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Chad Talks with Ray Youssef (NoOnes)
Recorded: Sept. 29, 2025 Duration: 0:52:42Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, ThorChain was introduced as a groundbreaking DEX enabling seamless crypto swaps without bridges, alongside the launch of its tokens Rune and TCY. Ray Youssef shared insights on the decentralized trading landscape, emphasizing the importance of self-custody and the potential for significant growth in peer-to-peer trading, particularly in the global south.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Mic check, can you guys hear me?
Can somebody give me a thumbs up please there we go I'm trying to oh there's Ray I see him jumped on okay well he gets connected I'm
gonna start this off start the introduction here guys uh welcome to ThorChain. ThorChain is a DEX that enables you to swap Bitcoin with thousands of other cryptos. All layer one native tokens. No bridges or wrap
tokens are used. You can trade all from within your self-custody wallet. There's no KYC on
ThorChain. It's permissionless. ThorChain's token is called Rune, R-U-N-E. And you don't need to hold or buy any Rune to place a trade on ThorChain.
However, all the fees on ThorChain are deducted
from your swap and that's used to buy Rune.
And this Rune is a yield that goes
to the liquidity pools and nodes.
There's no block rewards on ThorChain, no inflation.
100% of the yield is real.
ThorChain has another token called TCY.
This token is like a preferred stock where 10% of the revenue goes to these token holders.
If you deposited crypto into savers or took out a loan on ThorChain,
make sure to claim your TCY token so you can start collecting this yield.
this yield. And anyone can buy this token too and collect yield as well. To swap on ThorChain,
And anyone can buy this token too and collect yield as well.
we've got our new site live, swap.thorchain.org. Check it out, play with it. New features and
functionality will be added over the next few months. If you find any bugs, please report it
to the email address on the site. Rajira is building decentralized Binance on ThorChain's
smart contract layer. It's being rolled out as we speak. And speaking of Binance on ThorChain's smart contract layer.
It's being rolled out as we speak.
And speaking of Binance and other sexes, if you hold any ruin on these centralized exchanges,
withdraw them into self-custody because it can be used to short sell and drive the ruin price down on yourself.
And once in self-custody, you can look at bonding your ruin, start earning some some yield on it and you help secure the network.
There's a ThorChain community discord and telegram.
You can join to learn all about ThorChain
and make friends.
The final links go to
at ThorCommunity on Twitter.
That's their handle.
Guys, if you're listening,
please repost this space,
get some of the listeners in here.
And I'll do a quick intro myself and then Ray,
but like I'm a node operator at ThorChain.
I host the Twitter spaces here with Patriot
and every Saturday.
And we're doing a special one today for Ray Youssef.
And normally Ray, I would ask you to introduce yourself.
But I want to introduce you for you.
Because what kicked off this space was DDaddyBio, one of the Unstoppable Devs.
He wrote a post about you, which is such a banger.
And so I want to read it out loud for everybody.
And then you can add to it if you miss anything. But so his post goes,
be Ray Yusuf, born in New York City,
son of Egyptian immigrants,
grew up broke, even homeless at one point.
1999, launch a ringtone startup,
AKA Napster of ringtones,
get millions per month,
discover a problem of unbanked teens can't pay,
build social media platform without ads,
disgust it is turning into proto-only fans, rage quit,
spend seven years as MMA fighter and spiritual wanderer,
come back to tech, fail a few startups,
leads to dark rabbit holes into health, politics, history, science, the Quran.
In 2014, broke, homeless again, learned to sell PayPal gift cards for Bitcoin on LBC,
realized gift cards equal the world's first digital bearer instrument.
With this idea, he builds Paxful, the local Bitcoins for Global South,
teaches Nigerians to bypass economic apartheid with gift cards. With this idea, he builds Paxful, the local Bitcoins for Global South.
Teaches Nigerians to bypass economic apartheid with gift cards.
Bitcoin adoption booms.
Paxful hits $88 million per year in revenue just by word of mouth.
Builds 11 schools in Africa, 13 worldwide, because everyone eats.
Department of Justice and U.S. compliance nightmare.
It means 88 compliance staff, which is greater than most banks. This leads to 4.5 million in user funds frozen.
The co-founder embezzles, blows 40,000 a week on parties, booze, and hookers.
Ray offers some 87 million to walk away. He refuses, sues Ray, locks up payments,
He refuses, sues Ray, locks up payments, wallet goes down.
Ray personally saves it in 11 days with no sleep.
Ray still walks away with nothing.
In 23, Paxful implodes, users are stranded.
Emergency launch of no one's.
The vision is the WeChat of the global south.
Gift cards, crypto, OTC, jobs, services,
and messenger, non-custodial wallet.
Radical transparency, there's a CEO dashboard
that's public.
50% of the revenue goes back to users and schools.
The mission, onboard 1 billion users in five years
across Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Commonwealth of
Independent States. Self-styled war chief, building decentralized nation for free people.
