product. But is it direct lending to a specific business in emerging markets
that you can go and look at? Like, no, this is a portfolio approach that lets people get.
We believe a really, really great stablecoin product, which which we can sort of stand behind
and be proud of, whilst also driving, we think, impactful outcomes across the world. Yeah,
I think that how Phil puts it, he brought up a good point. It looks like you guys are capturing like
users. That don't really fit in in the current like kind of like environment. Like for example, me,
I'm not a degenerate. I would like to participate, but I don't do this kind of stuff.
I'm a long-term kind of investor, right? Exactly. So I would love to be able to participate,
and you know, what I do in a regular finance. World, but in crypto, but right now there's just
no really anything like it, right? So this is really exciting for somebody like me,
because I think that if if I get empowered in this ecosystem, I'm here for reasons that are bigger
than myself. Then I could actually it will trickle down, right? That if I can earn. You know,
interest and and all this stuff. Then I could put that money to invest in the ecosystem.
Which right now it's like all the money that I spend in this ecosystem is just
like I'm not getting anything returned. So I, you get depleted if you keep like funding things
if you don't get any kind of return. So I think this is really exciting in that sense. So I just,
yeah. So thanks for that. But I wanted to because I know there's like so much, and this is why Ben,
I told you that we needed to get the whole hour. You guys, so much going on.
Because there's a proposal, and then you have this incentive program with SPOs,
and I want to understand it. Can you guys talk a little bit about that?
I know that you guys have some governance, but in the future, nothing, nothing concrete at the time.
Can you tell us a little bit about this SPO program, that that incentive incentivized thing,
and the accelerator program thing? Yeah. Jenny, can can can Kit ask his question before we get into
that? Sure. His hazard conduct. Yeah. Okay. Good evening, Jim. Good morning. Sorry, evening here,
Jim. I'm hi Ben. I I started researching about real fire when you when you mentioned it like
since last day. So I just want to ask a question because I went through the you know websites.
What are the plans for like Maureen said the actual underbanked people? Like
if you look at crypto now, like the way crypto is and blockchain is, I mean for the average person
it's still relatively complex for them to get to you know I was looking at. What it was saying,
something like you're going to be staking. You can easily stake your ADA, stake your USDR.
And I feel like then is real fire not the projects for like a product for like people that already
in the ecosystem, like they're already in Cardano ecosystem or they're already in crypto.
Then what about trying to actually, you know, get people that outside of the bubble?
I don't know if you understand what I mean, but I don't know if real fire. Yeah, if you like,
do you remember you because we talked about it, like the tweet that's pinned to my profile
about ultimately an an ecosystem. What is the game that you're playing, and the game is growth,
and how do you define growth? And growth is capital productivity. That to me is like
why Real Fire was so interesting. And you know, I'll be honest. You know,
after I finished my tour duty with IO. I DMed John and was like, "Let me come
and bootstrap the community for RealFi, because I wanted to see Cardano and stakepool operators,
especially, get a stake into the RFG token, which is the governance token, and that's
where it's coming from." And John, I'm off the reservation here, but like when you've explained
the model, this is with my personal questions. I'm taking any kind of association with RealFi away,
right? But I was listening to a podcast and he was talking about a totally unrelated topic,
which was. Franchises, but the interesting thing is, he was saying is about an owner-operator model
where somebody is going to take care and provide a much greater service if they own, you know,
that satellite or that franchise. Is that a little bit like the way that you're describing
the credit and stuff being managed, where like a an owner-operator is kind of managing
those different credits and and and that money, and then you're behind that backing it as part
of the system, or is this the stupidest analogy you've ever heard? No, look. Okay,
so let's let's talk about the two sides of this particular market, right? On the one side,
what we need is capital. We need to be able to get capital in. On the other side,
we need places to be able to go and deploy that capital. The basic thesis for realfy is
that currently in crypto, there's often a lot of capital, but places for that capital to go
are often based on inflationary economics, Ponzi economics, emissions. It's not real, right?
And it disappears very quickly once BTC starts falling. So, real life thesis is there are places
in which we can go and put that capital, which will have a steadier kind of return profile,
maybe even lower risk, depending on what the assets are, and ultimately more predictable.
It's kind of what we're trying to achieve with our assets. But then there's like a second part
to this, right? Which is forget about returns, etc. We also believe that capital can do good
in the world, and ultimately it makes more sense for that capital to be going into places that are
productive than what currently happens with, let's say, most stablecoins,
where it's just holding UST bills. It's just reducing the cost of U.S. Government borrowing, right?
And that's kind of our thesis. Let's let's make capital work. Let's make it be productive.
So then the question is, how do we go and deploy that capital? And you know there is the kind
of Kiva-like model where you're really going to the completely unbanked, right?
But that's really hard because you can't do that at scale. It needs to happen individually.
And let's not forget that you know Kiva ultimately is a charity, right?
And it's not a ginormous Multi-billion-dollar kind of huge scalable fund.
It's done more on the premise that you know the return may or may not happen,
but ultimately you're doing good, which is an amazingly noble aim, right?
But when we're trying to think about how do we do things scalably, it has to work through
local providers and local fintechs who have equity on their balance sheet,
who can afford to provide some defence to the people who are providing capital on the other side,
and then to your point, then over like. Owner, operator, franchiser, yeah. I mean,
these fintechs—they're running a business, and they're highly motivated to make sure
that you know ultimately the lending activity they do is working and and is great, right? And also
that they have the regulatory licenses in those countries to operate. All of this kind of stuff.
So my kind of final point on why these people are so important. Is actually to give you to give you
the example of Goldfinch, right? So Goldfinch recently kind of blew up,
and a large amount of the reason why that happened, I think, is a lot of the underwriting,
which was being done to be able to decide whether this was a good place to lend to,
was basically being done by like ordinary people, right? They built a model to incentivize
ordinary people to go and underwrite opportunities, and they were doing that on the basis of like
you know getting some Goldfinch tokens. I mean, look, you wouldn't put your money.
