Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. I'll go spam very excited to have you all here on an amazing tour of spaces. Let's just give it a minute to get started. All right.
Hey Matt, how's it going?
can you hear me Matt you have to am yourself okay yeah do well thanks how you doing Fred fantastic I'm doing great how are you do you can you hear me well now yeah loud and clear fantastic so how's
going today. I guess the first question I have for you, even before we get started, even before we introduce you, where are you based out of Matt? The question, so I'm based out of London in the UK. London, and how is the way
Do you know it's not been too bad it's starting to get a little bit more sunny the days are becoming a bit longer so yeah we're coming out of the internet so it's yeah it's a good time to be in London.
Can you hear me? Yes, I'm sorry. The reason why I asked you is because I live in Brazil as you know, but I live in southern Brazil. So every time I say Brazil people think, okay, so it's stereotypical Brazil, you know, but the beach and it's very hot, but no, I live in southern Brazil by the mountains
It's overcast like 300 days a year. It's cold. It rains. It gets like zero Celsius like no 30 Fahrenheit in the winter easily So you know, I fear you I basically I live in Brazil's lumber kind of a thing some now already used this weather and ask because you know, it's supposed to be summer Brazil right now, right and man I haven't seen this stuff
- I don't feel like two X. - No, it is depressing. - Well, we have to deal with that in London for most of the years. It's nice for someone else to share some of that. - Yeah. - So whenever I go to visit you, Ellie and the whole team in the office, at least I'm gonna feel like home, right? - Whether or not. (laughs)
Fantastic. Well, thank you very much and I truly appreciate you and the team taking the time to join me and the Algo fam for a conversation today. I think we all are very much interested in learning more about control all because when you announced last year, like a few months ago, it was quite a surprise
a lot of us, a lot of people were not expecting or didn't know that you were building this on Algrang and you cut a lot of people by surprise and excitement because you're building a product that's the best of my knowledge. You know, there is there isn't anything similar in Algrang as of now and really not much in the blockchain space. You know, there are very few companies that are trying to do something
similar to what you were building in other protocols, but no one has the angle. So I'm personally very much excited to learn more about control out today over the next hour. So the community also gets a chance to learn more about the product and of course ask you lots of questions. So to get started, I'll go fan in case you don't already
already know Matt is the founder and CEO of Contra Alt. He spent the first part of his career working across funds, structuring, alternative investments and trading and Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. He has developed extensive knowledge of beauty financial products, regulation and asset raising. And I think this and I'm pretty
sure Matt is going to speak on this very soon. But you know this has given him the idea to basically build control out right and control out is basically this free to use app that allows you the users to access alternative investments like property, sustainability projects and more purchasing like digital shares
that have legal recourse to the underlying asset. By leveraging their partnership with us, you know, Algarine, they're able to take full advantage of a digital format that's operationally efficient, secure and transferable. And you know, that's, that is my standard pitch for control, but Matt, you might be just a little bit better than I can on pitching
your company. So I need to give you a proper introduction of the vision and everything that you're building, please. Yeah, absolutely. I think you did a very good job there, Fred nonetheless. And first up, yeah, just thanks to you and the Aga and Foundation team for having us on. I think it's really important for us to try and get what
we're doing out there and try and educate people on the alternative space and what kind of solutions there are now for people to access this market. So you touched on it before but we did spend a long time in, I guess, what we would call stealth mode so we spent a long time building the products and finding
And I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able#
that can be anything from real estate to infrastructure, green energy to even something as maybe out there as films. So we take these alternative assets and we open them up to people so they can invest with low amounts of money and in a much more simple way.
way. So instead of needing tens of thousands of dollars and pounds, you can invest with ten pounds instead. And also do it in a way that is simple, easy for people to understand, and without a lot of the hassle that is associated with investing in alternatives.