West doesn't want Africa to be served? Fine. I'll build my own tech stack.
Welcome, Ray, to the space.
Welcome, Ray, to the space. Do you got anything to add to that?
Do you got anything to add to that?
Thank you so much for that, brother.
Yeah, there's a few things in there that I could add,
things that I haven't really mentioned to anyone,
but we'll get into it as we go along.
Well, sure.
As we go along, then, do you want to maybe tell us about no one's um you know can you
maybe expand on that like what what it is and what you're doing there yeah brother so after
paxville uh blew up even though i walked away with nothing you know i'm not starving i live
a pretty good life and i was kind of happy in retirement and I wanted to stay in retirement
but I really couldn't because all these traders were really without a place to trade especially
in the gift card business and we had to do something so I did something but I didn't
want it to just be a place for people to trade gift cards because gift cards were very valuable
to onboard the global south but it really is a very troublesome business I wanted to be a place for people to trade gift cards, because gift cards were very valuable to onboard the Global South, but it really is a very troublesome business. I want it to be a lot
more. I want it to be a place where we can set an example for what we should be doing.
Over the next 20 years, humanity is going to encounter a complete upheaval of our culture.
There's going to be massive black swans everywhere.
We've already encountered them.
It seems we can't go six months without something blowing up
and a new psyop revealing itself.
So I don't care what the bad guys are doing.
I care about what we can do with our own hands.
We still don't have a platform where we can trade universally,
especially in the global South, in places like
Africa. And everyone involved in crypto just doesn't seem to be interested in setting that
standard in rebuilding civilization and giving us the tools that we can work off of. Everyone just
wants to make their buck and leave. So NOAA is basically the world's first decentralized nation state. Because when you think about it, governance is about money.
99% of governance is about money.
Who makes the laws for parking or where your dogs can poop?
These are local concerns.
It really is all about the money flow.
Every village in the world usually starts with a temple and a market.
And the temple is really there to make sure that there are ethics in the marketplace.
So it literally is all about the flow of money and commerce.
That's the lifeblood of civilization.
So if you're in a marketplace, you have a tremendous burden and also a tremendous opportunity in this responsibility.
You can show people how to make the money flow and how to
represent people properly so you know the traders on paxville on no ones um they're really our
citizens they're more than our citizens they're really like our house of representatives and our
senate and i would go all around the world and meet with these brothers. I'm actually going to go to Ghana in a small town called Tamale up in the
north,
where literally it's an enclave of the best peer-to-peer traders in all of
Africa.
And these brothers have been sitting around their round table and they've
been making all these plans because,
you know,
these big exchanges like finance,
they don't want anything.
They're not really serving the peer-to-peer traders.
They don't understand how unique it is and how involved they have to be to
actually serve these communities.
So they want me to come in with no one's and give them a real place,
a real home.
So they're all sitting there and planning and I'm planning with them and I'm
going to go meet them.
They really are our governance body.
It's these traders. These are the guys that make the money move on the streets. They don't work for the government. They're normal people just like us.
Most of them were unemployed students that just got their start with peer-to-peer training,
and it completely changed their lives. And we're all getting together as a group,
kind of like those evil bankers did on Jekyll Island to plan the Federal
Reserve. Well, we're getting together as a group and we're plotting and planning
on how to blow peer-to-peer up and make the money move all around the world,
starting in our little corner of the world, starting with the first country in Africa that
declared independence, which is Ghana. I'm giving this as an example to show how you really need to work peer-to-peer.
It essentially is governance. No one is the world's first decentralized nation state.
Everything I've done on there, besides just building a marketplace, is to set an example.
My CEO dashboard is public for the entire world. That's a value I call radical transparency.
There's no other company in the world that does
that, that literally shares all our stats, things that only the CEO would see with the entire world.
I also believe that everyone eats this old American corporate structure of, you know,
just returning money to the shareholders by any means necessary. That isn't going to work in this new world we're building.
I believe everyone eats.
So 50% of our gross profits goes back to the community in many different ways.
I've built 11 schools, and I'm going to do a lot more than that,
especially when giving the money back to the community.
That will have tremendous benefits, and the world will start to recognize that soon.
So there's a lot more to this, brother, but no one's is really the start of us doing things right, of setting a standard of excellence and success and getting everyone a copy of me.
Because I don't want to be the only one doing this, believe me.
You know, when you try to do things like this and try to empower the global south especially places like africa to use
their money that's when you put your neck on the chopping block that's when uncle sam comes after
you you know the higher the monkey climbs up the tree the more people can see his butt it's an old
saying from zimbabwe and i don't want to be the only one going in i want to have a massive landmark
success because i want everyone coming into this space with me.
I want marketplaces to pop up all over the world, and I want them all to be connected.
That's what we need, an unstoppable series of marketplaces that just will not end,
doing the kind of governance that our leaders should have given us, but they cannot because
they're too corrupt, too cowardly, or too stupid.