I don't think you put your money into a fund that's being like managed
and underwritten by essentially a volunteer, right? That's not really
how how things typically happen. So I think that you know the the model we have, I think,
takes some of the strengths that we see in traditional tradfi, opens up new opportunities
to drive impact with capital, and hopefully also brings something new to people in crypto, right?
Which is a productive stablecoin that's also doing good in the world. Sorry,
it's a long-winded answer about we were talking about a few different areas of the problem.
I hope that kind of sets out how we we see things. Just in addition, John,
I think you know there's a real high laser focus in the team to focus on getting stuff done
and for it to work. But in the future, a governance token means there'll be proposals
and people can vote on things, and and you know this can evolve. Right?
This is just the starting point. Am I right? Absolutely. So, what what I'm really excited about,
or maybe because I've got a bit of PTSD from Five and a half, seven years in Cadano, if you include
Cadano Foundation. Um, it's just it's just really fun to be building cool shit
and back in a a community at the very beginning where you can have an outsized um impact.
And if you're listening to this X base and you know John is so eloquent and explains it well,
and you want to get involved in real fight, you know the Discord link is in the chat.
What do you call it, Jenny? The the replies to this link. It's so easy to get into the Discord.
You know, there's easy ways to earn the points that will get converted for RFG tokens at
the end of the season. Um. And if you're delegating to a state pool operator that's on the RealFi
SPO Accelerator Program, you're going to be able to earn points passively just by delegating to
them. The marketing team, John, moved so quickly. There was this workshop I mentioned at
the beginning of the call. We're doing this workshop with SPOs. One of the things they wanted was
a base profile within 24 hours. You know, Rob was on a call with me getting website designers
to mock it up. So just the work pace astonishing, and the team is is. A joy to work with,
and they're really receptive, and that's the vibe in the community. If you come in,
you are going to be heard, and you can you can get involved. The the points are the ones I'm sorry,
Marine. The points those are the points that get converted into like that.
Is that the governance token? Right. Yeah, this is a governance token,
so it it's going to mean you have a really meaningful say. You know, I don't want to suggest
what proposals one might propose, but but all I'm trying to say is this is going for at the minute
we're at ground zero, right? We're all got our origins in Cardano, but um, you know,
what other ecosystems are we going to, John? Yeah, ETH mainnet is happening very quickly.
Maybe this is actually an interesting point to talk about a little bit. Now,
one of the things that we always talk about in Cardano is like, how do we grow TV out?
How do we grow the usage of DeFi? Well, it's kind of the chicken and the egg problem, right?
You don't have the liquidity available on Cardano, so new DeFi projects never really get get what
they need to exist. But without DeFi projects, why would there ever be any liquidity on Cardano?
So we think we've got a sort of interesting setup here, where you know we have our native contracts
on Cardano, canonical accounting happens on Cardano, but we're also putting
native contracts onto ETH mainnet. So what this means is that you know you can have
your MetaMask wallet on ETH and you can go and you know come to the DApp
and have a really great experience, right? Your MetaMask wallet connects, same
as if you're in Cardano, right? You can connect your Eternal wallet or your Lisk wallet directly
to the DApp. But it also means that you know any volume that we see coming from ETH mainnet,
where there's already tons of liquidity and demand for products like this,
ultimately is going to grow TVL on Cardano, right? Because this is where ultimately the assets sit
and where the the accounting happens. So we believe that this is also potentially a way to drive
hundreds of millions of dollars of TVL for Cardano by actually building an experience
and a product that people want, both on Cardano and also in ETH. And who knows,
maybe maybe other ecosystems as well, you know, like Solana, etc. This is how you're aggregating
the the liquidity at the end. It's through the the assets that are being The accounting
happening in Cardano. Yeah, accounting is happening on Cardano. I said TVR will sit here.
Yeah, we wanted to get into the stake pools angle. You guys still up for it? Yeah,
you you want me to explain how it's working? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so people know what to look forward
to and if participate and whatnot. I know that you already selected the pools.
I don't know if you're still in the process of doing that, but just for for the users, you know,
so we had 102 uh stakeholders register. Um and they were overwhelmingly it's like
ninety seven ninety eight percent um single state pools you know um they're in Discord
and we're building out the campaign now but basically what it looks like is if you stake to one
of the state pools in the Real Fire Accelerated Program you're going to earn a hundred points
a day passively on top of the points that you can earn inside Discord participating in the testnet.
And this is the important thing: is that it's a legitimate activity that we're looking for.
It's not a vanity metric. So this is why a lot of it is going to be on chain. Well,
the benefit of it is is that you delegate into a pool. When you come to claim your points,
we'll be able to verify that you delegate to the pool, and that's how you're going to get
the attribution to you. So for the stake pool operator. What that means is, stake is sticky.
It's difficult to attract it. Right, a stake pool operator by definition has to attract stake.
They have to wear a marketing hat, which is obviously different to proof of work.
And because stake is sticky, it's hard to differentiate your pool in a compelling way
to attract stake. Now, a couple of things have happened in the past three to four weeks. Right.
There is the second fire, Yvori Emergo hacks. Okay, so it's timely in the sense there's a lot
of active discussion about where delegation should go. So staple operators in our program,
there is a fear of loss. I think that they can speak to where they can say it's important
that you secure data and these are the best practices and educate people on that.
But they're also able to offer. Hope of gaining the sense of the RFG token
and having a say in governance within RealFi, and it's going to go multi-chain.