So the concept is very straightforward, but obviously executing that, you know, is a different, is a different ballgame. And so we spent a long time, as I just mentioned, building this product from the ground up and we're really excited about about what we built and really excited for the whole community to get to try the platform to
Fantastic, I have to follow up questions first of all you said that you were you know building on stealth mode Can you share just a little bit about how that was if you did any fundraising while on stealth? I was that experienced and secondly you when you're talking about you know alternative investments as a massive class by using the word alternative
Does this mean that these are not regulated assets and instruments or they are? Yeah, absolutely. So when I talk about building in stealth mode, so when you're trying to build a platform like this, you know, there's a lot of considerations that you need to take into account. So it's not a simple
It's not a simple platform to build by any stretch of the imagination and so we spent a long time You know putting together a structure that is secure for people to invest in that is you know within the regulators and oversight and doing things in the right way So this isn't a product that we want to rush to model
we're very aware that people are parting with well-earned cash to invest in these products and we want to make sure that it is a platform that people trust and that has all of the mechanisms worked out. So we raised a fairly small pre-seed investment round while we were still in stealth mode and while we were still building.
and we're fortunate to have the Algrang Foundation providers with a grant to help us with funding that build. So a lot of time was spent not only on the regulatory side of things and building our legal framework, but also building the product itself. Again, we built this from the ground up on Alvarand and so
So, yeah, it took us a fairly decent amount of time to get it over the line and get it built. So, we wanted to have the best product available to our customers. And when we talk about alternatives, this is something that's really important for people to understand because it's very easy for us to be on
here and say, you know, we're opening up alternative assets, but a lot of people don't really know what that means, what is an alternative asset. And it is quite broad. It is very simply anything away from traditional assets like stocks and shares, like bonds and debt instruments. And I'd also
probably put cryptocurrency in there now as well as becoming a little bit more of a traditional asset class. So alternatives can be anything outside of those traditional asset classes. So you know things like real estate, things like infrastructure, hedge funds, venture capital funds, they are all what we would call alternative assets.
Fantastic animation and I can only imagine the the legal and regulatory challenge of structuring such a project product right so the I guess the first question I have on this topic is is everything that you're doing is it everything regulated in the UK and is it only open to like no UK
The citizens are global, no global users. What are the limitations of the platform platform? Yeah, absolutely. So we definitely see ourselves as that intersection of traditional finance with disruptive technology, with Algorand being that disruptive technology.
Our approach has always been regulation first. So we have not used technology to try and circumvent regulation, but we acknowledge that being in the financial services space, being a FinTech app, we do come into scope of financial regulation. And so we wanted to tackle that
head on and that's what you know again took us quite a long time to get over the line and you know really make it clear what we were doing, how we were doing it and doing it in the right way. So when we talk about being regulated we carry out certain regulated activity so
You know, for someone that is dealing with what is essentially shares, but in digital format, you know, these kinds of securities, as they're called, are regulated. So it is regulated activity. So in the UK, it comes under the
oversight of financial conduct authority. So in order to run this product and for UK investors to access this product, you need to have permission to carry out that regulated activity. And so we spent a long time, again, building that structure so that we were able
to get the permissions to carry out those regulated activities. At the moment we are only open to UK customers as our permissions only cover UK clients at the moment but we are looking to expand into Europe and another jurisdiction. Very sick.
Fantastic. Do you have any timeline on that explanation? No concrete timelines. I don't want anyone to hold us against any set timelines, but this year is definitely a big year for us. We'll also see some expansion in terms of geographies and jurisdictions.
Awesome. Well, now that I think me and the entire community have a very decent understanding of what you're building, what is the mission of control. Maybe we'll take a step back and as a share in the beginning, you spent a good deal of your career both at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. Where in that journey
We had the idea to execute a dismissal to basically allow anybody to have access to an alternative investment and to take the leap of faith and start building this and of course choosing to order it. So what is the motivation to that come from? Yeah, so as you pointed out I spent my career at some of the largest financial institutions.
in the world and while I was there I was putting together products in the alternative space typically for hedge funds but putting together products for the most wealthy in society or corporate investors or institutional investors. So very sophisticated and wealthy clients.