So we're doing it.
No one's did it.
So no one's will do it, if that makes sense.
Totally, man.
Absolutely.
Dude, I couldn't agree more.
So when you say there should be or you want to see multiple marketplaces pop up around the world,
are you saying you want multiple no ones pop up around the world or you want to see as no one's kind of
like the aggregator of all these all these different marketplaces no one's is a global
marketplace except for the united states for obvious reasons and there's marketplaces that
can be local on no ones and of course people can use our platform but honestly brother i don't mind
competition i want everyone to come into the peer-to-peer space i want everyone to copy me
and copy my model and build marketplaces that can't be That way, if something happens to me, it keeps going on.
It just keeps happening.
If you see people in business,
you see everything as a zero-sum game.
That is not the way, brother.
What I'm talking about is nothing less
than creating billions, billions with a B, of jobs.
That's what I'm out to do.
That will make the whole world a lot richer.
That'll give us endless options.
Instead of one city like Dubai,
imagine 100 cities like Dubai
all over the global south.
That's the kind of world we have,
especially the technology that we have now,
if we just put people to work.
Africa is 1.4 billion people.
Over half of them are young.
And more than half of those young people,
actually 70% of them are young,
and more than half of them are unemployed.
That's like 600 million unemployed young people
in just the African continent alone.
What happens when we put them all to work?
We all get richer.
So yeah, bring it on.
Everyone copied me.
CZ copied me cz copied me
he you know he did a deal all people don't know this story uh we did a deal he we did a deal he
wanted to use one of our components to uh bring off ramps onto binance and he wanted to buy the
company he wasn't shy about you know putting that out there and he he was really
pushing hard and he gave me an offer it was a lowball offer he didn't really value the company
much and i understood why but he basically did that deal with us to get our users and to get you
know uh to figure out how our system worked and he just copied the platform and i was like cool i
didn't want to sell to him though because i didn't want another centralized entity to run peer-to-peer.
I really wasn't interested in the money.
But he copied it. He created Binance peer-to-peer.
And I'm glad he did, because they've actually done a really good job.
I really am. And I'm glad for all the other peer-to-peers.
Then CZ tried to recruit me, actually, to leave Binance Africa for an insane figure.
I won't say what it was but i rejected that too
and i just went ahead with no ones because alexis he's a buddy but uh he doesn't have my same outlook
on things i'm not just in it for the morning i'm in it to fix the money for sure when you say p2p
peer-to-peer is it um are you talking about peer-to-peer like doing fiat transactions
or peer-to-peer in crypto or both?
Well, both really.
So how it started was, I'll tell you the story.
So I was homeless in New York about 11 years ago.
And this was before Paxful.
It was a real hard part of my life.
And I was homeless.
I ended up homeless for almost six months.
And a friend of mine noticed how haggard I was.
I was always dressed well, though, because a lot of people in Sutton Place on the east side throw away some really nice clothes.
I was always wearing nice Bergdorf Goodman trench coats, which I found in the trash, by the way.
And one of my friends notices, hey, man, you're looking a little haggard bro maybe you need some extra money and i said yeah what's up man so
you gave me some alpha and he said you know you can sell gift cards for you know you can you can
i'm sorry you can buy a 500 paypal my cash gift card for about $250 in Bitcoin.
I thought it was a scam, but I tried it with my last money,
and I did it on local Bitcoins, and it worked.
And I was like, wow, this is amazing.
I scaled it up, got an apartment, and I was like, this is a money machine.
Then I really started to figure out what gift cards could actually do,
and that's when I built Paxful.
Wait, wait, wait, can you slow down?
How was that not a scam? How were you getting 100% profit? could actually do and that's when i built paxful wait wait wait can you slow down how did that how
was that not a scam how are you getting to 100 profit how is that legit how is that working
great question i wonder the same thing right so let me outline the situation yeah sorry
well let's take nigeria for example so if you want to send money to Nigeria, to your cousin back home,
or your family member, or your brother, whatever it is,
people will go to Western Union,
and say they sent $100 via Western Union to someone in Nigeria.
They would get the Naira, the local money, at the official price set by the central bank. And the
official price of what one naira is worth $1 is always much, much worse than the black market
price. For example, the central bank of Nigeria will say, you know, $1 is equal to 1,000 naira.
But according to the black market, it was almost 2,000 naira to
$1. So if
you sent 100 bucks
to Nigeria with Western Union,
and you got the official price, which you always do,
the person on the other
side would get like 1,000 naira.
Right?
And then I proposed something
different. I said, okay.
So your brother over in Lagos
is getting a thousand naira for that hundred bucks
and he has to go to an office,
you know, maybe far away,
pick up the cash, wait on a long line,
takes two days to clear
for those international transactions.
Here's a better way.
Go to a drugstore or a gas station
and buy a gift card, Amazon, Walmart, whatever.
Then come onto my platform and you can sell that gift card to someone in the world.
