Akin Sawyerr, Team Lead at Decred: How Crypto is Bridging the Gap Between the Banked and Unbanked

Akin Sawyerr is helping to build the future through Decred. In this conversation, Akin and Anthony discuss the current state of banking in Africa, how consumers are discovering and using crypto there, what Decred is and how it works, and why less developed countries are poised to leapfrog the world's superpowers today with the help of cryptocurrencies. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa. Before we get started, I want to go over the four sponsors for this episode who make all this possible. They're fantastic, so go show them some love. The first is the best URL in the industry, crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: driving mass adoption. That's why we're all here, right? To get every human on earth a digital wallet and to get them using digital currencies. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and a new card payment. Everything you could want is at crypto.com. They've been longtime supporters of Off the Chain and recently announced a new exchange. So go help them out, download their app from the App Store, or visit crypto.com and tell them POM sent you. There's nothing better in the world than a company helping to drive global adoption of this new technology.

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Another part of global adoption is making sure that we secure the various blockchains with computing power. CoinMine has built the best consumer experience in mining, hands down, no competition. If you want to help secure the blockchain and get started in mining, you can go to coinmine.com/pom. Order a CoinMine, it'll arrive at your door, and you simply take it out of the box, plug it in, and connect to your wifi. You'll be mining your favorite crypto in five minutes or less. It is honestly magical. I have one running right now here in the office, and it's super quiet, it's got no heat, and every person that comes in the office asks, "What is that?" Every single person asks. It's a CoinMine. The best part to me is that the CoinMine comes with a mobile app that's super slick, and the company continues to push over-the-air updates to the device that add functionality,

• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  add tokens that can be mined, or increase the efficiency of the device. Similar to how Tesla does car software updates over the air, CoinMine is sending these passively to thousands of CoinMines around the world on a periodic basis. Pretty damn cool. When Farbood and the team pitched me on the idea of an Xbox or PlayStation-like box that could mine cryptocurrency in your home, I was immediately sold. I invested in the business, have a device personally, and keep telling people to go to coinmine.com/pom so they can save a lot of time if they want to get started mining today. And CoinMine has a partnership with our third sponsor for this episode, BlockFi. BlockFi is one of my favorite companies in crypto because they allow users to deposit their assets in a deposit account and immediately start earning interest. Think about it. If you keep your digital assets on an exchange...

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Or in cold storage, you aren't benefiting from any yield on the asset. With BlockFi, they allow you to deposit crypto and then get paid interest on a monthly basis in crypto. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in ETH? You can do it. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in Bitcoin? You can do it. The rates at BlockFi are currently some of the best in the industry. You can earn 6% interest on Bitcoin and you can earn up to 8.6% APY on GUSD deposits. I'm an investor in the company and think BlockFi is building really important and compelling infrastructure. So go check them out at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp. And that brings us to the last advertiser of the episode, eToro. These guys have absolutely crushed it over the years.

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Their founder, Yoni, was one of the original Bitcoin OGs and has been ahead of almost every trend in crypto. He built eToro to help people buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies. But he added a few twists: social trading, copy trading, and virtual trading accounts. Social trading is a feature where every asset available on the platform has its own separate social feed where people talk about the asset, share trading ideas and analysis, and even include various charts or graphs. Virtual trading accounts is targeted at beginners. If you're just starting out and want to try trading with play money, eToro will give you a virtual account with $100,000 in it to test, learn, and get comfortable. And so, then that brings us to copy trading, which is by far the coolest feature. This allows you, as a user, to select any other user's portfolio to copy.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  If you see someone on the platform you like, you can set your account to mimic their trades. They buy Bitcoin with 5% of their portfolio, your portfolio buys 5% Bitcoin. They sell 50% of their Ether position, your portfolio does the same thing automatically. Copy trading is awesome, so go join the 10-plus million other traders on eToro and start trading all the most popular cryptocurrencies today. They're one of the largest companies in the space and you can get started by going to etoro.com. Again, that is etoro.com, where the entire team is ready to get you started in just a few clicks. And don't forget, go subscribe to the Off the Chain Daily Newsletter. You can go to offthechain.substack.com. I write a letter of news, analysis, and opinion every morning that goes out to more than 40,000 investors. See you there.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Akeem Sawyer is helping to build the future through D-cred. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of banking in Africa, how consumers are discovering and using crypto there, what D-cred is and how it works, and why less developed countries are poised to leapfrog the world's superpowers today with the help of cryptocurrencies. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well.

• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Bang, bang. I am here with Akeem Sawyer. We'll get into the name in a second. Super excited to have you, so thanks so much for coming to do this.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 5:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we're gonna start off real hot. We gotta talk about your name, Akeem Sawyer. We were just talking about it, and you gave a good laugh. Sawyer spelled with two Rs.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So S-A-W-Y-E-R-R.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 5:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell us a story.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so the basic story is I have, I think my great-great-grandfather decided to sort of branch off from the main family line and decided to add an extra R, just to be different. And so now we've, you know, we have this curse of my name always being corrected. I have, I have official documents with a single R all over it, and it's just not worth changing anymore. So I have like bank cards that I haven't misspelled, and it's like, whatever. As long as you have my social security number, like, it should be fine.

• 5:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And so Sawyer is a common last name in West Africa?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think, so I think it comes from like, basically from slave trade. I think there was probably like a group of Sawyers that came back to Liberia to Freetown.

• 6:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  But a number of them decided to sort of basically trace their roots back to where they thought they were from. So you have Sawyers all through West Africa, from Liberia to Ghana to Nigeria where I grew up. So, but it's one, I think generally it's one big family that has links, linkages, and so.