And, you know, we came to the point where, you know, we've been in our jobs for a little bit and we've made some money that we wanted to put to work ourselves. When I'm talking with you, I'm talking myself and my co-founder. And we looked at what we wanted to invest in and real estate was a great
investment. Something that is fairly stable, holds its value well, but also is able to generate a return above what you would typically get in a bank account, particularly in low interest rate environments. But there was just no solution out there that was really simple.
for people to be able to invest in real estate, particularly in the UK. There's not many ways to access property. We looked at READs real estate investment trusts, which are a common way that people try and get exposure to the real estate market. But the problem with that is
you don't get to choose what properties you would invest in. It's all at the discretion of the third party manager and so you don't really get control and that's really at the core of what we're trying to do. We're giving people control over alternative assets and letting them access this world. That is
previously not open to them. So we were the ones that ourselves had this problem and there was nothing out there in the market for us and we'd spent our careers structuring products in the alternative space for the most wealthy and grew quite frustrated that there was nothing available even for us and everyone else in the market. And so that was really what kicked
started the desire to build this platform. When we look at how we wanted to build it, we looked at what technology was available for us and we were very familiar with the tokenisation concept and the use of blockchain. So we looked at some of the platforms
and, you know, they're ones out there for us to leverage. And we did a extensive exercise on all of those options. And an algorithm was certainly the best fit for rising. I think it's probably the most common question we get asked by investors is
you know, why did you choose to use algorithms? And it's quite straightforward really. I think when you look at the transaction costs, when you look at the speed, when you look at the fact it is carbon negative, when you look at also some of the native features that are built into
the technology, so our ability to claw back tokens for our ability to only let KYC and AML verified participants transact with each other. It's a really friendly blockchain for us to work on and we love working with with Algorand and the ASA platform.
That is beautiful to hear because as our CTO Joe Wood says in our other end is the first blockchains basically built for purpose right I mean we're the perfect solution for projects to deploy whenever we need this kind of logic infrastructure right at a layer one being extremely fast secure cheap and scalable all the same
time right? So that is amazing. So you touched a little bit on the motivation and basically your target audience. If I'm not mistaken, please correct me from wrong. But I remember when I was looking at the app some time ago, then you can invest with like as little as 10 pounds or 10 euros. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct.
So basically that these are strategies, you know, so just bring this sort of investments to the masses, right? Basically the the shadow population that never had access to this sort of investments before. What is your current at least, you know, as of now your target audience, like, you know, both demographically and geographically, you mentioned that as of now, you're mostly going to the UK, but I'm just
here is what is the audience and retargeting to sell this? Young people called it students are like young professionals, anything that you can share on who you're tackling, if these are already web 3 people or not web 3 people, what is the focus there? Yes, sure. Our product is quite appealing to a very
wide audience. So I wouldn't say our product is also particularly geared at one subset of the demographic. I think the people that are going to be most comfortable with using us as a platform and probably who this is most suitable for are the people that are already aware of these
So already familiar with property investing or investing in certain asset classes that are maybe considered non-traditional, but they just haven't found a good way for them to invest in it or they might not have all of the capital, the cash,
acquired to invest in those assets. Even if you have £10,000 to invest and you want to invest that in property, that doesn't get you anything in the UK. So what we would like to get across to people is that there is a way for you to
invest in asset class in an easy way and without needing the large amounts of cash that you would have otherwise needed. So I think our typical user is slightly more sophisticated in the sense that they are familiar with different kinds of investments and they're very
aware of the value of investing in alternative assets. But that's maybe not necessarily who will always be our user at the same time. There is an education process that we are carrying out to try and educate the masses on the value that alternative assets bring to everyday investors
portfolio. There's been a lot of coverage recently in the press as well about alternatives to that. Particularly now with public markets, i.e. tech stocks, performing the way they are, investors on the more sophisticated
side are looking at alternatives, but also investors across the spectrum should also be looking at alternatives too. So I think we're a really interesting proposition for quite a large audience, but you know from what we've seen so far there is a certain audience that we certainly resonate a little bit more with at this time.