Most of them were in China.
And even if you give that person a 50% discount on the price of the gift card, you will get that crypto instantly.
of the gift card, you will get that crypto instantly.
And then you can turn around and sell that crypto to someone in Nigeria for a bank transfer
and make a profit.
Sometimes anywhere from in the early days, it was 8% to 20% because people really wanted
the crypto.
They were hungry to get it.
And they had no way to get the crypto in Africa because it's impossible to send money out
of the country.
So you can see there, because of the official price compared to the black market price
in all of these global South countries, especially places like Africa,
you can sell a gift card for 50% off and still do so much better than if you sent it at Western Union.
Because you sent it with Western Union, the guy on the other side would take a 50% haircut
and go through a whole bunch of trouble and wait.
If you send it with crypto by selling that gift card, you'd actually get the same price, but it would be faster.
And you could turn around and sell that Bitcoin and make a profit up to 20%.
sell that bitcoin and make a profit up to 20 so you can see it's not a scam because of the real
scam which is something i call economic apartheid in africa nothing works and if it does work it's
always basically a scam who's taking that money it's the central bank that is keeping that money
or western union that's keeping those dollars and the person on the ground literally gets half as much. They take a 50% haircut
on every transaction that comes into the country. And even sending money within Africa is even worse.
It's often about five times more expensive to send money inside of Africa than from the outside and
into Africa. That's why it's not a scam brother
because the whole world of finance is basically a much much much bigger scam dude that makes
perfect sense and i i totally hear you and this is something i've always wondered is like
is like in my mind crypto and you can correct me if i'm wrong but i would think crypto should be
like like super widespread in Africa by now.
Like, is it?
Like, are people adopting and picking it up?
Or is it, it is happening?
No, it's huge.
It's happening, but most of it is peer-to-peer.
So, you know, Nigeria leads the world in crypto adoption.
And that's a country I really focused on hard because when I went to Nigeria and I met the people there, I was impressed.
I was like, wow, everyone and their brother
has a fintech startup here,
extremely bright, ambitious people
with huge financial problems.
The financial system is broken by design.
So I pushed it really hard there
and the Nigerians just went for it.
It went for it hard.
I'll give you another use case.
One of the first people that I really onboarded into this was people who sell cars.
People like these Nigerian brothers would buy a car in America, you know, an old, a 1986 Land Rover or something.
And then they would buy the Detroit, Manaheim auctions, ship it over to Nigeria and then sell it for double.
But then the central bank said, hey, you know what?
We're stopping. You're not allowing anyone to send US dollars out of the country.
So how could that brother in Nigeria pay that auction house? They had no way to continue the
business. The business was effectively shut down. So I told them, hey, no problem, bro. I'll show
you how you can buy crypto. And once you have this crypto,
you can literally sell it to someone in America and ask them to pay the invoice for you with
their bank account locally. And at first the Nigerians were calling me a scammer. They're
like, man, there's no way this works. But you know what? I took some chances. I gave people
some of my money just so they would see
that it would work i lost a bit of my i lost a lot of money actually but man the ones that came
through came through tremendously and it spread like wi-fi and then all of a sudden you had all
of these import export guys especially the car guys in nigeria that all jumped into crypto and
they saw that it wasn't just you know a way to invest in meme coins and gamble,
but it was actually a proper means of cross-border exchange.
So that's how it really blew up,
just with a lot of blood, sweat, tears,
and education on the ground sacrifice.
But man, Nigeria is the biggest crypto economy in the world.
In fact, in 2023, the official crypto volume in Nigeria was about 60 billion.
And that's counting all the official stats from exchanges, etc. that they could get.
But the peer-to-peer volume in a place like Nigeria is at least 10x more than that.
That's over half a trillion dollars that's flowing in Nigeria and Western Africa, just with peer-to-peer.
And it's not all happening on exchanges like mine or all the other peer-to-peer exchanges.
That's only a fraction of it.
Most of it's having it in person, on WhatsApp, on Telegram, through peer groups.
It's literally the biggest business in the world, and most people have no idea.
Unless you go there on the ground, get into that community, and then, my goodness, your eyes will open.
That's amazing.
Actually, I can corroborate your car story because I'm friends with a VASP in Cayman.
I was talking to the guy the other day, and he's being asked to speak at some kind of car conference or something
because these dealerships
and that whatnot want to be able to take, start taking payments in crypto because they're
getting demand for people to buy vehicles and stable coins.
And it's only because they had no interest in crypto.
They just, they keep getting asked about it.
And, you know, the dealerships want to make money.
And, you know, the dealerships want to make money.
So they're kind of being forced to look into it.
So they're kind of being forced to look into it.
And like you said, it's from people around the world wanting to buy cars and stable coins.
So, man, that's pretty cool.
So, like, well, it's kind of good then in a sense that you have to go on the ground to know what's going on.
to know what's going on, like then that means the network is truly decentralized. Like the
Like, then that means the network is truly decentralized.
powers that be can't stop everyone using WhatsApp and messenger and coffee shops and whatnot.