• 6:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And one dude was just like, hey man, we're putting the double R on and rolling.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I have that, which is, is unique, but it's more, it's more trouble than it's worth, to be honest with you.

• 6:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I guess if there's a single R, then people actually think that's how it's spelled, right? Whereas the double R, that's the one that they think they should be correct.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the very least, too, if it's a double R, then you know it's like an African Sawyer, as opposed to like a Sawyer from somewhere else. Maybe, maybe that's, maybe that's worth it.

• 6:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Alright, so, so let's go back to, uh, you grew up in Nigeria?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yes, I did. So I was born in Massachusetts, actually.

• 6:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  But, um, a few months after I was born, my parents moved back, um, to Nigeria. My parents were here for college and grad school and decided to move back afterwards.

• 7:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And where in Nigeria did you grow up?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  So I grew up in Lagos. So Lagos is the, I think it's probably the largest city in Africa now, population wise.

• 7:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  But it used to be the political capital as well of Nigeria, but that was moved, I think about 25 years ago, it was, it was moved to a brand new city that was built from the ground up. But Lagos is still the commercial capital of Nigeria.

• 7:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So I wanted to do this interview and not tell you what I'm about to tell you until you got here. Uh, I went two years ago or three years ago to Lagos.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, you know, all the westerners, all the, all the white people, they stay on Victoria Island, right? They, they hang out at the hotels and all this stuff. Uh, but the, uh, the friend that I went with, um, he basically had a, a buddy that lived in, uh, in Lagos, uh, near Computer Village.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, uh, we stayed in a hotel and when we pulled up, uh, they had the guards outside with the AKs. And, uh, the first night I was like, hey man, why are there guards outside with AKs? And, uh, it was one of these things where when you were looking at him, you're like, yeah, I get that they got AKs, but if someone starts shooting, I don't think those guys are gonna stick around. And so, uh, it was a really cool experience though, because, uh, we would walk to Computer Village. Um, and for those that don't know, Computer Village is basically, I don't know, we'd say six block by like 10 block, uh, area that's just packed with electronics and computers.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's massive, yeah.

• 8:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  You can get anything fixed there. You can buy anything there. It's, it's an interesting phenomenon. It's a huge market, yeah.

• 8:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and so when I came back from that trip, I actually wrote something, I published publicly, just said, look, I, I saw the future of, uh, technology. It was, that entire area was taking people who previously didn't have access to internet, computing, electronics, et cetera, and over, you know, I don't know if it'd been 10 years or so before I had went and visited, they'd gone from very little access to now it was highly connected. There was great inner infrastructure. Um, they had all the same devices, right? They had, you know, smartphones, all this kind of stuff. And there's a lot of people and it's growing incredibly fast. And I don't think that a lot of people here in North America understand kind of the demographic dynamics that are at play, especially in Nigeria, but in other African countries as well.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the African continent is probably the youngest continent in the world, right? And so if you're talking about demographics, just about everywhere in the West, you know, the birth rates are dropping. I think it's acute in Japan where, you know, they have empty houses because there aren't enough people, right, to replace the old population. So I think demographically, Africa is extremely young, lots of young people, lots of labor, and it's a massively untapped resource, right? When you think about it relative to the rest of the world. And I think investors are beginning to understand that, you know, that Africa is the next frontier, it's the next big market, and you're seeing people beginning to vote with their money, right, with investments continuing to increase, particularly like, you know, to fintech and the startup ecosystems across Africa are

• 9:59Speaker 01

  growing. And you have more and more sources of funding just coming in.

• 10:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So give us, you've got a big focus on African countries. And so maybe give us kind of like a lay of land. Africa is not one country. It's a continent that's made up of a bunch of different countries. And obviously, when you have those different countries, there's different parts of the continent. Like, how do you view the connectivity, kind of the tech ecosystems, et cetera, across Africa? Is there generalizations in terms of the West versus the East, or the North versus South, or is it really country by country specific?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's kind of like ecosystems, right? So I think Nigeria is large enough that it's an entity unto itself. You know, there's a lot of tech innovation around just payments and financial services out of Kenya, because M-Pesa was basically, is probably the most successful mobile payments deployment, arguably anywhere in the world in terms of just adoption within the country. And so, you know, Kenya is large as well, but East Africa is almost like a block.

• 11:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I think some of it is because of just how close those countries are in terms of, you know, the union they have and with, and so in many ways, it's like there's a large ecosystem going out of like, you know, East Africa with Kenya, Kampala, Rwanda now kind of coming up. Nigeria is 200 million people, so it's an entity of itself. You have pockets of development in Ghana and in South Africa, right? South Africa is a large country, probably the most developed, right? So it's kind of sits on its own and to a large extent, North Africa is sort of separate. Like I think oftentimes we'll think about Sub-Saharan Africa and the Northern Africans have sort of more of allegiance with the Middle East and certain parts of Europe.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  But I think, you know, I kind of see it as three or four core ecosystems with like anchor cities that sort of then bring, you know, lots of the region together.