It's going to be meaningful, you know. So the staker pool operator is able to say,
"Delegate to my pool, and I'm going to be able to give you this RFG token through
the points mechanism." So, for the state pool operator, you can get to differentiate your state pool
from other pools that are not able to do that, right? So that's the value
for the state pool operator. For the delegator, it's to get even more points
and even more FGT tokens, and it's to get into the community. And then, when you think about
why are we doing this for the state pool operators, it's because we want to see Cardano's network
remain and and become even more decentralized. But you know, there's a gives and gets here as well,
right? The argument is that I think stakeholder operators are some
of the most competent technical influencers and KOs in Kadane, and that these operators
are going to be great ambassadors themselves in Real Fires community, and we're going to be
able to select because we had 102 registered. I think there's 90 SPOs in Discord,
over 700 community members in Discord at the minute after a couple of weeks,
and over 600 verified wallets and the testnet. But there's a couple of mechanisms that
I'll just touch on, which is that the delegator is delegating stakepool. They're earning passively.
Additionally, each stakepool operator, the first ten delegators that complete the set of actions
in the quest on testnet are going to get ten USDR, which I'll send to them. And then,
if a stakepool operator has ten delegators that are first past the post,
that's how the ten dollars will work. If a stakepool operator gets ten delegators to complete all
of those quests. I'll send them a hundred dollars and a real fire hoodie and some swag,
and we'll give them a call, Discord. So why does that matter? Because when we get to mainnet,
I want to be able to show John and the marketing team wants to be able to look at which
of the stake pool offers has really participated and drove performance in a real way. You know,
and I think ten delegates completing those actions is reasonably low barrier,
but it does show you that people have come up and turned up. You know,
so I think that positions as well for mainnet. Does that make sense,
or should I dwell a little bit more on any of those points? So it's like. It gives you a signal too,
on how things are are moving, right? Exactly, right. So somebody I did,
someone I've known for a while, in my DMs, saying, "Well, you know, Real Fire
is going to get something out of this too." I'm like, "Of course." There's gives and gets.
We want to have a community that's made up of people that have been in the trenches,
have built their own communities, and are committed. And I think the best way to source
that initial cohort is from Staple Offer. There are lots of other ideas I've got,
and probably too many, about how we can engage NFT communities and how we can engage the chains.
But at the minute, I think Staple Operators is where to start. You know.
Because that's where I started in Cadano, originally, you know, with ITN,
and there was like a. I was just after the ITN, actually, it's 172. Bringing back the basics.
Can give some love to to the else. For sure, I was sort of saying to John, like, let me get back to
where I was. Let's get back to when it was fun, you know. And if Midnight's offering
rational privacy, right, then I think we're offering some rational hope, right.
This is this is an opportunity to get back into it. So, um. Yeah, I think state pool operators are
really interesting, and they have a really great mix of different skill sets and assets. And um,
the workshop that we would run, and we are running now with SPOs, it's about
asset-based community development. So what's nice is, you know, if you've been on X for too long,
you just feels like everybody's looking at like what the problems are and saying negative.
But asset-based community development is about saying, look, let's all start off looking at what
our strengths are and what we're good at. So you're looking inwards first,
and then you're talking about like, well, what assets have we got? Could we actually move into
play here, be mutual benefit, and to promote these pools? And then you can look at okay, right.
So what should we prioritise, and you know what work is there, and how might we claim that work?
And I'm kind of going into a bit too much detail, but some of that workshop is looking at
like what are the centralised marketing buckets ideas we've got. So that would be things real fire
can do for SPOs. Um, then distributed marketing is things we could give them to help them go out
and talk about real fire. And everyone that's been in Cardano for a long time knows what it's like
in a community. A community is inherently self-organizing. You know, this isn't an audience
that we're just sending messages to. This is a community we want to self-organize around problems.
If they believe in the vision, if they think that John's product is really interesting,
if they can see the value of RealFi being a platform, and to me, I think Cardano needs a lighthouse.
You know, and when my tour duty with IO finished, I was looking around like,
what was the most interesting project I could work on? And RealFi is it. So I'm really, you know,
grateful for the opportunity. Thanks, Ben. I think it's an interesting program,
and as someone who owned the stake pool, I can definitely testify
that it's difficult to attract stake, and it's uh definitely interesting. Uh,
I guess the whole program would depend though on what the points are worth, right? So
if I accrue a bunch of points and it's worth less at the end of the day, I am not.
Doing anything with it, so I guess. Well, the challenge I had is that token allocation
and certain decisions are still in flight. You know, so talking to Clay, he's the head of product.
The point of the point system is to allow us to start working and doing stuff,
and we can then the points can be converted to the RFG tokens once the allocation
and stuff has been signed off. So if you think about campaigns and seasons,
it means that you can allocate whatever the allocation is. Finally, the points will still be
relative to it, if that makes sense. So rather than trying to Promise something. We can say, "Right,
work out what the allocation is, and then we know that campaign is going to have this percentage
of it." But I think, after taken anyway, um, has to get launched. So whether something has value
or doesn't have value, who knows until it hits the market. You know. That's true. Anyway,
anyone listening who has a question, please feel free to comment. I would add one one other thing,
by the way, which is that if you're delegating to a state pool operator,
he's part of the RealFi Accelerator program, you're not risking any of your principal. You know,
if I got a thousand ADA sitting in my wallet and I delegate it, that thousand ADA is staying with
me the entire time. I've never let go of it, right? But I'm delegating to, say, your pool, right?
And I'm getting my rewards, but I'm getting these points for the RFG token as well. Extra, you know,
so I think, yeah, you're getting everything that you're already get getting,
but you're getting something extra if you delegate to a real fire stateful operator,
Jenny. I want to make sure I don't know. KB looks like he hasn't hand up,
but it might be just on my end. You know how this thing works. Nope, just glitched. Okay,
my shoulders not tired yet. All right, good, good. So I guess my question is more about like.
What's next? I mean, there's so much that's happening with you guys. I've been reading so much.