And out of curiosity, have you already sold any assets through the platform? The platform launched recently, right? Yeah. So we did our first test in the summer. So that was only open to a small subset of invite-only users. So we did that in July.
of 2022. So that was a property just outside Manchester in the United Kingdom and we successfully tokenized that house so we put that investment on blockchain and we were the crown of being the first platform, the first people to have ever tokenized
a house in the UK which we're really proud of and yeah we've done that all on our round which is which is fantastic. So we followed that with a public launch in November of last year so towards the end of last year and that was a tiny house so our concept for our launch
was starting small and so we brought a tiny house to the platform and for those of you that don't know, a tiny house is literally as the name suggests, it is a smaller house, it is designed to be able to be moved from a different location to different location and currently it's placed in
the Peat District which is a wonderful national park in the United Kingdom and so that cabin is there as a short term let for people to come and stay in and the rental income that comes from that tiny house is then distributed to the investors that participated in in that asset.
I'm sorry, my connection glitched a little bit, but this fantastic. And I actually, I am surprised because I did not know that you were possible for the tokenization of the first house in the UK. And I think this follows suit closely to what lofty has been doing in the United States right because I believe, if I'm mistaken, they're also the first to tokenize the house over there.
And we're finding it out because most of them were done on the algorithm rails, which of course, they'll just keep proving day after day that we are a fantastic blockchain for real world solutions. But we all know that pulling these feats are complicated, right? That is a lot of regulation, a lot of rat tape, a lot of hoops that are pretty
to show you how to jump to be able to do this. So it probably speaks to the quality of your team. And you have a fantastic background. You have already spoken about. But can you share a little bit about the team that you have that control out to be able to achieve this in such a short time? Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, as you said, the main hurdle, I say one of the main hurdles, for building a platform like this is around the regulatory framework and making sure that that is watertight and it's not just myself and my team that have been responsible for that, but we've also been very fortunate to have in our extended network and
and fantastic advisors and a fantastic council to also help us build a platform to what it is today. In terms of our immediate team, we're a team of six primarily based out of London here in London. So there's myself, our head of marketing, Elle, who is
of a FinTech background herself and was very experienced in growing and scaling both B2B and B2B and B2C businesses. So really lucky to have her on board. Jordan is our COO. He was previously at Morgan Stanley working alongside
me so very experienced in financial structuring, in regulation and also in risk management as well, so really lucky to have him on board. And then completing the team in London, we have Joseph, who is our lead engineer and Emily, who is our marketing intern. And then we do have a head in the US
So Nick is head of our partnerships and he's got fantastic experience in partnership marketing and particularly in the FinTech space. So great to have him on board helping us make some really interesting partnerships which would urge everyone in the community to look out for as we as we go forward in 2023.
You have a team of heavy hitters, man. Congratulations on putting all this bright minds together. I cannot wait to see what you guys got. I have several more questions for you, but I just want to give a reminder to the Alga fan that is already used to this Twitter space. Of course, we always love to, you know, give you the space to ask questions.