Right. So that's great to hear, man, that it's real grassroots decentralization right there,
because that's ultimately how we're going to win. They won't be able to stop it.
they won't be able to stop it.
Do you know when,
so are they trading fiat for Bitcoin
or fiat for stable coins?
I've heard stories that like,
the global South is actually,
they're more interested in US stable coins versus Bitcoin.
Do you have any insight on that?
Yeah.
So on all the other peer-, you know, like on all
the other peer-to-peers like Binance
and Bybay and OKEx,
it's mostly, it's like 99.9%
stables, USDT
usually. And so now
USDC.
But on my platforms, on Paxil
and now on Dolan's,
90% of it
is still Bitcoin.
Because I was a Bitcoin maxi for so long i guess it rubbed off on the folks over there and they're still taking the bitcoin in fact
most of the gift cards are almost all bitcoin usdt is growing uh but bitcoin still has a lot
of leverage there they just got used to it, you know.
That's, you know, because Bitcoin really came to a lot of people's rescue in the early days before there was USDT.
There's tremendous volume happening.
That's how we got the first crypto into Africa.
If it wasn't for the gift card, because the gift card trade is really what solved the problem of getting Bitcoin into the global south, especially Africa.
It's, you know, there's no other way to think about how like in the beginning i was trying to figure out how we're going to get crypto into africa they have so many problems with money crypto can help but man there's no
crypto in africa there was no crypto in africa 11 years ago like literally none and it's so hard
to get money out of a place like nigeria, right? How are you going to pay for the crypto to the Chinese or to the Europeans or Americans?
Whole multinational corporations are created just to extract value from Africa, but they
don't do it with the money system as that's purposely broken.
They do it by extracting resources.
resources so i only had two options either i buy 10 million dollars minimum order of cacao beans
So I only had two options.
from nigeria ship it over to rotterdam and i couldn't do that uh because you know i i had i
was homeless at the time or just freshly unhomeless you know shipped all that over to rotterdam
and then you know turn it to euros sell it and then buy crypto and sell it and send it to Africa.
instead I use gift cards and I trained an army of people to,
instead of,
you know,
get their,
you know,
remittance for services or just,
you know,
family remittances with a Western union,
switch over to gift cards, sell the gift cards to the Chinese.
And if you take a 50% haircut, you'll still come out ahead because you'll make a 20% profit afterwards and you'll get it instantly.
And it just blew up.
$60 million a week passed through that one corridor.
And it was so powerful that, you know, so many people in Africa started switching over to remittances of crypto.
And I attracted some really unnecessary attention.
The DOJ did not like that.
They started investigating my old company.
And they didn't like the gift card trade.
They thought, you know, these literally, they thought all Western Africans were scammers.
And they thought this whole thing with gift cards was money laundering.
And they wanted to put us in jail.
And I had to sit there in front of these guys, in front of an official hearing, and explain these things to them.
No, Africans are not trying to embezzle or launder money with a $50 gift card.
They just figured out that it's an easy way to send money.
And the reason is because of the extreme capital controls
that, by the way, are affected by the financial policy of this government.
And the people are just struggling to find a way around it.
It's perfectly clean money, and they found their way around it.
And they're still taking the haircut,
but they come out ahead and they can transact so business can continue because guess what guys the banks don't
work over there this is the way they have to do it and that was my life for the past eight years
pretty wild oh it's amazing i love it um well love your drive, but I also love hearing that the adoption there is real and people are gravitating towards it, doing it. And that's amazing.
card there is that is that the the um like the gift card you're using or is it is this a visa
card like etherfy like you can load it with crypto then go spend it um yeah it's like the
ladder it's just a visa card a debit card that you can load with crypto and spend and that's
something people want you know people want off ramps to the crypto so no one's you know in order for it to be successful it can't just be a peer-to-peer marketplace of crypto to fiat
that's actually a very specialized niche and training people on how to be a event a merchant
in that respect is quite difficult you know it takes a lot of training but it changes people's
lives believe me it really does it's like the best side hustle in the world but what about all the you
know people that are have simpler problems or simpler ambitions and they just want to do a trade
they just want to use it like revolute with crypto we also serve them as well so we can also offer
people to bank you know people can offer up from crypto to a bank account to Momo and now, you know, a virtual debit card.
It's quite useful.
Nice.
I noticed on your site, too, you've got an OTC desk.
How does that work?
The same way OTC desk works.
It's the same thing that happens on the platform.
you know, the entire platform is essentially OTC.
You know, the entire platform is essentially OTC.
So basically, someone can go on there and you can say,
hey, I have, you know, I have 10 million Naira,
or I have, you know, 4 million Ghanan CDs,
and I want to buy crypto with it, or the opposite way.
You know, I have crypto, and I want to get resources or fiat
in, you know, somewhere in Africa or Asia, Vietnam, et cetera.
