We have returned for another exciting Metallicus and friends where we bring our friends from the industry right to the palm of your hand
financial officer and board member Irina Burkun and we all get to have the exciting conversation with Eleanor Terrat, the crypto journalist from Fox Business, you may remember her. She was on Metallica's live last month and you can
find out on all of our podcasting platforms available where you can have an exciting conversation that we've had for over an hour getting to know Eleanor but we have her back and we have her with the team and everybody thank you all so much for hopping on how are you all doing today
Hey, hey, thanks Eric doing great. Thanks Eric. Welcome Elinor. Yeah, it's great great to have you.
Thank you. I can't believe it's been a month since I was on with you guys last. It feels like, you know, just yesterday. That literally feels like a few days ago. It's crazy. It's it's crypto time. I know I guess there's no dull days in crypto, right? So time flies. Yeah, it's this space is just too boring.
for me. Sometimes I get I'm dying from the boredom, you know. Not enough things happening. I know right. Yeah, it's been it's been a while past couple of months, you know, we last year, I think everyone in crypto last year thought it can't possibly
get any crazier right around November right like they couldn't get any crazier than this could it and I feel like we're setting up to see um yeah absolutely the craziest uh period of time that we've ever had in you know 15 or you know 14 years and uh going on 15 years in crypto
because we've seen explosions like Mt. Gox, we've seen exchanges change hands, but we've never seen kind of the mass adoption of crypto and what that might look like and what we're seeing now on the regulatory front and kind of big banks coming in is just that, right?
The American public has spoken, they want this. If it didn't have all this traction, you wouldn't have the White House talking about it. You wouldn't have influencers and journalists talking about it. And here we are. And I think it's going to be a big inflection point this year for crypto.
Yes, no, I agree with you. And I think just what you said, basically, crypto is kind of getting that validated validity right now that like it's kind of being talked about in government, you know, it's it's definitely a hot topic. It's going to be a hot topic in the 2024 election. I think just giving it that, you know, credence that it might not have had about
five or six years ago, necessarily. It's kind of bring it to the forefront. And so yeah, for sure, it's, it's, it's a good thing for the space. It's getting, you know, it's, uh, it's very to the forefront. And I think we're going to see more of that, like you said, um, but it's good. I mean, it's, whether it's, you know, it#
long as it's in the conversation, I think that it's a good thing for sure. You know, this morning when I saw the announcement from Treasury about the risks to defy with money laundering, I kind of, you know, people are getting mad, I say this, I kind of giggle a little bit because I was like, that's exactly what we prepared for, right?
Metallic is we we put digital identity into the DeFi we looked at it right away and we're like when we were building it you know DeFi is the future the centralized world had the centralized exchange world if we got into crypto to build more decentralized systems why are we recreating the old problems and then after over a
decade we keep saying, "Woop, that exchange blew up or that lending platform blew up." When we have the solutions, but then the obvious thing was that, you know, if I'm borrowing on a DeFi platform, I can't borrow or lend to North Korea, right, or sanctioned individual. So we got, and then we can have that tech.
We can have the decentralized identity tech. So Metallicus, you know, I think a few years ago when we started on this path, people were kind of poo-pooing us and saying, "Oh, that's not what crypto is about. It's all about anonymity." And me being a long time crypto guy for over a decade, I can say, "That's not where it started at all."
It was all about self sovereignty and ownership of funds and that you can be your own bank. You've probably heard that statement before. That was where Bitcoin and crypto started with the kind of the libertarian movement, cyberpunk movement, but it wasn't actually about anonymity.
things like that. And I think that that's really, you know, as we're seeing the rise of like Fed now faster payments and things like that, it's great because it creates competition. And then in the crypto space, there's no reason why we can't do all the same controls, anti-money laundering and do it even better than we did it before with the banking world.