• 11:51Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And help me understand, like, where's the education coming from, right? So when I was there, what it felt like to me was there was a lot of, now that there's connectivity, hey, the internet is this portal to information and to education and access to other people and things like that.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that true outside of Lagos, right? Because to me, kind of what you're saying, like Lagos is, almost feels like a little bit different than some of the other cities, or is that one thread that's throughout all of these different ecosystems?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  So it varies, right? So, I mean, so Nigeria in particular, you have Lagos, which is a huge city, which takes a lion's share of all the tech investments, right? The tech ecosystem there is pretty dynamic, lots of investors come in, right? So Lagos kind of is the center of tech in Nigeria, but then you have, you know, pockets in the east, southeast of Nigeria, like Uyo, Port Harcourt, which is basically an oil city, but has now sort of begun to evolve into a knowledge city, right? And, you know, the thing about tech that's interesting, and particularly like, you know, coding and software development, is you have a lot of people who are just smart, who never really had access to higher education, who are self-taught, right? And like you said,

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Connectivity, it's sort of like an apprenticeship system where you have a really good developer and he just brings up the next generation. Right. So there's a lot of kind of like an apprenticeship type approach where as the ecosystem grows, it's trying to kind of replicate itself. Right. And there are people who don't have frankly, other options, right? Because it's either that university admission is very limited. And even if you do gain admission to universities, the quality is just terrible. Right. So for young people who are coming out of high school, the smart thing to do is figure out how to learn to code.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  And as much as possible, kind of hack your way through the system. Right. So you talk about computer village, like a computer village is full of hackers who are basically self taught technologists. Right. They took apart computers, they figured out how to work, they forgot to put it back together. Right. So there's this culture of just trying to figure things out on your own and just a very strong culture of entrepreneurship. And I think you find that in Nigeria in particular, you know, but it shows up differently in other countries, you know, some other countries have just better education. So you'd go to Ghana, in my view, and you'd have a lot more university taught developers, right? Because the university system there is frankly, better.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And just about other parts, just about almost any other country in Africa, I think you have a slightly better higher education system Nigeria as a whole. So it looks different depending on the country, but all in all, you know, I think the narrative is that lots of young people who are hungry, who are looking for, you know, who see a future in tech and see a way to kind of to get there.

• 14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And you mentioned the kind of like this spirit of entrepreneurship. The, the most fascinating part of the entire trip to me was we went and watched a couple of, of in the US, what we call soccer, but, but obviously football games there. And literally how we would watch them is we would basically walk up to what kind of looks like you're walking to somebody's like backyard. And you pay them a little bit of money, you know, basically like a dollar equivalent here in the US. And you literally walk and they've set up benches in front of TVs, there's exposed wires running.

• 15:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What to these TVs and it's not like two people are watching. I mean, these things are packed with, you know, forty, fifty people all sitting there watching these games together. And, and what essentially has happened is these young entrepreneurs have figured out, hey, if I can figure out how to get a TV, get cable to that TV, get the soccer games on, uh, and then charge people to come in just like a bar would or anywhere else. Um, it, it, it's pretty incredible to see that entrepreneurial type, um, you know, spirit at work, even in things that aren't tech related, right? I mean, that's just, hey, people want to watch this game and I've got the ability to, to give it to them. But I think that spirit, um, spills over into a lot of the tech things you're talking about as well.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. And I think a lot of it is out of necessity, right? It's like, look, I need to make a living one way or the other. And people look for a way to provide a service in any way they can, right? So you're right. You have all these pop up bars that, you know, show up during your Premier League soccer games on a Saturday or a Sunday. And literally someone's like business where they, they have one cable, they have a good TV. And, you know, they, they charge people to come and watch the games and sell them alcohol and, and food, right? Um, so you'll see that across, you know, many African countries where you have just, just this issue of, so this kind of called like non-consumption.

• 16:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Where for the vast majority of, of Africans, like at, at the bottom of the pyramid, they can't afford cable. They can't afford to have their own setup. And so what you end up having is someone has figured out a way to take some commodity, right? And make it cost effective for everyone. So now that TV and that cable box is a shared resource for the street or the neighborhood and it now makes it accessible, right? And so I think it's the same way even with, you know, I guess we're going to get into crypto, but even the way crypto is proliferating across Africa. Um, a lot of it is actually intermediated out of necessity, right? You have people that are tech savvy that have figured out ways to buy and acquire Bitcoin. They know that Bitcoin can be used to settle global transactions.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  And they essentially become intermediaries for businesses who say, look, I need to import, you know, mobile phones, for example, I need a market, I can't access US dollars. And some guy says, look, I can Get you those phones. I can sell that transaction with Bitcoin. Like you don't know how to, you don't need to know how to use Bitcoin. You just need to know a guy, right? And, and so a lot of the industry is actually proliferating that way. Where the some guy who's figured this thing out, he's charging me a fee. After a while, I figure out what he's doing and then I cut him out because well, I could figure it out myself. Right? And so that's, I think, how a lot of things proliferate across Africa. And with crypto, it's not different.

• 17:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and I think, uh, part of what's fascinating to me about some of these markets. So the African countries for sure, uh, India, I've heard some similar stories where people also aren't going on to like traditional exchanges to buy Bitcoin. They'll literally walk over to a computer village or you know, some other area. And they'll hand somebody physical cash and basically get Bitcoin in what's kind of like a black market type trade. Um, and I remember when I was there, uh, in Lagos, um, that's actually how we switched US dollars into the local currency. Was not at the airport where they're going to take, you know, 20% and, and quote you some ridiculous exchange rate. It was a guy in a, in a village, basically. Um, and so it's pretty interesting to see how like those systems already exist without crypto.

• 18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And now crypto is just being fit into how they're culturally, um, the people of a certain country, uh, operate.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I mean, so like you said, that, that there are these well-worn distribution channels that exist. And, you know, 80% of Africa is unbanked or underbanked.

• 18:52Anthony Pompliano?