questions for Matt from this discussion, anything that you're curious about, you won't even expand on our Ask a Followed Question, just hit the Mike Request button. It's going to be a pleasure to bring you to the speaker board so you can ask your questions directly to Matt. Matt, a couple minutes ago, you touched on a point that the book is a very crucial point to not only control all the book,
the entire blockchain industry, which is education. Teaching people how to not only use technology when talking about it, for example, algorithm, but how to understand what you're building, how do you establish trust, how do you explain the differences between the regular and the alternative assets and different asset classes, and how even though you're selling things that
people are not used to buy, they're still regulated, they're still safe. I recently saw that you launched a new blog on the website, called The Fine Print. What kind of materials can you expect to see there moving forward and how that's going to play a role in the educational materials that you're creating? Of course, outside the blog as well, I'm just curious to
allow opportunities that is just not possible in the past and in general of course we're platform as well. I mean education is really important to us and I think when you're bringing something that is very new in many ways
to the public education naturally comes as a part of that. So not only do we need to educate people on what exactly alternative assets are and what that can look like, but we also need to educate on the way that we open up alternative assets to people i.e. through
blockchain. And so there are a few, I guess, learning cabs that people have to go through in order to really understand and get comfortable with with others as a platform and the concept. So the fine print is part of that education process for us and part of that
education series. So it's a written blog where there is people in the team will cover a particular topic whether that is something as simple as what is an alternative asset or what is fractional investment to maybe dive in a bit deeper into
a particular asset class, for example, what a green energy investment would look like and how you would get your money back or how you would get some sort of return on that kind of investment or what is generally happening in the alternative space. I think another really
important point is how we actually use blockchain and it's very easy for people to say we're built on blockchain and we use our grand or another blockchain but actually how do you use it and I think that is a question that is on a lot of people's minds and so we address all
of this in the blog, it will be a weekly series with, as I said, various people in the team contributing. And if you're more interested in a more interactive experience as well, we are also introducing a video series to go alongside that
that is called breakdown. So we'll have some videos done by ourselves and some contributors as well to, again, try and educate people and try and get the message of what all types of assets are out there and answer questions that people might have to
Thank you for sharing this video.
But what do you have store in 2020 like what's coming up for this year? What are the next milestones for each? Yeah, it's a really big year for us. I think 2022 was really focused on proving concepts. You know, this was something that many people didn't think was possible.
And we've proven that it is possible that we've been able to do it in a really incredible way. And so we're really excited to roll this product out further, whether that is to new jurisdictions, whether that is with new asset classes or whether that's with new
new product features as well. So I guess to give a bit of a sneak peek on next asset that will launch on the platform is a green energy project. It's really fascinating. It takes, it's basically an infrastructure investment. So you'd be investing in technology that takes the heat from crypto
or computer power and uses that waste heat to heat swimming pools to heat hotels to heat flats and that infrastructure generates a return which is passed on to our investors. So it's a slightly different kind of investment but something that is super topical at the moment with the energy crisis and the global
crisis and something that we really want to kind of show the power and that alternative and the science investments can have. I think from a product perspective we're really excited about some of the new features we bring into the platform and our tech team are doing a great job of bringing
these ideas and these concepts to life. So later on this year we'll look to have what's essentially a secondary marketplace. So then you where users will be able to buy and sell tokens, their digital shares on a secondary market.
So really excited to bring that to life. It's a key concept when we talk about fractionalization and the use of blockchain. How does that open up a secondary market and how does that potentially improve liquidity options? So that is a really big, big product development for us and we can't wait for people to see what we've built there.
Yeah, this is fantastic. I can now wait for you guys to launch the secondary market, but just going back to the actual product that you were about to launch very soon about the renewable energy. Is there anything more that you can share with us? Where is it located? What kind of source it is? Just like the information about the project itself.
because it resonates very well with our own disposition of being extremely energy efficient chain, we're carbon, basically carbon neutral moving towards being a carbon negative chain. So I guess it would be nice for the other community to know a large, what kind of energy solution is coming up on the platform. Yeah, this is something that's really close to
to our hearts as well and it was again part of the reason why we opted to use Algo Round in the first place was you know Climbing Investing and Sustainable Investing is really important and so this this asset that we're bringing to the platform is is part of that way
and part of that, you know, phase the approach to our asset selection where we want to bring the asset classes that people are interested in investing in but also have a positive impact on the world at the same time. So this particular piece of kit, this infrastructure, is installed
in a swimming pool in the south of England. So it is installed at a leisure centre that has a swimming pool and that leisure centre might have had to close if they couldn't solve for their heating problems. So simply too expensive to run this swimming pool.