Right, and I was gonna say that right so I mean in the report you saw them say the DeFi space caters to cyber criminals thieves scammers and ransomware attackers But you know the same could be said for any technology, right? They can all use the internet as well But are they trying to regulate the internet out of existence? No, I think it's easier for them to use traditional
banks because when they move when the cyber criminals are moving money from one bank to the next, it's very difficult to stop them because there is no transparency like that between banks. So you have one bank calling the next bank and by the time you know bank A calls bank Z, that money's off to Russia, that money's off to some
part of the world where it's not going to get clawed back or whatever. So crypto. Well, there's also a human element to it. A banker can make a decision on a certain transaction while the protocol will always make the decision that's built into the protocol. And do you want to trust the human and humans can
be influenced while protocols cannot. I think that's what a lot of people don't understand. Yeah, you can use both of these systems to do bad things, but one of them is actually programmed and the other one has a human element. Which one do you trust? Yeah, and I feel like it's not really
hitting home with the government, right? Everybody in government right now seems to think that, you know, crypto is bad. It's used for money laundering. It's just used by bad actors. But at the end of the day, and then they say, you know, well, we, we, it's untraceable, right? Like we can't, you know, money laundering, but, but the banks, it's untraceable#
You have a trail you have a money trail and you can see what's going on so I think that hasn't really hit home yet I feel like people are still kind of they have this idea that crypto is this like you know Digital anomaly that we can't figure out but actually you know it's very clear Yeah, it's it's interesting because in every what to
You know in every scenario crypto and blockchain has really been a truth litmus test right when you look at you know what governments in the world are banning crypto right if a government is banning crypto let's see who do we have we've got Russia China Nigeria basically all the most corrupt
you know, nations that have issues with totalitarianism and free, there is no, there's further thing from free speech, right? And so I look at like crypto being received positively by the government or at least in a way that's accepted that this is part of the internet as more of the free world.
and then the countries that are banning it, the opposite. And same thing with the, even in the industry, these players who did the CFI lending that exploded, it just became obvious over time because all that information was on chain researchers could say, "Hey, Blockwise Insolvents or FTXs and
We can see that on chain. You know, unfortunately we didn't have that luxury in you know pre 2008 in the banking world right no one really knew it until it was too late until it was you know the stock the bank stocks are tanking or other things like that. So I think that crypto is just this incredible super powerful tool that can
be used for great good or a great evil, but at the end of the day it also exposes corruption, transparency, and for those players that try to play pretend banking with crypto and then crashed and burned, there's a solution, defy collateralized lending and responsibility.
but we didn't have to create all these crazy systems that just are replicating the old system. The new system is definitely decentralized, definitely defy, and you know, surprise. We can have identity and we can have compliance better than we ever had it before with the traditional finance world.
Yeah, and you make a great point as well. The countries that are banning crypto, the China, the North Korea, the Russia's. There are the ones who don't necessarily have this democratic freedom that we have in the US. There are more dictatorships, there are more, it's a lot different than it is in the US. There are the ones banning it.
the US really want to follow that path. They want to go down the path of the Russians and the China's and not have this technology available to its people. It's a democratic technology, as you just said. So I think you make a great point there. It's kind of a dangerous path that we're kind of going down at this point. I feel like with the regulatory stuff, because
You know, with all these with all these bands all these long enforcement actions, it's gonna it's gonna really force people to go offshore. I think we talked about that last time I was on. You know, people are already moving, they're making their moves to banks overseas, setting up, you know, jurisdictions elsewhere. It's it's really sad to see, but I think, you know, that's
It's a shame, right? Because we don't necessarily want to be like those, you know, competitors that we have overseas that aren't, you know, democracy friendly. It's a bit scary to see, I think. I think it's time for America to have its kind of Boston Tea Party in 2023. It's time to dump the tea in the harbor.
because we need to, and what I mean by that is we need to, you know, if you really like crypto, it's time to write your elected representatives, it's time to self-custody your own crypto, it's time to really speak up and to get active and get involved. And I think that that's, you know, that
That's where we need to be right now. We need to really, really as Americans say, this is what we want, this is the direction that we're going. And we live in a democracy that I think the government recognizes that there is some value in crypto, but unfortunately under this administration, I think they have really
viewed it as a threat to the dollar or to banking when it actually can be this incredible renaissance for technology in the United States. It makes sense that it would happen in Silicon Valley and that we would get traction here in California and that's
what's happening, but I think it's time that we definitely as Americans put our foot down and say enough is enough. We don't, we will tolerate CBDC, but we're not going to tolerate being forced into what we can buy and sell, especially when it comes to Bitcoin, especially crypto.