  That's crazy.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Right? Same thing for the economies. Their majority informal. So whenever you see a country that has like a banking sector, like it's oftentimes a lot smaller than it should be. Right? You know, banks in Nigeria primarily serve the government by buying government debt.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  They might serve some large conglomerates that are chumming with the government, but that's really it. There's no like active lending market on a retail time, from a retail perspective. But in that same country, Nigeria, we have what we call like savings groups, Susu groups. Where literally they're networks of people that lend and borrow to each other. Right? These affinity groups and some of them run into the hundreds of thousands, right? Of people of members.

• 19:35Anthony Pompliano?

  What?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  And the funny thing is, most of these systems, particularly in Nigeria still, they're still run by like paper and pen, right? Physical ledgers, physical relationships, your credit score is based on, oh yeah, I know your uncle and I know your brother, and they were good for the money, so you're gonna be good for it, right? Because, I mean, the one thing that a lot of African cultures have is, like, the family name is very important, right? And so oftentimes, credit is determined by what family you're from. Because I know, for example, well, if I lend you money and you sort of get in trouble, your family will bill you out to preserve the family name, right? And so there are all these kind of social ways in which credit, and they're pretty sophisticated in how credit is determined,

• 20:20Speaker 01

  but they're all off the books, they're all non-digitalized. And I think the huge opportunity is now taking some of these cultural norms and figuring out ways to kind of digitize them, such that you can still capture the, you know, those, you know, those systems where our credit risk is determined, but now you have a digital platform that's interoperable, that gets into the world, right? Where you can start harvesting this data and actually now pumping a lot more capital into these, into these countries. Tell me more about the savings groups. How do those work? So savings groups, they're all over Africa and they have different names. Like in, so in Kenya, they're called saccos, right? Now Kenya, and Kenya and the East Africans, they're, they're a lot more regulated in that you can get a license to be a sako in Kenya.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  And so you're effectively like a bank, right? Or a credit union is probably the best corollary. And, and basically, it typically rolls out of these affinity groups where, for example, it could be a group of cattle, you know, cattle farmers. And it's in our best interest to basically pool money together such that we can expand our assets, right? So you have ten cattle farmers who, no, no single one of them can afford to buy a new cow and expand his flock, but if we all contribute money to a fund and we re-rotate, you know, taking out that fund, every month someone buys a new cow. And it's funded by the group, right? And so savings groups typically rose out of affinity groups like farmers or market women.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Who, for example, you know, you might have a market room and like a dozen of them all sell oranges. And they say, look, let's get together, form a savings group. And we also can extract pricing power from our wholesalers, right? Because we can now buy in bulk. So all these systems are developed through, you know, particular groups of people that were in the same industry. They're basically pooling capital to grow their businesses, but also like sharing knowledge. Right? Because the after effect of that is, look, if we're all calorie errors, right? And we're all invested in each other. If one of us figures out a better way to get, you know, an increased yield of milk. Well, I want to tell everyone because we're all invested in each other. Right? So it's it's in my best interest to share information, to share knowledge such that.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Because I mean, the better you are deploying my capital, the more likely it is I'm going to get a return. Right? So that's how I think a lot of these savings groups typically grew. In parts of East Africa, they're more formalized in certain ways with rules and, you know, actual regulations around them. In places in Nigeria, they're kind of pretty much off the books. And for a lot of people, that is the financial services they access, right? That's how some people, you know, borrow money to send their kids to university abroad. That's how people borrow money to buy a car. So I could be an Uber driver, for example. And all those things are informal. And the real opportunity is how do you now take those informal things and systems and digitize them?

• 23:12Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fascinating. One of the frameworks that has really caught my attention, and I think I've started to pay more more attention to over time, is this idea that, you know, that 80% unbanked or underbanked. Most people, I think, would look and say, you know, African countries were very far behind the West. Well, over, I don't know, the last five, 10 years, there's been kind of this leapfrog effect when it comes to at least mobile banking. Right? So things like M-Pace obviously helped usher that in, but there's others as well. Talk a little bit about how, you know, is there an advantage for technologists who are building without the legacy systems in place? Do are they able to kind of accelerate the adoption and development?

• 23:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is that maybe just there's some edge cases where people point to and say, yeah, that happened, but that might not be the norm?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  So I'd say yes or no, depends on the context, right? Or the country. I think there are scenarios where.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  So, so I'll kind of paint two stories, right? In Kenya with M-Pesa, you had sort of like certain things that aligned themselves. You had a government who backed it. You had a telco that had, I think, about 80% market share, right? Safaricom. And you had an incentive system that allowed agents, agent networks to be built out, right? So the commission-based system. And what was happening in the early years of M-Pesa was that I could be a middle-class person with a great job and I'll actually fund like five payout points, right? Literally go to those stores, pay for them to get the infrastructure, pay for them to stand it up, and then it's a business I'm funding. I get the return as the investor, right?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  And so that ensured that M-Pesa proliferated because you had all these points where you could spend and use it. So the distribution channel was incentivized to grow. You had a massive company that had singular market share. Just about everyone had a Safaricom phone. So many things, and then the government really backed it, right? So a number of things aligned, and all of a sudden now you have this core infrastructure, which is mobile money, that, you know, became basically larger than cash. Now, once you have that ecosystem where there was orders of magnitude of GDP flowing through M-Pesa, people started iterating on that by doing lending with Mshwahiri, like all these innovations on top of it because you had a core payment platform in place.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Now, in Nigeria, it kind of evolved a little bit differently because in Nigeria you had very powerful incumbent banks and you had telcos. And there was sort of like, you know, a lot of the telcos are more diverse in terms of the makeup of capital, right? MTN is the largest, it's South African. You had Airtel that had some Arab money invested. But for the, for, for most cases, Nigerian banks are primarily wholly owned by Nigerians. So politically, the banks had more power, and the banks wanted to ensure that no one encroached on the power they had in the financial system. So the way mobile money has not evolved as well in Nigeria is because regulation and banking power has stifled things.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And up until, I think, this year, telcos were not allowed to get into mobile money. I think MTN just got the first license as part of this. Why did that change? Um, I think it changed because, maybe for a couple of reasons. I think, one, because it was clear that the Nigerian model for mobile money was failing. It was clear that even if you look at the most of fintech and lots of funding has gone into fintech, it's still catering to the bank, right? So it's an improvement on the user experience for folks who are already banked, right? So I have a bank account, but now I have an app that lets me make USSD payments at point of sale, but it's still attached to my bank account, right? The guy that doesn't have a bank account is not going to use that product. So if you think of what's been happening in Nigeria in particular is a lot of integration

