#475 Robert Materazzi on Standardizing Crypto

Robert Materazzi is the CEO of Lukka, which bridges the gap between the complexities of blockchain data and traditional business needs. Formerly he was a Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, specializing in large risk, regulatory, and cybersecurity driven technology implementations for traditional financial institutions and foreign banking organizations. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of creating industry standards, how crypto is transitioning from innovation labs to business units, and why Lukka is winning so many customers. ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.io/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today. ======================= Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ======================= Download the top-rated DraftKings Sportsbook app NOW and use promo code POMP when you sign up to get one hundred to one odds on any football game THIS WEEKEND. That’s code POMP for new players to get a shot at one hundred dollars on any football action this weekend.… for a limited time, only at DraftKings Sportsbook! ======================= Did you know only 1% of day traders actually turn a profit? So why are so many of us mistaking picking stocks for serious investing? You can’t control the markets, but you can control your risks. So how do billionaire investors control their risk? They invest in blue-chip art. If that sounds unusual to you, you’re not alone. But the ultra-wealthy have been investing in art for centuries. And since 2000, art has outperformed the S&P by an incredible 180%. Just a few years ago, a single work sold for $450 million! Imagine... Being able to invest in the very same paintings as millionaires and billionaires, at a fraction of the cost. Masterworks.io is an exclusive platform that makes it as easy as trading stocks online. And the best part is: you don’t need to know anything about art. Their experts will create a custom portfolio to meet your investment needs. With Masterworks.io you don’t have to choose between big risks and big returns. Sign up today, select PODCAST and you can skip the 70,000 waitlist to get first dibs. Just go to www.masterworks.io and select PODCAST.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano, most of you know me as Pomp, you're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there, let's kick this thing off. Robert Matarazzi is the CEO of Luka, which bridges the gap between the complexities of blockchain data and traditional business needs. Formerly, he was the Director at PWC specializing in large risk regulatory and cybersecurity-driven technology implementations for traditional financial institutions and foreign banking organizations. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of creating industry standards, how crypto is transitioning from innovation labs to business units, and why Luka is winning so many customers. I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:38Anthony Pompliano?

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• 5:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Masterworks, Exodus, Crypto.com, and DraftKings. Let's get into this episode with Robert. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by POMP or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by POMP as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 6:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. I've got Robert here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you for having me. Happy New Year.

• 6:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, happy new year to you as well. Let's just jump right into your background. You spent some time in the military, then worked at PWC. But where'd you grow up? How did you get to the military? And then why go to PWC afterwards?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Sure. Great, great question. I grew up moving around a lot. My dad was in the hotel industry, so lived in, lived in Europe. So not a military brat, but pretty, pretty comparable. I joined the military very, not randomly, but spontaneously following 9/11. So I was in college during 9/11. So that, that caused me to go into the Marine Corps. They needed pilots. So, so I was a helicopter pilot there for nine years. And then, and then left, joined PWC. They were kicking off a big military hiring initiative. And, and that was really what exposed me to, to a lot of the more traditional financial services side of things.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  So I worked in their banking capital markets group. And a lot of the post-financial crisis regulations, a big focus on large scale technology implementations and risk management or other regulatory compliance initiatives. And then, and then was introduced to Luka through a mutual, mutual friend. And hadn't worked heavily in crypto. I was familiar. I'd read the Bitcoin white paper, you know, bought a tiny amount, wish I'd bought more. And, and then started off at, at Luka a little over two years ago now, formerly called, called Libra. We changed the name a few months into, to me joining. And they were creating

• 8:03Speaker 02

  institutional grade software and building data products that made, that helps to make the software function. And, and that was very, very appealing to me in a rapidly growing industry. It was something that I knew the industry or I thought would get to eventually.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Which is one of the things I think we're going to talk about today is as, as mainstream is, is adopting all of this. So at Luka, we build institutional grade software and data products to support middle and back office operations.