in that leisure centre. And so our asset partners, the folks who are behind the actual technology and the infrastructure itself, were able to solve those problems by installing this infrastructure. And what's really interesting about this particular investment is, you know,
going forward what we'll be able to do is will allow communities, local communities to invest in infrastructure that saves and helps to support their local swimming pools, their community centres. And so not only do they get to
help with saving and supporting those venues, but they'll also get a return on that investment at the same time as well. So, really interesting concept of community participation, for good investing while also making a really strong return at the same time.
Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that matter. Appreciate it. And look forward, you mentioned a lot of your focus is on residential real estate and large. But aside from real estate, what do you think might be in the pipeline of our control out in 2023 in terms of like, you know, other types of assets?
Yeah, so we're ultimately an asset agnostic platform. So we bring assets to the platform that people are interested in investing in. So a lot of it is us talking to users, talking to the community and understanding what they want to see on the platform. You know, we are able to bring all kinds of assets.
So that people can invest in them, but ultimately we want to bring what is most interesting and so far property real estate is definitely the most interesting to our audience and has the broadest appeal. And I think part of that is because again when we look at
about and talk about education. Property is also something that people generally are very familiar with. They're very familiar with why property is a good investment in many instances, how you would generate a return from property at the same time.
education curve isn't a steep for when you're bringing property to the platform. So we definitely want to bring a lot more real estate projects to control old in 2023. We see a lot of demand for it. We want to bring different regions of the UK to life as well.
So we'll do properties in London, we'll do some of the major cities, some of the commuter sounds. And so, yeah, we're really excited about property in particular in 2023. And I think a lot of people might look at the property market in the UK and globally and think about some of the problems.
You know, with house prices, but we actually think it's quite an interesting time and to be cash buyer in this market. So, you know, there's great opportunities out there and we're working with our asset suppliers to provide the most interesting opportunities to our customers and our users.
Fantastic! Thanks Matt, appreciate that. And just as a quick reminder for the Algo fan because I'm seeing a lot of very very familiar faces here in the audience today. If you have any questions or curious about anything about, oh no, what Matt and the team are building, just hit the mic request button right now. It's gonna be a pleasure to bring you to the speaker board so you can ask for questions directly, right? Do not be shy.
And Matt, as we move forward in our conversation, probably to the next big topic of discussion is, of course, financial inclusion, right? So you are bringing the possibility of basically any person as long as they go to the process of KYC to be in terms of, you know, being okay with writing
But you're basically allowing everyday people, ordinary people to have access to things that they would never have done before. I'm curious to hear from you why are you so passionate about alternatives, to bring it to the masses. What is the same important? Either portfolio, diversification, or the
or finish inclusion, just want to hear a vision of that. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what's also important to remember is that, you know, it really depends on the asset class as well. So when we talk about opening up these asset classes, it's not like we want to make something
like emerging market, credit investments available to, you know, mass retail investors. That's not what we're looking to do, you know, that's not really, that's quite a complicated investment and that's probably not appropriate for the mass market. What we're trying to do is, you know, for certain, for certain users,
for certain qualified users that want to access alternative investments where that is, you know, property or otherwise, once they've gone through a verification process with us and we've categorized them as a user, we're able to show them, you know, appropriate investments for them. And so we do have
have a fairly sophisticated process to sort out what kind of investments are most suitable and that's really important to us and how we operate in this regulated environment. But again, when we talk about alternatives, it is fairly broad. So property is
is a big focus for us and you know why shouldn't people be able to invest in property you know people buy their own homes so why shouldn't you be able to invest a smaller amount into house and I think when you look at diversification so splitting your investment so I think
I think that is a really powerful concept and really important use case of fractional investments and low investments. So, you know, with diversification, investors will typically be able to lower the risk profile of their overall investments. So rather than, you know,
even if I had a hundred thousand pounds, rather than putting that all into one property through control, you might be able to direct that into different properties in different areas and therefore reduce your overall risk of something happening in one area or happening to one property.