I don't. Maybe I missed something. What's the next step? What What are you guys? Um,
of course you're busy with the the SPO stuff and the accelerator and the workshops. Um,
but what does the roadmap look like? Um, you know, in the near future, what's what's next? Yeah. Um,
I mean, the big focus is honestly getting ready for Mainnet. So this is uh basically buying assets,
getting all of our trading infrastructure set up. Um. Figuring out, you know,
how basically we scale assets, right? You know, it's one thing if we launch, and there's, you know,
twenty million dollars of demand. But you know, probably the closest analog we have is Athena,
which grew to, I think, like two billion dollars of TBL in like four months or five months.
You know, God knows how successful will be. But you obviously you need a strategy if there's
ten million dollars of demand, a hundred million dollars demand, billion dollars demand.
So there's a lot of work around that. And then, of course, on the technical side,
all the Cardano stuffs done, smart contracts audited, etc. But we're busy working on
our EVM mainnet contracts as well, so all of that needs to get audited as well.
So there's a lot of technical work, of course, as well. And then we have the GTM workstream,
you know, which Dexers will be on, which curators will be. Be working with RealFi,
which sectors will be working with RealFi? Pitching to crypto allocators, you know,
people who've got lots of stable coins to to come in and participate. So just a lot all over.
But the sort of TLDR is, you know, we're targeting mainnet in probably eight weeks. So yeah,
making sure we're ready legally on the asset side, on the GTM side to be able to have
a strong launch. Thank you, John. And can I ask you like a more of like a human side kind
of questions, which I usually like to ask. Which is what? What? What brought you to this? What?
What inspires you? What moves you? What makes you tick? I mean, look, I I think I've always been
interested in impactful finance. I think for many years I've been trying to figure out
how to kind of square the circle and build a product that I think does
impactful stuff in emerging markets, whilst also, you know, basically doing something that's useful
for people who currently have crypto. And I think it all kind of clicked for me
once I started seeing basically the yield-bearing stablecoin market start to emerge.
When I saw what Athena had done with tokenizing basically this hedge fund trade to be
able to generate yield from funding rates, it kind of clicked to me that we might be
able to do something similar, but rather than this, you know, funding rate trade,
do something similar and replace the engine with something that could make capital more productive
and more impactful. So yeah, that's basically been the journey putting putting this together,
and now we're now we're ready. And I'm just honestly really excited to see this come to life.
Did you start from scratch, or did you like find some tech that was available
and like repurposed it, or anything like that? No, we we built it all right.
So the starting point was the last like three or four years, where we've been doing
this fintech based lending, so data driven underwriting of fintechs and providing capital to them
and generating you know strong risk adjusted return. So that's like.
The more traditional finance stuff we were doing, and that's also what we were talking about
earlier, right? How do you underwrite a fintech? How do you analyze the loan book at scale?
You know, all of these loan books have got millions and millions and millions of loans and entries.
So how do you ingest all of that, process that, understand that, and use it to make
lending decisions? So we'd sort of been doing that part, and then you know, once I saw the,
I suppose, the Athena opportunity, it was starting to think about what else would you need in
the portfolio on the asset side. You know, T bills, yes, but but what else? What kind of?
And that's the sort of Janus Henderson, CLO parts that we started to add. Then after that,
it was okay. Great, we've got like an asset strategy now. We think it's impactful,
but what would the legals look like? You know. How would you structure this? Where?
What regulations, etc. And then finally, the technology piece, right? The smart contracts.
How do they work? But I had some great help with that. You know, Danell, who started this with me,
he was CPO at Cardano and IOG for many years. We've also been working very closely with Pi at Sunday
over the contracts as well. So yeah, that part honestly has has gone really well
because we've been working with such great people. Phil on this call has been super, super,
super helpful. So yeah, a lot of great people. That's it for me. Thank you, John and Ben,
both of you. For coming here today. Back to you, Maureen. Um, I just, I definitely would uh love
for people to come up and ask questions. I see a lot of people down there. I know you all have
great questions. Uh, feel free to come up and ask questions. So, uh, Ben, uh, so other than the,
the other all the things we've talked about. Oh, I see, Jonah is coming up.
Other than the things we've talked about, is there anything you guys have left out
that maybe you want to share? As far as real far is concerned, what you're trying to do? No,
I think. Sorry, go on then. Well, well, I will then, seeing as giving me the conscience.
But what I'm really excited about is working with Kate and thinking about
how we could create an environment in which people could innovate and come up with ideas
and even build. But it's like I'm just trying to make sure that I've set the SPO community up
for success first. But I'm really passionate and interested about kind of ecosystem strategy,
and you know, you've probably all seen Cadena's ecosystem map and. How we can get not
just more people, like more actors, but thinking about the value chain, right? So
that we can get a network effect, so that we can think about like a field of interactions. So,
you know, I'm I'm really interested in talking about builders next. Um,
but obviously doing it in a way where my enthusiasm and ideation doesn't get in the way
of the important work the team needs to do. So I'm trying to build the opportunities
for people to participate. Um, around um the you know the engine as as we're building. So yeah,
I'm really interested in getting developers in next. Um,
that's that's top of my mind. John, you. I think you've covered that.
Jonah with the handle. Good morning. I'm just laughing at John saying he's on an audio loop
of me talking. Just must be his worst nightmare. Just never ending, never ending Beno Hanlin
with ideation. All your words, Ben, not mine. Thank you, Maureen. Yeah, I had. Thank you, everyone,
for coming up today. Thank you for the team for presenting. I had one question.
I'm not sure if it was addressed because I didn't catch everything from the end.
I will definitely listen back or from the beginning. But I have the question.
I have is why did you decide to build another stablecoin? Is and is there something special
about RUSD that that you guys wanted to do that that other stablecoins didn't provide?
Yeah, I I'll take that. I think that stablecoins are an incredible product. They're useful.
Everyone wants them, and they've already seen proven market demand. Right? You know, I think.