We help them with that.
We give them the white glove service and help them with their transaction.
Find a counterparty, smooth out the transaction.
It's a value-added service that we use ourselves for all of our corporate needs.
And a lot of our customers are corporations as well.
So it's extremely useful.
Okay, great, cool.
And this was actually,
so part of self-serving why I wanted to chat with you
and introduce you to ThorChain was seeing
if there's something ThorChain can do to help you.
Cause this is, everything you're talking about
is what we're trying to build at ThorCh know to basically help bank the unbanked and um um you know the only thing
Thorchain can't do is fiat but pretty much you know any kind of trading you want to do within
crypto can be done through through Thorchain and any platform can integrate it so like like no one's
you could have you know Thorain integrated in your background and
no one would know.
Like you don't even have to tell your users that it's ThorChain.
You can just pawn it off like it's your own exchange, but it's all layer one tokens.
Like it's no wrapped tokens and we can do Bitcoin, like UTXO chains,
you know, where a lot of these DEXs can't. And the third chain really is decentralized.
Like, you know, there's no censorship
on the trades or transactions.
So like, I don't know if you're familiar
with like Change.ly or Change.Now.
Like it drives me nuts that these wallets have,
they integrate these quasi centralized platforms and
then they freeze people's trades and demand kyc and then the person can't provide the kyc so they
can't access their money or you know and if they can it might take take months before they can do
it um and no this is and so this is a real problem for people in the global south because they're
um excluded from the financial
system because of their KYC, right? And all these other DEXs purport to be decentralized,
and they're not. And ThorChain is the one true decentralized one. And the best way I can
demonstrate it to you is that, you remember the Bybit hack that happened in February?
Yeah.
That billion of ETH went through ThorChain,
went from ETH to Bitcoin through ThorChain,
and back five times, like five billion of volume.
And it didn't go through Hyperliquid,
you know, it didn't go through anything else,
it went through ThorChain,
because it's the only one that can do it uncensorable.
And nothing, no one's, at the time the community was pretty,
everyone was a bit worried because ThorChain is still small,
relative to Bitcoin and Ethereum, right?
Like Bitcoin and Ethereum get a pass because they're so much bigger
and they're obviously decentralized.
But because ThorChain's smaller, there's still a question mark, how decentralized is
And I think that was its test, the ultimate litmus test that no one went to jail, no one
got in trouble, everything moved.
And so this is why I think we're doing, Star Chain is doing what it can to provide an uncensorable open utilitarian
egalitarian exchange for anyone in the world to use regardless of where you live
and um so this is why i wanted to part of the reason i wanted to chat with you today just
help introduce you to that that you know we're on the same side we're on the same team we're
trying to work towards the same goals. So if you ever have,
you know, if you have interest in integrating ThorChain and no one's, you know, let me know,
I can put you in touch with the devs and, and help you, you know, help you do it. But, you know,
it's, we're doing what we can to help, help further your vision too. You know, we, our community
share, have the same ideals. So, yeah, man.
Definitely sound like it.
Yeah, yeah.
And then no one's as well, too.
You can add in your own commission on top of the trades if you want.
So you guys can make a bit of money or not, or not do it.
It's totally up to you.
Yeah, man.
But it's, yeah, right now we've got 10 different blockchains you know solana and
tron are coming so it's you know pretty soon you'll be able to pretty much trade like
like 99 of any crypto through thor chain through dex aggregation so um um
yeah yeah it's coming. Real freedom is coming.
Wow, yeah. ThorChain sounds like an amazing product. In fact,
the guys over at
Unstoppable love ThorChain
and they're building an entire
atomic swaps on
ThorChain and we're actually going to be
switching over our swaps
to that. So we're already on it,
brother. Soon our swaps are going to be running
uh through thor chain we're covering there you go man yeah we got so i love the unstoppable guys
they're great um they're they're they're building the front end for thor chain the swap.thorchain.org
that's the unstoppable guys and um um yeah and then and they're also building a DEX aggregator for us too,
which they'll also use themselves and for people like you.
And yeah, I love their vision.
They want to add in the atomic swaps to it.
They're like, it's really good first principles thinking.
I love it.
I love it.
That's great.
I'm glad you guys are in touch.
That's great.
I'm glad you guys are in touch.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
Ray, I want to open up to questions here.
I invited someone up named Corey.
Corey, do you want to unmute yourself?
Do you have something you want to ask Ray?
Give me a sec, Corey. I don't know if I'm saying your name right. Q-O-R-E-E-B.
I can't see the rest.
I'll give him a second to sort himself off.
If anybody else wants to jump up, ask Ray a question,
any comments, please feel free.
We've got about another 15 minutes here. Ray, while we wait for that, is there anything else you want to talk about that we haven't touched on?
I could talk forever, brother.
But lately, everyone has been asking me, all these media outlets have been asking me about these custody plays.