• 27:01Speaker 01

  has been basically just cannibalizing the same group of customers, right? Within the same pie, it's not really growing the pie. And I think, I think the central bank in Nigeria is realizing one way or the other that that model is not getting the results that it should be. And other countries are moving ahead. So it's either that you change course and say, look, the telcos are frankly, naturally the best place for mobile money to operate out of, right? Because they own the core infrastructure. People are effectively, even in Nigeria, people are effectively finding hacks around mobile money. Like in Nigeria today, what people were doing was, you know, most cellphone services across Africa and in Nigeria is prepaid.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  So you buy a scratch card, you scratch off a code and you load up money onto your phone. Now, what people were doing was, you know, you could actually buy a scratch card, right? Get on the phone and I owe someone money across the country. So rather than like send him 50 bucks, which I can't really get to him, I'll just buy a scratch card in Lagos, right? And give him the code over the phone or text it to him. And that basically is money, right? Because he can take that code and either load up his phone or he can resell it at a discount, right? So he could say, look, someone sent me a $50 scratch card, I actually need the cash. You need to buy credit, I'll sell it to you for 48 bucks, right? So I'll give you an incentive to basically get a discount.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  So people were already using these mobile services as same platforms. So it tells you that there is a market that says, look, I want to use this utility and this phone as a way to transact. And so I think the Nigerian model is beginning to shift. I think MTN has gotten a license and other telcos will follow. I think we should get You know, a better outcome, a better result. But I think, I think it's literally just, look, the current policy isn't working. And there's a lot of frustration in the system as to why we're not getting the results in terms of financial inclusion that, that the government is targeting.

• 29:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and, and speaking of government, what is the general sense of like the trust in the government, right? So some countries around the world, uh, there's fairly democratic processes. People, yeah, they know bad stuff happens, but for the most part, they trust their governments or at least don't think their governments are actively working against them. In other parts, it's clear as day, hey, my country's government is corrupt and, you know, nobody here trusts them. Where do some of these African countries actually fall in that spectrum?

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Um, so probably in the lower end of the scale.

• 29:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Um. In terms of they, they don't have high degrees of trust?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a lack of trust in the system, right? And it's, it varies, right? Some countries are improving and getting better and are better governed and have a more positive trajectory. But I'd say like the bulk of African countries, at the very least, the citizens look at the government in very high suspicion. Because, I mean, the rifle corruption, I think Nigeria is the model for that. Rife with corruption, weak infrastructure, people are not seeing like physical investments. They're not seeing their lives improve, right? And you're also in a system where most things are informal, right? I was saying earlier today in another conversation that, you know, part of the problem with Nigeria as a nation is, you know, the majority of government revenue comes from oil sales, right?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Oil is bought by foreign multinationals and foreign entities, right? So the Nigerian government frankly is getting no revenue from the people. And so even just that tells you that they're more likely to do the bidding of countries buying their oil, right? And setting it up such that that revenue continues than serving the populace and their, and, and their people.

• 30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're catering to their customer.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Exactly, and the customer is not the Nigerian citizen, right? Nigerian citizen is just someone you just have to make sure, you know, things don't tip over to revolution, right? And so, but what that has created, um, to your point is, you know, very, very low trust in government, very good. Low trust in institutions, very low trust in banks. Anything that's formal typically comes with some level of a sense that that entity is trying to take advantage of me as a citizen and not give me like my do. And I think that's created a system where it's not only low trust, but people have to fend for themselves. Right? Even just like getting power, reliable power is a problem in Nigeria. Right? And so I think what that's created is a purpose that really says, look, I'm in it for me. I need to figure things for myself.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  And I think because of that, in many ways, I think you have a captive audience for crypto. Because crypto is the ultimate like individual sovereignty tool that, look, I can kind of take things on my own. I now have a currency, I have a way to transact. And by the way, the government doesn't really care about me anyway. Right? So it also goes back to when people talk about regulation as an issue. I think for most African countries, the regulator doesn't even have the wherewithal to know what's even going on in those countries, let alone have any policy that can stop crypto in any material way.

• 32:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's almost like the lack of sophistication gives them less insight. Right? So if everything's cash based, if everything's kind of gray or black market type transactions, you have these informal economies, these savings groups, et cetera. That can't, you know, in the US, the government knows what's happening because they look at the data, right? And everything's kind of documented in some way. I recently interviewed Congressman Davidson from Ohio. And he at one point even said, look, we've essentially empowered the banks to spy on their customers for the government. Right? Well, if the people don't trust banks in Nigeria or some other, you know, African country, so they don't put their wealth there. Well, the government has no clue what they're doing, right? And so it's almost like the regulations can't affect them, right?