When we think about the power that alternative fractional investments have, it is finding the right investments for people that they would typically have been able to access otherwise, but we're just giving them a better way of doing that, a better user experience and more effective way of doing that.
This is super exciting man. Thank you for sharing. And I got a question for you because in the beginning talk about you know you gave lots of different options of what or no alternative assets could look like. And do you envision yourselves by you know while making available
as one of the things that is physical in a sense that it's like a jewelry, a diamond, a watch or something that you know it's not a house they can be rented and then the part of the fractional owners split the rent, anything else that you think potentially could potentially be
you come and listen to the buy for? Absolutely. I mean collectibles which would include assets like watches are a really interesting space. There's a lot of demand for investing in collectibles and when you look at the watch market and how that's performed
you know, the last decade or so, it's certainly a really interesting asset class. I guess as we mentioned before, we do respond to where users have demand and where users have appetite and we see the collectible market as fairly volatile
from a demand perspective and that's also reflected in in the price movements of collectibles. So ultimately it depends on what I use the looking for if watches are something that we've got a lot of demand for and we think you know
is a really interesting moment for people to invest in watches then absolutely will look to bring that to the platform. I think, you know, what's really great about ISA's our flexibility, we operate what's what we like to call a container model so we can theoretically load anything into that container, whether that's whiskey casks or
watches so really exciting what we can do with it and certainly asset classes that are close to our own hearts as well you know I'm an added watch collector so we'd love to see watches on the platform at some point but yeah we really have to see that that user demand and and response and that
Absolutely, collectibles are super fun, but it comes with an issue that I don't understand in terms of custody, right? Let's say you buy, and I'm going to resonate right now with the geeky side of our all the fame. So let's say you buy this all-fledged black lotus from Magic of the Gathering, or you buy this no-foy with Charizard.
like one of these very iconic collectibles. Would you be responsible for custody? How would that feel like, you know, would you lend it out or rent it out to collections in museums, whatever? Do you have any insights on how that would be done? Sure, there's, I mean, there's a lot of different ways.
that we could do that. So for watches, you could store it in a safety deposit box. You could store it in a secure warehouse. You could have it in custody of a third party and it will be legally registered in the name of some sort of legal entity that we
with them issue the tokens in and that's how we create that legal ownership chain. For something like whiskey for example, they will have to be stored in bonded warehouses in Scotland. So a tightly regulated market and so the way that those particular assets are custody is maybe a little bit
different. So it really depends on the asset class. For collectibles that can be moved and stored in different locations. There are a whole host of options again whether that is with a third party custodian or some sort of secure location.
where space can be rented. They are all options for us when we look at storage. But control out ourselves, we wouldn't cost the assets for clients. That's not what we do. We are more of a facilitator of the transaction. Typically,
we work with what we call asset partners. So these are companies that are already selling these assets as investments today and they will normally take care of the custody arrangements and the storage of those assets on behalf of the investors.
Fantastic, thanks for sharing that and you know just one final reminder for the Algo family if you have any questions just hit the mic request button right now. No, we're gonna split this speaker board, okay, and Matt I'm already winning down on my questions for you. I mean you're so quick man. I've thrown you dozens dozens of questions already and I loved it all but I have a curiosity now
If you can go back to algorithm a little bit, I'm just curious as to what part of the operations actually happen on chain. For example, is every new asset like that you put up for sale? Is it like an NFT on chain? Every new user automatically has an account like a algorithm wallet or is it only created when they actually buy something?
something, just curious in terms of operations, in terms of like wall rates, transactions, assets that are minted and executed on chain. It's a great question. And again, it's one that we come across quite frequently. So at the moment, we use the blockchain in a fairly light touch way.