Oh, the DAT the deaths the digital asset uh yeah yeah exactly we all want to know about that and uh i've been up opening up on that man about what
that actually is so we'll talk about that yeah yeah man rant yeah yeah tell us your thoughts
yeah so everyone's worried about it being a Ponzi,
and when all these people try to pull out at the same time,
the whole house of cards will collapse.
And that's just a superficial concern.
And to me, it's not, I mean, yeah, it would,
if everyone tried to pull out at the same time.
That definitely would happen.
But the real question is not if it could happen.
It's the fact that we gave them the power to do that,
because we basically handed over the keys of price discovery
over to people that got us into this mess in the first place,
over to the huge multinational funds like BlackRock
that essentially own half
the corporations in the world. Over to the people of the WEF. Over to the central bankers
and all their proxies. We gave them our one best tool, which was Bitcoin, which was a
solution to the financial problem. And the monetary problem as well because you know the financial system and
monetary system are two separate things the financial system is how you use the money
meaning the rails and the monetary system is the money itself meaning proof of work instead of you
know proof of weapons and debt and we basically handed them over both those things in exchange for more fiat gains.
That's that.
Because it's proven, just by looking at the gold and silver markets on the Forex, you know, that if any centralized entity owns even 2% or 3% of an asset, that they can literally suppress the price with a few paper shorts, you know, on the market every morning through all these derivative
instruments that's what they've done with gold and silver and now we're giving them the keys to do
that with bitcoin and it seems we want every crypto every blockchain or every token is welcoming in
these same guys in the hopes for a few gains you know short-term gains well the truth is bitcoin
is not even keeping up with inflation anymore.
What got us to this point was commerce and retail adoption.
And in an extremely short-sighted and outright idiotic, you know, narrative shift, we've abdicated all of that, you know, for number go up.
Quite sad, brother.
So that's the real concern.
It's that we've handed away the keys.
It's not, oh, what happens if everyone tries to sell their Bitcoin
at one time?
I mean, if they can control the narrative so well
to get them to this point, and you're worried about that,
you're missing the whole point.
That's basically it.
Do you think there's a chance that these deaths and stuff might be bad in the short term, but could they be good in the long term that it helps introduce Bitcoin and crypto to normies and helps kind of normalize crypto, make it more?
I have a conversation with people who they don't think crypto is a scam anymore.
They think it's real.
It's here to stay.
And they're starting to take a look at it and and take it more seriously do you think it
could maybe have a that you know could there be some positive take from it that it kind of helps
legitimize crypto in people's minds uh no no not at all there's no positives whatsoever because
look i understand the argument right so these people that are now starting to take it more seriously,
who are these people?
These are people that might run pension funds,
a lot of huge money there, right?
They're people that have already wed to the system in an extreme way.
The people that don't really have a need
uh for honest money they don't even care what honest money is if they did they would have known
by now these are people that also have no need to be able to move money around because there
most of them are already in the golden circle of western finance anyway so they don't benefit from
the monetary or financial revolution that crypto, Bitcoin, and DeFi gives us
they're just like, oh, you know, Big Brother thinks it's okay
so let me buy a little bit and hold on and diversify it
my 401k and my S&P 500 and
whatever other bullshit they were into, that is not how a revolution
looks like.
That is, you know, I don't know what you would call that, but it's certainly not progress, brother.
That's not what we're trying to do here.
So, yeah, it's giving us some attention, but you can see where is it actually leading us.
Yeah.
So do you mind touching on your journey with Bitcoin?
I know you've had, you know, at first you're a big proponent.
Now, have you had a bit of a falling out?
Are you still a proponent of Bitcoin or do you look at other cryptos?
Yeah. Can you maybe fill me in there?
Yeah, bro. I'm not a proponent of bitcoin anymore i mean you know the reason i was such a die everyone thought i was a diehard maxi because you know i was part of this maxi cult
it wasn't that at all i just was pushing bitcoin because we need to you know business works when
you put all of your juice behind one thing one idea one market and you start like that that's how you get traction
as a natural business builder i've had 14 startups in my life i know that's the only way to win so
i'm like okay all these other coins coming out promising whatever okay that's that's nice whatever
but we have a real proof of work honest money here and we have we have a financial system here as well where we can send money as easy as an email.
Let's focus all our energy on getting this out the door first.
That's why I was so pro-Bitcoin.
And both those things have really been taken away right now.
Honestly, yeah, Bitcoin is still technically proof of work.
But now basically, these central bankers, these huge funds and multinational corporations
can essentially control the volume of currency, of Bitcoin in the ecosystem through these pay-per-short contracts.
That completely invalidates proof of work, actually.
And I know the maxis are screaming right now,
no, well, they need to shut the fuck up and get an education.
Central bankers have made it very clear.
The real power in any economy
is who controls the volume of currency in that economy.
I have like eight liters of blood
in my system right now, in my body.