people should have that freedom of choice. And I think it's time also that that we start to get forward thinking regulations so we can grow industry here in the United States. Because if we lose this, I predict that the United States would be if we are, you know, the kings of software, we're losing blockchain and crypto in the future, that's going to be a significant portion
of web technology. Call it 20-30% of web technology is going to be based around blockchain in the future. And we lose that, then we lose Silicon Valley basically. Right. And I think Coinbase and the digital currency traders alliance, they're both doing the initiatives where they're helping people reach out to their
members of Congress to say, hey, you know, this is technology we use, we want it to stay. How do we, you know, how do we, how do we get this through, you know, Congress, how do we make some comprehensive laws? How do we reverse the SEC's kind of attitude towards this? So I think it's very, yeah, it's down to the people for sure, you know, the election in
2024, I guess that's going to be pretty, it'll be pretty telling. I think Coinbase did come out and say they were backing crypto-friendly candidates. So that'll be, that'll be interesting. I feel like, you know, that every election has its kind of theme. And I feel like crypto is going to be a big one in 2024.
I think it's also going to show who is educated about which part of crypto because you can say the word crypto and blockchain and the lot of different definitions come out. And even if somebody has hesitations towards the use of crypto or blockchain, if they can come out with an educated reason or an educated
way, you know, to relay that, I think that's also going to be important. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I feel like some lawmakers are kind of just hopping on the bandwagon, you know what I mean? Like, exactly. That's exactly what I'm getting at. Yeah, it's bad. Okay, crypto's bad. Why? Well, I don't even know what it is. Exactly.
There are some aspects that can be argued either direction and if somebody has a very good argument that they've researched, I think that's going to come forward more than just people saying it's bad. Exactly. Or people saying it's good, but not really knowing too much about it. There's some who I feel might be, they say, it's the
the stuff on Twitter like oh you know there's like the crypto twitter space and all these people you know we'll vote for me if I'm crypto friendly but but we really need the people who are you know understanding of crypto with the blockchain and all the technology that comes with it as well and I think you make a great point that it will come out you know we'll see who's kind of in the know but you know you know
What's funny that kind of reminds me, there were a couple of politicians or candidates who were running for different things. They had reached out and started tweeting, "I love blockchain. I love crypto." And then they would reach out to us and say, "Hey, I said I love blockchain. Can you donate to my campaign?"
We didn't really engage with any of them, but I remember there was one that kept talking about it and we said, "I don't think she really knows what that is. I think she just wants the buzzwords of crypto and hopefully..." And then she said, "Oh, so-and-so blockchain set up a wallet for me. So now you can send me donations here and do even know how to
them in. We want to see action before focus on donations. What are the politicians who are the politicians that are out there that deserve these donations because they're actively authoring bills or sponsoring bills or speaking out publicly
about it. And like I look at Senator Tumey, I look at Lomis, I look at, you know, Emmer, and like, wow, they're doing such great work, you know, in Congress and the Senate and pushing things forward, pro Bitcoin, pro blockchain. And, you know, realistically, we need more
We need more of that and less like talk and sadly I think that in the US under this administration it's moving towards this very anti crypto rhetoric like what you saw with Elizabeth Warren and I think it's just completely wrong. It's like saying it's like 1997 and saying we
We need to get all these tech companies out of the United States before they create this internet thing. It's going to be very bad for our economy. And then, you know, Flash Forward 20 years, it's like it's a substantial portion of our economy. Right? So I think that if you ignore and think about Bitcoin, blockchain,
crypto in general is its Pandora's box. You can't close the box. You can't say, "Oh, well, let's just ban it." Because then in that case, it's the same thing as China. You're going to have to firewall the internet. And then at that point, you're really deciding what people have access to, what they see and read, and it becomes very, very scary.