And there's certainly a lot more that we want to do with Algorand and bringing more of our operations on chain. That is again part of our road map for 2023. When you look at the actual asset that people will invest in through our platform, it isn't an NFT. So it's not a non
a non-fungible token, it is a security token. So it is essentially the same kind of security that you would or type of asset that you would invest in if you invested in a ship. So what we have created is legally the same as a ship.
there. So it embeds exactly the same rights that you would get if you were investing in a share in a company. So quite easy for people to understand and get their heads around. When we talk about how we actually use blockchain, so I think one of the most powerful use cases that we have
it is actually as a record of ownership. So there are obviously multiple investors into a particular asset and they are the shareholders of that asset. Now what we do is we maintain that register of shareholders on our round and so that is our
record of ownership. So when you think about any company in the world that has their share register, who exactly is invested in that as a company, it has stored somewhere and we do that with the help of Algorand. The other element is
is an element that for non-crypto natives and for those that I'm not familiar with blockchain is really important and maybe takes a little bit of time for them to get their head around and that is the wallet component. So obviously because we are issuing address data assets, ASAs, they need to be stored in
in an algorithm wallet. So through our app users can create their own algorithm wallet or they can import one that they have created elsewhere. And that is where their investments will be custodyed. So it's a self-custody wallet. So users will be in control of their own keys.
And yeah, that is a, I guess an important part of the user experience. We try to integrate that in a certain way in our platform that is really user friendly so that those that are not that familiar with blockchain and crypto will be comfortable. But also with all of the features that you would expect from, from a non-custodial wallet.
Fantastic, Matt. Thanks for sharing. I'm super excited about everything that you and the team are building in Europe. So you know, I have to ask one final question for you today is that are you hiring at the moment? Yeah, not that.
Another good question, we are hiring, so really excited about 2023. We are looking to hire developers, we're looking to hire people in our operations, customer support roles as well.
These aren't public yet, but later on in the year we will be advertising for these positions. So if there's anyone in the community that is interested in these roles, keep an eye out on our LinkedIn and our socials where we'll be advertising these jobs.
Sounds like a plan, man. Please let me know whenever you publish this and I'll help amplify okay? Before we wrap up today, I just want to ask you if there's anything that I didn't hesitate and man I threw you a lot of questions But is there anything that I didn't ask you today that you want to share with the Algo fan before we get going for the day. Yeah, no look. I think
It's a really interesting topic when we talk about alternatives and there's a lot that we can cover and there's a lot that we've probably missed. I think for us we want people in the Agri and Community to interact with us, to try the platform and to give us some feedback at the same time.
time so we can see what what users want and what they what we can be doing better. So if you're in the UK, download our app, it's available on iOS and Android. But if you're outside the UK, sign up to our newsletter, drop us an email, keep in touch with us on social media and let us know what you think.
Excellent sounds like a black Matt. Thank you so much. I truly appreciate your time. You know appreciate the help from the whole team Especially Ellie's probably listening to us right now. Thank you so much for all the help. You know, it's great to make
this happen and I cannot wait to host you and the team again. You know, a few most on the line to see how everything's evolving. I'm truly excited about you gaining distraction in Europe. You know, it's a market that I'm very much
interested to see how it's going to be in the state and mainly here in Latin America. So please keep us posted. I'll be following very closely everything you build and I'm already looking forward to our next conversation. Fantastic. Thanks again Fred and look forward to our next conversation.
Thank you so much. I'll go fam. Thank you very much for tuning in live to our conversation today or questions that we're recording later. And just make sure that you follow Contra out right here on Twitter to make sure that you stay in the loop of the news, right? I'll go fam have a good morning afternoon evening, whatever you are. I'll see you.