When you look at Tether, when you look at Circle, you can see that demand was there.
But you're not going to break into this industry by going and doing the same thing. The opportunity,
I think, is that both Tether and Circle have got an incredibly lucrative business model
that they don't want to disrupt. Right? Ultimately, when you mint USDT or a USDC,
you give them a dollar. They go and they take that dollar and they give you a digital dollar.
But they're going and investing that into T-bills and they're taking all of the yields.
There's not really any incentive for them to go and change that model because it's enabled Tether
with, you know, probably around 100 people to be as profitable as Goldman Sachs. This was last year.
There was an article about it, right? So it's incredibly lucrative business model.
I think what we have is the opportunity to go and leverage the the lessons from this,
which is that stablecoins are really useful, but change the economic model over who gets what,
and that's what we're doing with RealFi. So that's kind of the opportunity, right?
It's you know take something that works, change the economic model to provide the people
provide people with an incentive to go and try yours. Secondly, there are
some really cool use cases. You know, yield-bearing collateral from a trading perspective is
really interesting. Rather than posting dollars as collateral for trading, if you could post,
you know, yield-bearing collateral or asset appreciating collateral, then a lot of trades
which may not have worked can start to work. Right? Just as an example,
if you were getting eight percent on your collateral, that's pretty exciting
from a trading perspective. And that's not even really thinking about the opportunities
for people to think about it from a savings perspective, right? You, most people
in their bank accounts really don't get a lot. I think my NatWest is like one percent
or something like that. So you can really start to see the advantages of tying this into.
A dollar-denominated stable product, I think, is is just it's got a lot of product market fit.
So I think that was kind of the idea here, right? Is rather than starting with
something complicated, start with a really useful, easy to understand concept like a stablecoin,
and then attach towards it the kind of assets that we're building. And I think that way it's got
the widest market appeal, whilst also doing something differentiated from what the bigger players
in the market like Tether and Circle are doing. So that's kind of how we thought about it.
Thank you, John. Yeah, that make that makes a lot of sense. I understand.
Just what I heard is that you you want to utilize the yield that obviously comes from issuing
a stablecoin to use it more creatively. That kind of benefits your your your user base
and your business as well. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, it's actually all going there, right?
You know, we're super transparent over how RealFi charges. But you know,
if you would think about the normal model, which is Circle takes everything and you get nothing,
you know, where we're on like the opposite model where the user takes almost everything, right?
That's excellent. I'd had this a little follow up. Sorry, BlockTalk. I see your hands up.
I had a little follow up. I understand that the there is like a a component where when the user
moves into the staking part, that you guys are then sort of like more aggressively investing
that profit into yield bearing other yield bearing assets. Are are those going to be micro loans
as well? Did did I did you mention that? It's a portion of it, right? So.
We're slightly jumping the gun there on this, right? In that, probably next week or the week after,
I'll do like a nice simple whiteboard video on what assets are being held, how risk is managed,
ultimately what risks you're actually taking. This is really important for me, right?
I want I want to make sure that we're super transparent over this. I believe
that risk is being managed in really, really effectively. But ultimately, you know,
everyone has to do their own research, and there are a number of ways in which we create protection
from a financial perspective on anyone that's participating on this. That being said, absolutely,
some portion of the assets are basically doing working capital finance in emerging markets,
really highly impactful stuff. That, at the same time, generating a nice, you know,
a nice return on that particular part of the book, and whilst also doing something good. Awesome,
love that. And then, sorry, this is just a little bit more. The will you ever have like
a user-facing part of that of the product? Will you ever have like the the loaning
and borrowing component? Is that something you want to build out as a user-facing product,
or or will be more institutional? Yeah. Look, that that what you've just described there is kind
of the holy grail at the end of it, right? This like fully decentralized flow all the way through.
All I can tell you is that that part won't happen quickly, right? There's really good reasons
why you do things from a pooled perspective, from a portfolio perspective,
with like a bunch of intermediaries within this this part, right? And I would say.
I've tried to adopt a very pragmatic approach versus a philosophical approach. Right,
we're doing things that work, that have been proven to work, that manage risk effectively,
versus trying to stick towards maybe a more purely decentralized dogma. At the end of the day,
I want to build a product that scales, that does its job well, that people love to use more
than I want to stick towards. A fully decentralized ethos. So, yeah, absolutely,
it's a direction that's interesting in the future. But at the moment, it's very much done through
regulated partners working with fintechs that have licenses, that have been doing this for years,
that have large equity cushions, that have really, really good track records
with really low default rates. When it comes towards the other parts of the book, right,
these cloe ts. We're working with some of the largest providers of these in the world,
with really deep secondary markets, so we can always sell those assets
if we need to have redemptions. So yeah, that's kind of the approach, right?
Where we're trying to build the best portfolio possible that's still driving, you know,
impactful things, but in a proportion that still means that we can meet our redemption requirements,
that we're not holding too much risk, etc., etc. Well, again, I really appreciate
that that thoughtful answer. Thank you so much. Thanks for the questions, Jonah.
I see Blogjug has his hand. Hello, Marine. How are you? Hi, Bla. Good to see you. Good to talk to
or good talk to you. I can't see you right now, but ultimately, well, so first off,
I just want to say hi, Ben. Haven't talked to you in a minute. Ben is one of those people
that was like almost like an onboarding emissary for me into the wider community,
and made me feel very, very welcome, and also engaged me and and got me to start thinking about
how I can contribute to Cardano in in a broader sense. And so I want to first say I'm really glad
that Ben is a part of this particular. Protocol and the the team and of course also with John. John,
I've been following you since the beginning of being around here seven years,
and one of the things that led me here was pushing power to the edges.
And you were the lead on that in my mind over all the work that you've done.