• 32:43Anthony Pompliano?

  The difference between setting regulation and enforcing regulation.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 32:46Anthony Pompliano?

  If you have no way to enforce it, then you might as well not even have the regulation to some degree.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think, and I think that's, that's the nature of what's on the ground in the majority of countries. So that makes for a very, very interesting, and then you think about it too, the fact that. There are many industries or many sectors that are just greenfields. Like, it's like, there's no, no one is servicing those people. Right? I think it creates a massive opportunity because you don't have a lot of incumbents to like, work to, to, to fight against, right? The, the banking lobby in the United States is pretty powerful, right? That understatement of the entire podcast. It's, it's hard to see them be on the losing side of, of some sort of grand bargain. Right? Now, in Africa, most people don't even have banks. So you're not even competing with those entities.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  You're now trying to, you're basically competing with creating a pathway or a product that people can afford to consume. Right? You're trying to solve the problem inherently. And if you can figure out ways to sort of provide utility to that marketplace, figure out a good UI and UX to serve them, then it's a massive opportunity. Because I think inherently, um, the way I kind of see Africa evolving is, it's, it's the ideal place for, to empower like sovereign individuals. Right? It's the ideal way to say, look, you can be your own bank. You can be your own financial service provider. And moreover, you can be networked to this global marketplace where you can acquire products from anywhere, right?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  So I see a future where Africans will source mortgages, source loans globally, not from their local banks. It'll be from some, you know, blockchain-based protocol where they can source, you know, capital from cheap, um, you know, low or negative interest environments. Figure out ways to program, you know, to, to, to, to, to take out the risk in terms of interest rate risk. You just kind of figure out ways to program it into it. And all of a sudden, you have a product that can like sell, like, you know, hundreds of millions of people that never had access.

• 34:54Anthony Pompliano?

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• 35:39Anthony Pompliano?

  That's right. You purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box, you plug it in, connect to your wifi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kinda like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right, go to CoinMine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. One more word from our sponsor BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency.

• 36:21Anthony Pompliano?

  This rate actually compounds, so you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi, and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out BlockFi.com/Pomp, again, BlockFi.com/Pomp, to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. So before we get to the crypto and blockchain stuff, the last question I have for you is, are there examples where the distrust in the institutions and the banks, et cetera, the banks have like done bad stuff? Or is it more of just, hey, I don't think you have my best interest at heart because, you know, your customer is somebody else and it's more kind of psychological?

• 37:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Or are there examples where, you know, like the Cyprus where they know they took 10% of our money? Right? And they actually seized assets or are there that type of examples or is it more kind of psychological?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  So there's some of those, but they kind of, they kind of become things like, so if you think the nature of banks, particularly, you know, lots of African banks, Nigerian banks, they tend to see their customers as a revenue source.

• 37:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Right? So I lodge money in a bank and all of a sudden I start seeing all these weird fees. I have this stamp duty, this fee, right? So there are all these costs, but then there are all these weird scenarios that tend to happen where, you know, I might have a savings account and a checking account. And it might cost me a small fee to move money between my accounts. All of a sudden you see that I made 50 transactions between my two, those two accounts, which I never initiated, but somehow someone in the bank, maybe due to weak, weak controls or something, there's some nefarious activity where they're now creating systems to basically tax or pull or charge me for things I didn't authorize.

• 38:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's almost worse, right? Like if they just seized the money, at least they, yeah, they took my money. But this is like a silent theft of the money.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Right. And the thing is, and the thing that I think emboldens institutions is the lack of just strong civil organizations. Like there's very little recourse, right? So I have a couple of thousand bucks in the bank, like, am I going to sue the bank? Like, I don't even have the resources to hire someone. So the power dynamic is so skewed that powerful institutions can get away with all sorts of, all sorts of, you know, illegal activity and get away with it. So I, as the customer, has very little recourse and, you know, lots of strong reasons to distrust these institutions.

• 38:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So what do people do with their wealth? Like where do they store their money pre crypto and knowing about that? And then what's the culture of investing versus savings?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  So a lot of people, a lot of people still store, I think the biggest store of value, I'd say Nigeria is real estate.

• 39:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Right, so I think kind of like in the US, there's this culture of, oh, I want to have a house that I can live in. I want to have a house in my hometown. Like, it's a source of pride, a source of, okay, you've made it, right? So I moved to the city and I haven't really made it till I build a house back home. Right? So there's just a general culture of having property. But I think out of necessity, it's the one store of value that just about everyone, I mean, practically makes sense to put money into it because even in high inflationary environments, there will be asset inflation too, right?

• 39:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the inflation drives the asset price.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Right, right. And so you sort of have this inflation, somewhat inflation-protected asset. It's easy to acquire land and physical property. You can see it, feel it. And then even for like nefarious and illegal activity, it's easy to hide money in a house, right? I can, I can, I can hide it behind a corporate structure. I could have it as my cousin actually is a beneficial owner when I am. Right? So typically, like, I think the primary store of value, partially because you don't have a lot of financial innovation in terms of just other asset classes, the stock markets are relatively small. As I said, most of the environment is informal. So people's wealth is typically stored in landed property

• 40:23Speaker 01

  or maybe in a business that they're running. But even businesses tend to be more cash flow entities, right? People tend to take cash out of their businesses and store it in housing as opposed to grow, necessarily grow the business. Because there's a lot of risk in tying up capital for lots of people in their business. All sorts of external risks which disincentivize people from wanting to kind of grow their businesses. It's more about cash flow. What can I get today? How can I turn that over and how can I store it?

