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TCR Crypto Pulse LIVE
Recorded: April 23, 2025 Duration: 1:00:21Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, industry leaders explored the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency regulation, the struggles of Ethereum ETFs, and the innovative pivot of the Secret Network towards confidential AI infrastructure. With the SEC's new leadership promising clarity, the conversation also touched on the importance of partnerships in fostering decentralized AI solutions and the ongoing challenges faced by crypto projects in the U.S. regulatory environment.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello and good evening everyone.
Can I please request our host to kindly make CryptoRidge the speaker?
If you can please request to be the speaker, CryptoRidge. We also have another really
interesting guest joining us today from Secret Network, that is Lisa Loud. So whenever she
joins, I'd once again request the host to kindly make her speaker and as we wait for everyone to join in
we will go over a few news that ruled the market over the last week
hi crypto rich hello l, very good evening.
I'd request you guys to please request to be the speaker on the show while we wait for
more people to join. Thank you. All right, lovely.
Hi, Lisa.
We are super excited to have you on the CoinRepublics podcast today.
Hello.
Thanks for inviting me. It's lovely today. Hello. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
It's lovely to have you. And we'll soon have Crypto Rich as well speaking. I think he is
driving right now, but he'll soon be up. And as usual, Crypto Rich is the host of these weekly
episodes that we do on the Coin Republic. The format of the show remains the same. We'll go ahead with a few
pieces of news that ruled the market in the last week before we dive into a deep conversation with
our guest hosted by Crypto Rich himself. Now, without further ado, I would go ahead and talk
about a few news pieces that I thought were really important over the last week or so.
that I thought were really important over the last week or so.
So good evening and welcome back to Crypto Unpacked,
where we will dive into today's and last week's top stories
that shaped the digital asset landscape,
from regulatory shifts to ETF struggles
and a turbulent first quarter that tested crypto's resilience.
The first news is SEC's new era, which is
definitely going for clarity over chaos. The US Securities and Exchange Commission
is ushering a new chapter under Chairman Paul Atkins, who vowed during his swearing-in this
week to prioritize a rational, coherent framework for digital assets.
A top priority of my chairmanship will be to provide a firm regulatory foundation for crypto,
Atkins declared, signaling a stark departure from the SEC's contentious approach under former Chair Gary Gensler. A long-time crypto advocate and former Bush
era SEC commissioner, Atkin brings bipartisan credibility. Under his leadership, the SEC
has already launched a crypto task force to hash out rules through industry roundtables.
The shift could end years if regulatory ambiguity, fostering innovation while also
protecting investors, which is a balance that critics say Gary Gensler's SEC failed to strike.
Now, why it matters?
Because institutional confidence hinges on clear rules.
Atkins advised, he has already advised Trump's economic team, suggesting crypto may
play a key role in 2025 policy agendas. Second up, we have the not-so-positive news of
Ether ETFs floundering as Bitcoin dominates. While Bitcoin ETFs thrive, their Ethereum counterparts are flailing.
Spot ETFs hit a grim milestone this week, recording an all-time low of 4.57 billion in AUM since the launch.
Around 1.1 billion fled ETFs over seven weeks, while Bitcoin ETFs did well by its digital gold narrative, retaining
inflows despite the volatility. Now, the problem here is, well, ETH's value proposition, which is
a blend of network utility and speculative tokenomics, is hard to sell to institutions.
The SEC's recent ban on staking rewards for ETFs stripped ETH of a
key yield advantage. Meanwhile, the market is flooded with new ETFs for sole XRP Litecoin,
which risks splintering institutional capital. Altcoin ETFs may struggle to gain traction,
capital. Altcoin ETFs may struggle to gain traction is what a lot of analysts are warning.
However, critical masks, without critical masks, they'll remain a niche product is what a lot of
people in the space are still speculating. Moving on, we have a quick update on the Q1 stats from the DEFI space. Q1 2025 was a quarter of contradictions.
The year began with optimism but unraveled into macro chaos, trade wars, tariff threats and
a flight to safety saw crypto's total market cap plunge by almost 18.6% to 2.8 trillion at as we speak.
Now, some of the key trends were that DeFi TVL crashed by 27.5% driven by its 46% price
collapse to around 1800.
And I see Crypto Rich is back.
Welcome back to the space
oops wait a minute hello hi veroni hi lisa thank you so much hello
okay uh veroni thank you so much for those news items. And thank you to The Coin Republic, thecoinrepublic.com for hosting this.
And I recommend you go check out their website to keep up to date with what's happening in the crypto world.