I know you've ran into a lot of roadblocks. It's been very difficult, especially in some
of the regions that you work in. But at the same time, it's very challenging. I know,
but you kept on and you didn't give up, and that's one of the things I really value when it comes to
people that I either follow or work with. And so, one first, thank you for all of that.
The second is is that obviously I'm a BD lead for USDM. We had a meeting yesterday with Seni
and Clay. Great, great guys, by the way. Great part of the team. Look forward to meeting the rest
of them. But I'm curious. We had a little bit of discussion afterwards, having to do with
how exactly, in your mind, could USDR Be used as a way to be able to mint USDM. You know,
this is something that we're discussing now, but it feels as though we couldn't exactly take USDR
or burn out into USDR through USDM through our portal, which we do with USDC, USDT, and PYUSD.
But we'd like to be able to do it with USDR as well. Do you see a path for that in your mind?
Such a great question, and to make you feel better about this, this is all actually on my list
for Monday to start looking at. Um, the guys said that you had a really great conversation.
They've got some notes for me, and we said we have a chat about it on Monday. So, um,
you're probably a couple of days too early for me to give a proper proper answer to that question.
Um, what I will say is, you know, I'm obviously a huge fan of what you guys have been doing at USDM.
Um, you know, you're kind of like the homegrown Cardano stable coin. So, yeah, you know.
I'm excited for us to try to think about ways in which we can sort of work together
and support what you guys have been doing. So no easy answers for you right right now,
but I promise you, you're on a list a list for Monday. No no problem. I look forward to that,
and I do look forward to working with you guys in the future and finding solutions to things.
Because ultimately, in the end, the the real goal for me and the reason I came here was to,
in effect. Affect people's lives, and in most cases, without even potentially knowing I'm doing it,
and it's just simply because Cardano and its ability to be able to reach anybody anywhere
and empower them. And when you give people financial security, self-sovereignty, you know,
freedom of choice, no matter where they live, you've now empowered them, and more than likely,
everybody around them. You know, so it's exponential in its impact. And so,
this in my mind is something that is very near and dear to my heart, and I want to
definitely happen. And I know you said this is you're doing it a little bit more pragmatically.
I understand that, you know, doing these like what Kiva does, say for example,
the default rates surrounding that, the way they built that particular model is to, in essence,
kind of break even. It feels like to me, it isn't like a real. Business venture more so
as a philanthropic way to be able to provide people loans, which I actually do that.
And that was Charles actually talking about that. I want to say three years ago or something,
and I've continually kept doing it since. You know, and it's been absolutely amazing.
It's exceedingly gratifying to be able to do that. And and so I really look forward to the day
where it comes full circle, and what you guys are doing with USDR does provide that ability to be
able to also provide that particular function as well. And then at that point, we've arrived, right?
And we've successfully done what I think Cardano is meant to do. So yeah, looking forward to that,
John. Thank you for coming to Cardona for coffee, and Ben. Thanks for coming in and and chatting,
man. And and you're never too verbose, my friend. I think I match you at least potentially,
so not to worry. Yeah, you know. Look, let me just add one final thing. Then I apologize, everyone,
but you need to jump. But you know, look, even with essentially the sort of I. Consider
kind of my like trial years across the last three years when I've been working on this model.
You know, I was lending out a relatively modest amount of capital from a real world perspective,
but I still think we did something like you know four million loans across you know
four four countries whilst we've been building out the model for this, and that's huge scale, right?
From as I say, a relatively modest amount of capital, but huge impacts as well, right? So as we go
and we roll out Cardano, sorry, roll out RealFi, be looking to sort of tell more of these stories,
but that's the kind of impact you get from doing things in a more institutional way versus
you know the more Human to human Kiva side. So yes, of course, you lose some of the immediacy,
the connection with that that end person that you're lending to. But what you get is scale,
and scale drives impact as well. So yeah, I think there's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here.
Thanks, my friend. Appreciate it. And here's to the future of us trying to change the world,
and we do it one little bit at a time. So appreciate that. Thanks for coming in, Ben and John.
We have 10 minutes till the end of the show, but I do want to know if you guys have a call to action
for everyone listening right now. Yeah, my my call to action is to join the Discord.
That if you're in Cadene, to delegate to one of the state call operators that are in
the RealFi state call operator program, um, and it's an opportunity to be part of the community
early. And if you were here in the early days of Cadene, you know that might be something
we'd really like to do. What about you, John? Call to actions. Oh, if anybody has
any great interviews or X spaces that I could line up for John, DM me them as well. Thank you. Yeah,
just call to action is yes, as Ben says, you know, follow follow us along on Discord. But yeah,
please do play around with the testnet. You know, testnets are not just to be able to give out
points; they're also to to battle test your product. So it's really useful, right,
for the development, engineering, and product teams to be able to do that. And then yeah,
just get excited for the mainnet. You know, I think we have an opportunity here to build a product
that's really useful that can attract liquidity over from ETH world to put some real points
on the board for Cardano in the DPI TVL side. And so yeah, please do support us, rally around,
and I think we can do something special. Thanks everyone. Thank you guys for coming.
I think on the Discord at the top for anyone that wants to join. I just want to say thanks for
for taking the invitation and appreciate it. Just uh, just a reminder,
you you you can always come here. It's open and free. It's like we've been doing this for five years
now. And now that you're here, just come and join us. Keep us updated what's happening.
Mondays is open for all, so it's always a great, great day to come and give it, you know,
an update if anything changed throughout the week or you have a new announcement.
It's a great way to like stop by and kind of like do like a we call it drive by shilling.
So just like just to keep kind of like a little watering hole sort sort of thing, you know,
just keep people in the loop. And if you have something bigger you want to talk about, you know,
just schedule another another long forum, and we just dedicate some time to it. And you know,
all the best to you guys. Thank you, Ben. I feel like an interview with Ben, the life
and times of Ben O'Handlin, feels as though this might be a feel good piece. That we could discuss,
and he might have some nice juicy tidbits. Well, there is always that,
and you landed right in the right spot. I was worried for you for a hot second,
and then I wasn't worried for you at all because I know you manage yourself very well.