• 40:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Let's talk about Bitcoin, then we'll do Decred and then we'll do kind of the broader ecosystem.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 40:58Anthony Pompliano?

  How does Bitcoin fit into this and how do you think about awareness and adoption of Bitcoin across the various ecosystems in Africa?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I think it's, it's one of those things that...

• 41:12Speaker 01

  If you don't, because our markets are so informal, I think a lot of people underestimate what's going on. Right? I think there are lots of people who have been historically cut off from global financial services. Literally, your ability to acquire things globally out of a country like Nigeria, if you're not banked or fairly well-connected, is hard. You can't acquire foreign exchange. Nigeria is a very, very... And a good number of African countries are very import-dependent. Right? So, basically, the formula is, you know, foreign countries extract raw materials, they create finished goods, and they come back and sell it to us. Right? So, everything from cornflakes to rice, like, we import everything. Right? And because of that, lots of businesses are based out of trade. Right?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Sourcing goods, putting a margin on, selling it off, basic necessities. But you can imagine that every time you have an economic shock, like, so the last recession Nigeria had, obviously, all of a sudden, foreign exchange got scarce because everyone wants dollars. Either to store and hide their value because the currency was shorted to appreciate, or they needed foreign exchange and increasing numbers to keep buying their goods and running their businesses, but it was scarce. Right? And from that shock, some people realized, oh, there's this thing called Bitcoin that can use to settle transactions. Right? And I don't need to kind of figure out how to get dollars on the street. I don't need to go to the central bank. And that, out of necessity, got people into leveraging crypto.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  And so, you had a handful of, you know, so like Bitcoin-based payment companies that kind of came out of that. You know, some of them got slapped on the wrist and got into a little bit of trouble running a file of rules. But, basically, that, I think, was the first use case. This idea that I can settle global transactions and acquire goods internationally to run my business, and I can use Bitcoin.

• 43:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to me that the permissionless aspect of Bitcoin is exactly like a product market fit for those consumers, right? Those people who say, "It's not because I want to do something that the authorities don't want necessarily, as much as it is, I don't have access."

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so the permissionless nature of something like Bitcoin is, yes, it can circumvent authority and kind of rules and regulations at times, but if you don't have any access to begin with, you aren't worried about rules and regulations because you don't have access. And now this says, "Hey, if you have an internet connection, you now get access."

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty, it's pretty special. And then you spent a bunch of time working on Decred. So talk a little bit about what Decred is, kind of where your, your interest there is, and then what, what's going on in Africa with Decred?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, so, so Decred, I mean, at a high level, is iterating on Bitcoin, right? And so is this idea that you're going to have a sovereign store of value, but we believe that, you know, blockchain as a protocol has and will have many, many, many, many more uses beyond just being a store of value, a medium of exchange, right? So I think the ethos of Decred is this idea that you can build, you know, a decentralized, autonomous organization, right? So a lot of what we do at Decred is effectively building all the parts and features that would allow us to evolve into this fully autonomous entity, right? So things like governance become very, very important because we see ourselves more like

• 44:36Speaker 01

  a, almost like an economy or a nation-state than just a simple money protocol. Now, you still have to be a strong store of value. You still have to have all the security, and I think with our hybrid proof-of-work, proof-of-stake system, you know, you know, we're 20%, 20 times more secure than Bitcoin, right?

• 44:55Anthony Pompliano?

  How does that work?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  So, so, so unlike Bitcoin, you know, Decred is a hybrid proof-of-work, proof-of-stake.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Protocol, right? We still mine blocks similar to Bitcoin. We're still gonna have a $21 million, $21 million supply. But the difference is every block, as it's mined by miners, also has to be validated by proof of stakeholders. So that's people who own Decred. You can buy what we call tickets, and this ticket basically gives you a vote. And what that vote essentially does is every time a block is mined, there's a pool of this tickets. I think the optimal number is about, close to 41,000 of these tickets have been purchased. And five of these tickets get called up pseudorandomly to basically vote to validate that block. And you have to have at least three, you know,

• 45:47Speaker 01

  three tickets voting and a majority voting in affirmative. So what that does is, it does two things. One, it aligns incentives of stakeholders and miners, right? Because effectively, the miners cannot operate outside of the will of ticket holders, who could basically invalidate blocks if those blocks violate a rule or a tenet of Decred in any way.

• 46:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What happens if the miners validate and the stakers don't? Is the block invalid?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  The block is invalid and the miners lose the reward. So the incentive now for miners is you have to basically comply. So everything from, you know, unlike, I think Bitcoin, Bitcoin is backward compatible, Decred isn't. So when we have a change to the codebase, basically all the miners, over a period of time, which oftentimes is, you know, generous, you have to kind of upgrade to be able to now be on the active or valid copy. And so if a miner, for example, is working off a different version of the, of a software, like all those blocks will be invalidated because you're not on the current version of the software.

• 46:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And I guess it works the same way. If the miners don't validate a block, then stakers as well. You, you need both, right?

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:00Anthony Pompliano?