Yeah, I just wonder what it's going to take. Like, is it going to take the 2024 election? Are we going to see some kind of regulation? Are we not regulation? Some kind of like framework for, you know, like a law, law, regulation, you know what I'm saying? Regulation. Like, is that going to happen in 2024? Are we going to wait till 2025? Like, there has to be some
framework and I just wonder how long that's going to take and I feel like FTX really unsambring would free really just kind of put a stopper in that because you know there were all these bills right like the senate was coming up with something last year the house they had their own crypto related bills and they were looking to pass laws but then sbf has
and it kind of just chilled. So I wonder, you know, how long it really is going to take and like you said, it's going to be a substantial part of the economy. One day, I see probably like 20 years from now, it's going to be, you know, booming, but, but, you know, how long are we going to wait? Can we afford to wait that long? I have a prediction around this. I know everyone loves#
You know as a kid, you know how do we learn when you were a kid how did you learn that the stove was hot or not to touch the electrical outlet? Hopefully, you know mom or dad, you know Explained it and then you didn't do it, but a lot of kids are gonna touch the stuff right they're gonna get a little burn and then you go oh man and so as humans we love
There's nothing like negative reinforcement to ensure that you don't do something again. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to get burned. And so in crypto, I think that you have, I frequently call it like sports teams. Different blockchains are like different sports teams. And you may have the Red Sox in New York Yankees.
where you have maybe Bitcoin and Ethereum. They're at each other, the maximalists are at each other's throats. What it's going to take is a really big bad event where let's say theoretically, in exchange, this 90% of all the spot markets does a lot of bad things. A lot of
not good, not compliant things, and then explodes in an epic fashion, and it hurts everyone, just like FTX, right? But imagine bigger, right? And like an event that is bigger than FTX where people really get burned, enough for these sports teams to come together and say, you know what, we're all in the MLB.
here. We're all playing baseball here. We should be pro baseball. We shouldn't be fighting like we do. We may be different teams, but we want our right to play ball and we want our right for the spectators. We want our right for everyone to be a part of this if they want to be. And I think it's going to take a big event, you know, hypothetically
like a really large exchange exploding and everybody gets burned by it and says you know what that's it we need to come together we need to we need to lobby for the right bill what I learned about bills too and in crypto bills I guess or I didn't know much about how a bill is written a
few years ago or how it gets to Congress and how it gets voted on. It's very political and what you would think is supposed to be ethically or morally right is not really what lands to be voted in Washington, unfortunately. There's all of these strange bedfellows
they call them and different kind of backdoor deals that have a bill arriving with what they call pork in it, which are like extra added things, which are backdoor deals to get this bill, you know, onto the main stage. And so what I've seen is all of the crypto bills have actually been very one-sided or lopsided towards the people
that are sponsoring them, the interested sponsoring them. I put a bill together in 2020 and got it sponsored called the cryptocurrency at 2020 and it was a great bill. It was very short. What I think sucks about some of these bills is like a 70 page bill and it's clear that even the representatives are probably not even reading through the
big right and that was like SPFs bill right which was going to kind of like really neuter D5 and pump up his FTX exchange and you know token taxonomy act and some of these other bills that's like a pro ripple bill or whatever when I went to go do the cryptocurrency act 2020 I had you know ripples
Facebook, other lobbyists saying, "Put this in, do this, do that." And I thought, "Well, that doesn't make any sense because it doesn't actually make any sense." So I think the problem we have here is that we're all at each other's throats. There's different teams. Everybody has these political interests. And if we could just, as an industry, agree on some basic principles of
And so, you know, when once we get to the end of the day, we're going to be able to do a lot of things, and we're going to be able to do a lot of things, and we're going to be able to do a lot of things, and we're going to be able to do a lot of things, and we're going to be able to do a lot of things, and we're going to be able to do a#
get burned really bad, like a large industry player explodes and hurts the liquidity of spot markets and hurts our reputation so badly that we say, "Okay, enough is enough, we have to get together." And I'm seeing the very beginning of this with Coinbase, I had already been telling, you know, it's users to write their representatives, but I think that you're going to see
the more crypto companies, exchanges, blockchains, web3 teams, whatever it is around the space coming together and starting to push for just at least something basic, but it's going to take all of us getting burned together sadly and I've been warning about this for years but we're finally here and we're going to get burned
And once we get burned, then everyone will say, oh, you know what? Maybe we should come together. So you think there's going to be something worse than FTX and Teriluna? That's a scary thought, Marshall. Oh, oh, well, I probably about 20 times worse. I would say. Great. Well, yeah, like you said,
It's coming. It's coming. Yeah. You learn from the bad things, right? In life, you make changes and you learn from the bad things. So I guess, yes, that. Well, I mean, I think some people don't learn. I mean, we're, you know, I always go back to this, you know, who invested in FTX and what kind of do diligence did they do? And those people
have learned. I'm seeing deals being negotiated and done on exactly the same level of due diligence that was done for FTX on FTX. And you had like a game doing that too. You had the Cavanolearies of the world and the Anthony Scaremucci's. They were all, you know, scoyas.