If you had a magic button
that could take it down to one liter,
I'd be in shock. Pale white on the floor, unable to move. If you had another button that could take
it up to 20 liters, heart failure. I'd be a bloated mess also on the floor. That's the power
that they've had with all this fiat. We just basically handed over that power to them with
Bitcoin. They may not manifest that power too
quickly but believe me they have it it's in their back pocket so we've lost that we've essentially
lost proof of work and as far as being able to move bitcoin around and use it you know people
say oh it's not so much the limitations of bitcoin as far as the blockchain yeah the
on-chain transactions are lower than they've ever been since inception.
And Lightning is a piece of shit.
It was designed to fail.
It was a stillborn technology in the area between retail adoption and actual high-level volume usage from industry.
Or nation-states that have been sanctioned doesn't serve that
so what is bitcoin actually good for if it's not proof of work it can't actually be used to move
money around especially because of all the limitations that are being put through all
these centralized exchanges it's just a savings mechanism for as long as the price holds it's
not even keeping up with inflation so So why am I going to be
pro-Bitcoin anymore? Especially because I know
the bad guys took over and the
community just went along
with it like donkeys. Extremely
disappointing, brother. I don't give a
damn about the tech. What makes
any revolution is the people.
In the beginning, the Bitcoiners were the smartest,
most gung-ho sovereigns around
and now they're just a bunch of droids.
So I'm out of that camp, bro.
The war chief holds it down and keeps it real.
That's it.
Nice.
Yeah, the Bitcoin maxis has been quite frustrating.
I feel like a lot of them have turned into fiat maxis.
Okay, so I hear you and all that stuff.
Is there a crypto that you are positive about?
You know, like, is there one that you think that you did?
Absolutely.
Monero.
Okay.
There you go.
Okay.
Right on.
Monero for the win, Muget Man.
And can people access Monero through no ones?
Like, is that actively?
Absolutely.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah oh yeah they can trade it
peer-to-peer they can buy it on our spot unfortunately they can't withdraw it from spot
but they can buy it sell on peer-to-peer withdraw everything yeah we're fully monero enabled do you
have any man can't save or take did you follow that is it cubic or qubit you know that whole
51 thing and it was like i don't know if that was fud or not i don't. Did you follow that? Is it cubic or qubit? You know, that whole 51% thing, and it was like, I don't know if that was FUD or not.
I didn't follow that closely.
Did you follow that?
Do you know what happened there?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah, it was FUD, but it actually wasn't FUD, if that makes sense, or it will in a moment.
What that whole situation actually proved was that there's a big flaw in proof of work,
even though the 51% attack doesn't have to happen with the nodes.
It can actually happen with the mining pools.
That's what that whole thing proved.
It's, you know, with the control of the mining pools,
you can actually 51% attack a network in that way.
That's what
all that whole mess proved, basically.
Bitcoin suffers from that as well.
Yeah, I was thinking that had implications for Bitcoin, too.
Yeah, so it didn't trip to, yeah.
Exactly. They chose Monero
as the first victim.
Why?
I guess they, you know, they had real incentive to do so.
But Monero is by no means the only possible target.
They can take Bitcoin down with the same attack.
It'll just cost them more.
Or any proof-of-work base chain.
In regards to Monero, it was FUD.
But, man, we've got a problem, it was FUD, but man,
we got a problem, bro. Yeah. We really got a problem over here,
but they're just letting us know what they can do. You know,
they always do this. They let you know what they can do to you to keep you in
line. Watch it, boy. You know, it's that kind of thing.
Well, I'm glad we've got people like you fighting back.
Ray, this has been great.
I apologize to any of the speakers that want to come up, but I think we should wrap it up here.
Ray, I really appreciate your time coming up and chatting with us.
I've got another hour, bro.
Who wants to ask questions?
I'm ready.
I took over the whole interview, man.
I want to hear it.
I have to go. I apologize. And actually, to be honest, I didn't know how long
you would give us. So that's why I only booked this for an hour. Would you be down to come back
for like, we can, actually normally when we do these spaces, we'll go for two or three,
sometimes three and a half hours. Can we book another one with you and we'll do that?
We'll just have a longer form one
and give you as much time to talk as you want.
But this one, I gotta go.
This one, we gotta hang up.
Absolutely, brother.
I'm always real for it.
It's been great.
Okay, awesome, great.
Well, yeah, we'll get in touch offline, set something up.
All right, thank you everybody for coming. Ray Youssef, it's up. All right. Thank you, everybody, for coming.
Ray Youssef, it's been great.
Love chatting with you.
Been a fan of yours for a while.
I love what you're doing with no ones.
All right, everybody.
Normally, we do our spaces on Saturdays.
So this Saturday, we've got Chad Barefort.
He's going to come up, give us an update on ThorChain and the code and everything he's doing.
The following Saturday, we've got the Litecoin community.
And I promise we'll figure out something here with Ray,
another friend to come back and talk longer with us.
Thanks, everybody. Take care. Talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you.