So I wasn't really concerned. And then you landed with John and the rest of the team,
and I was just exceedingly gratified by that. So yeah, I would love to hear a story from Ben.
I mean, for some people, they don't know. In some cases, who Ben even is, you know, really, right?
And so, I mean, I've known him for shoot since Consensus Austin, and before that,
in Chris's space with the tech space, I used to come in and jump in there and talk. So, yeah,
I think that would be absolutely amazing. Just have Ben come in and speak for twenty-five minutes on
on everything he's doing and his a little bit of his experience here. That would be awesome.
I'm actually writing a. I think I mentioned this at the very beginning.
I don't know what you want to call it—an easing, or a Burke, or a series
of five posts—but basically, it's about the intelligence revolution will be decentralized.
Let me get my thing up, and I'll give you 30 seconds of the outline. But basically,
the prelude is talking about like money as a coordination technology. Hang on.
Are you interested in this? Because I'm going to post this in the next couple of months.
If you read, did you read the numbers come before strategy in my pinned post? Drop. I have not. No.
No, I have not. I still have your map, though. So I have it sitting on my desk, actually. Okay,
so there's like the map is showing you how to think about ecosystems in terms of roles and layers,
right? Then pinned to my profile is an article about numbers come before strategy,
and there's a flywheel in it that shows how ecosystem growth can happen if you agree that growth is
capital productivity, and that the issue in an ecosystem is the blind men and the elephants.
So that is that roles and layers will optimize rationally locally, but that if you look at it
from a system wide points of view. Those behaviors aren't always rational when you think about
the good of the whole, you know. And so, therefore, what you need is you need to establish
a small set of system-wide units of account. This is an axis
around which a hundred different projects, or a hundred different proposals,
or a hundred different schools of thought could contend, and it allows for decentralization,
which is a superpower of crypto. But you do need to understand, like, what are the core numbers
that you're you're ultimately trying to to move, right? So the reason I've explained that is
because there's three kind of pillars I'm trying to tell. One is the numbers,
which we've just discussed. The second is what I'm talking about now, which is basically like
where are we, right? And when I look at Near Protocol or Eigenlayer, I think those guys are
really good at pivoting to the narrative cycle, and I think that Cardano has to think about
where are we in terms of like the grand narrative, the arc of history, right?
So that's what this vision piece is about, and then later on, I want to get into stories,
which which is in fact superpositions across many minds. But okay, you can start the timer,
thirty seconds. I'm going to tell you what I'm writing, right? I get so. It starts with the prelude,
you know, and we talk about how money is a system that's captured in the 20th century.
So money is a coordination technology. Control over monetary affairs is a critical part
of genuine sovereignty. So that's individual businesses, the nation state,
and by the end of that prelude, we're then able to say, like, in the 21st century,
the coordination technology is AI, and that is going to be captured, right? If if we're not careful,
right? So there's this symmetry. So that's our prelude, right? Then we go into like the acts,
which are basically like the stakes, which is you know setting the stakes.
I'll begin to join the permanent underclass. So this is like a fear that everybody has, right?
And how the intellectual commons is being captured, right? And are the intellectual inheritance
of all of our children is being taken away from us? And there are some axioms that are explored,
right? So basically, these are the axioms. Technology is an agent of change.
An example is a mechanization and print, right? Our agents have changed. Gutenberg printing press,
for example, technology is a conduit for coordination. So the Enlightenment would be a good example
of how you had to have those conditions, steam and print, to get to the Enlightenment,
because basically, print standardised information, and suddenly America and France
and England could start discussing ideas, and it standardised it too, right?
And then you get to the third axiom, which is technology is ecology. So it's not just
that technology is a tool that you change the world with; it's an environment that we're in that
changes us as well. And I'm I'm getting there, Jock. Wait, stay with me. Wait. So
why am I making all of these points? Because the point I'm trying to make is the Enlightenment
was about governance, right? Man's ability to determine his fate, right? Or women, you know,
in modern, right? And the second enlightenment is in economic enlightenment,
and that's actually what crypto is to me. It's it's the conditions that you need to determine
your own economic sovereignty. But but the revolution hasn't happened as prophesized. You know,
we feel that like big finance or government have come in and take crypto.
So the argument that I'm making is it's only because of where we are in time, right?
If you went back to a certain point in the enlightenment, you would think it hadn't happened.
The revolution, then the glorious revolution, French revolution, American revolution,
all these things happened as like a cascading event, right? So the argument I'm making is that.
AI is the selection pressure that is going to create that revolution, and that's why I'm saying
technology is an ecology, right? Because the environment creates selection pressures, okay?
And the fact that everybody's scared of what's going to be happening with their jobs,
I'm going to be replaced. Oh my god, it's the end of the world! And it's like tyranny.
There's like the four horsemen of the apocalypse Charles was talking about, right?
Where you've got AI and quantum and biosthetics, and then And all these technologies that,
when you combine it with AI, which is extended cognitive capability without consciousness, right,
is terrifying. So then the argument is, well, you know, there's going to have to be
an information insurgency. There's going to have to be a counter revolution, where we say, no,
you can't capture all of our intellectual inheritance and sell it back to us as a utility
on a meter, right? Where like, and then something interesting happened, right?
Where the USA put export controls on Fable. So then it's like, da da da. This is only interesting
because. A nation states cannot allow right their ability, their means of cognitive production
to be taken away at a whim, depending on where you're born, right? Which is why the prelude
was relevant, because we've seen that's happened with the monetary system, right?
Now AI is at stake, so now sovereign nations are going to have to start responding to this, right?
And then like where we're getting to is basically this is like Act Four at this point
about crypto superpowers, which is you know instant capital. Capital form,
instant global capital formation, and and the fact that you can give everybody a stake,
the incentives, you know, and that's how you can drive coordination. And so then when you get to
this point, what you're saying is, okay, let's start looking at what the superpowers
and capabilities of crypto are. And I'm gonna, this is, I don't know, am I sounding crazy?
I'm trying to write this whole series out, and I've been deep in it. This is like what I did
after I left Io. I went a little bit crazy, you know. I can carry on, by the way.
I'm just conscious that I probably just streamed or talked at you for a little bit there.
But but the cul the culmination anyway. So. Here are the five acts, right?
The stakes that we talked about, like where we are, the poor underclass,
the pattern with those technology axioms, the crisis we just talked about,
where everybody can be touched. You know who's allowed to eat? It's a famine. So there's abundance,
but it's only if you can access that abundance. That you're going to get this utopia
that's promised. If you can't access the abundance, that's actually a famine, right?
Which is what people are worried about. Then we talked about the Second Enlightenment
and superpowers. Oh, right. And then the final combination, Act Five. Now I'm done, Jock.
It's too long, thirty seconds, isn't it? Is the shelling point, and the point is,
what's going to happen is China, and you're already seeing this, they're going to make open source,
open weight models available to deprive America of that, of having that system of control,
the same way they did the monetary system, and also because they're building chips and production
and this kind of stuff. And so, therefore, open source and open weight and decentralized.
Is the counter revolution is inevitable, so that's my pitch. How long does that take me?
Three hours? I don't know. I someone needs to talk, otherwise I just I feel like I'm in a cupboard.
I've just I've just ranted at the cupboard for a good thirty minutes. Oh, you you lost blackjack.
It's a rabbit hole, like a. Did any of it make sense or not? For all of it, made sense for me, Ben.
I've been I read the article. I think you posted it somewhere else on your Substack before, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. You should be able to copy if you know how to do that.
I can't do it from my phone. I was pinned on my thing, but but the point is, like,
the reason you would write it is because you want to be able to say, like, the fight's real.
There's still this exciting tech that we're being building, and everybody's tired with governance
and fucking shit, and you know, everybody needs to get paid. Like, fair enough, me too.
We all have to get paid, right? But but the point is, like, I just when we got into this,
it was because it was fucking exciting, and we wanted to build cool shit,
and we thought we could change the world. And like you know, we felt like the systems
as they were just weren't serving us or our children or their children.
And I want to get back into that. And I can see the grand, grand. Arc of history.
When you start looking at those revolutions and those technologies that were agents of change,
it's really interesting. Um, and I and I just think something like that is
what could galvanize people, you know, potentially. But um, I think that a lot of us feel that way,
Ben. To be honest, like uh, today's interview, there's like one part that John was talking about,
like um, Kiva being a charity thing, right? And I'm here, like, well, you don't have to go too far
to take it to Kiva. I mean, I feel like this this whole like our ecosystem. Turned everyone,
every regular, everyday person that was willing to put some capital to lift this, turned people,
regular people, into angel investors that that were not angel investors,
like supporting all this like startups with absolutely no, you know, nothing to back up this,
you know, this investments, nothing but risks, and it was like so much people lost so much money
that. And a lot of people are just broke, man, and they're just still showing up,
but there's no money. You know, this is like, see, this is the thing with John is like he he's not,
Real Fire is not trying to, it's not retail money, right? It's businesses, so I like that,
and then I like what you are saying as well because it's like the old age of like L ones
and where it was really passes out. Like I feel that's gonna die one way
or the other because the agentic economy won't care about like the. The um the what's the word
I'm looking for um but the partisan politics of it right they're just going to care about
the primitives and like what what does the tech actually do and we're probably a little bit
we're not on top of a gentec economy yet but then finance coming isn't going to care about
this stuff either so I think the other thing is like crypto and blockchain
and even tech right it it is a narrative market right it's narrative cycles
and the reason that I think that you need to go numbers vision and then stories is
because of that superposition so you know there's is many many minds are co-occurringly coming up
with these interpretations and probabilities. And that—that's the supervision
I'm trying to get about in AI, where everything is like such a hyper, fast velocity cycles,
where you don't even like so much is happening so fast and it's changing all the time.
You don't even know which way to lean in. You know, there's a lot of opportunity to shape
that attention, that potential narrative energy, if we as Padana can get out of ourselves,
and I think like you have to bridge to these other ecosystems, and Mirai is one way of doing it,
and possibly Pogen, and I think the guy from C Swap was trying to do Bitcoin stuff too.
So I'm not just trying to name IO ventures, you know. But we have to bridge the other ecosystems,
and we've got to kind of get fresh talent in, which means I think we need to get out of our bubble
to be able to. Yeah, we have to become one ecosystem. Like the industry has to kind of yeah work
together. Yeah, yeah. It's like relation. So it was people all the way down, right? Like,
do you do you know there's um, do you know games or what is it, Minecraft or whatever,
where you can make all of the land disappear and you can just see where.
It's just people all the way down. The whole thing's people, you know. Um. So yeah. Um. Yeah.
So sorry, Jock. I didn't give you my life story, but it would have basically gone:
I got born in England, lived in Saudi, went to lots of boarding schools in England,
and then I worked as a chef, did market research, built a bank's community,
and then I got into privacy projects, and then I got into Kadane. That's my that's my life story.
So I don't want to cut the the show short, but I really do have to go. Thanks for coming, Ben,
and I really enjoyed talking to you guys. So maybe you can join us, like Jenny said,
once in a while for banter or just to talk more about the project. Hundred percent. Thanks,
everyone. Well, just this is my last day, so I won't be in curtain or coffee after today.
So thank you, Ben, for showing up for my last day. All the best to you guys. Love you. Jenny,
I'm so glad I caught you on the last day. I I know you are exiting. I didn't know this was the week.