Yeah, Sequoia, like, yeah, some of the biggest names in the industry were, you know, didn't do their due diligence and that's kind of mind-blowing. Well, there is also smaller ones that Kip saying it's okay Sequoia did the due diligence. So there are deals that I'm seeing happening right now that the funds are literally using the same excuse.
And maybe maybe it's going to take the venture space cleaning up as well, right? Like, you know, venture space for crypto from like 2017 onwards was really not. I don't think was really supporting the space like it should have been. It was focused on what I would call short
term cash grab, different things like this. And this is why you have like the telegram, ICO being restricted and different things like that. You know, the emphasis was on all the wrong things. You know, over the past couple years, you know, who should have been getting like a lot of funding and focus is like the digital identity start, start of doing digital identity, start of doing, you know,
non-custodial wallets and technology around that. But instead we went the opposite way because unfortunately a lot of these founders that are now, you know, exploded and so forth, they lied. They just blatantly lied, right? They conflated DeFi with CFI, you know, you have machines he's saying, you know, unbank yourself, and this is DeFi, okay.
Okay, it's not DeFi. It's CFi. There's a guy behind this thing making all decisions and making all the wrong decisions and then tricking people between the nomenclature of DeFi and CFi and then you have, you know, Adventure Capital that, you know, once a snowball gets going, it's like, well, we believe these lies now because these lies are backed by all these other guys
who are saying, you know, these lies are fine. And what's scary and frustrating to someone like myself and to arena is like watching this and saying, wow, the more we perpetuate this, the harder and bigger we're going to fall, right? In terms of the public stage and forum and how people view crypto, because if these are our leaders that are, for example,
having a stablecoin war, depagging stablecoins and causing bank runs, well then we all look really really bad don't we right? So we really have to kind of stealth police, we have to stand up and say you know what what is the right direction and I think that there are there's two types of there's multiple types of
But two real major buckets that I would say in crypto. There's the people that came here on the vision and the idealism and really love this idea of a free open internet and digital economies. And there are people that came to basically grift and get as much money as they can for themselves, but they don't care what direction this space takes. They don't
care if it blows up in five years from now, as long as within that five years they can walk out with their millions or whatever, they don't care. And so we need to get rid of that other portion. We need to not let that other portion represent us. And unfortunately that other portion for the past few years has been representing us. And now it's coming home to Roost. And the SPF
and the Luna and the Celsius and all that stuff became apparent and there's more. I hate to break it, but there's more coming. And I think that now is the time before it explodes that we can start to say, "KYC is good. We can do decentralized identity. We want to work with the banking system. We want to have compliant systems."
We shouldn't run in the opposite direction because if we run in the opposite direction, say we're not complying with any of these rules or laws and crypto is here to break all these laws and there's nothing you can do about it. But we'll find out very quickly that we're going to get a swift, bad regulatory reaction and we are going to send all the opportunity overseas and then when it comes back
to the U.S. the U.S. is going to be have completely missed the boat on all this opportunity. And I think it's going to really, it, San Francisco from 2020 when COVID hit, it was like, it was like decimated. Everyone moved out and went to Florida and Texas and other places. And this would be just kind of like,
I don't know. The icing on the cake for something like that. If we don't get this right, then I could see a lot of the tech kind of flowing out. And what happened with SBB really was in one way it was a banking failure. But in another
The other way, it was a stable coin design that was not really scalable, the way that it was set up, and then you have these warring factions fighting over stable coins, and we can't have that. If two large stable coin players want to do it out, they shouldn't be duking it out in a public forum.
way to do what's best for the industry. But sadly, you know, this kind of attitude, I think, has really dampened our space. And I hate to be doom and gloom, but I do feel that we have to like crypto has to run into a big wall again. And it's just inevitable. And when it does, I
think we're going to get big banks, we're going to get heavy-handed regulation. And I just hope that as an industry before that heavy-handed regulation comes in, we can speak up and say what we really stand for. And we can really be heard before the explosion happens. So our regulators, policymakers can say, there are good people here, right? And they were saying this long before this thing exploded.