• 8:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so I know you're not the founder of the business, but you lead it today. Help us understand kind of the impetus for the company's creation and kind of what the original idea was and then how it, if at all, it's evolved to where you are today.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Sure. So Jake Benson was my predecessor and founder. He's still involved with Luca. And he created the first Bitcoin tax calculator back in 2014. We kind of joked around that he was the only person trying to pay his capital gains on his Bitcoin investments back then. And really, you know, he discovered very, very quickly through a lot of conversations that the right use case there wasn't just a Bitcoin tax calculator, but it was a cryptocurrency tax calculator because there was a lot of innovation going on and new assets being created on blockchains. And then around 2017, company pivoted towards

• 9:33Speaker 02

  institutions. It was a lot of the funds had now been created by that time and fund admins, some of the smaller fund admins were starting to take on crypto fund clients. And so we built the first version of our software. We're now on the third generation, built the first version of the institutional grade software with standards like AICPA SOC controls in mind as we were building it so that we could support the businesses that were forming around the crypto ecosystem.

• 10:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And as you started to kind of get into these institutions, what are some of the major themes that you're seeing, right? So the idea of building software at an institutional grade for kind of middle and back office to many people would seem unsexy and frankly, they don't understand it. So kind of when you go into a corporation or an organization, like what is the conversation like? What are the themes you're seeing? And kind of maybe, how does that sentiment shift even over the last year or so as you've been CEO?

• 10:37Speaker 02

  So it's all about the data to start. So if we're working for a customer and we're trying to figure out whether it's creating whatever type of report they need. So if it's a fund, they're trying to strike NAV or their fund admin is trying to strike net asset value reports. We'll come in first and collect that customer's data from the ecosystem. People that know the ecosystem know that it comes from a lot more places than than traditional funds. And so and that's that's one of the great things about crypto and the innovation that's going on. And they're trading and exchanging these assets in new ways. But that creates a lot of downstream challenges for the middle and back office operations.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  First, just collecting all the data. Second, trying to make sure Bitcoin is Bitcoin. You look at Kraken calls Bitcoin XBT and Coinbase BTC, two of the largest exchanges in the US for the most commonly traded assets. So when you get to the other 7,000 plus assets that funds are trading on today, it gets much more complex. And then we fill in things like cost basis proceeds. So anything that requires fair market value with the pricing data source that our customers want, we let them choose from a number of them, including our fair market value, our proprietary fair market value pricing product called Luka Prime. And then ultimately, we apply a bunch of reconciliation steps and techniques to

• 12:02Speaker 02

  make sure their data is accurate and complete, so we can create a crypto sub ledger effectively. And then from there, we can do the things that usually the customers are calling us up to do, which is any of the reporting processes, helping them pass an audit, tax reporting, financial statements, ledger entries, all the traditional financial requirements that usually people take for granted when they start putting crypto assets into their businesses.

• 12:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. One of the things that's been really interesting to me is you just highlighted this kind of very elementary problem of just, hey, if two different exchanges call the same asset, two different names, then that can cause confusion. But also, there's some much more nuanced challenges. So one, for example, is an expanding balance sheet potential, right? So if I hold Bitcoin on my balance sheet, and all of a sudden, it's expanding in kind of US dollar value, and I report in US dollar terms, where does that go in my financial statements or my financial reporting? Another is actually denominating revenue when it comes to crypto. So rather than denominating the revenue in dollars and saying, hey, I made $10,000, I may say I made, you know,

• 13:14Anthony Pompliano?

  a third of a Bitcoin. And so how does that kind of affect a lot of this, these accounting standards? How much of that today, across all of those different issues, are, you know, still complex obstacles that people need to navigate versus, no, we're getting to the point where there's like some pretty good standards here, and you feel pretty comfortable that like corporations moving forward, whether in the public or private markets, are going to have like a nice foundation to stand on, and everyone kind of agrees on what that treatment and rules are?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  So absolutely, like you pointed out, we have to apply some new techniques to some of those situations to do some of the very common things like establish ordinary short-term income versus capital gains or whatnot. I think that, you know, I'd say roughly 90% of that was figured out before DeFi. You know, once, once we get into that, and that's one of the exciting things, is it's the next thing for everybody to figure out, and it's, it's causing a lot of innovation. But when it comes to the very basic things, which are the, what the majority of the portfolios make up today. So these are your, your mining applications, your staking applications, so all that short-term income, all the air drops that people experience on a recurring basis, all the net capital gains that they get, or receiving an income and applying something

• 14:28Speaker 02

  at fair market value. I think all of that is, is fairly straightforward. We might be missing very formal guidance, but, but it doesn't mean that the standards aren't there. We do have, you know, Guidance, I know the AICPA has a ton of, you know, leadership groups and has put out a ton of perspectives. Even a lot of our regulators or government agencies in the US, like the IRS with its FAQs, have matured a lot since, for example, two years ago, that define a lot of these things. So I'd say there's a lot of work to go, but the basics, and I think the basic foundation is there. However, with that said, it's still something that we explain even as part of our very basic sales pitch

• 15:12Speaker 02

  almost every single time. So I think there's a lot more education to go, but the good news is, is yeah, a lot of those basic functions, most of the standard setters agree on how we should address them.