And before I introduce my fabulous guest, I just want to say that don't take anything that I say on this space or any other, I don't know internet thing that you listen to as investment
advice none of this is of this is investment advice do your own due diligence check everything
out okay we're just sharing news and information and occasionally our opinions all right Lisa
Lisa thank you so much for making yourself available.
You are the Secret Network Foundation.
And I really appreciate you taking the time out to be here. And you have been on my channel a few times.
And full disclosure, I have been holding Secret Tokens, SCRT, since 2018.
And I've featured Secret Network on my channel a few times, not enough times,
but there you go. All right, Lisa, please introduce yourself.
Hi, I'm Lisa Loud. I'm the Executive Director of the Secret Network Foundation. We are working
to bring, I mean, it's hard to say the history and the present, but the history is we've
been doing on-chain encryption since 2020. But at the end of last year, we pivoted into confidential
AI infrastructure. And this is so important for the future of our world, our planet, and our race,
future of our world, our planet, and our race. Because without confidentiality, AI can become
a very, very unpleasant tool for destruction. So I'm really passionate about that. But I loved
the news items that you raised. Because in two days, we have the next SEC roundtable,
policy roundtable. And my colleague is going to that.
I'm super excited about it, and I've just been thinking about all of these policy changes recently.
So I'm hoping we're going to talk about that too.
I guess I could launch into it.
I think Crypto Rich is still on mute.
So my background is really, I'll just tell a little bit more about my background.
I'm from the big tech space, worked at Apple and Oracle and then PayPal for many years.
So I come from that Silicon Valley culture.
I entered the crypto space in 2017, and I've been through quite a lot of the exciting times
in the space. I've spent a lot of time on regulations, a lot of time thinking about
regulations. I actually was working with commissioner hester purse to come
up with a draft regulation set in case it was ever needed and um more recently i've been really
following the abolition of the the crypto task force not that the crypto uh whatever it's called, the team, yeah, the crypto enforcement team,
that being abolished really, I mean, you said, Viruni,
that the clarity of regulation is the most important thing for institutional adoption.
And I think that's true.
And while under Gary Gensler the regulation by enforcement
was far from ideal.
Taking that away, it does raise some questions.
What is, are we going to get clarity?
We want regulation by thoughtful, proactive structure,
not by enforcement or random enforcement, I could even call it.
But we don't want chaos. We don't want anarchy because
then no one knows what to do. And every action you take could be an action that lands you in jail.
And speaking of jail, we're looking forward to Bitcoin Las Vegas. And I just learned that
Ross Ulbricht is going to be speaking at Bitcoin Las Vegas.
As you may probably know, he's been in jail for many years as a result of the Silk Road arrests.
And he was free very recently.
Lisa, forgive me for interrupting you.
You know, earlier on when you said I was on mute, I was on mute and I couldn't work out how to unmute.
But so technical issues.
I'm so sorry about this.
There's so much that you said that I've been interested in that I want to pick into.
Right.
But if you could just give a sort of broad overview about secret, the blockchain, the crypto.
And then we can get into i'd love to talk to you about some of the um news that you of course yes i'm happy to talk about secret so secret went to
mainnet in 2020 we are part of the dcc alliance the decentralized confidential computing alliance the DCC Alliance, the Decentralized Confidential Computing Alliance. And there are four different
technologies that you can use to have on-chain privacy or encryption. And we're not talking about
privacy to do mixers or launder money. What we're talking about is actual data privacy
and encrypted computations. So one of the problems with blockchain is that
it's very difficult to do anything if you're not able to protect your data. So there are
several technologies that allow you to protect data. The only one that's really practical in
today's world and not just a pipe dream for the future is trusted execution environments uh trusted
execution environments are essentially hold on a second please forgive me right i want to break
this down you know secret inside out of course you do right but i want to break it down so it's
sort of accessible for people who are new to this right so if i can say a few things and then we'll go in so so the one of the ways that i understand secret it's like ethereum but with privacy so uh bitcoin is just a currency
monero is a privacy currency a value exchange you can't really write anything on monero but like you
can create applications on ethereum you can create applications on secret
and that's i think that's what you were referring to with the encrypted blockchain and it's a
it's an open source um protocol part of the cosmos ecosystem so you know if you're if people
here are familiar with osmosis decks or some of the other ones that are part of the ecosystem you'll be able to get secret and secret has several decks as well that are part of its own
ecosystem allowing for secret defy um the token is secret s-c-r-t and was it there's a couple of
there's a secret foundation there's agents you know if people
want to get involved they can just go to the website which is uh scrt.network and
get involved in the project and go to the telegram group or follow them on x and you know find out
that way and do your own due diligence that way yeah great summary thank you for that that was
great i do know a bit about it having been involved with it since 2018 right i think it's a really
really great project oh and by the way it's stakeable so you can get your scrt tokens and
then you can stake them and earn interest in the form of more scrRT. And then you said earlier that you're now moving to private AI.
Yeah.
So because we have the confidential infrastructure to run on-chain
encryption, we have extended that to incorporate the NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
And the reason that matters is that a trusted execution environment is fairly small.
So while you can do smart contracts in there, you can hold data in there.
When you talk about AI, AI takes a lot more space.
And training AI especially takes a lot of space. So the trusted
execution environment that we've been running, as you mentioned, since 2020 on mainnet, we have
applications, DEXs, interesting use cases, including peer-reviewed science papers, genetics,
all of these things that fits into secret network very nicely. But what didn't fit into that from a hardware and encryption perspective was AI.
And so at the end of last year, we realized that there was an opportunity to combine the trusted execution environment with the larger GPU memory that came out from NVIDIA and to create a larger
walled garden in a way that allows you to actually do LLM training and to store AI models,
not just tiny ones, but larger ones. So that's a very essential function in the world.
And it's quite a difficult problem to solve.
So we spent, yeah, last year solving that problem.
And now we're rolling that out.
Okay.
Now I'm still stuck with the problem, right?
I use Grok AI.
I use OpenChat.
Why does it need to be private? I don't understand. And what
difference does Secret make? Great question. So I like to use the example of a free search engine
that allows you to search the internet completely for free. And what did we find out when Google
grew? We found out that Google was not a search engine company.
It was a data mining company.
And they monetized the data.
We essentially were the product, not the data, not the customer.
And what we're looking at with AI is a similar thing.
If you use Grok, a very powerful engine, it's great.
If you use ChatGPT, it's very inexpensive.
But whenever you get something very powerful for very little money,
you should question, why am I being given this thing for free?
Is it out of the goodness of their hearts?
Is there some profit model?
Well, most likely there is some purpose, some agenda in there.
And in the case of AI, that agenda can be quite sinister. You get the use of free AI models,
but in return, you're giving it a lot of context data. You're training the model.
Example, let's say you decide you want to have an agent that you're going to train to be your therapist.
Now you're going to give it all your private information, your history.
That's more than a search engine would ever get.
A search engine just gets what you're looking for right in this moment.
looking for right in this moment. And that turned out to be insidious. Imagine if now you're giving
And that turned out to be insidious.
your entire life story to someone for free, and that someone happens to be the large enterprise
behind the LLM, behind the AI model. And it gets worse. What if you decide this agent is going to
run your whole life? It's going to have access to your credit cards.
It's going to have your passwords.
It can go out and do everything in the world for you.
It can book hotels for you, book your flights.
It has a lot of power.
It has a lot of information about you.
And now you've got a back door.
So Secret closes that back door.
Instead of having these lisa forgive me forgive
me for interrupting you again and i and i and i will probably do it again as well
that's just incredible i never thought of that so if i type into uh google or uh
i don't know one of the duck duck go or something and i say um flights to i don't know, one of the duck, duck, go or something. And I say flights to, I don't know, Los Angeles.
And then it comes up with that.
But with an AI where I've got an account, even if it's a free account,
I'm giving them lots of information over time, over time,
so they can actually create.
Like I could ask AI, look, this is when I was born.
And the time I was born born give me a vedic
astrology chart and grok would do that i don't know how accurate it would be but grok's now got
my date of birth and your time of birth and location and my time of birth and location right
and then you know i might ask him other stuff over time i never ever thought of that
never ever occurred to me that um over time i i become embedded within the ai infrastructure as
a digital identity a whole digital identity wow okay yes exactly you've answered my question fully
thank you and i wonder you raised a really good question, though.
I wonder how many people are thinking about this right now.
We, you know, we've learned our lesson a little bit with search engines,
but can we apply that learning to the future and say,
OK, we don't want this future where AI knows everything,
absolutely everything about us and has
all the power but how do we prevent that yeah yeah what do you think do you think people are
thinking about that no i don't think so i don't think i i mean i'm not using myself as an example
if you know if any of those that want to um you know put a thumbs up if they have been thinking
about this to the level that as lisa has distinguished put a thumb up otherwise we'd
be like no i have no i have no idea because i think it takes time um for people to learn about
these new technologies to get familiar with them you know even when someone comes into the crypto space
and and they get some bitcoin the mistake that they might make in the beginning oh is ethereum
is the same as bitcoin solana is the same as bitcoin but it takes time to acquire that new
you know that new to modify the thinking to tailor it especially if we get comfortable with where we're already at yeah exactly and it's always convenience versus safety or security like it's so convenient for me
to plop something into into chat gpt but did you know if you if you have a patent and you are the owner of the patent if you take all of the wording in that
patent and you put it into chat gpt to say uh write me a summary of this you've now given away
the right to enforce your patent because now the chat gpt the license in there, says that they now have a free license to use all the data that you put in there, which goes against patent regulations.
But as the owner, you shared that information.
So now you can't enforce it.
Wow.
And I suppose it would be the same if somebody said, I don't know, was writing a book or something and they wanted the book proofread.
Or they wrote a song and they wanted the song, I don't know, kind of put to music or something.
They wrote the lyrics and they wanted it put to music or adapted or something like that.
Is it then the case that ChatGBT or Grok or whateverk or whatever deep seek then own that input it doesn't own it
but it has a free use license for it right which means that if it decides to if someone else asks
a question that your book answers or your piece of work answers it could take a paragraph out of your book and wholesale plop it into the
answer to the prompt. And that person who got that could now use it because ChatGPT has the
license to use that, has the rights to use it. So it doesn't violate a copyright in that case.
doesn't violate a copyright in that case.
Wow.
This is why people are creating their own local LLMs.
I wrote an article about DeepSeek and, you know,
DeepSeek is very, was a big deal when it came out
because all of a sudden it was so inexpensive
to do all these things.
But if you use DeepSeek, the main version, you are definitely,
there was a lot of uproar about how you're giving away your information.
However, if you were to get the hardware to support it
and download a local copy of DeepSeek,
you isolate it from the internet, and you train it yourself.
Now you don't, you know, you're not giving away the information except to your own LLM.
And this is, but you know, how many people can, can train their own model?
Yeah, or even know that that option is available. I didn't. And then training my own model forget about it how would I do that so then obviously
what we need is some sort of solution that enforces our privacy the individual's privacy
and preserves their data I wonder if there's anything like that out there? Well, I mean, there's, Secret Network provides the infrastructure.
What we do is very foundational. It's at the infrastructure level. We are building secret
VM, secret AI, and that we're partnering with other companies that are building agents.
Autonomous, I think, is, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about that.
Yes, you are.
What they're doing.
No, I mean, I don't know if they've released the news yet.
Okay.
Let me just ask Anubis.
He's put a thumbs up, Anubis, if I'm allowed to talk about the Autonomous Project with
Secret yet.
All right, No thumbs up.
So there,
there are companies that are building agents with secret as the backend.
And those agents now are not,
they're not vulnerable to they're contained within a,
a private LLM space.
And so you know that there's no backdoor.
Let's say you create a trading agent.
Well, if you're going to make an agent that takes funds,
your funds even, and trades them for you,
you want to make sure that there's nobody on the other side
who's going to be able to get access to your agent
and drain those funds out of the agent.
That's a very basic example, but that could be done if you don't build it right.
So what we're trying to do is get the word out that if you're building agents and we're working with Eliza that has these features where it's contained.
It's verifiably private.
And there's an attestation that shows that there's no one on the other side manipulating the agent.
It's fully self-contained and independent.
and independent.
No one has access to make the agent do something.
So that's one big step is getting this confidential AI infrastructure
integrated into all the AI that is being built out there.
Okay.
So wait a minute.
So you've created,
Secret Network have created a trading agent called Eliza,
which is...
No, Eliza.
Sorry, Eliza is the platform that works with AI16Z.
It's gotten a lot of attention
because it created Twitter agents or ex-agents
that post on their own.
Nobody's telling them what to post.
So they gained a lot of attention and notoriety.
And we just recently released an agent
on the Eliza platform that has confidential AI features.
I got it, I got it.
And okay, and this allows for creating trading agents
which are verified,
you can verify that there's no one else on the other side no one
has got the data so i take it they're open source in some way yeah trading agents or agents that do
anything really right okay okay wow okay so lisa i'm forgive me i'm a little bit dumbfounded and
gobsmacked gobsmacked is an english expression i
don't know if that's in the american vernacular or even in the indian vernacular because the coin
republic are based in out of india all right so i think we read it in harry potter so i think we
i'll be a bit like bloody bloody hell all right so then how does secret network
keep this data private and owned by the person who's using it well that's a pretty technical
question i i know you don't want to dive into all the details, but there's something called a
virtual machine. So when you run a server, that server is controlled by a virtual machine,
and there's usually an administrator for the virtual machine. The big weakness in our
distributed cloud computing system is that these virtual, these administrators, network administrators can see everything that goes in and out.
So we don't talk about it very much.
Administrators, are they human or are they, is it part of the computer program?
Usually it's a human.
Network administrators are human.
Well, I mean, a network administrator is a human
who administers the virtual machine.
Right.
Understood.
So there's these humans, right, in the world
who are running networks.
We call them IT people or we call them network admins.
They have an incredible amount of access
because they have to fix things when they get broken.
And when you need to fix things, you need to see what's going on.
So these network administrators are kind of a hidden vulnerability throughout all of tech,
all of our networking. If they're good actors, that's fine. And they're supposed to be good actors. But if you have a bad actor in a position like that, they can spy.
They can listen to all of the traffic that's going on.
They can read the log files and find out what someone did.
And that information, it's kind of a vulnerable area in the end-to-end networking world.
So, well, people, I definitely am sure that people don't think about this vulnerability.
But even your, you know, if you have a Wi-Fi at home, have you ever thought about your internet service provider and how much they could know about you from all the traffic that goes back and forth from your
computer yeah yes no I've never thought about it but I get it and you know when I don't turn my
VPN on for sure yeah and then something else uh from what you were saying Lisa so I work part-time
as a child protection social worker and and I use a particular database which stores information on
the children and the families that I'm using that I'm working with and then I have a particular database which stores information on the children and the families that I'm using, that I'm working with.
And then I have a local authority laptop, which has all sorts of security protections.
But if there's any problems, I go to the IT guys who are able to do all sorts of magic and make it all work properly.
Right.
If they're honorable people, not an issue.
Right. right right now if they're honorable people not an issue right but but the vulnerability i i get
what you're saying is exactly they are a vulnerability and then that's okay i mean
it's not great anywhere right but for um financial companies you know moving large sums of money
there's um state secrets or know, the defense departments or diplomatic
secrets or commercial secrets. That can be a major issue. Exactly. Yes. I mean, for government,
there's a completely different standard where there's classified information. You have to be
given access to be able to do that.
But in regular industry, we don't have those classified categories.
So it is quite a big vulnerability.
So coming back to the question you asked, which was,
what was the question exactly?
How does secret network report this issue issue right and by the way your
explanation is very very clear not at all oh good okay i can get sucked in sometimes to my own
thoughts but um but so you have this vulnerability with if you use Secrets' confidential AI infrastructure, that VM, that virtual machine, is completely encrypted.
The network administrator, even if they read the log file, even if they listen to all the traffic, it's encrypted.
So they can't make heads or tails of it.
So instead of having clear text and data streaming through, it's now encrypted and no one can listen to it.
No one can look at it. And yes, if you're thinking that must make maintenance a little harder, like if your database was completely encrypted and your IT person wasn't able to tell what was going on, didn't have a key, it might be more difficult for them to do wonderful things,
which is always the trade-off. But the good thing is that by default, I mean, you might give him
access or her access to the database in order to fix a problem, but you would be giving that access
rather than in the current world, most things are by default unencrypted.
And so most things are by default vulnerable to being listened to.
Right, right.
Okay.
So with secret, we lock that all together.
And there is no human that can read it unless they have the key.
And then it's up to the owner of that platform to give the key,
and then they know who they've given the key to, when they've given it.
No, not the platform.
I just want to correct that.
The owner of the platform also doesn't have the key.
Only the owner of the data has the key.
So how would that work with an AI system?
So how would that work with an AI system?
Well, let's say I am training an agent for my own purposes.
Let's say I'm making a travel agent.
I have the key to that agent.
I am able to get my have access into the agent's thoughts or data.
I, as the agent owner, as the data owner who put that, even if someone else created that agent for me, there's a platform that created
that agent for me. They created a confidential agent that only I have the key to get the data
out of the prompts out of the answers out of only I have it. Okay. Okay.
How does the AI then accumulate all the data to then be used so if for example I want a
Vedic astrology chart for the month for the next month and I put in my date of birth and
my time of birth and place of birth using the secret technology.
How where does what happens there that somebody else can't come in?
But also, how does the if we all did that, how will the AI accumulate information?
Well, it's a one it's a one way. It's like a one way pipeline so that So the agent can get data from the web.
There's a lot of public data out there.
Right.
So it can gather information.
There's public databases.
In the future, if we don't have an unencrypted worldwide web or Internet,
then there will be sources of data.
And just to take that one step further, you could sell your data
to a public source. And you could say, this data here, I want to share it, but I'm going
to get compensated for it. Whereas right now, it's all your data is being stolen from you.
But we're very far from that. So in today's world, there's a ton of public data available online, through public databases, everywhere.
So that AI agent can go ingest all that information, not a problem. Ingesting information
is not difficult. But when you put your information in to that AI agent, as well as all of this public
information, nothing can come out except with your key got it okay so then you wouldn't
be able to read my um what the stars will tell for me in the month of may unless i gave you the key
yeah unless you well yes or unless someone had the information that you know your date of birth
and could find it somewhere else and make their own agent yes yes yes okay all right and then I know um secret network uses this what's
called a TEE trusted encryption environment and the way I understand it and without getting too
technical you know there's old cameras with the old black and white cameras? And then what happens is that you the photographer would put a cloth over their head and then they'd do something in the camera and the photo would get taken.
There's really, really big ones, the black and white cameras. Right.
So there's some there's some encryption that happens inside of this box.
With the information going in, the information going in the information going out is that is that a simple enough
experiment metaphor for the tee yeah i think that's a good metaphor because the the light
comes into the camera and something strange something mysterious happens inside the camera
and then the photo is is is or the negative is imprinted and you get a result.
So I see where you're going with that. It's very similar.
The TEE is,
is this black box where mysterious things happen and a result comes out.
Right. Well, Lisa, if you like my metaphor, it's open source,
feel free to use it.
Thank you. Okay. So, so then that's, so that, that's where secret network is it's pivoted towards
working with ai and then what's happening in terms of partnerships with blockchain companies
and non-blockchain companies yeah well um on the non-blockchain side, we're really focusing on AI providers, whether they happen to be blockchain related or not.
The decentralized AI is really a good hedge against a future where one entity has too much power.
And then confidential decentralized AI is a good hedge against companies stealing your data and using it for nefarious purposes.
On the blockchain side, we're still very actively nurturing projects that need to build on a confidential environment.
And there's still nothing to equal secret.
There are quite a few other companies
that are building on TEs.
There's companies that are building blockchains on TEs.
There are companies building
confidential AI infrastructure on TEs.
But at the moment,
there's no project that is as mature as Secret since we came out in 2020.
And we've had a lot of time to build our platform.
So we're partnering with companies that don't have any other solutions, basically.
don't have any other solutions basically there's there's a few companies that are doing um
besides the ai side of things there's companies that are doing peer-to-peer
football betting because the betting industry is very much slanted in favor of the house and
people if even if people bet against you, get odds or whatever, they get really
taken advantage of. Most of the money goes to the house. Whereas if you create a pure peer-to-peer
system, then the profits go back to the people who are placing the bets. I know gambling is a controversial subject though,
so I'll also mention Mudo, which is a company that is building genetically specific supplements.
So they need confidential data, of course, because if you want to add your DNA information,
your genetic information into a platform,
you want to make sure no one else is going to be able to access that level of information about you.
But once you input that, Mudo is able to create supplements that are specifically tailored for your genetic makeup,
exactly what you're going to need to be your healthiest self.
And that's a really interesting use case.
We've long wanted to be more active in the health space because health data is so sensitive
and you can do so much with it, but only if it's protected.
Yes, no, that is incredible.
That is incredible with the health data because there's
especially in the last few years it's been rather a
controversial topic or rather something that's been talked about it's been very topical
um on the vogue okay all right look we've got about um 15 minutes left i do want to pivot to what's happening in the terms of news and the background of especially in the us and there was something you mentioned earlier the crypto was it the task force
under biden yes now my understanding is uh really what they were doing was suppress.
It was a way of using regulatory procedures
to stymie crypto innovation.
Would that be accurate?
I think that was, I don't know if that was the,
it could have been the intention,
but I would say it more that they were using enforcement as regulation so rather than creating any sort of rule
they just decided someone was in violation of of something even though there was no clarity on
what you were supposed to do they would just pick a company and go after them. And yes, I think the ultimate result was stymieing innovation
because everyone was so scared of doing anything in the U.S.
You didn't know if Gary Gensler was going to go after you or not,
if the SEC was going to go after you.
And you didn't know what you could do
to be in compliance. It wasn't like that. You could get a no action letter from the SEC.
That was the best you could do, which is not worth much, but at least it shows good intention. It
shows that what a no action letter is, is that you tell the SEC what you're doing and ask them if they see any
problem. They will not tell you. They would not tell you, oh, what you're doing is fine.
They would just send you a letter saying that we're not planning to take any action against
you right now. It really means nothing, but it at least shows good faith. And people were using that
as the only way to do innovation in crypto
in the US. You would get a no action letter. That was the big prize. Very funny, really,
because it doesn't mean anything, but it was all we had. And at the same time, you didn't know what
you could do and what you couldn't do. If you went over some line or you attracted attention some way,
couldn't do if you went over some line or you attracted attention some way you would get an
unenforcement action you would have potentially fines potentially jail sentences and you know
this happened a lot so with the abolishment of the the enforcement team crypto enforcement team
i think that's the wrong name but it's something along those lines.
There's an E in there.
With the abolishment of that, some people are celebrating
because they're like, oh, yay, we don't have to worry about
the SEC coming after us now.
But that's not really true.
What is true is that you still have to wonder what the rules are.
You don't know if you're doing things correctly or not.
And you don't know what's coming in the future.
I've had a lot of conversations with founders who are considering coming to the U.S. with the new environment, but then saying, but we don't know what's going to happen.
There's actually no clarity.
Europe, on the other hand, is much clearer. There are times when it's frustrating
because it's a little more stringent and you know there's a lot of things you cannot do,
but at least you have clarity. Whereas in the US, we just have chaos.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. But hopefully the clarity will come and we will come on today the thing about the no action letter is um
i don't know maybe this is my social work it's a little bit abusive because it leaps because um
any other business so for example if i'm going to set up a
i know a mechanic garage it's really clear what I can and can't do but if I set up a
mechanic garage or set up any business and then the regulator is saying right now we're not going
to take any action well it doesn't allow me to build anything there's no certainty there's no
direction can I do this can I not do that at any point they can come down yeah
so so the the net effect is to stymie innovation but it also looks like they're not doing it
which is something that i deal with human beings
yeah i mean looking like they're not doing it that's a very interesting perspective that you bring i love that yes i find it quite useful in my political analysis
perhaps one day lisa another another conversation when you come on my channel we can talk a little
bit about that maybe online or offline or whatever right they're all gangsters by the way all of them
they're all gangsters the world is their turf and we're just the ants watching the giants
fight now so what do we know about the new administration what are the noises that they're
making what's coming down the pipeline yeah so i mean this week is is better um on friday in two days the sec is is doing their um
crypto round their third crypto policy roundtable and they're focusing this time on custody custody
issues like what is it okay to do what is it not okay to do and just soliciting in from uh opinions from the
community um uh fluidify my company we registered for that so my co-founder is is going to i have a
a company that does data and analytics on in the blockchain space since 2020 and it's fully amica
compliant so i've been in the compliant on the compliance train for quite some time.
But we're providing some input to that. Just being compatible with Mika ISO 27001.
Sorry, hold on a second, please, Lisa. So one is, this is the third crypto policy roundtable since Trump came into power?
I think the other two were yes, since he came into power.
Yep.
Wow.
Well, he's not messing about.
He's really looking at this.
And then Mika.
What's Mika?
Mika is the European framework for compliance and for how data is treated,
how data is treated, how financial data is treated.
how financial data is treated.
And I would say that most crypto companies are not Mika compliant,
which is a huge problem in Europe because there's a lot of crypto companies in Europe.
And now they're non-compliant.
It's quite difficult to achieve Mika compliance.
And I think most of the blockchains are not Mika compliant, frankly.
So that raises another interesting question.
How long are these blockchains going to survive in an environment where there's no KYC for using the blockchain?
There's no oversight whatsoever.
So it's a good question. I know
I've heard people talking about moving towards compliance, moving towards identifying all the
actors on the chain, because that's the only way that we can move into the future, which of course
there's the other side that thinks that's heresy, decentralization, and lack of government control is the holy grail for some people.
You know, both sides have a good point, but we have to reach some sort of peace between regulators and anarchists in order to move the energy forward.
Do we? Do we have to, Lisa?
Okay, so
I'm going to say a few things
and you
are at liberty, of course,
to maintain neutrality over what I say,
right? And this is my point of view, not
coin republics, not secret networks or anything.
So what the European Union is
really, really great at
is regulating the european union doesn't have an ai
company like a major ai company but it wants to regulate them they don't have any big social
media platforms but it wants to regulate them now they have all these cryptocurrency projects but at the same time in october they plan to launch a cbdc and i and i just wonder if
mika compliance would then be used as a weapon to suppress crypto innovation because there was
something that came out of the eu the other day is i'm just looking for it it was on tom luongo's um twitter file uh twitter because he
he was he was a guest on this as well so people who uh have listened to this before and it is
about the europe this is i found that the european central bank warns that trump's pro crypto stance
could trigger financial contagion that may destabilize Europe's economy, according to Politico.
The ECB fears that a surge in US-backed stablecoins could lead to a flight of European capital into the US.
That was a treat by Coin.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Would you like to comment on that?
Yeah, it's the first time I've heard that. I's more likely that there will be a
flight of capital into more friendly jurisdictions. While the US is very friendly towards crypto
today at the moment, it's not clear where that's going. I don't know. And most of the people
that I talk to don't know as well. and people are hesitant to commit, hesitant to commit to putting their money here.
I'm in Canada right now, but putting their money into the U.S. because anything could happen.
So without any further context, I would say more likely that people will move their capital somewhere else that's more
friendly yeah and i think you may be talking about crypto capital versus the larger capital
which is what i'm talking about right which and there is a there is a drain of capital
and there has been for some time from the european union the United States, partly because of fears of, you know, the war, Ukraine, Russia, so the gold leaving the European Union and the UK as well, going into
the United States, the Dow Jones as a safety refuge, a safety harbour for capital,
partly because interest rates in the United States are higher than they are in the European Union, and also because the European Union is broke.
It's defunct.
It has no way of generating money anymore, really.
And then there's crypto capital, which I imagine is going to move to places like El Salvador or Dubai
and other friendly jurisdictions that welcome crypto know, that welcome crypto innovation.
Yes, you're right. That's that is what I was thinking of.
Yeah. OK. All right. Now, this guy, Paul Atkins, as the new SEC chair, do you have any take on him?
what his stance might be?
What his stance might be?
I don't.
I'm hoping to know more after Friday's event.
I just feel like that will give us some context,
watching how the questions are asked, how the conversation goes.
It seems like it's still a little unknown for me,
and I did hear Varuni talk about his former experience under Bush.
So it seems like at least he's an adult, which is great.
But it remains to be seen, really, how this will play out.
Right.
Okay.
All right.
And then anything you want to say in terms of your read on the situation in the United States,
given that we have Trump
coin, Melania coin, JD Vance has Bitcoin, RFK has Bitcoin, Elon Musk and Tesla have Bitcoin.
And Dogecoin. And Dogecoin, I'm sure, and perhaps a few others. And then there's the
talk of the Strategic Reserve. I think 30 plus states, maybe it's less, are looking at creating their own strategic reserves of Bitcoin.
Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a circus.
There's some I think there's some good things that have happened, but there are also, there's disappointment in the market because things that, you know, the market, financial markets have been very poorly affected.
And that affects people's real lives.
Like their retirements have dipped by 30% in some cases.
30% in some cases. And you can look at idealism and aspirations all you want, but when it comes
right down to it, you're mostly looking at what you've got saved up against a rainy day. That's
probably more important to most people than anything else. And I do think the election was mostly run along economic lines and expectations more than idealistic expectations.
And we haven't seen that turn out to be as rosy as promised.
So there's a lot of unrest, a lot of uncertainty.
And in Canada, the border has shut down,
almost completely shut down,
went across the border a couple of weeks ago,
and I was the only car going across the border.
And the U.S. border guard said to me,
good luck, which they usually say, have a nice day. It was weird. So there's tensions.
There's quite a few tensions. There is tensions and there is disruption. Definitely say that,
right? And anything, okay, thank you so much, right? And I'm sorry if it seemed like I was
And I'm sorry if it seemed like I was taking you onto turf where you don't normally venture.
taking you onto turf where you don't normally venture.
No, it's very interesting.
And I learned a lot from some of your comments, too.
Lisa, you should definitely subscribe to my channel and you should spend all your time listening to videos.
All right. Thank you.
Anything you want to say before we finish up, Lisa?
Think about your data. Think about who you're sharing it with.
Make sure to envision the future and read up on the consequences of being of convenience.
The consequences of convenience. That's a great way to finish. I'll leave it at that.
Lisa, thank you so much. I so appreciate this. And just so you know, this space will go out
hopefully on the TCR website. And also it'll go out on my channels. And I look forward to having
you back on my channel at some point. Please feel free to invite yourself on. And for anybody who's
listening, please, please, please go check out Secret Network.
Follow them on X.
Go check out their Telegram group.
It's a really, really great project, in my opinion.
Follow me on X as well.
Lisa is loud.
Yes.
Yes.
Lisa is loud in a sort of very quiet, dignified, secretive night.
All right.
Lisa, thank you so much
thank you everybody and thank you to the coin republic all the best bye Thank you.