Yeah, yeah, couldn't have said it better myself. I quick I want to get your opinion on this. Why is Elon Musk putting the Dogecoin logo on Twitter? What is he doing with Dogecoin? So I'm close to this. I work inside the Dogecoin foundation on the board.
with the Dogecoin team. You know Doge is an anomaly, right? It was a joke made by Jackson Palmer, Billy Marcus and Christine Rick's late December 2013. Jackson thought Bitcoin was silly so he made the dog on the coin and it took off and exploded.
You know and Elon is he loves memes right so we know this we know he loves memes he loves memes so much he went out and bought a 40 billion for Twitter right? And Twitter has become you know quite the place to be I think that you on I can't speak for him, but I personally think that he um he's very
idealistic about the future. He wants to go to Mars. He wants to have better news and free speech and things like that. So, like Dogecoin is the ultimate joke of money. Money is in a weird spot right now, right, with the way that Central Banks have managed some of the risks.
they're doing the best they can, but we're kind of built on this system that's struggling. And so Dogecoin is this funny brand, funny meme. It's a life of its own. So you'll notice it's not just you on. Dominoes, old spice, everybody, Dominoes just did Dogemanos.
It's like a cultural phenomenon and it's also currency and he's been talking about it for a while because Bitcoin I think I like Dogecoin for the same reasons Elon does Bitcoin's cool, but it's just two times it can be too much is too like some sometimes
Sometimes the community can focus too much on maximalism or the financial aspect when the whole point of crypto in my opinion is for people to be able to easily access to have fun, play around, and what's more fun than a dog on a coin. Also, the inflation schedule is higher. People didn't think that at 5 billion
Doge of Year, this would work, it gradually becomes less and less, but it has a really good inflation schedule for the miners for the way that it's built. And yeah, just an awesome meme. He had been joking about it for a while. He did his SNL thing. He's a fan like I am. I don't know, it's just Doge is a phenomenon. Kabozo.
So you can't, it's hard to explain in words why you would do it, it's just fun. And it's also, you know, Dogecoin also just has one of the most viral, amazing communities of all time. It really started on Reddit and it blew up so quickly that it got the founder at the time, it got Alexis Ohani and the founders that
I did a panel with him in 2014 you can look it up on YouTube and they're like you know this Jewish coin thing it's really taking up. It's only a few months old but at that time it had you know it becomes such a critical part of Reddit's culture and now I think it's just part of Internet meme culture. It's the money of Internet memes and I think Twitter is going to become a pain.
payments app, that's very obvious to me. It's like a super app payments app. It would make sense that Dogecoin would be part of the, if all the memes live on Twitter and this thing's going to become a payments app, well, wouldn't you want the currency of memes? That's what I think he's doing. I love it. I'm going to get a lot of heat for saying this.
but I'm a cat person if anybody follows me on social media I post my cat all the time so I don't know if someone comes up with I think there is a cat coin right there but it's not there's one of our followers created one but
Well, we're starting to get caught up on time and this has been such an intense and figurating conversation. To everybody that's at the edge of their seats, I hope you didn't fall down because I did.
This has been such a pleasure. We might have to do more of these but Eleanor it's been such a pleasure having you on it's been Eleanor Terra from the crypto journalist from Fox business once again Marshall Hainer the co-founder of Metallgist and CEO of Metallgist along with CFO
and board member, Irina Burkhan. My name is Eric, it's been such an absolute pleasure. Everybody that's listening on YouTube, you can follow us @wearemetallicis and everybody that's on the Twitter spaces going over to YouTube. This is gonna be live over there so like, comment, subscribe,
Do all of it but in the meantime it's been such a pleasure having you all today and we will see you all on the next one. You all have a great rest of your day. Thank you all so much for joining it. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Eleanor. Thanks, Eric. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye.