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Tokenise Everything: The Next Era of Web3 💪 The Aggregated Ep. 119
Recorded: June 27, 2025 Duration: 2:54:33Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto community is buzzing with excitement as new partnerships and projects emerge, including RWA World's asset tokenization platform and the Polygon song launch. With grants supporting innovative initiatives and a growing trend towards tokenizing real estate and royalties, the landscape is evolving rapidly, promising increased accessibility and engagement for investors and creators alike.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Polygon pump it up
Pump it, pump it, you gotta pump it
ZK EVM is Ethereum. Yeah. Thank you. You gotta pump it.
You gotta pump it.
You gotta pump it.
Yeah?
Good morning.
Rock, you there?
Good morning.
Good morning.
Or good afternoon.
It's three sleeps till Monday.
What? Why would you say that?
Yeah, what's wrong with you, man?
Yeah, Darren, what the heck? Way to ruin the vibe man yeah that i mean that is uh it really is an example and i know he's kidding but yeah of how
you know people can look at the world half empty or half full right it's either you know
thank god it's friday or it, work starts in two days.
How's everyone doing today? Brandoff, good to see you.
What's up, Rock? How you doing, man?
Doing well, man. Doing well.
Yeah, I hear that song. I like to imagine that it's darren like whispering into
his microphone those those fun lyrics and it brings my enjoyment a 10x every time
awesome and we got two cent timmy also in the house what's going on yeah how are you all
man we got some legends here.
Yuli K also, hello. How you doing?
Hey, what's wrong with my song this time?
Why not my song?
Hey, I'm like listening.
What's going on?
Are you upset with me?
Darren?
I think your song is difficult to play
Yeah, Darren can answer
The X has noise compression
And I haven't been able to find a way
To not make that happen
So whenever I play this song, any high note
Just completely gets wiped out
So it gets completely silent
Oh no, can we get Elon's attention to this please
This is very, very important
I'm spending much more I think I'm just going to actually have to buy a mic get Elon's attention to this, please. This is very, very important.
I'm spending much more... I think I'm just gonna actually have to buy a mic
with a large
diaphragm mic, though. I've had to
actually look into this. I've got, like, a mixer
on everything on that. On my PC,
you know, to try to fix specifically
that song. Anyway, it's out there.
It's out there. Guys,
click on my profile, go to my
profile. This to my profile.
The song is pinned post in my profile.
For those who haven't heard the Polygon song,
it's literally everywhere on every single streaming platform. Thanks to Polygon fam.
Thanks to Marshall and all the wonderful people who helped me to work on this one.
Go and give it a listen and leave your feedback.
And thank you for inviting me we do have the next best thing that we could just make you sing it oh yeah i knew you'd
say that we'll get brandon from the back in vocals all right guys uh let's get started. We're going to do quick 10-second intros. Let's
see. Why don't we start with you, RWA Ray.
Yo, GM, everybody. Ray here. I'm the head of research over at RWA World. You can find
us at rwa.world, one-stop shop for asset tokenization. You can subscribe to the newsletter,
Friday mornings, 8 a.m., under 1200 words.
Subscribe to both like the DTCC, European Central Bank,
Manic, Coinbase, Kraken, et cetera.
We also have a data product,
but that would go over 10 seconds, so I've tantalized you enough.
We'll pass it back to you.
Awesome.
And let's see, Solitaires, why don't you introduce yourself? Awesome.
And let's see, Solitaires, why don't you introduce yourself?
Hey, hey.
My name is Mark.
I'm working in business development at Printer.
And yeah, that's pretty much it for now.
All right.
And Luukasai, are you a bio fan?
Leukocyte. Okay. We'll come back to you. For those who don't know, leukocytes are uh uh like an immune cell um let's see cyber shakti go ahead gmgm great to be
back um my name is cyber shakti and i get shit posters paid on the internet
nice the Living the dream.
Absolutely.
All right.
Nerd girl, Nicole.
Hey, I also get paid to shitpost, but I do other things too.
I'm a journalist.
I work for LDA.
I've got several jobs in crypto.
Awesome. Good to have you as always, Nicole.
Brandoff, tell us what you do, man.
Well, guys, Brandoff here, you might not recognize me.
I'm a wizard of a different color.
It's all explained in my pin post formerly uh polygon wizard but now i work with
polygon through my job as the marketing director at lumia bringing r2was to the world so happy to
be here to present myself under a new light and uh hopefully we'll have a good time today
awesome fan of lumia and uh yeah congratulations on the role. By the way, your PFP is a white wizard. Are you closer to when Gandalf became Saruman the White? Or are you closer to Saruman the white when he was, uh, when he became evil?
Oh, definitely a Gandalf thing.
I don't know if you could tell, but like half of my name is Gandalf.
So like, it's not like a Saruman thing. I'm not an evil wizard.
I'm kind of a goofball, uh, which isn't really a Gandalf trait.
I'm keeping an eye.
Uh, but yeah, I reached out to
9F Studios and
had him redraw my PFP
because it used to just be a screenshot
of the wizard emoji that I
colored in with my finger on my phone.
It was really cheap.
So this is super legit
and I get the red beard now so people
don't assume I'm some really old
dude.
I actually liked your P.F.P.
Yeah.
Darren said he graduated from Gandalf the Cheap.
Well, man, you got to make your own way out here.
When I got into this shit, P.F.Ps were like $1,000.
I wasn't paying that.
You know, you got to build an identity in a fun way at a budget that you can cook with.
So sometimes free is the way to go.
I was watching the Lord of the Rings, Rings of Power with Cindy the other day.
The new series of like prequel of Lord of the Rings.
And they said Gandalf.
Well, we think he's Gandalf in it.
We don't know yet.
This wizard in it.
And he said something about or actually Bombadil, Tom Bombadil said that something about a secret fire.
secret fire. And I instantly was like, wait, what? That's what Gandalf says when he's fighting
And I instantly was like, wait, what?
the Balrog in Khazad-dûm. And I paused and I was like, wait, I know that's something
Gandalf has said. And so I go to show Cindy the scene. She's like, please, you've showed me this
scene 20 times of Gandandalf fighting the balrog
and then i go to you know after you know the first scene from the i think the first or second movie
he then i was like wait but no you got to see him actually fight the balrog hey everyone can you
hear me uh yes i can't hear anything right now yeah we actually do you actually like pause the
tv to tell somebody these things like oh yeah yeah, yeah. Did she punch you in the head after?
Am I Rogan?
No, she's used to it now.
No, we can hear you, Lucasite.
Can you hear us?
Okay, he can't hear me.
Can someone tell me?
Maybe he's just on like a 10-minute delay,
and that's him answering you earlier.
Darren, can someone tell him that he can't hear and he needs to leave close
the app completely and come back okay he's gone but anyways yeah cindy's used to it it's really
annoying i mean because rings of power is just too it's like really complicated. When they say something about the Valar or the
Maya or all these
things, I always have to pause and
bring up the wiki page on it to
figure out what the hell we're watching.
She definitely gets really annoyed by it.
I would hate the TV remote.
She does.
She always does, but I find it.
You got another backstory. remote. She does. She always does, but I find it. You've got to know the
back story. The TV remote on
your phone.
At least I'm
not pausing it to tell her, let's
go read The Silmarillion or
something.
That book is dope, though.
That's a sick book.
I actually haven't read it yet. I'm looking forward to.
Oh, definitely go for it.
Yeah. I read all the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. Um, yeah, those,
I mean the Hobbit was my favorite book of all time.
bro same i keep a copy of that in my travel bag for when i'm at the airport
Bro, same. I keep a copy of that in my travel bag for when I'm at the airport.
nice nice man yeah i think it was like what 700 or a thousand pages i think the lord of the rings
the three were like around 700 pages and that one was like a thousand or something
yeah it's a good that's a good couple hour read if you're if you're chilling you don't have
anything to do a couple hours man what do
you you like some kind of uh savant but anyways let's get to the show all right back to the show
back to the show folks we're doing i'm doing what i do to cindy right now to the audience
all right so we have uh let's see who have we not introed uh yeah two cent timmy
yes gm i am on the polygon marketing team and i just pinned it to the top i am a uh lego lord
of the rings builder um but i actually they just came out with the book nook with the Balrog scene, which is super, super cool.
But yeah, I work for Polygon on the marketing side of things.
Awesome.
And you guys, you should know the scene we're talking about.
If you don't know it, there's something wrong with you.
There's not something wrong with me.
It's something wrong with you.
It's a scene where...
I'm kind of joking joking but kind of serious here
uh it's a scene where gandalf says you shall not pass that's my favorite that's what i remember
from all all the movies like that that's the one i remember the bus yeah it's awesome
i forget the exact word but the flame of uran will not avail you. Oh god. I get goosebumps
All right, all right, we got to get back to the guys come on come on come on guys stop stop hijacking the show Uli
Crypto chick how you doing?
How you doing? Good to see you guys too. Good morning. Well, first and foremost, I'm a huge fan of Polygon. So let's get that out of the way. And then I'm CryptoCheck, everybody. I am the client relations exec with Crypto Magazine and also the founder of Web3 Global Network. And I like to get on the ground floor and go to events and meet people and do panels
and get innovation out there to the world.
And thank you for having me.
I'm okay. Wait, can y'all hear me yeah no rock either okay rock went to go watch that lord of the rain scene so he's gonna be bad
if you want to check the Jumbotron
if you can play it loud for us
so we can all watch it and listen to
oh he's gone
he's just thought nope
play or cosplay
I did bring
guests on as well
are we going to have guests later
have a chance for them to speak instead?
Yeah, let me just get Rog back up.
Okay.
So what happened is when you speak out, when you're role-playing a movie scene like that,
he got dragged down into the abyss by the Balrog.
He became Gandalf.
He spoke the words.
Now he's gone.
Sorry.
Can you guys hear me?
Oh, he's back.
Perfect.
Yeah, Darren was right.
I can hear you guys.
I did have to leave to watch that scene. I just couldn't help myself. Perfect. Yeah. Darren was right. I can hear you guys. I did, I did have to leave to
watch that scene. I just couldn't help myself. Um, no, uh, okay. So it's in the jumbotron now,
if you need it there. Perfect. Uh, Kevin from hummingbird. Yeah. Nice to, nice to join again.
So yeah, normally I joined from, uh, the hummingbird accountmingbird account, which is a marketing and data network platform.
But I thought maybe some of the things I say aren't the view of the whole entire company.
So let's join from the personal account today to cover some of that stuff.
But great to be here again.
Always love chatting with you on these topics, Rock and the rest of the panel.
And let's have a fun Friday.
Let's do it.
And I will encourage anyone,
while you're listening to the show,
if you are not in the middle of work
or something where you can't do this,
go outside, put your sneakers on,
go outside and get your steps in.
You can cover some serious mileage during this show.
There was one day between this show and I think one or two other spaces,
I actually did 21 and a half miles.
I almost hit a whole marathon.
So get out there, get your steps in.
You could easily on this show, the three hours that this show runs,
you can easily do, like if you're not even that fast of a walker,
you could get seven, eight miles easily. Yeah, get your health on, exercise your brain. We're
going to learn about, I think, what really, truly this phrase, tokenize everything. I really think
this is the entire world over the next 30 years.
I think everything will have some kind of either token native, token derivative.
And I think the whole world is gearing up for this.
I mean, when you have Larry Fink, you know, the CEO of BlackRock, like every other day,
he's talking about how they want to tokenize everything.
And BlackRock is actually on polygon their fund and um they're working with i think securitize on that um but uh yeah franklin templeton also has their fund on
polygon but um yeah i think everything will be tokenized uh lucasite are you are you uh still
rugged can you hear us no i can hear you now bro gmg rugged? Can you hear us?
No, I can hear you now, bro.
GM, GM, bro.
Can you hear me?
Yep.
Give us a quick introduction.
Yeah.
Yeah, Lucasite, bro, from here.
I'm a content creator, you know. do um quality writing and um video creation you
know to educate people i mean i educate a lot of newbies in web3 space i tell them about tokenizing
web3 um yaping info5 and nfts make tiktok videos too so i feel so good to be here bro it feels so good it's my first piece here bro thanks so much awesome
uh good to have you and so like the the it looks like you do uh kaido uh cookie kaido i kaido is
one thing i still haven't dug deep enough into but uh you know it's everyone that i talk to about it say it sounds great i know for projects
it's crazy expensive i've heard quotes from like 20 000 a month to 250k a year uh like as a minimum
it's pretty pretty wild how expensive it is it must be really uh yeah well getting good organic
information yeah a little a little food coming down to kaito but you know
kaito is crowded right now you know um i think um kaito have um about 100 000 plus users um or
a million i don't know but last time i checked for cookie cookie has about 100 000 snappers
unique snapper so it's crowded i mean projects just just come there for the mind share just
to you know get the name go up everywhere and just be just be hyped up
you know right well at the end of the day so the projects don't do well I mean
they just need the I can go I don't know how much the pick I too I don't know how
much the gift to kite or to I upon all but at the end the community don't get
what they really want you know right but i'm just
there on kaito you know at least it puts me outside the um leverage me to write my content
at least a lot of people will see that content so i'm just on my writing and um original content
just for people to see it and at least know that this is what i'm really doing and the city you
know right so um you know for cookie i think they have a big
project right now that's um a hyped or but that project didn't do well so for me if i see anybody
who wants to go into kai too you know i used to advise them you better make connection i think
that's a major reason why i'm here to connect with big men.
You know, big men.
I mean, people that think such like I do,
because I think a million times every day.
Like, I think like a billionaire.
I'm rich, but then I think like a billionaire, you know?
So I feel like... Lucas, your connection's a little bit choppy.
Yeah, my connection's a little bit choppy. Yeah, my connection's a short, yeah.
Yeah, we'll come back to you, though.
Thanks for the insights, man.
Yeah.
Okay.
Did we miss anyone on introductions, guys?
Yeah, you missed me.
Did I?
Yeah.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was only complaining that you didn't play my song, but that's okay.
Wait, wait.
Why are you talking to me?
Now you missed me.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, hi.
So, you know, I just wanted to complete what I started.
So, you know, since everybody's like a Lord of the Rings fan, I've actually pinned Yoda
Labubu.
And what I do is I actually am building Poster Not Fun.
Poster Not Fun helps you tokenize amazing shit posts and AI generated posters like the
one that I've pinned,
and I help creators get paid for it.
Because, you know, yapping is great,
but I really want to help more and more people have fun
while making amazing content,
and I want to remove the skill barrier for people.
So, basically, just express your vibe with visual content
basically just
express your vibe with visual
content and
grow together and get paid for
making cool posters
alright thank you
Cyber Shakti and then Yuli
I think we still haven't introduced you
but go ahead
hi everyone
I'm Yuli Kay
alright and now moving on
just kidding
go ahead Hi, everyone. I'm Yuli Kay. All right. And now moving on. Just kidding. Just kidding.
Just kidding.
Go ahead.
Yeah, we are not.
Can I please?
Go ahead, Yuli.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I'm Polygon and especially aggregated OG.
I've been here for, yeah, quite some time.
I'm not always speaking, but I'm almost always here to listen and support.
And I wrote Polygon song and I'm a small KL myself.
And I also work with Cryptic Web3 Agency.
I'm a senior marketing and account manager and KL manager.
And that's my intro.
And I love you guys so much.
Awesome. Awesome. Okay. Guillermo. manager and that's my intro and i love you guys so much thank you awesome awesome okay guillermo
yes yes thanks uh well i'm guillermo i'm from argentina and i'm the cto of insurance
blockchain-based rain shooter a licensed rain shooter so we we have been in polygon like since 2021
i'm sorry a licensed what rain shooter rain shooter so what we do is we cover a real world
risk real world like travel risk risk different kind of insurance policies or insurance like
policies with capital on chain yeah you guys were in tact. You were in season one of Tesseract.
Yes, yes.
Probably my colleague Marco Mirabella
has been in one of the calls.
Yep.
And you got a grant from Polygon, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
We got a grant.
And something that happened recently is that because we are a regulated entity, so a lot of paperwork to do around many things, but finally the regulator allowed us to onboard the retail investors.
So now our pools are open to retail investors.
I think that's a big change of the last few weeks, and we wanted to share that.
Awesome. Great to hear the progress okay
i think we got everyone uh solitares we got you right yep yep i was among the first ones i think
yeah all right um nicole do you want to start with a question?
Yeah, yeah.
I'll let you take the lead.
I can start us off with a question.
So let's get going with, like, how important is AI in content creation already?
And how will bringing the content on chain help creators?
content on chain help creators?
How does, if you could help me understand,
how does that relate to tokenize everything?
Tokenizing content, I guess?
Yeah, so, well, I guess when we started,
like the idea behind this space,
it was about using AI in tokenized content.
So I could ask a different one of the questions, I guess, if you'd want to.
Well, it seems like we have a lot of content creators here, so that would make more sense to me now.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
Anybody have one answer to that?
Good morning, Rock.
What's that?
I said good morning good morning uh does anyone want to talk about how so how ai will help with content creators or what ai could be used for with content
creators like how important it is already for in the content creation i like darren is like a master of using ai
even in his personal life right like sometimes the things that he uses ai for is like mind
blowing i'll be like darren i don't have things to do and he'll be like ask ai what you should do
or yeah i don't have a single thought of my own anymore not a single thought of my own no he'll
be like i just took a picture of everything that was in my pantry and ai told me what i could make and i'm like
what that's amazing i would never have thought to do that that is actually yeah
yeah i wanted like a really good natural sauce once and i was like i've got this so i just
sent it like i put like four photos of my fridge and chat gpt and i was like I've got this so I just sent it like I put like four photos in my fridge
and chat GPT and I was like yeah you just do this do that for three minutes and pour this and it was
it was 10 out of 10. Wow. Have you guys used it as your personal therapist yet or? I've used it as my
lawyer I've used it for legal advice and it was like really good legal advice too so I mean I've also used it can draft documents
yeah I've used it for I've used it for content creation obviously right or like to help me
brainstorm ideas too because usually like when I use it for content creation we go back and forth
I don't just use it and then like it generates a draft and then I use that like we go back and
forth a lot like I'll use it to help me come up with ideas and then like go back and forth with it several times so it's not
just like I blanket use it you know whatever it says um but yeah like interested in how other
people use it as well obviously wait wait wait so has the world completely gone crazy that instead of using mind-altering drugs
to come up with good ideas we now use ai mind-altering drugs are still better really that
hard to come up with good ideas i mean just uh just take something and you're good no no mind
altering drugs are still great for creating for coming up with great ideas right but like
sometimes the ai can help enhance them even further.
Or sometimes AI can help with
the research process.
What we need is AI
altering drugs where you have
grok and you feed it with
something and then it acts
completely different. That would be awesome.
If you would give AI
LSD, yeah.
You also don't need mind out on drugs just if you want a nacho sauce like it seems like quite a lot of effort
yeah what's this pressure on drugs to be so productive right now we can just chill the
fuck out and enjoy drugs the way they are meant to be enjoyed and chill out and like
is anyone here on drugs i feel so dumb i
never ever even tried oh my god yeah it's 9 30 in the morning here i'm not currently on drugs but i
will tell you i get really good ideas on drugs like and i write them down and then revisit them
when i'm sober i'm i'm why do you think all music these days is just remix of 60s and 70s music?
I mean, all the bass lines, all the like half of the songs you hear in like EDM are all
remixes of stuff because that generation, they were creative.
That's true.
That's true.
All the best ideas were coming from there.
I know.
Hey guys, like just an example.
Yesterday, I know somebody that's getting ready to like work
on some uh collector cars and you know something as simple as like wanting to know like like I
literally I took it I took the original picture of the car and then I was like I want to see what
this would look like wrapped like this this and this but use the same car you know so like that
that's beneficial stuff like
that that's kind of neat i had never done that before but to like just take an image and then
like rewrap it so you can like see what it might look like if it was done that way
yeah i also love like what nicole said i can refer to just like brainstorming with gbd especially
when i don't have like enough time and i need to brainstorm some ideas and I just want to go for a walk.
So then I just end up talking to GPD like, you know, like my colleague or like my friends.
Oh, my God, that sounds weird.
And then I'm just like I walk and I talk to GPD.
So there are some real cool ideas coming out of that.
So there are some real cool ideas coming out of that.
But of course, like what's actually upsetting for me personally is that I see a lot more just, you know,
GPD generated posts like without next copywriting, like after that, especially like working with a lot of KOLs, of course, I'm not going to point on people, but there are a lot of KOLs that are just like
sending, you know, GPD written posts without like putting an effort into that. And that's actually
pretty sad because it's just like generic. It's not interesting for you to read. And when you see
like actual human posts, you can already say like which one was, you know,
GPD created and which one is, is actual, um, human.
So it can be a great tool, but if you're not doing anything right,
like after, if you're not turning your brain on it, just like,
I don't know where this is going to.
Well, um,
research is another like great way to use chat gpt right or chat gpt or grok or whatever
your ai tool is so like feeding it data and then and then being like hey can you help me
pull up some more information so when i was so good for sorry sorry go ahead when I was in Las Vegas recently, I got a chance to spend some time with a good friend of mine and she builds out like the AI digital twins. So they look like you and they help run your business and stuff. And it was, it was actually really cool because we had a panel that normally was about
web three and crypto. And I asked her to join the panel. So it became, you know, about like
crypto and web three and stuff and, and, and AI. And after getting to know her a lot and I read her,
her nonprofit, basically the way she's explained it is that we've been in a hamster wheel a lot
of our lives. And that if we can actually use AI right to do a lot of the jobs that maybe we
don't want to do, because we want to use our imaginations and use our minds, you know, to do
all this other stuff. And we use it as a tool that we might actually finally get to be human.
Finally, you know,
and we might get to like spend more time with our families and loved ones and
actually grow some of the dreams that we come up with, you know,
all of our lives.
I could become a professional video game player.
Yeah.
Why don't,
why don't you,
you should start.
I honestly,
if I,
if I didn't ever have to work again,
because,
because,
you know,
AI was just like working for me,
that could be a,
that could be a career.
I could have seen myself
going in when I was young. I think, and I think web three opens that up. I was just actually on
a call with a team that just got an investment from a team called Lusa, who's building a gaming
platform and they use a lot of AI in it actually, and they got invested in by Yatsu, the chairman of Animoca,
et cetera. But yeah, this is definitely, I would love to see the world of gamers be able to
monetize their gaming. I think that'll be pretty cool. If you could make a career out of gaming
thanks to Web3, that's a whole other topic.
I think what's really interesting, too, about the tokenize everything with the content is one of my favorite projects right now is Ethos Network.
Not affiliated with them, just a huge fan.
And the idea is like on-chain reputation that you can build up.
And the idea is like on-chain reputation that you can build up.
And then they have an ethos agent that will save tweets to, I believe it's on base.
So like you can tag it in a tweet.
It'll take that tweet, put it on chain.
And then when people, so like it's tied to your X username forever that tweets on chain.
And then if like,
there's a question about your reputation or are you a good person,
a trustworthy person?
And then people have like,
there's this database of tweets where you were shilling a rug or whatever,
or like all of this stuff.
It can get really interesting as you can like kind of evaluate how trustworthy
people are simply by putting their content online.
And it beats just like the, I would say Web2, you can just delete your tweet and no one sees it.
And I know that there are like central databases that store that information. one centralized which obviously isn't good and two the uh like it can be gamed and takes up a
lot of storage where it's like very clear stuff you can tag people and put it on chain i think
that's a huge a huge step forward with the big problem that we have with trust in general in
this industry yeah definitely i mean on chain or you know or reputation scores we have them but they're siloed
generally right you have a reputation score on reddit uh that's your karma right and you can go
back and see your history of all your stuff and what you talk about and all that um you have you
know i guess where else do we have that we had it it on Steemit, which was a Web3 thing.
I guess I wouldn't, I guess, yeah, Facebook, you have an on-chain, not on-chain, sorry, I keep saying.
You have like a digital reputation, right?
They can look through your photos and look through your wall and, you know, see who's commenting on your stuff.
So that's an on-chain, that is a, you know, a digital reputation.
But yeah, I guess Web3 would, the cool thing is you could bring it all together.
You could have like your reputation across different platforms.
But I mean, to some extent you want your reputation separated, I guess.
And like even within one platform, like Reddit, uh, you might want to have different
accounts, you know, one is, you know, that you can talk about, you know, stuff more openly,
like a more pseudonymous account and one that's a doxed account, uh, where your people know your
identity. Um. But yeah.
Yeah, I think the big thing that people can use it for more than like who's trustworthy is who isn't trustworthy. Like if you go to ethos and the worst accounts, like X accounts, you're talking like Sam Bakken and Freed and Do Kwan and like all of these serial ruggers and people that like.
and like all of these serial ruggers and people that like so you can go when you have these new
people coming to the space that i would imagine uh for a lot of people they come in and then they
just trust anyone on twitter that has a big following without realizing how um how the
systems games if we can have tools through tokenization of a this person's trustworthy or this person
isn't i think it goes a long way um do you need that to be tokenized though like couldn't you
just build that with web 2 to play devil's advocate i think you could but i think the
part of the idea behind it so um what the person building out Serpent is like you can actually monetize it where you can put you can create markets on someone's reputation.
So like if I think you're someone that's really trustworthy and you don't have a like I can buy your token for your reputation.
And then I seek to gain as more people think you're trustworthy.
And then if you're not trustworthy, I can sell your token or short your token and like it creates this marketplace
of reputation which is um i don't think you can do that on web 2 i think you can only really do
that on web 3 i don't know if it's perfect truthfully i think it's really exciting and
interesting and like this is the first attempt So there's like obviously going to be iterations and improvements upon it.
But as a like whole concept of like,
you can bet on or like tokenize someone's reputation and then create a market
out of it is a really interesting concept to me.
That was really cool when that guy came on and was talking about it in that
episode that was about InfoFi.
What was the market name of that again today?
Yeah, that was Ethos.
That was Ethos.
I think, Brock, you were somewhere.
You were traveling.
I think you were in Vegas.
Yeah, we were all in Vegas, actually.
Yeah, at the time.
I was in my house.
That's true.
You were not in Vegas.
Darren wasn't invited. He was in my house. That's true. You were not in Vegas. Darren wasn't invited.
He's not cool enough.
Just kidding.
They don't let me meet other people.
He didn't come to our retreat either in Thailand, man.
land man that bummed me out but um so max kaiser um the the bitcoin guy uh he made the holly something
That bummed me out.
kind of like this it was called hollywood stock exchange and uh it was for kind of trading the
the kind of value of uh celebrities reputations at the time.
And so let's say news came out that someone was just cast in a new big movie.
Then their stock on this celebrity trading kind of, it wasn't tokenized,
but you could trade people's like value.
And if, let's say the movie came out and it got really bad reviews or a
critic,
a big critic came out and said it sucked or something,
then their value would go up and down.
Kind of,
kind of similar.
Yeah.
And I think,
I think that's where it gets very interesting of like markets of people.
Like,
I think I saw someone make a uh
i don't know it was a funny video like just a satire where like tokenized people but like it's
in a weird way i feel like we're getting closer to that concept
you could certainly people have been um i think someone has already done this, right?
Where they're like, let's say you're a musician.
You can sell tokens that are like rights to your revenue or things like that.
You could potentially, and this one seems a little crazy to me, but you could potentially,
let's say you're a 20-year-old guy or gal and you believe that you're going to be very successful in life, you could sell
like a portion of all of your income for the rest of your life as tokens. That's pretty
interesting but a little scary.
Isn't that also like a singer that was recently uh introduced haven't
you heard about that like actual ai singer that's signed to uh you know famous famous uh studio
whatever that's crazy there was a really interesting project that got a season one
grant and polygon that was built that way for athletes that were young, like 12, 14, 15 years old,
like specifically in tennis because it's a very expensive sport that may have shown promise,
but they didn't have the money to continue and you could invest in them and get a portion of their career earnings too.
career earnings too well the other thing too is royalties so an interesting thing about royalties
Well, the other thing too is royalties.
is royalties are not securities um which is why the royalty market on everything from oil gas
music everything is is so popular you can move them you can trade them um you can buy them and
they're not deemed as securities because it comes off the top. It doesn't come off of the operations of a business.
So like a musician could actually, you know, through a platform say, hi, I'm going to sell 50 percent of the royalties to like this specific track or an artist could do it for a movie or something like that.
So instead of instead of giving up like your whole life's income, you could actually segment it to different pieces of work,
authors, writers, everything like that. And again, like you don't, it doesn't fall into
classes of a security because you just say, hey, for every unit that is sold, you get X amount.
And so that could actually be really popular. And tokenization would be great because you wouldn't
have, someone wouldn't be able to fabricate it. I used to do a
lot of loans where people used oil and gas royalties. And one thing we would have to do
is review the paperwork to make sure that like the person giving us the paperwork saying like,
yeah, I get these oil and gas royalties that they actually did have those because you could
actually fake them. And so with blockchain and tokenization, you know, if that whatever entity
it is issues those, you would have no issue with that.
So I see tokenization of royalties as, you know, a massive market, not only for the platform that creates it and the creators of them or the entities that would issue them.
But now you bring in a lot more people that normally wouldn't do it, right?
Like, I don't know how many of us get to invest as like a producer into like an artist's music track or something like that.
And if we did that, you know, now that's another investment opportunity for a lot of people.
And whenever you do that, you know, we've noticed that, right?
Whenever you make something readily available, the market really pumps.
So tokenization of royalties is
something I don't hear a lot about, but something someone should build.
Hey, hey, hey. So I actually am building a cross-chain, and one of the recent collaborations
that we did in December 24 was with Story Protocol. know I really believe in the programmable IT piece that
you just mentioned right and what we are actually sort of going live with right now is micro
licensing so for example there is you know the way you have sites like Shutterstock and you know you have Getty images right where all the assets music
assets images graphics etc are available people put them up and they put their licensing terms
that okay if you want to use my IP you need to be subscribed to these apps right now what happens is when you tokenize this the creator can control
all the licensing terms and the beauty of this is all the royalties also get mapped on chain and
that's something that we've been excited to build uh you know even before this protocol actually
uh went live we have actually accomplished this as on an app level so now that's also possible
on polygon for example that people can actually pick up somebody's meme template they remix it
and once it gets monetized you actually get paid out every time your meme lord chops actually get
remixed so you know this is actually not a distant dream this
is actually something that we've been able to go live with and you know this is I think the way
forward for creative economy especially you know when we talk about AI right I think creator economy
is is is massive right now I think tiktok massive right now. I think TikTokers are making more
money than Hollywood stars at this point. I think Mr. Beast is a great example for this, right?
So creator economy and building amazing IP licensing and I think payment rails and putting it on chain is actually you know the most
the most straightforward way to do this I guess and really happy to keep expanding on it as we
keep progressing in this conversation. Yeah I mean content creators in so many ways are some of the highest paid people in the world at
this point and that's whether it's tiktok or youtube i mean look at how much money is joe
rogan making but his deal with spotify and that was i mean he's gotten much bigger since then
that was like 150 million dollar deal or something um i mean, OnlyFans, some of these OnlyFans
people are making tens of
millions of dollars a year, right?
There's like all over the place.
Your point about, you know, some of these
people are making a lot more money than people in
Hollywood now. It's wild.
So about, let's
talk about tokenized
music, right?
It's cool to tokenize the asset.
How many times have I bought the same album?
I bought it on cassette tape.
Then I bought it on CD.
Then I bought the MP3.
Then I got my Spotify subscription.
I don't get to buy the actual asset.
I don't get to sell it when I'm done with it. And that's the big product market fit in my mind,
because that gives fundamental difference
in ownership of assets to people.
When we start talking about royalties,
to me, this just sounds like creators
signing up to chain themselves to a deal that they have no idea how this is going to scale.
And if it does scale, are you trapped in that rate that you set when you were new? And sure,
that can incentivize early support. And that's dope for your early supporters. But if you're
at scale and you're
making massive money if you sold rights to a song that becomes a major hit and you're stuck with
that rate that can be like not what you wanted but then on the on the flip side if you leave that
contract open to update those terms in the future then your early fans could be upset. So where is the balance? How does that
fit? How does that fit from a from a creator standpoint? I know we have some musicians on
stage and such like, where do you fit in that? Maybe that depends on like what your goals are,
because not every singer songwriter wants to like actually sing for huge audiences and gather stadiums and people are
happy to just be in you know independent artists and have their rather small community like i'm a
big fan of independent artists recently there are a few guys that i know personally that are just
funding themselves and they have very loyal and supportive community and they actually got to the
point when danke just you know they can make a living from their music their songs and they are
happy with that they don't want to like again to to get our stadiums and you know go for for the
deals they don't want to or sing something they don't want to or if you're a singer uh either way
you're you're bound to you know at times or not in times but to do and sing and wear things that
you don't want to i um i had experienced myself when i almost signed a deal when i was still like
in ukraine with one of the studios and they like prepared all,
you know, like kids, like brand kids for me.
And they would tell me like, you're going to look like this.
You're going to sing this.
You're going to behave like this.
You're going to post this.
And it's just, for example, it's, it's, it's not for me.
And I, yeah, I don't know.
It again, depends on, on your goals.
Like in the future future I would love to
with the help of my community uh but like self-fund my own songs and do what I love and what
other people are enjoying with rather than go for that um you know deal yeah sure sure but if you
know if we're talking adoption of technology then we need to
we need to talk about the whole thing and like just because a certain subset of musicians or
creators are just fine being amateurs uh and getting just enough they need to live
scaling these systems needs to be part of the conversation. So what does everybody else who wants to grow do with these setups?
If they're going to sell their royalties, if they're going to tokenize access, lifetime access to their IP, how do you set that up in a way that's going to be manageable long term and work at scale again if if you just want to be a casual lifestyle artist
that that doesn't really apply to the question crypto chick okay so you guys i have been working on a song for five years okay and but like i'm not a singer like i
would i wish i could sing the way that i wanted it to sound and i have put together like my own
beats and stuff like that but still this particular song especially being in crypto and the nfts and stuff like that i wanted it to be
i wanted it to have like a different beat so all of a sudden like it's all my lyrics but i was able
to use ai to guide it to produce exactly the kind of beats that I wanted. Like I wanted like healing frequencies in it.
You know, I wanted like cello violin.
Like I was able to guide it on that.
And then, you know, it actually sing it
because I've talked to like several different musicians
about singing it.
So scouting and trying to find like the right person
and then like what's that,
Cyber Shakti that was talking about,
you know, having to, you know,
you kind of like get your rights taken
and stuff like that.
And if they take you under their wing,
the traditional way.
And then also all these big stars,
like, you know, they've not been able to capitalize on their music like they used to.
So, so this being able to like use AI to actually like, you know, put together, finally finish something and put together that maybe you might have never done before um is such a huge advantage and it it's
turned out like amazing if my sound didn't sound bad i would play it um but i will i will eventually
it turned out really good so i i love it can you do you have a tweet with a link to it or something
that you can pin in the jumbotron so we can check it out i'd love to hear that i don't i don't yet um
i just put it together and i have some i have some big plans so maybe i can like um i will i'll
i'll send it to y'all get with you guys or maybe like next week when we have another space like
i'll get like a sample ready or something like that and put it out there because yeah awesome um to your make it
going to like to the broader point on that 30 best seconds of your song and do the clip with that and
then and then build around that later so debut us the 30 best seconds of that song when you can
okay then i'll just use ai to rebuild the whole song and then i'm not gonna exactly
and then she can go and that's how she'll make money off it um oh my gosh you guys that would
be fun that would be fun like to take like a certain clip and then everybody like go at it
and like redo it and we'll have like an entire project of like different courses you can do that with
suno ai ai like i've been i've been experimenting recently a lot with suno because for example
i i don't have like i don't have keyboard with me or something and i like the only instruments i
ever played well in my life is a cordon and it's like far away it's at home in my parents house
and i haven't played it for years and i
have you know i don't have a guitar or something to help me to just get a draft of my idea i'm not
saying that i'm gonna like write ai song and publish it no way but just like to get a draft
and then for example i want to collaborate with another musician and i'm sending him like at least
this draft so he understands like the way the song should you know the way I see it so it's like so helpful it very much is one
thing though that like after I did it somebody had pointed out that if you do
use AI like somebody was saying like you don't actually like own the rights and
so we may be going through like a time period you know where that's got to
be straightened out because even if you use it for the sounds and stuff like that if it's your
own lyrics if you like i didn't use ai to write any of my lyrics at all then that should still be
like my song right and if it's your i mean melod, melodical idea, for example, I basically, I sing a cappella
my idea.
And then it just like there's, I don't know, there's a keyboard in the background or something
just to help to get a better understanding.
But like lyrics and the whole idea behind the song, if it's fully yours, then yeah,
I agree.
Yeah, that's what I agree. Thank you. Interestingly, the IPs that actually make their most royalties are the ones that are
most remixed. You know, like the most iconic music, forget music for a minute, like the
most iconic painting in the world is Mona Lisa, right? That lady is still popular today, 500 years later.
How? How is that painting so popular today? She's so relevant today because she's been
remixed across platforms, across mediums, across forums, across the internet culture,
and she's managed to still stay so iconic, right? It's only through remix and derivative work that IPs actually find value.
And these are the IPs that actually make some royalties on it, right?
Like rest of us, you know, we might say that, okay, I want to tokenize my IP.
But then, you know, you stay, say, like a small creator.
And then you never grow. Right. And let me give you a more
contemporary example for this discussion, right? Xcopy. Xcopy is an open source artist. They are
CC0 artists, but still their NFTs are like so expensive. I think one of the most expensive
artists in the NFT scene, right? And why is that? Because they allow anybody to remix
and anybody can actually make copies of their work. Their name literally is XCopy, for God's
sake, XeroxCopy, right? So I think proliferation plays a big role in this. Now, the value leak
really is that while if you put everything as open source,
you know, you get marketing and you get publicity and it sort of gets indirect value to it. I think
with tokenization, we can actually make like a payment rail or we can actually fix that leakage
pipe, right? So the more you let people remix your work and make copies of it the more popular you get
and the more on chain value comes back to you I guess I mean that's a lot of the how the world
is these days it's like either freemium models or you know like Balaji his network state book
he offers for free online I mean giving stuff to people for free or or even just on youtube uh for which is
kind of free but then you may get your your your kind of royalties uh seems like one of the best
ways to to grow i don't know if it's the best way to like capture monetization i think it is though
but going back to the royalties so yeah brandoff i
wanted to comment on what you were saying i mean this is like uh it's a big problem right if you're
a early musician it's very it's probably the same thing as you know getting signed to a label if you
get signed to a label um you know and they take a bunch from you and then you're like stuck i'm
assuming these have you know clauses where you can't leave for some time or they own your rights for some time or whatever.
I'm not not sure like exactly how that works.
Some here might. But yeah, the idea that if you're going to sell rights to your income or to your music's revenue or income or profit or whatever, that, yeah, of course you you might sell just like if you had
a company because music is also a business it's an art and a business but if you have a company
and you sell equity in the beginning you sell 10 of your company for you know 50k because you're
20 years old and you're like oh man 50k i K I could do so much with, I could do such a great job building the company.
I could hire people, whatever.
But then later the company becomes worth a billion dollars.
Well, legally, you know, the person who gave you that 50 K, I mean, I think legally and
ethically should be entitled to what you guys agreed to, right?
They took a risk early and you took the deal.
So it's a difficult one. I mean, yeah. So that's probably
why we wouldn't let like someone mentioned that we gave a grant. I can't remember this project,
but yeah, 120. We gave 120 grants in season one. So I don't remember the details of everyone,
but it sounds vaguely familiar. But like if you were to sell a 15 year olds, if they were to raise so that they could go to the right school or whatever it is,
if they were to raise some funds and give up some of their sports career money,
that seems a little questionable. I don't know if a 14 or 15 year old should be able to make
that decision, I guess with their parents' permission. But wouldn't that suck if you were an early person in junior high or high school and some more aggressive agent or someone
or company said, hey, we want to buy 50% of your career rights for, we'll give you $500,000 or a
million dollars. And you're like, oh my God,
a million dollars. I could, that's, I can retire for the rest of my life on a million dollars.
You might think as a kid. Uh, and then you go on in a career where you're doing, you know,
hundred million dollar deals and they own 50% of you, you'd be kind of bummed out later on.
Uh, so yeah, it's a, Hey Rock, we just need buybacks right like taylor swift just went and bought back
all her masters uh so same type of thing like that the lawyers will just get creative they'll say
you know hey for this fifty thousand dollars you get you know ten percent of this up to
a certain amount or there's like a buyout offer so yeah i agree that would that would suck that
would be that's interesting yeah Up to a certain amount.
But if it's in the smart contract, if it's already baked into the smart contract, there's the nuance, right?
So we're on a knife's edge right now between tokenizing assets for self-sovereignty, right?
For philosophical reasons to fit the 21st century. But then we have other
groups coming in to build on top of this with other layers. And what they're doing is more
extractive, putting more control and less sovereignty. And then you're getting locked
into new systems of control. You're beholden to new financial interests.
There is going to be a changing of the guard right now.
It's banks, it's legal contracts for things like royalties and intellectual property.
And this technology is inspired by the ability to take back that power for the individual
and to be able to have the power
of tokenization in your own hands. So if you're deciding at a young age, especially to offer
something in perpetuity, that's a different conversation, I think, than tokenizing assets
for sovereignty and self-control. Well, yeah, I mean, could a smart contract.
And when I started building in this space in like 21 and I started meeting with devs
and wanted smart contracts to do all this stuff, I actually came upon the realization
that these contracts are not actually all that smart.
A lot of the things I wanted to build in, like optionality or triggers or things like
that, people were telling me like, couldn't be on.
Now, I don't know if that's different,
but like, for example,
if you had all the income for something like route through a smart contract,
for example, you could say, Hey, I'm willing to, for $50,000,
I'm willing to sell, you know, 10% of my income on this, you know,
income stream.
And if that income stream all goes through the smart contract,
but at a certain amount, I can buy that interest out or it stops at that point. That could still be all built into
the smart contract if smart contracts allow that kind of stuff to be done. So yeah, you would have
to be thinking about when you tokenize something, is it just finality or are there triggers and mechanisms within the smart contract that as different economic factors play through that smart contract, either revenue running through the contract or, you know, a million and then it's four percent on the next 10 million and three percent on the next 20 million. Common structure in VC
deals in the Web2 world when you're structuring a deal between two companies in terms of how you
get compensated on the size of a deal. So if a smart contract could bake that in, then again,
it's up to the creativity of the individual when they're issuing that contract to someone, what you would negotiate on, and then the contract could be built.
And then, yeah, there wouldn't be ambiguity around that when those triggers were hit.
We would play out.
Yeah, I don't think that should be a problem to build into smart contracts.
I'm pretty sure we could do that today.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but I actually imagine it would be easy. I don't think that's complicated.
So then it takes a lot more than just being... I don't think that's very complicated.
So if you're young, you're intrinsically talented, you want to tokenize that,
you've got this other layer that you have to be able to read the tea leaves, right? Like which token,
which contract setup is going to be most beneficial for me long term. When I lock into
something immutable, right? Is it immutable? Which contract are you using? And so you can't
just come out with a product that's talent-based and offer tokenized rights to those profits
without considering the very long term here, because there will be impacts.
Even if you want to maintain sort of a casual scaling and stay at a smaller level that you're
comfortable with, these things will eventually have an impact legally and financially.
Yeah. I mean, and these things are somewhat common in certain types of business deals,
but at the same time you have to consider, it's not a, like a simple solution because
if you're an investor and you're taking a shot on someone, uh, that's very early in their career
and hasn't proven themselves yet, you, when you're doing the calculus in your head, you're saying,
okay, there's a one out of a hundred shot that this person actually makes it. But I'm hoping for
if I invest in, you know, 20 of the, or a hundred of these guys, uh, or these gals that, you know,
I'll have, I'll have a two high. I now, if, if they have to have over, if I invest in a hundred
and each has 1% chance of making it, then I got to get at least a hundred X on one of these guys
or average of that or whatever. But so if you start putting these stipulations like, oh, well,
if I make over a million dollars, then you only get this much. And if I make over 10 million, you only get this much and over a hundred million,
you don't get anything or whatever, then the investor is not going to be as excited, but
there's always a, there's always a balance. So you either are selling infinite upside,
right? Which is the most common thing in, in business, I would say. But if you don't want to give infinite upside,
then they're not going to pay you as much, but they might still be interested. But they'll
probably be paying for your equity at a discount. Well, and Rock, this is where catering to the
mass markets is where that comes in, right? If you're a VC or a family know, a family office or something, yeah, you're going to
say, I want the unlimited upside. I'm not going to go into that. But think if you have a platform
where someone with a hundred bucks can participate in that, they're going to be okay with not having
unlimited upside, you know, because they don't even get those opportunities anyway. You know,
it's just like, you know, why Robin Hood comes into effect, you know, a lot of big, you know, it's just like, you know, why Robin Hood comes into effect. You know, a lot of big, you know, a lot of big investors get.
I mean, fair, but I would argue the math, just because they're not sophisticated doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing the same calculus as a fund.
But maybe they don't have the opportunity for different reasons.
Because they're not accredited.
They can't get it on the private deal.
They don't have the $10 million to get in on the Series A and the Series B.
They don't have the $10 million to get in on the Series A and the Series B.
So while they should do the math, they also have to be aware that if you're only putting $100 into something, you don't get the same opportunity as someone that puts in $10 million.
And that's okay because they'll still get an average annual return that's better than sticking it in a savings account.
Or at least.
Like this artist, right? I, if I could have, you know, in my early years,
there's several artists that if I could have in my early years, put a hundred bucks into,
into, to own like a small, small, you know, 0.001% of this guy's person's career. Uh, I would certainly have done that. And like like there's been a few that i've i've uh
that i was a huge fan of when they were like no one and then they became they got signed later so
yeah it's a really cool concept steve aoki martin garricks those guys i literally like saw them
perform when they were on small stages and if there would have been a little qr code next to
the stage that said hey uh put in a you know put in a hundred bucks and get that, you know, especially in the EDM scene because of how people come up through doing DJ shows and stuff like that.
A hundred percent. And those guys are grinding. I used to work in that industry and, you know, they're grinding for like doing sets for 200, 500 bucks.
And then, you know, three years later, they're playing in front of 50 000 people so yeah absolutely i think it's also incredible that is an incredible idea kevin if imagine if that
became a standard for young artists is you could you know some of these people you have like uh
you know you go to a a small like um small band in a bar or something, and they got a little tip jar, right?
You know, and they're making whatever, maybe a few hundred bucks or something.
But you could have a QR code, and if everybody understood it, it would have to become more, you know, ubiquitous, and people would have to, like, be used to this thing. But imagine there was some, you know, music tokenization, you know,
artist platform that everybody trusted and knew that if something was on there,
that it was, you know, or you could go, you would have your phone,
you scan the QR code and then you could either do it right there while you're
drinking, which is dangerous.
Or you could then do due diligence, you know,
later when you get home and you're like, man,
this, these guys were really good.
Maybe, you know, I could, if I could get, you know, a small percent of them, uh, for
this for 50 bucks or 20 bucks or 10 bucks, just as a long shot.
Cause these guys are so damn talented.
Um, I, I, and so instead of tipping, you might do that.
Like, Hey guys, you want to tip me?
Cool.
Here's the tip jar.
You want to invest in my career through, you know, this tokenization platform that is as
reputable as like a label. If that happened in the future, that would be pretty cool.
Yeah. And you could even add tipping into that side too. So like you scan the QR code
and let's say you have an app that has, um know, some digital currency. You could it could be, you know, existing digital currencies or it could be one that like a platform sets up that has monetization to it.
But yeah, you could literally tip. You know, there's two options. A, do you want to just tip and, you know, throw them a couple bucks or do you want to do you want to go bigger on that?
I mean, Sum 41, you know, was a band that me and my wife would saw when they were, again, just playing local things out here.
And then they 100% blew up.
And a big reason why bands don't get a shot, just like anything, is money.
Do you have money to market? Do you have money to travel?
And some of these people might be willing to give up 5% or 10 know, their income on shows or something to have money to
buy the latest gear and stuff like that. So yeah, I just think it'd be powerful to bring creators up
by letting their communities do it. And then everybody's excited about it because then you
have communities about it. You can even have special shows that are like, hey, let's do a
show for everybody that's a royalty holder. I mean, it just, it takes everything we're doing in Web3 and brings it to the regular world.
And then everybody's like, oh, this is what this technology does.
Let's go.
Huge.
And then the cool thing about this too, is you can have secondary markets for this now.
So if you were to invest in an artist or you are a label it would
all be private and there would be backdoor deals and not accessible by the public but if you could
you know either you could buy you know this artist tokens at like a pre kind of a pre-sale
before it's pre-market um or it could be not liquid or you could have it be liquid. And now this artist, you know, has released 10% of his entire rights to all his music for the next whatever years.
And it's all tradable online and he's holding 90%.
So for him, the more the value goes up of these, the more valuable his, you know, his own personal equity or the band's personal equity becomes
over time because it can trade in real time.
And if they had a badass concert or they landed like their opening for, you know, Metallica
or something, then now all of a sudden that their tokens would be going up in value.
What a crazy cool concept.
And then if you're like the investor, you could take, you know, it's like anything. It's
like, you know, it's like the Bitcoin rotation to alt season, right? So you go in on someone,
they blow up really big. Well, now you're like, I've got, you know, let's say you put in like
$500 and now it's worth 10,000 where you can be like, well, I still want to support them,
but I can sell $5,000 on the secondary. And now I can invest in and support 10 other local artists.
So you could keep.
This is truly an incredible concept.
So my whole rule, if anybody ever takes an idea of this
and builds with it, you just owe me a burger and a beer.
So if someone on this call goes and makes this
and you see me somewhere, just buy me a burger and a beer
and we're good.
I think Brandoff, this is like a combination of you and Brandoff.
So Brandoff, you got to give Brandoff a half of a burger and half of a beer.
We're talking burgers and beer now.
I thought we were talking 5%.
Well, let's split 5%.
Put us down for that.
Trademark this.
Talent Capital Markets.
What's that?
Talent Capital Markets. We should trademark. Talent capital markets. What's that? Talent capital markets.
We should trade markets.
Talent capital markets. That's actually a great
phrase. Someone has to be
doing this. I know I've heard of stuff like this
in the past, for sure.
Two Centimi, you said
we wrote a grant from Polygon
for sports
for this?
I feel like music would be so much more used
because, I mean, I don't know.
I guess sports is like, it's not niche,
but like young, you know, high school,
you know, sports stars is more niche.
Sports is super relevant.
Timmy, I think we lost him,
but one of the ecosystem projects at Lumia
is, is sports-based in this way.
Uh, because football clubs, you know, like you said, you're, you're, you're sourcing
new talent, maybe one in 10, if you're lucky, turns out to be that big talent, but they've
got to spend the money up front on all the new thousands.
Yeah.
Well, sure.
I'm being generous.
Right.
Full disclosure, not a big sports guy.
So they don't want to pay the full price.
They want to crowdsource that to the people.
Right.
So you're going to you're going to buy shares to help offset the football club's costs to onboard new athletes.
Then you are part of that that new athlete's career,
right? And so I guess my concern is that young people make hasty choices and that if these
things are in fact immutable and that they don't have advisors going into them, that it could serve
as a ball and chain in certain circumstances. And I don't think that's what this technology was
designed in the spirit to do. I think we're out here to give more autonomy and freedom
and sovereignty to people. And certainly that gives that freedom to the consumer.
But if you're the one who's selling your talent in perpetuity, then you're opening yourself up to
speculation. And when, you know, we've seen it
every day out here, what happens when you let people speculate, they fuck it up. They over
speculate, they go too nuts. And then, you know, I don't want to see young people get into bad
situations, because they tried to get more free and got less free. But I think in certain fits, like new athlete sourcing, when you have a platform offering
this in a system, and it's not just your DIY decision to offer a certain percentage
of your royalties or your sales, then there's a lot more room for structure and for good faith in that way.
So I think my hang up is that I'm hearing and seeing DIY builders out here who might be doing their own contracts.
And I just would I would air a little bit of caution because if you're using a contract that's forever and you you give people rights to
something that blows up you're going to be stuck with that for a long time because you didn't have
a vc lawyer with you to stage uh the royalties and and reduce them over time
yeah i uh looked it up and it was fantium was the name of the project that was funded.
But I like.
And as like you guys were talking to, I know you were on music, but like I also think about like tokenizing investors and investment funds where they go, OK, here's the like, here's my expense ratio, here's what I charge. And you can choose,
almost like open up and you can pick whichever fund you want to invest in or whichever person.
And if you want to say, hey, Warren Buffett, here's all my money that you can manage and you
can earn whatever it is. But like you tokenize, I mean, we kind of have tokenized stocks and bonds
right now, but it's, I don't think we have the same level of like a
asset manager wealth management isn't tokenized a lot of that uh gatecapped and when you put it on
an open source blockchain and have these platforms where you have investors say like here's my
historical return here's what i charge then all of a sudden you can start driving a lot of value to
retail investors because they can make these decisions on what they're comfortable with.
But you open up, I think, part of the financial industry.
And I know we've talked about accredited investors and a lot of exploitation where if you open it up and you give everyone this clear lay of the land, all of a sudden you're going to stop the extraction and the people in the industry are going to compete against one another.
And then what that does is gives the actual users and people making the investment a better product overall so you
can just tokenize what you're investing in and then people say okay this is someone who i want
to go with or not there are certainly on-chain funds uh there's not a whole lot of them and most
of them are technically securities um i actually am dming i think he's going to join so this is a project
called Upside
they're a spinoff of Republic
the fund
and they have some on-chain fund stuff
but it all is like
it requires like
you know
I think it's all accredited
and then KYC and stuff
but I'll have him on
to talk about this stuff actually
yeah and I think that like we're nowhere near KYC and stuff, but I'll have him on to talk about this stuff, actually.
Yeah, and I think that, like, we're nowhere near the penetration I would like to see,
I guess, because I know there are stuff.
Like, I know Acred is one of them, too, on Polygon, and I want to say Solana is the other one, but you have these funds, but they're not.
You certainly, it's like a shitty companies 401k options versus like everything you
can invest in yeah I mean the key here is that you're opening up to global markets and you're
reducing the friction I hope that we could have funds that don't require accreditation because I just don't love that.
I really don't like that.
I kind of hate accredited investor laws.
I think the concept of them is to protect consumers and say, but in reality, what they're
saying is you, the general public, are too stupid to understand investing.
So we're not going to let you invest in things until they go public.
What does that mean?
It means that the rich people, they get access to these things early because to become accredited, the main way is you have to have a lot of money.
And so this is like a moat for rich people to stay rich and poor people not to be able to penetrate.
So basically they buy on the private markets early and then they dump on you, the public, when it goes public.
And it's a terrible, these are terrible laws, I think.
I think they really underestimate people and it's just so like, what's the word, patronizing.
It's to think that people are too stupid to make their own choices and to learn about investing by getting their feet wet.
you know, wet.
So I hope that this,
this is one of the biggest things I hope about crypto in general is that it
just opens up the world to both global access.
You know, you could be someone in, you know,
Nigeria with, you know, a hundred bucks to your name,
but you could take 10 of those dollars and invest in a company early or
invest in a token or a
project or an artist. Or what if you wanted to like always, you know, be a homeowner and
gain the benefits of, you know, the growth of the home as it raises. And that opens up a whole new
door for everybody all over the world as well.
Tokenization of real estate, of property homes, all of that, you know, being able to like take
a hundred bucks like you were saying and invest. And now you have, you know, real estate in your
portfolio. And no matter how much you have, whether it's a little or a lot,
like you were saying,
it used to be like,
there was a threshold at one time
where you could only get in
if you had a lot of money.
So it opens up the doors to everybody
all over the world being able to invest
and that actually helps the companies as well.
Absolutely.
And it's not just a price discovery. Yeah, well, it's not just being better price discovery yeah well it's not just being
able to get in at a smaller amount like with the government bonds that you can get with spico
uh where you don't have to go in with a minimum of 10k right but you can buy real estate without
a credit score without a bank history check without an employment check all of these things these hoops
they make us jump through to prove that we're worthy to own our own shit but now you can just
go you got money in your wallet you can go buy you can buy real estate right now in like three
minutes open up the platform find something you want sign the transaction, it's yours. And this is a huge deal breaker for the systems
that have been in control for the last hundred years.
And this is the big message that people need to hear en masse
is that you can have the power back in your own hands
to buy and sell the things that you want to
without somebody else telling you no.
Yeah, no, that's great.
I got to jump, guys.
Always a pleasure on a Friday to speak with this awesome panel and stuff.
And yeah, if anybody wants to build something like that, hit me up.
I'm always down to collaborate on platforms and projects and stuff like that.
But yeah, power back to the creators and let's tokenize everything.
Yeah. projects and stuff like that. But yeah, power back to the creators and let's tokenize everything.
I just talked to actually a project yesterday. So I'm involved in BitAngels and it's an investor pitch network that has 30 cities around the world where projects come pitch. We had three events last week, actually.
Typically, we have three or four a month.
But one was in New York for permissionless.
And I believe they were the first place winner of that.
Yeah, I think they were.
It's Project Tokenopoly, and they're doing tokenizing real estate.
It's synthetic, which I'm not sure.
I'm still trying to figure out if I'm a fan of, but I guess,
so the concept here is exactly what, uh,
cryptic you were just saying. I think it was you.
They were saying that, um, yeah, or maybe brand off,
both of you were talking about similar, but the idea is that, look,
I want to buy a house, uh, or I want,
if I just want exposure to real estate, maybe I'm not buying the house because I, you know, I don't know how to, you know, do property management or Airbnb or I don't want to live in the house.
I just want exposure to real estate because maybe I'm overexposed in, you know, crypto stuff or whatever.
So I want access to exposure to real estate. So what they're doing is,
um, synthetic, uh, shares of real estate based on some kind of like, um, I don't know, trusted
like oracles that other investors already use in trad fire or something. But, um, at first I'm like,
okay, paper, it's like synthetic and shouldn't and shouldn't people be buying, it shouldn't be backed by the real thing.
But I guess the benefit of synthetic would be that one, the management fees are much lower because you don't have to manage the property.
You don't have to go through as much like regulatory stuff and managing hundreds of properties or whatever.
So there's a lowering of management
fees. And then the one big benefit of it that actually kind of made sense to me,
because like, okay, in Bitcoin, I would not want to buy a paper, you know, synthetic Bitcoin.
I want the real thing. I want something that's backed by the real thing for sure,
because I believe in Bitcoin and I want the price to go up over time. The more of us buy it,
the more the price goes up. So CME,
I think was doing like a synthetic, not synthetic, but I think it wasn't like fully redeemable or
whatever. That was the first ETFs for Bitcoin that were approved, I believe. But when it comes to
real estate, it's actually, in a way, it's kind of a benefit for it to be synthetically traded,
because then you can get, as long as it's trusted and you're not going to like buy shares and then they become worth nothing because it's not actually backed.
So that's something you have to figure out. But I mean, this is common in, um, trad fi,
like not all, like, I don't know. I would even guess that maybe most of trad fi like op, you
know, options and futures are not actually backed by the underlying asset. They're just contracts or bets on the asset.
So like for real estate, it actually kind of could be a benefit because people right
now, if you want exposure to real estate, you have to buy the property.
So BlackRock and others buy up these properties because they want exposure to real estate.
But then what does that do?
It increases the price of real estate so that people who want to live in the homes can't
afford it as much, right?
Arguably.
But it also balances rent markets and things.
So it's not like – I don't think it's totally a bad thing.
I think it's a good part of market, like price discovery and efficient markets.
But anyways, but it does aren't buying up the real estate or pushing up the price as much so that regular people can continue buying homes, I think.
I'm not sure, but that's one of the ways I'm thinking about it.
Lukasiteite your hands up
oh yeah i wanted to confirm what project you were talking about when you're talking about
tokenizing real estate and all these projects that i used to see so i wanted to be sure of
which projects you are talking about so i could relate yeah it's called tokenopoly
token okay okay the one i know is multibbank but i don't really know it's like
a multi-bank group i don't know but i just wanted to be sure you know right yeah i'll um i'll post
in the jumbotron the twitter space from yesterday where we so they won first place in new york at
bid angels and then we had them on uh our bid angels show yesterday uh to talk to them so if
you want to hear more about it you could hear there i'll pin it in the jumbotron okay fine fine yeah fine fine
you should pin it now okay we've got Bruno I think you haven't said anything yet so if you
want to introduce yourself also hello everybody I'm Bruno and I have a long history in trad and been in crypto since longer than I can remember now.
I just wanted to touch on the conversation about accredited and then turn it back on to what's going on with tokenizing and enabling it on the TradFi side,
tokenizing and enabling it on the tradfi side which is still where obviously most of the money and
you can put air quotes around it legitimacy is where we need to make headway anyway with regulations
and all that um accredited although it's popularly believed it's to gatekeep that's not really and
effectively it does that but that's not really what the
intention or purpose of it is. It's to allow companies to bypass the extremely time-consuming
and costly process of full disclosures, prospectus, filing, and everything, and say,
hey, here's some people that are well off. you screw them they can afford to come after you not
just afford the losses not just probably know what they're doing but they can come after you
because of course the idea that just because somebody has x amount of dollars they're
sophisticated is obviously not true it's ridiculous they could have got that money all kinds of ways
chasing a ball inheritance off a meme coin, whatever.
So there's other exemptions like that.
Friends and family, same thing.
These people are in your circle.
If you don't disclose something, if you rip them off and cause them losses, you're going to have to face them.
You're going to have to deal with them, which is how society used to work.
It was the power of ostracization that kept people in line. You'd be kicked out of the tribe and have to go fend for yourself.
Because of things like online gambling, meme coins, you name it, DeFi, the regulators are aware
that their lunch is at risk of being eaten. And not a lot of people in TradFire are aware of it yet,
but I've been sounding that alarm for a while now.
And consulting with regulators.
And most that I can say here is that they are sincerely looking at loosening things up
for the mutual benefit of people looking to raise capital through
traditional methods and competing with what's coming in DeFi, knowing full well that if
the easiest path for people's money to flow is into other options, like whether it's online
gambling, whether it's meme coins or whatever, or things in a different jurisdiction that they can now just access through their phone,
they don't need to get a brokerage account and do all this stuff,
then they're going to need to compete on that playing field.
So they are looking at making it more egalitarian.
Equity crowdfunding is one of the initiatives they've done more recently that touches on that.
And they are aware and they are making sincere efforts to bridge that gap.
us in crypto if you will in DeFi and tokenizing is that slowly but surely TradFi is being moved into
um let's say not a shotgun marriage but into cooperating into being part of it and obviously
we're seeing that from the top down from from BlackRock, from the new administration in the States, etc.
And when the light bulb finally goes off for them, and I think it will take losing business,
I think it will take losing customers, losing money for them to really get it.
Because they've seen me be in this stuff for 12, 14 years or more now,
seen me do very well, and still there's resistance.
It's human nature.
They just want to do what's easiest, what's always worked,
what's comfortable and familiar to them.
Slowly but surely, though, they won't have that option.
And human nature is it's probably going to take them taking some hits, having their lunch
eaten.
But it's coming.
The walls are coming down.
And that will be good for people who are digital natives to have disclosure, to have some form of regulation behind the things that are offered,
some sort of security, some trust. And it will be tremendous for those who are early
in the DeFi space, because when that money comes flowing and the sophistication that they have
for creating, for marketing those things to big money,
to allowing them to have leverage to participate in these things, synthetics, opportunities like
was brought up, then it really is going to explode, I think. So that's what I wanted to add.
Thank you. You know, it would be interesting when you talk about the difference between and the benefits of, you know, accredited investor laws and the negatives.
And I do think there are probably some benefits, but I think it's net negative is my opinion.
But when you talk about these things, you know, would not an option be to have two markets?
And that's what I've always kind of hoped crypto could be, is a less regulated and more open global market for these kind of things.
And now if you now let people choose.
Now, you have lots of other countries with more lax, you know, equities laws and investment laws than the
United States. And guess what? People largely still choose, even though it's way more expensive to
do the regulations and the filings and all the paperwork and the reporting. And it's, you know,
you have to be accredited for early state, whatever. But still, the US, both private and public markets are the largest
in the world. And again, people can go to other markets, but they still choose the US for that
reason. But what if you had two options for public? You had, this is kind of the accredited
or the more regulated US public markets. And these,
if you play in these other markets, which are not under the same rules, you know that there's a risk.
But you could still take a company public in a less regulated market and people know. And if
they get burnt, they learn from that. If I invest in this company that isn't required to do all the same filings, maybe I don't like the way they do the filings.
There's all these weird caveats to how people do filings and the requirements.
Maybe I trust this company to do a better version of filings.
And I'm going to take the risk.
I think giving people the option would be better than forcing people not to
be able to invest unless they're rich. I think that would be kind of cool. And I've always hoped
that the crypto markets would kind of force that hand, that these are less regulated markets and
that you can choose to go into a project that doesn't have to do all the full disclosure stuff,
or you could choose to go into a project in the crypto
markets that does have all of that reporting and is registering with the government or with the
United States or whatever country, you know, and you make your own choice. I'm a big fan of
personal agency. I think people should be able to make their own choices. I do not like having
a government tell me what I can and cannot invest in. I think it not only is, again,
patronizing, but I think it also hurts people. When you tell people you're too stupid and we're
going to protect everything and don't worry if it's a food that's FDA regulated, then it's safe
and then it turns out it's not anyways. I think it's better to let the free market solve these things. And then you would
have more, what you would have is instead of having all the government, you know, things that
have been put in place, you would have private, you would have things like Masari, who is telling
you, hey, we've looked at their financials, or we've looked into this project, and we believe
that it is a safe project or not, or we believe that, you know, there's revenue or you look at who invested in it. You know, if Sequoia invested in it, uh, then maybe I'm more likely to invest
in it also because I know Sequoia does, you know, deep due diligence, et cetera. Um, yeah,
that's my thing. Yeah. I'm with you. Sorry, go ahead.
Two. So I'll just add two quick things to follow up on that.
I agree with you.
You're right.
And that somewhat already exists.
They call them tiers in TRIFI.
So you have sub exchanges even on the NASDAQ where the reporting requirements go down all the way to essentially zero financially.
For the reasons, again, it's onerous.
It's not affordable for companies that are.
Are they publicly traded? Yeah, absolutely. You have tiers of exchanges. In Canada too,
you have the TSE, like NYSE in the States, and then you have junior venture exchanges. So
that is in existence and that is how they're looking at it. As somebody who has sat on the board of public companies and brings companies public,
I can tell you that when it comes down to the opportunity to save many months and tons of money
and also get there quicker and not have a competitor beat you to it,
to be able to just make a few calls, raise all the capital, and just do it under one of those exemptions is the difference between whether it ever gets done or not.
And so, like everything, there's a good side and a bad side.
And that's part of the reasons why those are there.
They're not totally or probably weren't even at all meant to be gatekeeping.
And I agree with you on the big brother nanny state thing too.
Sorry, who's the, who's the, I'm sorry,
who's the gentleman that's talking right now?
This is Bruno, BR00NO.
Bruno. Okay. A real pleasure, my friend.
Well, I've been on most of this call.
I did have another call that I had to take briefly.
And my, my name is Nathan Dunneville.
I don't know if you can see me on the ledger there.
Yeah, we can see.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to come across too naivete, but I'm really newer to the crypto space.
Who knows?
Maybe I'm the newest person on this whole call.
I don't know. But regardless,
I wanted to, at the very least, introduce myself and at the very most even kind of ask a little
bit of a quandary. So, you know, we own a company, we recently got patented for literally a fireproof coating.
We can spray it onto any home or anything and it fireproofs the home.
So we're starting to look at some major contracts to rebuild, you know, one-eighth of Los Angeles.
I already opened a headquarters out on the island of Maui, Hawaii,
already opened a headquarters out on the island of Maui, Hawaii, and we're starting to get
permits for the city of Lahaina to rebuild that city. 94% of that city was bound.
They haven't rebuilt that yet?
Nope, nope.
How long has it been? It's been at least two or three years, right? No, no. It's
been a little over a year and a half, but these things take time. You have to understand they
take time. You know, I mean, when a fire burns an entire city to the ground, there's so much
infrastructure that takes place. You can't just lay a concrete slab and start putting a home up.
But I guess where I'm going with this conversation, I don't expect that most of you on this phone call are contractors or necessarily builders.
But here's the tie in with this whole phone call is, you know, our company is not a traditional construction company.
Like I was mentioning a moment ago, you know, we have a new fireproof system here.
I can pretty much go anywhere in the world and build a fireproof tiny home or a fireproof
mansion or whatever you want without taking too much of your time going through all the details
of my engineering process and the chemists that I have. I have some of the top chemists in the world
um so just cutting to the chase a little bit um you know I'm we're looking to tokenize we're
looking to tokenize land we're looking to tokenize our building system like we're we're we're open
to basically converting our whole company over into the blockchain and um I'm just, I guess I'm just curious
who on this phone call is even open to working with us
or if that even applies to anybody on this call.
Bruno, go ahead.
I was just putting my hand up.
I'm always willing to hear what somebody is doing that's innovative and patented that's looking for access to funding. So we can connect on the back end, Nathan, if you want, and kudos for that. You're doing good work.
I'm just one of those lucky guys that would happen to be in the right place at the right time.
But the reality is, yeah, I mean, I certainly see, you know, I bought a little Bitcoin back in 2014, you know, and I thought I was going to like become a billionaire.
And then it started to go down.
It started to crash a few years later.
So I started to sell it, you know.
But, you know, beyond all that, I think, you know, I don't have the exact timeline here.
Some of you guys probably know better than I do, but I feel like just in the last three to six years, roughly, like this whole world has the whole crypto.
I mean, the whole blockchain. I mean, like it's it's gone into a whole nother level.
I do feel I owned one of the major marketing companies called Universe Relations.
So I do actually have a major background in marketing as well.
And unfortunately, I do feel that there's been a little bit of a disconnect, you know,
with the crypto world and the traditional world.
And it's none of you guys' fault.
I'm sure, you know, we can blame people like Sam Bankman, Freed and, you know, you know,
I mean, there's been a few bad apples. And so I
think that's tarnished, you know, tarnished things for sure. Um, but I would say, and I know we can
do more calls in the future, but I think for me, you know, with my marketing background and now
with our new construction company, um, I think that, yeah, if there's a tie-in that we can show
the common man, and I'm just saying crypto
loosely, I know you can call it many different things, but if we can show the common man that,
like you've been talking about on this call, you know, like crypto is the way of the future,
it can be marginalized and broken down where you can just put five bucks into something and become
a five dollar investor. And so I would like to do that with our homes and with our land and all of
that. And so I'm just letting you know on this call, like I'm absolutely wide open. I would like to do that with our homes and with our land and all of that and so I'm
just letting you know on this call like I'm absolutely wide open I had like an epiphany just
like a month ago um that I just am ready to convert everything over to you know to to this
to this whole world so anyway that's I think that's my thing in a two cent nutshell um our
website if you want to check it out, I think I put it on there.
It's pretty simple.
It's Zenith, like the old 1960s television.
But anyway, it's ZenithHomeSystems.com.
And I'd love to work with anybody on this call as well.
I used to actually raise a lot of capital as well.
But now I'm so swamped.
It's like I don't have time to do traditional capital raise.
So I was thinking, wow,
maybe I can start to do this through the crypto world.
So I just want to,
I want to thank you for stepping up and for coming up here.
You guys, Nathan's a very good friend of mine.
One thing that I kind of wanted to know that we don't get a chance to hear a
lot of us in the space is what, what, what,
how has it been
for you to work on like merging your company into web3 well i haven't i haven't done it yet that's
that's the reason i'm on this call i haven't i haven't even touched it so i haven't i haven't
done there's been nothing i haven't done anything with web3 yet so anyway well nathan nathan i'll tell you buddy uh i'm i'm with a
blockchain that focuses on tokenized assets so i'd love to get you somebody to talk to you
uh we can follow up in dms here got you okay yeah no that sounds great that sounds great no i mean
you guys mean a lot to me and i can tell that many of you on this call have put not just hundreds, but looks like thousands of hours into this. So big, big kudos to you guys.
I think I was probably 10,000 hours into crypto by like 2017.
Wow. Wow.
Yeah, I mean, I think some...
What's that?
I said you're ancient.
Yeah.
The running joke, I think, is that one week in crypto is like a year.
So you're like ephemeral at this point, Rock.
I'm like as old as you know.
I'm like his only other now.
I was going to say CyberShack, he's on 10,000 hours this week.
I was going to say, CyberShack, he's on 10,000 hours this week.
So what I would say is this is in the category of RWAs,
which is a generally hot thing right now.
Polygon is focusing on this.
Lumia, which is a Polygon Aglayer chain that Brandoff is with,
and it used to be with Polygon, are both focusing on this stuff.
I don't know.
I haven't seen a whole lot of non-Web3 kind of venture capital
raised stuff happening in Web3.
I know that it's happening, but I haven't seen a whole lot
of real success in it to personally and I'm pretty
involved in in the investment side of the industry um we run an excel actually we run an accelerator
I'm a mentor for Tim Draper's accelerator Bitcoin fi accelerator we run an investor pitch network
where we see like thousands of projects um a year I'm on the grants board for pitch network where we see like thousands of projects a year.
I'm on the grants board for Polygon where we see like 3,000 applications a quarter.
And I just don't see a lot of projects successfully raising for non-Web3 things.
If I was in non-Web3, I probably wouldn't be going to Web3 for my raise personally.
But I don't want to like scare you off.
I think there's a place for it.
And I could be totally wrong. You know, there's, there are some people, actually, someone will be joining here in about, I think like 10 minutes and they're, they've done some, a lot of
fun stuff that's less crypto related, but on as crypto funds. So he might have some better insights
than me on this. I hear you. Yeah, no, I hear you for sure.
I think we are at the cusp of a turning point, Bruno. Is this still Bruno I'm talking to?
No, this is Rock. Oh, sorry, Rock. Yeah, no, I do agree with you and your assessment that people
haven't done a lot of capital raise. I would just, I would just dare say this though. Um, and I'm not trying
to get political, but since obviously we've got a president right now that fully supports crypto,
um, I think we do have like maybe a three, like a three year window right now.
And, um, I would say over the next 24 months, everything that you just shared, it could,
it could be flipped upside down.
Yeah, it's happening as we speak.
Yeah.
Sure.
So, yeah, so I would like to be at the forefront of that as good as I can,
and we'll see what happens.
It's almost like I don't even know where to start, you know?
It's crazy. I don't even know the fucking thing.
I think, yeah, Brandoff with an intro to Lumia is good.
Let's see.
I'm trying to think of, I could potentially introduce you to,
because you said tokenizing land and the properties,
or how does that, what are you trying to do there?
Yeah, I think we would do
it separately we could we could tokenize land and the cool thing is we already own land so we own
many many acres already so we could tokenize land like one acre at a time or 5 000 square feet at a
time and it would be i i think the cleanest way is to keep it separate. So you can tokenize a lot of land, like an acre of land.
And then if people have more money and more involvement, more cash, then you can actually tokenize a house.
So we can build a complete house anywhere from, you know, 30,000 bucks.
You know, I mean, that's a new Tesla is what, 100 grand or whatever.
So I can build a house for 30 grand.
We could tokenize that all
the way up you know as high as somebody wants to go okay that's dope man and i gotta tell you like
if if we can talk and and i can't help you uh then i can find somebody who can uh so just i can't dm
you to follow me back uh but let's talk let's get you some resources and help you connect the dots to see this vision come to reality.
Right on.
We'll appreciate that.
You're going to shoot it on the DM or something?
Yeah, just because of the way Twitter works, you got to follow me and then we can DM.
Gotcha.
Okay. Sounds good. And you have, me and then we can DM. Gotcha. Okay, sounds good.
And you have, okay,
well, I appreciate that. Well, anyway, I don't want to
interrupt the call that much, but thank you guys.
Whose background is that?
That's someone's background.
Do we know who that is?
Okay, cool.
We got it figured out.
Everybody's chewing their sandwiches right now uh so it's time for somebody to sing a song
it's time to where did the song singer go somebody play the song i did a little clip for you like you
asked where's the clip is it on the, did you post it on the jumbo?
Let's go.
So it's funny. I'm like,
I'm looking through this list of questions and it's like so many of the questions we've kind of covered in some way or another,
like they've been asked indirectly, you know, just,
just through conversation, just natural conversation.
And that's like, that's the way that it always goes. It's, it's funny to, to see how that happens.
Yeah. Looking, looking through these to see where we can kind of, yeah.
Yeah. Can you guys hear me?
Yep. There you are.
I thought I was rugged and I was just muted.
So, yeah, one of the things3 markets being 24-7, right?
And then NASDAQ is also, I think, doing the same.
So pretty interesting to see.
that was one of the benefits of bringing equities on chain.
That was one of the benefits of bringing equities on-chain.
But I think it's still,
there's so many benefits to bringing equities on chain,
lower cost of management, settlement.
You have instant settlement as opposed to having these like clearing houses
and what is it?
The DTTC orTC or whatever it is.
Yeah, there's all these benefits to bringing equities on chain.
We had the Mexican government was talking about wanting to bring their equity markets on chain.
I think it'll be kind of like an Andrea Sentinopoulos thing at first,
like an infrastructure inversion type thing where, you know know originally the internet was built on phone lines and now phone lines are built on top
of the internet uh and i think the same thing will happen with uh equities i think right now
you'll have people moving equities having tokenized versions which there's a bunch of them
um and i think actually upsideside will be coming on.
I think they've done something like this.
But then I think eventually, though,
people will just be issuing their equities on chain
and there won't be like a separate equity-like structure
that you're just wrapping to put on chain.
It'll be native to on chain.
Yeah, that's going to be a huge game changer.
One of the, I was in the Palm Beach group and investor group years ago and they were talking about how the guy was massively in crypto and he'd travel
around and meet with government officials and founders and stuff like that to stay at the forefront and his main thing was that when the day comes that you know the uh the stock
market is able to be traded like 24 7 due to this technology and stuff that's going to be a really
really big deal and um actually like uh i started like testing out a lot of the
ton telegram ton applications and I found one and they let you connect your
wallet and then either trade crypto or gold and silver or Forex and then all of a sudden they incorporated like some stocks there was probably
like I think there's like 10 and I noticed like I was like wow this is so cool like here it is
right and then the other day I went back in and looked at it and there was a timer all of a sudden
on the stock side so now I'm'm like, like saying like it wouldn't
be available, you know, until a certain time. So now I'm like wondering, you know, there's
got to be, there's going to be a lot of regulations that are going to have to be surrounding that
I would imagine to do 24 seven.
Well, I mean, there are these, now these companies are starting to do that themselves.
So that's going to, I think, over time become less of a lure to bring those over to our
markets.
But there are still tons of benefits, the settlement, the clearing, transparency, having
the ability to see how the flow of these stocks is happening. You'd have less
of this like GameStop, you know, manipulation, short selling and stuff done where, you know,
the GameStop people were trying to track all the different, all the shares that they all held and
because it's not transparent. And so the GameStop people were putting together spreadsheets
and like putting screenshots of all the shares they owned
in GameStop and trying to figure out was more GameStop
being shorted than actually existed.
Because, you know, there was clear manipulation happening.
You know, they were trying to destroy the company by,
you know, big companies shorting.
So they're gonna take, So they're going to take,
so they're just going to take like all the tools and stuff and incorporate
it around what's already out there eventually.
Is that what you're thinking?
They can't, they can't solve all the problems without,
they need blockchain to solve some of the problems.
So I think,
I think for some time you'll have a hybrid where you'll have the same NASDAQ,
New York Stock Exchange, et cetera. But you will also have them tradable on Web3. At first,
they'll just be wrappers. Then maybe they'll have it where they can issue their shares either on
chain or like natively or as a traditional way a traditional way. Uh, and then eventually I think
it'll all just come on chain and, and who knows, maybe NASDAQ will build their own on chain product,
right? Um, maybe they'll be the ones that run it and it'll, it'll have the benefits of blockchain.
It'll still be the same incumbent, maybe running it. I don't know.
I don't know.
Are there any other...
Nobody seems interested in equities on-chain.
Are there any other things that people think are interesting to tokenize
that we haven't talked about?
Actually, Rock, I'm extremely interested in the tokenization of securities on chain because
that's essentially the business in part that i'll be in um but these effectively synthetic ones that
exist now um not as much it needs to be they still need to establish the whole thing from my perspective.
Are the synthetic, is the reason, so I imagine what's happening because either you would have to issue a stock on a securities platform, like a crypto securities platform, which exists, or you would have to make them synthetic.
And because you're not trading the actual asset, maybe that gets you around the KYC laws. I'm not
sure, but that's what I would imagine it would be like. Correct. And it's worth remembering that
regulators are a business. They are colleagues as much as they are the man, so to speak.
If they end up with nobody to regulate,
they're out of business.
So part of why they regulate
is to try to make as much capital flowing into
and with goodwill legitimate things on their platforms,
to use that term, as possible.
And then the platform grows, the amount of money invested in people involved grow, and
they make more money by virtue of having more things to regulate.
And I don't mean, I hope that doesn't sound cynical.
I mean that very sincerely.
It's how it works.
And sometimes, you know, they forget all all types of endeavors uh cops on the
street too that uh who's paying them and who their clients really are but um with respect to
securities on chain there's also the we have to be honest and not a lot of people in TradFi like this to be said, because it's painfully true, that a lot of the biggest, even some, not a lot, some of the biggest names out there today in TradFi, in stocks, and this has always been true, aren't really anything more than glorified pumps and accounting shuffles.
shuffles so and the idea that if you own a share in not to pick on them let's just say amazon
everybody's heard of it that you own a part of the company is both true and it isn't you can't
walk to their corporate office knock on the door and say to the receptionist okay i want my part
of the company they'll kick you out and if it ever came a time that there was a liquidation
then the shares would be worth so little that you would be at the end of the line in the structure, you would get zero.
So even that's kind of not a lot of different than a meme coin.
It's just one that has had the tradition and the religion behind it, if you will.
So that's a painful pill to swallow, a very bitter pill for a trad fi to swallow to come to the grips with
that reality because it kind of forces them to admit that in some degree they're the wizard
behind the curtain and in the wizard of oz and again i don't mean any of that to sound pejorative
or cynical it's a business i've been in most of my life it's just true and so if if we say the things that are true we can look at is this really
that different than what's going on in in defy and in tokenization and it's a lot less different than
people would like to believe and so if they can put their ego aside and admit that it can all
happen a lot quicker it can happen to the advantage of those looking to raise capital
through whatever um channel they pursue whether we call it tradfire DeFi still those lines will
blur like the distinction you made between um phone lines and the internet and people looking
to have access to things that as much as they care for them to be transparent and legitimate and actually have a
tangible share of something whatever that something is a company real estate etc then
they will meet and and they will have their market and they will have their settlement
and their provenance and their recourse, most importantly. Because last thing is, remember, people with the money,
they want the recourse if something goes wrong,
if they've been wronged or lied to.
And there's so many lawyers in the middle on both sides
looking to protect their own gig and their interests of their clients
that it's a lot to chip away on.
It's a lot to erode.
But we're getting there to everyone's benefit.
And the ones that want to be shysters,
they will still be shysters.
They will find the people that are willingly gullible
and need to meet their financial rock bottom
to learn the hard way.
That's never been different.
And it happens every day in traditional markets
on the New York Stock Exchange, on the NASDAQ.
It's happening as we speak.
So that's never been different.
That's human nature.
We're not going to change that.
Absolutely.
I mean, what was the company?
Elizabeth Holmes.
What was the company?
Theranos.
Yeah.
I mean, that was a fraud, right?
And it turned out to be a fraud. And I think what happened there was kind of what I was referencing earlier to play devil's advocate against myself is, you know, you can play in these markets and you can say, oh, Sequo to invest in that because Sequoia did. But, you know, the smart people aren't always right, to be fair, right?
Like some really big people, what I think was SoftBank, one of the ones that invested in Theranos.
I mean, some of the biggest investors in the world invested in that and they followed each other into it.
And it turned out to be a complete fraud.
And, you know, similar happened with what's the old, I think it was NASDAQ chairman, um, Bernie Madoff.
Uh, he was like chairman of NASDAQ, I believe. Right. And he, uh, took everyone for what,
$60 billion, $68 billion, whatever it was. Um, so these things happen and you're going to get
burned one way or another. That's why I don't like the accredited investor laws, because I think it's kind of a it's a sham that you're making people feel safe and feel comfortable that, oh, if it's government regulated, it's safe.
But that's not the case.
And it makes I think when we bubble wrap people and we tell people, oh, don't worry, the government's going to take care of you and protect you.
Then you make people become weak and they and they don't understand that they need to look out for themselves and they should never trust anyone fully, right? So, yeah, we have
actually a project here, speaking of Sequoia, who just came on stage that I mentioned earlier,
who's doing some stuff directly in the stuff we've been talking about here, tokenizing different kind of assets.
Someone asked about tokenizing funds.
We had the gentleman on who was talking about tokenizing or raising funds, tokenizing his real estate and fireproofing venture that's trying to rebuild some of the homes in California and Hawaii.
And so we have Upside here.
They were invested in by Sequoia and some other big names.
And, yeah, Upside, why don't you tell us what you guys do,
and we'll let you jump in the conversation here.
Maybe for, like, we'll give you, like, maybe one minute to tell us what Upside does,
and then we can maybe dig more into it.
Great. Perfect. Thanks for inviting me on, Rock.
So what Upside does is we're helping to tokenize everything and trade it on chain with AI. That includes stocks, bonds, ETFs, RWA's,
private market shares, and also new RWA asset classes.
My background personally was that i
led the team that originally launched nasdaq private market background 2014-ish and then after
that i was the cto of republic crypto they've made some big news lately about uh tokenizing
spacex shares which we're very likely to be a part of and we have a uh a transfer agent and our i actually dm'd you about that yesterday
when i saw that when i heard that news i dm'd you guys to see if you guys were involved in that
yeah yeah i can't say too much but uh let's say it's highly likely um we uh we also um we have
a transfer agent just um recently registered and we're rolling out full blockchain native
transfer agent features which is the you know the true blockchain card-alike functionality that people have been talking about for a long time.
And that's also a really key part of on-chain clearing.
So we're really happy about that.
That's the big shift for this week.
Yeah, just happy to dive into any area that's most interesting for this audience.
I've been listening along for a little bit, so I'm happy to weigh in on whichever area you want me to talk about.
We've had so many topics that made me think about you
that we've talked about in the last.
We've been going for over two hours.
But yeah, would love to.
Let's see.
I'll pause there.
Maybe Bruno, I think you might have some questions or thoughts about what they're doing.
It's pretty interesting.
Yeah, I guess actually maybe one more thing you can talk about is like what you,
like the partnership you've had with Republic and what you've done with Republic,
like what assets you're managing there and all that.
Yeah, the one that I most often talk about.
Because we were talking,
mainly because we were talking earlier
about like on-chain funds and how these things work.
And I think Republic is probably one of,
if not the most interesting on-chain fund
that I've seen in the industry.
Yeah, absolutely.
So the Republic Note Token
is backed by essentially 600 startups that are on-chain.
It is a tokenized fund. Well, the legal
structure is a little more complicated than that. But we can sort of broadly say that it functions
similarly to that. And it currently is trading on INX in the US amongst a lot of holders. It's really quite a powerful example of what can happen.
Applause, Drac. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, so that's one of the major ones. You
know, it's amazing. Like I actually worked with Ken back in, who's the CEO of Republic
back around 2017 on the original note white paper.
And there was a lot of complexity to deal with back then.
It was very difficult for people to understand what was possible in the future, but it's
actually live now.
The actual legal doc form, of course, is about 300 pages long now, but it's been really
exciting to work with them to launch that one.
And how much traction have you guys had with that?
So it's like you guys, I think, what, how many companies are part of that fund?
Yeah, it's about 600 companies, and it's connected to Republic's entire crowdfunding infrastructure.
structure. So it takes on both some of the deals that they do in their private market accredited
investor deals, and also the crowdfunding deals that they do that are available to unaccredited
investors in the US. The interesting thing about Republic also is that they are very focused on
US compliance. And that's a different perspective than a lot of folks have been taking.
And I think that that kind of seemed, that was very difficult until recently
where the administration has taken such a different tack
and is finally backing the industry.
So I think that there's so much available in the U. So I think that there's, there's so much available to in the U S now,
and there's so much opportunity in the U S to improve the way that people are investing here.
Well, still being, you know, still, still playing by the rules and adapting those rules to us. So,
yeah. Yeah. Really cool stuff you guys are doing, um i guess how do you think i have a question um
so some of the benefits of on-chain equities we were just talking about on-chain equities
before you came on but some of the benefits were that the 24 7 trading and i knew about nasdaq but
you actually were the one that told me about new york stock exchange now doing the 24-7 trading, and I knew about NASDAQ, but you actually were the one that told me about
New York Stock Exchange now doing the 24-7 trading. Can you explain to the audience,
what are the other benefits of bringing equities on chain, either as wrappers or natively?
Yeah. So, I mean, I think everybody, maybe a lot of the folks in the audience know that
the clearing process is is very complicated
i'm gonna no i'm gonna pause you there i'm guessing you are in this i'm guessing most
99.99 of the world doesn't even know what clearing is so i think you're assuming maybe
too much there we do have a pretty sophisticated audience here, a lot of builders, but this is a different area. This is less of a crypto thing, right?
agree on a price, at that point, the money has to go from the buyer to the seller and the stock,
the equity has to go in the opposite direction. So that's called clearing, where you do the swap
of the money and the shares, basically. And that process, that exact moment has a lot of,
that's where a lot of regulations kick in. And there is a lot of insurance that you want a
lot of assurance that the two counterparties are actually going to swap the assets. So in the US,
a lot of that is done through a clearing company called the DTCC. And that can take several days
to do. So I think NASDAQ is down to t plus one clearing which means
the time of the trade plus one day um but uh many many locations are still like three days to clear
before that actually happens and because of that it does actually open up a lot of room for
gamesmanship around in that clinton that clearing period um and there's there's been i think there's
a lot of issues around like naked short selling and this sort of like weird weird moment where uh it's not really
clear who owns what and then people are holding money on the float and making money off of it for
two or three days it's kind of like the paypal model but for clearing stock um so so that there's
and you explain to people what what float is both in in the context of PayPal and then in the clearing.
Okay. Yeah. So when you wire money from point A to point B, a lot of the time, the reason why it doesn't immediately show up in the counterparty's account is because the company in the middle likes to hold the cash for a few days, put it in a short-term money market account, make interest off of it. So that's actually the business model for a lot of money services businesses.
And it also is something that is possible when you have multi-day clearing.
It's a huge, huge business.
Huge business.
Well, actually, to be honest, I think stable coins are getting in that business now, which is that you have one for one backing, and then those dollars sit in
the account and earn interest for the stable coin. Yeah, I was good. That's what I was kind of
thinking. But is that, would that, I mean, but that's more like the traditional, I guess,
banking model too. But is that, is that considered float? I suppose. I don't know. Yeah. It's kind of, it's a very long float.
Yeah. Um, which is why it's the, it's probably one of the best businesses on earth right now.
Um, but I would say that like, there is a lot of value in, in being able to have an on-chain
representation of, uh, of, of a, of a currency that people are thinking in that they're, um,
and then being able to, to transact with it and to clear instantly. So this, this is sort of a currency that people are thinking in and then being able to transact with it and to clear
instantly. So this is sort of a long intro to why instantaneous clearing is one of the most
important features of the blockchain. So what that allows you to do is if you have instantaneous
clearing or you have things clearing within a group altogether, then that unlocks things like zero risk,
100X flash loans,
where you can borrow, perform a set of trades
and then repay the loan at the end of that
within one grouping of transactions.
And if it didn't make money
and you're returning the money to the lender,
then that entire group of actions will roll back.
You can't do that in a market where you have T plus three clearing.
That's not going to work.
And the on-chain composability is really this key aspect of the blockchain ecosystem where
you can be borrowing, performing trades, repaying, staking,
all within the context of one transaction.
And that's incredibly powerful.
And that's the direction that markets are moving, especially on-chain.
So on-chain is the only place that you can do that.
And then the last thing, the really important key to the puzzle that I think about a lot
is that these environments actually are quite complex. And thankfully, we now live in a era where we do have AI agents that are better at
constructing trading plans than humans are. And they can make sense of these kinds of opportunities
construct these trades for us and for our approval and verification. And that's going to allow us
actually to take more advantage of these on-chain markets
than we have previously. It's like this is a very powerful new era. And so if I'm talking to,
you know, a lot of the time I'll say, hey, you know, what we're doing is we're like bringing
NASDAQ on-chain. But what's also happening at the same time is what a market is, how it performs,
and what the structure of the assets are on chain is actually changing right now.
And that's that's incredibly exciting.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, what about the open access element?
element. So one of the great benefits, uh, and we've talked a lot about this today on the show,
but one of the great benefits of, of these things is like, uh, we used, for example,
uh, we were talking about like, uh, tokenizing talent or artists early in their career or,
um, uh, sports stars, you know, even as, as early as like high school, um, like in the,
being able to invest in them
and then own a piece of their revenue, similar to what, you know, agents do, right? Or maybe
less agents and more, yeah, agents too, but more like labels. So a label buys these artists and
they own a big piece of them, but, and the people are
beholden to the labels and the labels are, you know, uh, pretty aggressive about some of these
things. But if you could have, instead of going to a label, that's going to say, we want 50% of
everything or 80% of everything, or 90% of all your CD sales, you know i've heard crazy stuff in the past you could go to the public
markets uh i i am careful to say public markets because that has legal context but you can go to
these crypto public when there are public markets and raise from uh the crowd and raise from your
fans um and so when it comes to equities wouldn't it be great if u.s equities could be
bought by anyone including someone like i said you know earlier someone in nigeria or latin america or
you know some country where they don't have a lot of money but maybe they maybe they want to
learn to invest and they want to put five dollars into, you know, into, you know, SpaceX or into Tesla
or whatever. And right now they can't do that. But on chain opens this up. The problem is
legal requirements. And I think a lot of the stuff that you do, you have to use for the equities,
you have to use like securities platforms, which I think basically is what you've built.
Are you a securities platform or are you working with the securities platform?
Yeah. So what Upside does is we are a technology provider and we work with a number of platforms
that have, say, broker-dealer licenses or exchange licenses. I personally do have a Series 7 license that allows
me to talk about securities, basically. And then we also have the transfer agent license. So we're
playing very much in the regulated space because we want to address a US audience because it's such a major part of the investing world. And there are a lot of advances that we can make around accessibility
to private market shares in particular,
because this is an area where the regulations are...
I think there are positive aspects of the regulations
around providing information to investors. And that's really important, like avoiding fraud, like nobody wants to get rugged, basically. And regulations can help with that. But at the same time, it's very difficult to navigate the accreditation part and to be able be able to like markets can be a lot more educated
right now. And so we want to see an efficient regulatory system that is able to take advantage
of a lot of the innovation that's now possible and the greater information that people have to
be able to do their own research, um, and make intelligent investment decisions. So, um, that,
that's, that's how we situate ourselves in the US. I think globally, you
mentioned the opportunity for people to invest in US companies. I think it's a massive opportunity
because if you have to buy a single share, for example, some shares will actually be higher than
the amount that you want to pay to invest.
So you do need the fractionalization.
And then...
Can you give an example?
Like, for example, Berkshire Hathaway, their A share is, you know, $650,000 or something
last I checked per share, right?
They've never done a split.
So, yeah.
Exactly. So, yeah, even the never done a split. So yeah. Exactly.
So yeah, even the class B is like 486 today.
So that's like a significant investment.
Or maybe, you know, if you're investing like $2,000 even, and you want to divide that across
shares, that you would be overweighted if you choose to invest in a company that has
a share with a high share price.
So the fractionalization is beneficial there.
And then you can imagine that if you're in another country, it becomes even more beneficial if you have less to invest proportionally to the U.S. dollar investor in the U.S.
And then the last part that's also important to realize is that U.S. shares, when they get listed in other places, a lot of the time there's like an intermediary to that that requires a minimum buy-in.
And that minimum buy-in might be like $20,000.
And that's definitely inaccessible across a lot of the world.
But could they, does the middleman, is it that they have to buy $20,000 or is it that the end consumer on the edge is faster?
It's the end consumer.
And part of that is that like on the edge is faster it's the end consumer and part of that is
that like that entire process is very um is very regulation heavy and is expensive to do so there
is some cost to actually making that accessible um i think the blockchain makes that a lot easier to
administrate assuming that you have a fully integrated stack there which is the kind of thing
we're building and um so there is a lot of opportunity there.
I think one thing that people do maybe underestimate, though, is that some of the
inefficiencies in the market are directly tied to the regulations themselves.
So the fractionalization of shares is actually an innovation that's happened in the traditional
market.
And it makes even more sense when you connect it to a blockchain where liquidity
is kind of the default in a blockchain is that people can trade between each
other and you're kind of titrating that to the right level.
But a lot of those innovations are actually happening in the, uh, they're
happening in, in the traditional market and then they're being adapted for the
blockchain.
So there is this back and forth innovation.
That's really actually very important to, to look at and look at how those
influence each other i wonder why like what yeah you probably know you could probably give a pretty
good answer here but we're seeing a lot of the things that we're doing in Web3 that traditional markets are copying.
Now, are they copying because it's better?
Are they copying because they're forced to keep up?
This is what I say was one of the great innovations of Bitcoin in the first place.
Bitcoin in the first place was as Friedrich Hayek said, and we actually did a show yesterday with
Anthem Hayek Blankard, whose parents helped re-legalize gold in the U.S. after it was made
illegal for citizens to hold in like the 30s or 40s or whatever. And his dad actually did the
interview where Anthem Blankard, sorry, where Friedrich Hayek, which is crazy because I think I was talking to him
once and I quoted this and he's like, oh, my dad did that interview. But it's where Friedrich Hayek
says, the only way we can have good money again is to, in somely around about way, take it out of the hands of the
government. And he's basically saying we need private money, we need free market of money,
or at least competition of money. And I think one of the things that Bitcoin in our industry does
is it makes the other actors have to behave. So if you're going to keep inflating the dollar away
and Bitcoin or crypto is going to go up against it so much then eventually
you have to stop printing so much or your money printer will break like it has in every other
country in all of history and i think the same thing is happening here where when we start having
these public more public and globally accessible markets that have less kyc and for good reason
many of the time you're not custodying assets.
So why should there be KYC? In my opinion, if there's no custody, why can't we have equities
traded by someone in Nigeria? And I think one of the answers or pushbacks would be, well,
we don't want terrorists or sanctioned countries to be able to buy these assets. But like,
don't you? Like, don't you want
everyone to? Like, my argument for the dollar is one of the worst things we ever did was start
sanctioning people and start pushing people away from using the dollar by weaponizing the dollar.
You want your money to be used everywhere. And dare I say, and this is controversial, but dare
I say you want your money to be used by the drug dealers and by the sanctioned countries or by the people that you don't like.
You want your money to be used by everyone so it's universal if you want your money to last.
Otherwise, what you get is a union of countries that generally don't even like each other.
China, Iran, well, the BRICS nations, basically, right? And so Russia and China having problems,
India and China have had land skirmishes forever. But now they're getting together and uniting
against the US because of the weaponization of the dollar. And so my thinking carries over from
that to equities. Why would we not want everyone to have access to U.S. equities? And maybe there's some kind of national security baked in there where, like, you don't want some country to buy our defense contractors.
But, like, why wouldn't you?
Don't you want your enemy to buy your defense contractors and fund them?
I'm not sure.
I know China doesn't like this kind of stuff.
It has all these currency controls for their own reasons.
But why wouldn't you? I think it definitely is the case
that the US government won't buy from suppliers that take investment from some foreign entities
because of the influence that investors have over those companies. And I think that that kind of
gets at the core of what's different between money and a company, which is like between, say, a currency and a security, is that like securities are they are basically like associated with a group of people that are doing something together, you know, like especially in the equities example where it's a company. And there is actually a lot of reliance on people and their
word. Like Bitcoin exists in this intentionally trustless environment, but companies have a lot
of, there are a lot of people involved and they can do a lot of things independently. And so I
think that's at least the distinction between the two. And then there's a lot of different views
that we can have on those distinctions.
So, so what do you think? What would be, would, would the world implode with the U S like all of a sudden,
like fall apart if we all of a sudden allowed everyone in the world to trustlessly
on unit swap or quick swap or, or where, or on, on upside.
But like, you know, if upside were able to drop the KYC for equities, I don't see that. I think,
okay, I understand there's some negatives, but would it not be net positive? Do you not want
the U.S. to be the strongest equities market in the world? And it is partially because there is
access to other people, but why is it that we're only allowing that access to the government or,
you know, the rich people in the other're only allowing that access to the government or, you
know, the rich people in the other countries that can get access, uh, or even, even terrorists are
definitely accessing our equities markets through indirect ways or whatever, whatever terrorist even
means. But, uh, but like, wouldn't like, would it not be beneficial for the U S to have someone in
Africa who's struggling? Would it not be beneficial for all parties
involved for someone in Africa to be able to, in a poor country, to be able to buy $5 of Tesla
shares and invest in the future of America? It would be good for the American company and for
the buyer. The short answer on a citizen-to-citizen level is I think that's true.
I think there are – it's like geopolitics is a much weirder beast.
For example, on the one hand, maybe it's a good thing if North Koreans can benefit from the appreciation of Tesla stock.
Maybe they wouldn't want to nuke us so much maybe but but at the same time like just being very pragmatic you know like there's a person from the ethereum foundation who had that
view and he is just now getting out of prison you know so yeah uh yeah tell that story that was an
interesting one yeah it was really you know um uh virgil Virgil was a really idealistic person who decided that he was going to, you know, in this initial wave of Ethereum, believed that like person to person, person, the person to person, this argument, citizens should be able to invest in other citizens and that there is a greater good to developing relationships across
international borders, decided that he was going to go to North Korea and educate them on Ethereum
blockchain technology. All he did was give a talk in North Korea. That's it. He just gave a talk.
I was just researching this yesterday. It's on my mind. He, he actually did talk to the state department before and they were like,
sorry, don't go like specifically do not go to this conference.
And then he idealistically went and his argument was that he thought that the,
that he thought that it would be a, you know, more of a slap on the wrist,
maybe a fine, but he ended up in prison for five years and he's just getting out now. So I think like it is, you know, on the geopolitical level is the conflict between
nations. These are very, these are very strong forces and it's, it's important. I think it's
important as entrepreneurs to understand where we actually are in the matrix and what we can do.
There are things that we can promote and try to do, but I personally really enjoy living in the
United States. I'm a citizen here. I have a voice. I advocate for things that I want, and I'm also
very conscious of the legal system and how it functions here while trying to achieve certain objectives.
And I just state that directly because I think, you know, as someone operating a business here,
I do have to be clear about like how I operate. And do I think that people, do I idealistically
think that it would be better if individuals could work across national borders more directly and that blockchains allow us to do that?
Yes, I think that's like the fundamental pieces of blockchains.
And we've got like we've got a lot of work to do at the country level to be able to make that a reality.
And some of that pressure is going to come from the blockchain.
And certain people have made sacrifices and moves to make that a reality. And some of that pressure is going to come from the blockchain. And certain people have made sacrifices and moves to make that possible,
like Satoshi, by not revealing his identity,
made something possible that really could not have been possible otherwise.
But as someone acting out in public through U.S. regulations,
it'd be regulated, I have to operate in a very conscientious way.
All right, come back from your personal account so we could really talk.
No, I'm just kidding.
Let me come back from an undotched account so I could give my real opinions.
Look, I'm a proud American.
If you see me at a conference, I'm always the guy in the suit wearing his suit.
Absolutely.
Okay. Thanks. a conference i'm always uh the guy in the suit wearing his absolutely uh okay thanks uh i'm the guy in the suit wearing his american flag lapel pin and underneath it a bitcoin pin you know i'm
i'm a proud american but uh i i think all these like hurdles these over regulations and this
limiting um other countries from doing things i mean part, I don't know. I just, I'm a
libertarian, so I think we should have less of it. But, you know, there's, look, one of the reasons
we sanction countries is to put pressure on their people, which is sad because we don't like the
government. So what do we do? We sanction the whole country. So someone in, you know, Iran can't, you know, buy things from the
U S we can't sell things to them. They can't use our services. They can't use our, our PayPal or
Venmo or these kinds of things. You can't have Amazon there. I'm pretty sure. Right. I think
that's how it's, it is now. But, um, what's sad is that we, we basically are trying to hurt their
people so that their people put pressure on the government
or so that they vote for someone else so that we can get those people out of power. That's what
part of the soft influence the US is trying to have. And I just don't think that's fair to the
people of these countries. It's not fair that a North Korean who is already in the worst dire
of straits, most likely their starvation is rampant. It's just a terrible situation for them. And because
we don't like Kim Jong-un, we're going to, we're going to punish their people who are literally
starving to death. It's just, uh, it seems, it seems unhumane to me.
Yeah, I, I do agree with that. Yeah. do you think what do you think the chances are that
we'll have actual equities tradable globally with without kyc i mean you know global bonds or u.s
bonds are now being traded without kyc through usdc because the u., yeah, we don't want to let people buy our bonds,
but you know what? We really need people to buy our bonds and all these countries are stopping
buying them. And USDC and USDT are now the 12th largest buyer of US bonds in the world versus
countries. And so, yeah, maybe we can let Coinbase and base, like, so if you put your money,
if you put your USDC on Coinbase,
you get the bond yield or close to it.
It's like 4.2% or something.
And now they open that up to be more trustless.
I am surprised they've been allowed to get away with this.
But from what I understand, if you hold USDC on base,
you can get the yield.
I don't know exactly how that works or if that's true,
but I've heard this and that's, and base is not KYC'd. It is KYC'd for builders, but it's not
KYC'd for the users. So maybe the US will open up our, you know, regulations to allow for this.
I think it would be beneficial to our public markets. Yeah. I mean, I think there, you know,
what a lot of people have been doing because of,
you know, because of the situation is launching, launching assets that are not tradable out in the
US and creating a, you know, an adapter company that like, it holds US shares, the non US entity
only interacts with people who are outside of the US or in jurisdictions
where things can be freely traded.
And that's kind of like a proxy or an adapter approach.
The issuers themselves do actually have a requirement to understand who the holders
of their equities are.
At some level, they need to be able to trace down to who's holding it.
And that's the other part of
AML KYC, other than at the market level. So where people are trading equities between each other,
there's the burden on the exchange to do their AML KYC, but there also is a burden on the issuer
to know who it is that's holding their shares.
So there's two different parts of it.
So I think, and that burden is for either US companies or US investors.
So if you don't have a US company, you don't have US investors, then you're talking about a very different situation.
So I think like answering the question.
Isn't that a weird thing though?
Like, okay, you can trade US stocks, but you can't be a US person.
What a weird, what a bizarre thing.
And that's been a big pain in this industry actually in so many ways.
So like, for example, I think the current Genius Build does not allow people, stable coin holders to give yield to the users directly, which is kind of a weird thing.
And also securities laws.
Warren and et cetera, that, you know, if you make a shitty meme coin that has no benefit to the
user and you tell everyone, this is just a garbage meme coin and you don't get any, we're not going
to give you anything, then you don't have to follow any rules. But if you say, Hey, we're
going to make a smart contract that 10% of all trades go back to the holders or something as
revenue. Well, now you're a security and now we're going
to put you in jail or we're going to not let your people trade. We're not going to let US people
access it. And it just seems like a weird thing where the US is trying to do the right thing.
I understand the regulators are trying to do the right thing, or they're just
lobbied by the banks to not allow this kind of stuff because it would make savings accounts
kind of obsolete. But I think that for
the most part, the politicians are trying to do the right thing. But the negative of it is that
now you're cutting off people from access to these revenue sources that regular people could use.
Yeah. I do think that there's a lot of, I don't know, I would say overpreciousness about who can participate in investment.
Like we don't want people, it's like, I think moving in the direction where it's like, if
you're a scammer, we prosecute you is fine.
Yes.
But I do think that-
We have fraud laws for that.
We've had those since the inception of America.
And more participation is good as long as it comes with sufficient information.
Like that's the key, right?
Like we don't want fraud.
We want you to have enough information.
We want you to be able to invest.
Like those are like, I think that those are like the key principles.
And then there's, I think there's something else though that's like, I don't know.
It's like a hidden part of the lobbying engine, which is that there is a lot of lobbying money that's
going towards keeping the incumbents in place. And that is not in the interest of building
better markets and better, yeah, exactly. Better markets, better investment. And so I think a lot
of the anti-crypto movement has actually been
protectionist around uh around banking the existing banking incumbents existing market incumbents
and i think that's uh that's that's pretty sad because um i think like you know maybe people on
the left don't really realize that their their representatives are just defending banks by
attacking crypto rather than acting what they even think their stated interests are so i think that's
that's deeply ironic and i think that's something that like the crypto community could call more
attention to which is like hey you know like these bills are just defending like like they're just defending the incumbents. So, yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's unfortunate. I mean, I, for most of my life, I consider myself kind of like ultra liberal in so many ways. I was, you know,
an advocate for gay marriage early and I think pot should be legalized and I
have published research on environmental stuff and I but now like yeah what what's going on i don't i can't
i don't feel aligned anymore when when i hear you know elizabeth warren saying we're gonna we're
gonna destroy your industry we're gonna destroy this thing that is trying to democratize finance
and investment and and democratize everything and get rid of all these incumbents. And it's like, who is paying her?
Who is lobbying her to say this stuff?
What is the point of defending the inertia of the existing banking industry?
Like, yeah, there's so much deeply wrong with that view as opposed to like, hey, how are
we actually going to create a prosperous nation with the least friction on positive investment?
And that's really what we should be looking at.
And that's precisely what blockchain has helped to do in so many different ways.
It helps on the governance level.
It helps on the clearing level.
It helps on the expansion of investment opportunity.
As long as it is coupled with sufficient information and ways to address fraud,
we should be really,
really moving a lot, a lot faster on this. So it's, I'm very happy to see some of that happening.
Like this year has been such a major shift, um, on, on this level. It's, uh, it's really
important that we address this and it, it should be bipartisan. Um, but for some reason it it's moving now this overly politicized uh
you know overly politicized thing where it's like no this is like infrastructure yeah this is like
core core financial infrastructure that like everybody in this country is using money and
like and making investments and and wants to retire and it's holding assets. Like this upgrades that for everybody.
And we should be focused on, you know, as it is right now, a national priority around it.
So, yeah.
And I think it will be.
And I think whether it's for like proper kind of like doing the right thing or altruistic reasons or whether it's money.
I mean, I don't think Trump was necessarily like a big Bitcoin guy
or like really believed so much in Bitcoin.
It's that he said it at Bitcoin Vegas.
I was in the audience.
I've heard him say, there's 39 billion of you crypto people.
I want you guys to vote for me.
I'm going to help your industry.
Vote for me and we'll protect your self-custody and this and that.
And he said it.
He said, there's 40 million voters. Please vote for me and we'll protect your self-custody and this and that and it was he said it he said there's
40 million voters please vote for me i will get i will do what you guys want uh so and i think then
when we got you know crypto industry donated 48 of all donations meaning the combination of military industrial complex, agriculture, pharmaceutical, real estate, insurances,
you know, all these different industries combined, we donated that much.
And it's sad that that's what it took, but that is what it took.
And I don't love that game, but if that is the game, then we have to play the game too,
or else they'll just keep cutting off our feet every time we try to do something.
And so I think that the Democrats have to see that this is happening, and they don't want to keep losing these votes because they're attacking something that there's a lot of people who like this thing.
of people who like this thing. Hey, yeah. And I have to jump off to do a little bit of
business stuff. I wanted to mention one last thing though, which is that on the one hand,
we're talking about like the current onboarding of equities and assets into the market. And I
think something that's really important to highlight though, is that as we move more towards AI trading, which is another thing that upside is in private beta
with, that this new kind of world where we have real world assets and AI trading is actually
going to be a very differently shaped market than the current one. And one thing that I just want to
kind of leave everybody with is that like,
right now people are thinking, should I buy Nvidia shares? Or they're thinking about like,
do I buy this company that's holding this underlying compute assets around,
you know, and the what we're moving towards with on-chain real world assets is like,
should I buy the compute capacity? or should I buy the land associated,
invest in the land associated with these data centers? And so being able to invest directly
in the assets that are some of the underlying pieces of the, that these companies are built on
is becoming more and more available with, with on-chain tokenization. And so I think this is a really interesting shift.
And that also the AI trading,
the analysis there is going to help us make better sense of these,
this new market shape.
Yeah, definitely, man.
Thanks for coming, Noah.
Appreciate it.
And yeah, guys, give upside a follow. It's very
interesting what you guys are doing. And yeah, actually, can you quickly just name your investors,
guys on the cap table? I think it's important. It's not the most important thing, but I think
it is important to show that you guys really do have traction. Yeah, absolutely um uh we've got investment from uh borderless uh republic actually
is a major backer of us um borderless is a great fund i like this fantastic um work with them and
then um they're they're very defy oriented they're not like a typical fund that just writes checks
most of them but borderless is very active in defy and growth and a lot more liquid trading and and
those yeah and then um uh we were invested in earlier through sequoia and um we also have uh
balaji sreenivasan is one of our investors i referenced his network state earlier on the show
yeah yeah he's an important important person in the space um and then let's see who
else is in there um legal tech fund um some early uh tiger management um investors uh investing out
of their smaller funds but with that tiger management investment uh background yeah so
it's a great a great group of folks that have backed us. And yeah, if you want to get in touch, you can kind of see my link here, join Upside.
You can ping me there in my messages.
And yeah, just follow and send me a message.
Would love to chat with any of you.
All right.
Thank you, Noah.
So I want to read some, does anyone else have any comments bruno
i'm surprised you didn't jump in on that it seemed like stuff you would be have a lot of
questions about or comments he covered it so very well the biggest gap the hurdles between trad fi
and everything we just heard is that the paralysis involved with all of the moving parts that the
vast majority of people, a lot of them even in the business, don't realize exist and how crucial
those are and how much legal peril it opens up if there's question marks or it's not done right with respect to jurisdiction, clearing, compliance, et cetera, et cetera.
So since it will advantage both sides or all sides as this moves forward,
it will happen.
And as I said earlier,
it'll take people losing clients and money because somebody will do it first.
People have done it first.
Some people have taken huge hits because of it.
I mean, look what even Coinbase went through
in fighting the battle
and how different this whole conversation would be
if not outright illegal
had the election gone differently,
had a bullet's trajectory been slightly different
or whatever narrative you choose to believe in.
There's a big the biggest effect has been that election has been europe and other jurisdictions hong kong moving forward with clarifying the legal aspects and permitting defi singapore is huge in this respect. And with Bitcoin being over 100,000, Bitcoin now over 100,000
has just that round number psychological figure. The attrition, the war of attrition, if you will,
of all the years it's been going and steadily moving higher after all the sell-offs and institutions getting involved, that's been
huge in opening the minds of TradFi and eventually just going, okay, you know what? We give in.
Let's explore this. Then there's all those hurdles and that chasm I just spoke about.
And it's being addressed as we just heard. It's wonderful.
And it's being addressed as we just heard.
It's wonderful.
Well, for example, I mean, look, whether you like or don't like Trump,
the stuff that they've been doing, talking about like just