• 15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things that's interesting to me is that we're going to digitize the assets. Then there's this element of decentralization and then ultimately we'll get automation out of it, right? Where people can interact with protocols, machines can transact with other machines. And there ends up being just a more efficient automated system. Is there a world where we eventually get to the software, whether you guys are building or other people's software, that can essentially do a lot of the accounting functions and kind of what I'll consider operations or middle or back office in that same automated way so that you're not settling the books at the end of the month? You're actually doing it in a minute by minute or hour by hour basis?

• 16:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's kind of a more real time aspect to a lot of the flow of funds and the financial metrics?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. We do same day NAV. We announced that in the press over a year ago with hashtags. So they currently have one of their funds that strikes NAV every single day. And that's because we worked with them maybe, you know, a little over a month to sort out some of the processes to make sure that their data flowed in and that we could accommodate that. It gets much more complex, the larger the portfolio and really where your trading activity gets into. You know, mixed derivatives into it, mixed DeFi and Uniswap and all these new things that are coming out. Makes it more complex, so we still have to figure those out. But there's absolutely a path forward to automate the majority of those processes. Or at a minimum, highlight where there is.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Isn't automation and potentially replace them for the interim until until we build, you know, more advanced features on a case by case. But there's a lot of that. I will say a ton of this data is, I'd say, probably over 95% of the data that we intake for our customers. And we have over 160 funds that are managed in our software today, pure crypto funds, is most of that data is not off chain. So it is from privately held centralized databases. So like that you would, you know, get over a Coinbase API or a Kraken API or whatnot. So a big portion of it is is not on chain data for sure.

• 17:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, walk through some of the challenges with DeFi. You mentioned that there are challenges, but maybe just elaborate on one or two of those that you guys are actively dealing with.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  It's really the same thing that I just mentioned is traditionally when someone chooses a liquidity provider and that liquidity provider has their data that a customer can get over an API in DeFi, that doesn't always exist. There isn't always a business that they're interacting with, or if there is, they're not necessarily recording the data, the data set centralized, they're facilitating the exchange of it. And this depends on the, you know, the product and what specific process. So I'd say with DeFi, we are dealing with a lot more on-chain data. And whenever you're dealing with on-chain data, you're missing elements that people take for granted. You know, there's not going to be a US dollar value associated with it usually. And so some of those very simple things we have to fill in using some other techniques, all definitely solvable. But some

• 18:24Speaker 02

  of the data isn't as readily available and it's often much more incomplete than we need in order to satisfy some of those reporting requirements.

• 18:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then maybe we could talk a little bit just about this idea that you've previously said a lot of what we're talking about today was in the innovation labs inside these organizations, especially the large corporations. But now it's actually moving and starting to hit the business unit. So we're moving from more of an R and D type thing, more to an application on a day to day basis. What are you seeing there? And how do you think about that transition?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Sure, I think that's the the natural evolution of the the traditional financial institutions adopting adopting something that's that's this material, right, for their for their businesses. I mean, a lot of the things that's going on in the crypto industry that the crypto native ecosystem has been doing for, you know, you could argue a decade, probably materially, maybe the last five years. And and as these traditional financial services companies are coming in, they're reading a lot of the technical white papers. They've got innovation labs that are exploring a lot of things. I think the biggest thing, and this is advice that I give to any of the the larger financial institutions that I speak to, is to don't look as much at the underlying technology, look at the ecosystem, because that's where that's really what we're seeing a lot of innovation as well.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  And and that's what I think if affects the the overall markets and how people exchange these assets today, that's different from what they're used to seeing in the securities or FX markets, or, you know, whatever market you want to compare it to.

• 20:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it it's fascinating to me how kind of quickly this is all evolving and how quickly we're going from, oh, there's this cute thing in the crypto blockchain space to now, wait, we actually may be able to implement this in our everyday business. And it actually, in some weird way, feels like that's accelerating. Is that fair from kind of your perspective?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely. We we've been waiting for what is happening right now before our eyes for several years. We didn't, we've been preparing for it. We didn't know when it was going to happen specifically. We were all hoping it was going to happen soon. But it is kind of a domino effect. I mean, even by Luca's partnerships that we've we've announced with State Street leading our Series C this past winter, and partnerships with companies like S and P, IHS Market. We have partnership with CPA.com. I mean, those are all your traditional logos that are, you know, play a big, very big roles in the traditional financial services ecosystem. And now some of the traditional funds, for example, get to use the the name brands that they're used to seeing already

• 21:04Speaker 02

  to provide them services as they're adding crypto to their portfolios and as Enough to tell you in the press, it seems like multiple times a day, we see someone is buying, you know, hundreds of millions of Bitcoin or some other crypto asset. We know it's Bitcoin today. I'm sure that'll, that'll work its way down to the other cryptocurrencies over the course of this next year. But, but yeah, very, very exciting. And then it's whether it's all the regulation, like what the OCC has been putting out lately. I mean, allowing the custody of assets, you know, comparing what we're doing in crypto to things like Fedwire and whatnot is really, really exciting.

• 21:42Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned a couple of big milestones that you've experienced lately. Let's maybe talk about the fundraise first. You raised capital, my understanding is from State Street, CPA.com, and a couple of others that maybe aren't considered your traditional venture capitalists, but are very critical to what you're building and kind of the industry you're going after. Talk through just the partners in that fundraise, what the capital is going to be used for, and why select those to partner with.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Sure. So, you know, all of we named in the press, State Street, CPA.com, who we'd already been partnered with for over a year, and we go to market with them for our Luca Sachs for Professionals product, and then S and P. And all of those, we were talking to in commercial relationship capacities before investments, and we were raising our Series C last year. So our, you know, those big partnerships are natural companies to speak to. And so we wanted to focus on that, particularly in our press release, because we thought it would help the industry and help with some of the adoption. And then from there, we do, we do have other investors that were involved in the rounds that we didn't name that that aren't part of

• 22:51Speaker 02

  commercial relationships. But the use of the capital honestly is just to further improve our products. We've already built our products. We're on the third generation. We're actually just launching some of them more publicly over the course of the next couple of weeks in advance of tax season and, but they're not all tax focused products. I mean, we do have the next generation of our institutional software that we're putting out. We plan on improving it to add all the features that our customers are asking for related to DeFi very, very quickly, so that they can start using them right away and benefit from their, their back offices being organized as they're adopting some of these new financial products.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  And then continuing to scale our footprints. So it's pretty, honestly, the use of the capital is pretty basic. It's just the to expand our business, continue to execute and support our customers with features.

• 23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't happen to want to name the people you didn't name previously right now, do you?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Not right now, but we will probably it soon in the press. So just so that I don't prematurely, you know, share some of that. So we will be doing it, but we're just going to be doing it here in the new future that we've already, that we're already working on a strategy around.

• 24:10Anthony Pompliano?

  No problem. I didn't expect you to, but I got to ask. Another part that you've done and announced publicly is this partnership with the S and P. And there's some indexes and some other work. Maybe talk a little bit just about kind of that relationship specifically and some of the stuff that you publicly announced.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  So we are providing our Luca reference data and Luca prime among other data products to S and P to support them as they create their indices for crypto. They haven't announced specifically what the indices will be yet, but that there will be several of them. They're going to be coming out very soon here, which we're very, very excited about. And we're hoping that this is just the beginning of our relationship with them. They're a great logo that we know is very, very trusted. And that's a big part of our relationship is making sure that the data quality of our products can serve the companies like S and P and all of our other customers

• 25:11Speaker 02

  and meet those traditional institutional standards so that they can continue doing what they're doing. But hopefully with crypto assets involved in a much more material way.

• 25:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And would it be fair to say that majority, if not all of the business for you is really B to B? Whether you're going B to B and providing software to those middle and back offices or you're providing these data feeds and kind of reference data to somebody like an S and P? And then they may go B to C. So that's more of like a B to B to C type model. Or do you actually have direct touch points with retail and any of the products?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Really all of the above now. So a couple of examples. And our foundation, to be clear, is absolutely B2B. Right? We cater to our institutions, a lot of the biggest logos in the crypto industry. And you know, we're now starting to see the traditional side of things enter. But additionally, so for example, with our CP.com partnership, that's more of a B2B to C. So we built a product for them to sell to or license to CPA firms who are supporting their clients. So that's an example of our B2B to C. We have in a pre-launch mode and we'll be announcing it very soon here in the next week. A free portfolio management tool that is a consumer product that's absolutely free, which we believe will help support the industry.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  And there's some very inexpensive tax add-ons. So if they need to do tax reporting on top of that, it'll be extremely cost effective for the retail. So in that example, we are going direct B2C. And we'll continue to build those out, but really it's all with the same standards that B2B requires, which is a big part of our strategy. It's part of our culture. We built to our AICPA SOC controls and all the standards that the institutions rely on. We want consumers in the retail markets to benefit from as well.

• 27:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense too. I guess like once you get the B2B relationships and you're really able to establish yourself both from a product standpoint and accuracy, a resiliency and also kind of this validation to then move kind of downstream into the retail market as well. Is that generally how you're thinking about it?

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Perfectly said. That's exactly, exactly what we intend to do. There are, there's a ton of innovation that goes on in the crypto industry. And so you get a ton of startups, a ton of companies that are doing great things. However, when we start doing things to institutional standards, it becomes much more challenging. It's much more costly. I mean, even just our annual audit costs to maintain our AICPA SOC standards are higher than a traditional startup would be without a doubt. But that's what's required in order to build that quality of a product. So the standards that we support there are a big part of our value prop, a big part of our marketing campaigns and everything that we do.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  And it's honestly one of the challenging things too, because people think because they're selling you something that the calculations are correct, but I can tell you that they're not. And, and, and we want to make sure that we can put products out there that, that people can trust and that are accurate and that they can support and that they're very comfortable using when they're filing their taxes or doing any of those other things that could potentially put them at risk if they get it wrong.

• 28:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. I gotta ask, for somebody who was a helicopter pilot in the Marines to, to running this business, what are some of the similarities and also some of the biggest differences between those two jobs?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Sure, that's a great question. You know, at, at the end of the day, both of them just come down to, to problem solving. And that same thing I was doing at P W C. And that, you know, consultants, the ones that you can, that you can trust and that you rely on, you know, in the normal course of your business are helping you there to, to solve the most challenging problems or to improve processes. And that's exactly what we're doing at Luca is we're taking what is a very complex problem at the end of the day. And we're trying to make it as simple as possible for our customers. And in making sure that we focus on, on their needs first, you know, same thing as a helicopter pilot, you know, our, our customer was different.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  In that case, it was the, you know, the ground troops or the infantry or anyone on the grounds that we're supporting. It's, it's the same, same premise here is we're, we're solving problems so that they can rely on us. So we're in a, I consider our company to be in a support position to other companies, businesses.

• 29:41Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Before we move into the kind of lightning round to finish up, I just want to zoom out a little bit. And you guys obviously have built a great business. There's a lot of commercial partners and customers that trust you on a day to day basis. Really to run their business and kind of fulfill that support position you just described. Where are we going, right? When we start thinking about digital assets? Decentralized protocols, kind of this automated financial system. From your perspective, how does the business evolve? And kind of what role can you guys eventually kind of move into and serve for the industry as it, you know, not only brings in kind of more adoption, both in the institutional and retail space, but also different types of assets, different types of mechanisms,

• 30:25Anthony Pompliano?

  and kind of really moves to digitize most of the legacy financial system?

• 30:30Speaker 02

  So I mean, as this, our industry is moving fast right now. And particularly in the last six months, I like to say that it's, that it's picked up a lot here, which is exciting to see. And I usually resist a little bit when people say, hey, this is a new asset class or things like that. You know, this is, this is a new technology that can change the way that all assets are managed globally, potentially in the future. And when or if that happens, I don't know. I think that asset management and asset exchange can benefit from this technology. And when I say technology, I don't mean just blockchain, but it's the way that the ecosystem is exchanging these assets. I mean, if we can create new ways to access assets across borders

• 31:14Speaker 02

  and increase the liquidity of those assets and allow people to exchange them for one another in a marketplace, that's very, very exciting. I mean, you can apply it to real estate debt. I mean, you know, anything that's a, that has a store of value associated with it. And ultimately create a marketplace that exchanges these assets in a new way compared to what we've seen before. Now that makes some of these back office operations more challenging. So that's where Luca comes into the picture. And we plan on, you know, stay bleeding edge for the middle and back office operation space so that the innovators can keep innovating and, and creating a new way that ideally assets are exchanged globally in the future. So that's, that's really the future that we see.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  We know we're seeing it in a very, very material way today already. But it's got a long way to go, clearly, right? In the, in the larger ecosystem.

• 32:09Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Three questions that ask everyone and then you'll get to ask me one question to, to finish up. The first is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Great question. So my first reaction here is Gates of Fire, which is about the Battle of Thermopylae and the 300, which I know everyone's seen the movie, but that doesn't do justice to this book. And it's just an example of setting the right examples of leadership, of standard setting that really fits into the overall culture of an organization.

• 32:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great answer. Second question is a question that's sponsored by Eight Sleep. They basically have a thermoregulation mattress that makes it super cold. I previously was not into sleep. I used to fly around the country a bunch and basically beat up my body. And these guys convinced me, hey, you probably should sleep eight hours. And this helps you basically sleep in a much deeper, kind of more plentiful way. What's your sleep regiment? Or has anything changed over the years, especially going from the military to PWC and now here? Anything that you've kind of changed over time?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Yes, I sleep less, I think, is the short answer. I thought that I would get used to sleeping less from the Marine Corps. And I think it just made me missleep more instead. But I've gotten used to acclimating to it. But I think that the bigger takeaway, kind of like you hit it on the head for your sponsor, that should be a short term, right? Learn how to manage it, but you can never replace actual sleep. So I'll have to check out this mattress because I absolutely could benefit from it.

• 33:59Anthony Pompliano?

  How many hours do you think you sleep a night?

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Probably I'm averaging five now. I'm usually happy if I can get six to seven. So never continuously.

• 34:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And the one variable is always, I see a trampoline in the background. So I'm assuming you have young children who probably are not making this easy for you.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  No, that's definitely a challenge. I think they help and

• 34:31Speaker 02

  they help keep the focus though, for sure. So they don't necessarily help sleep.

• 34:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Last question, a little bit more fun. Aliens, are you a believer or a non-believer?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  I don't see how there could be a universe that big without them, I think. So I break it down to statistics when I do that, which is usually the way that I that I approach answers like that. So if I had to, if I had to go one way or the other, I would say, yes, I believe that they are out there somewhere. So maybe the NASA astronauts that are going to venture to Mars will will prove us right in some capacity soon.

• 35:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I agree that they're somewhere. I don't know if I believe that they've come to Earth and haven't revealed themselves or anything crazy like that, but definitely.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  They have arms and legs or eyes, but I think there's something out there.

• 35:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. You could ask me one question to wrap up. What do you got for me?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Sure, I'd say, you know, where, what do you think is going to be the biggest milestone in crypto in 2021 specifically?

• 35:35Anthony Pompliano?

  2021, I think we see a Fortune 50 company put Bitcoin on their balance sheet, or at least Fortune 100. You know, I don't know which one necessarily. We're recording this kind of mid-January 2021. If you said to me right now, what's the next big public company to do it, it's probably Tesla. But if you said to me, you know, pick one that is kind of nobody would expect, I'm not sure I could do that. But definitely somebody does it, or at least that would kind of be the big milestone. And then, once you get kind of all the corporations starting to do it in some form or fashion, I think then the next one is just like, what's the first central bank to not only do it, but to do it and kind of publicize it, right? You know, some people would argue, hey,

• 36:20Anthony Pompliano?

  look, somebody probably has already done it. But to really come out and say, hey, look, we're doing this, here's our thesis behind doing it, and we're committed to this, I think would be, you know, kind of, you went from retail investors to kind of now you got these institutional financial service companies. You'll think, you know, more traditional corporations, publicly traded companies, and then eventually you'll get the central banks. So those are kind of the next two milestones. But I don't foresee a central bank making that move in 2021.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Sure, I buy that.

• 36:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. Well, Robert, listen, thank you so much for for doing this. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Luca?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Sure, so lukka.tech is where you can find our website and you can find all of our social outlets there as well for our various products, depending on what type of customer you are. And that's L U K K A dot tech.

• 37:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. And anywhere to send them to find you?

• 37:14Speaker 02

  I am actually not on social media, just with the company.

• 37:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, I love it. That is, that's an easy way to make sure everyone goes to the company website.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's better than going to my personal one anyway.

• 37:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. Listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this, Robert. We'll have to do it again in the future.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, happy to come back anytime. Thanks for having me.