  You need the kind of consensus.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  So you kind of need both, right? So it becomes a symbiotic relationship where both sides need the other. But ultimately, ticket holders effectively are like the senate, or if you think about lower house and upper house, like they hold more sway. And you have to get them aligned. So we have a hybrid approval of state system. But we also have, you know, sixty percent of block rewards go to miners. Thirty percent goes to ticket holders. I mean, and ten percent goes into our treasury. Right, and this is basically where all the funding for the network comes from. So developers who are building, myself, anyone who works with the network with a full time or part time is paid out of this treasury that's getting ten percent of every block reward.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  But that becomes very, very integral to basically the long term goals of Decred, where we believe that over time, there'll be features that become critical and important. Right, so we released a privacy implementation on Decred a couple of months ago. Right, because privacy is important. The ability to opt into to have private transactions as a second layer. So it's not on our base chain, but as a second layer, we think is important. And we think that constituencies within Decred that would want that as a feature. We, we, we went through a proposal, we're gonna build a DEX on Decred. Because we think that most DEXs today are not really DEXs, or true DEXs. There's, there's someone in the middle capturing some rent. Right, and so we think that is not just important to Decred

• 48:26Speaker 01

  in terms of being able to, over time, be interoperable with other tokens and have a more, you know, active ecosystem. But we just think for the ecosystem, we need a real DEX that is permissionless and open to everyone. Right, so effectively, what Decred really is, is we're, we're saying, look, we think Bitcoin solved for some really large fundamental problems, but we think that we can iterate upon those things and expand it even and project it out. So I think there'll be a future where you'll have, you know, corporations that are built on the blockchain that have, you know, a means of exchange, have governance, have voting rights, right, can program that in any way they want,

• 49:07Speaker 01

  but they are not subject to necessarily, you know, the borders of any single country. Right, and we already see that being, we begin to have with the multinationals. Where large multinationals like Apple or these large companies, they're pretty powerful. And it's kind of hard to put them within one nation state. Like, so how do you regulate and manage an Apple or a Microsoft that is in, you know, over a hundred countries and multiple domiciles? And is effectively, in many ways, behaves like a nation state in of itself. We think that cryptocurrency and blockchain platforms are that next iteration. That basically take out all of the friction in markets. And we think that governance becomes really, really critical.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Because it needs to be transparent, needs to be a fair game that anyone can participate in. And as much as possible, you want to avoid ways for it to be gamed. And so personally, I think that delegated systems create problems, right? Delegated systems or systems are not quite clear. Where there's some intermediary who's now I'm delegating my vote to. The guy just opens things up for the same problems we have with nation states where it's open for capture, it's open for corruption. And we think eventually, especially as value accrues to a network, the stakes get higher. There's more money.

• 50:26Anthony Pompliano?

  There's more incentive.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  There's more incentive to basically game the system and capture it for, by a small group of people who might be savvy or whatever it might be. And we think those are huge risks broadly to the crypto space. But specifically for Decred, you know, those are things that we actively are designed and we actively look at to make sure and solve for.

• 50:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So that's how the kind of the hybrid mining and staking model works and kind of what Decred at the base chain layer is. What are some of the ecosystem things that either you're most excited about or you think are the most popular in and around Decred?

• 51:03Speaker 01

  So I think fundamentally, the thing that I think makes Decred very interesting is, so Politea is our off-chain governance platform.

• 51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  What is it called?

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Politea.

• 51:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  And so it's basically a way for, so I talked about that treasury, is basically a way for anyone to propose ideas that get funded by the treasury.

• 51:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. How much is the treasury in terms of like on an annual basis right now?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Um. So the, I think currently Treasury, depending on the price of Decred is probably in the range of 12 to 14 million dollars.

• 51:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's what's sitting in there, or that's kind of like the annual revenue to the Treasury?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  So that's what's sitting there currently.

• 51:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Um. I'm not sure what the annual revenue is, but our burn rate is basically, we're, we're burning what is coming in. And we're not necessarily like eroding the current base.

• 51:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  In terms of numbers, but hopefully, you know, as the price goes up, then you should be able to retain more and more Decred in dollar terms. Um. But anyone in the community, anyone, anybody can basically have a PolitiCast account, propose ideas. And the idea here is that, you know, that fund is to be, is to fund things that are beneficial to the network, right? And I think the thing that's very interesting about Decred and unique in many ways, it's not just that we have this platform, but it's about how we reach consensus. Right? And so one of our taglines is, you know, we want to make the best decision based on the sum total knowledge of the network. And whenever proposals come in, you know, one thing I've found to be very fascinating is that there's a process of debating the merits of a proposal.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  People chime in, people chime in on social media and also the platforms. And, and part of the goal one is to learn. So people are asking questions and pushing things, saying, why do we need this? Why is this valuable? And you find that other people who are knowledgeable in the community are essentially trying to inform everyone as to why this is a good idea. So there's a process of basically, in my view, upskilling in terms of knowledge, the community, such that ultimately hopefully we're making the best decision. But I think that process also creates a, it's a system of trust building in many ways. Right? Because you begin to sort of identify folks within the community that seem to have good ideas, who know very particular things.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  And I think it attracts people who want to engage in this very democratic process in many ways, where you have a stake in the game, but you have a say in how. Basically, the value in the network is spent and doled out. I mean, I think in the first year, Politea has been live for about, I think, 13 months now.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  A lot of the proposals that have come through, all of them are sort of heavily around like, marketing. So we hired, you know, Ditto as a PR firm because we needed more awareness for Decred. Recently, we passed a proposal that was competitive for market makers to just improve the liquidity of Decred on certain exchanges. Because, you know, we'd heard and that there are lots of potential investors who are interested in investing in Decred, but it's not liquid enough. Right? So we're able to basically, in many ways, just in time, rally around the community to kind of like, invest wisely in things that we think will benefit the community.

• 54:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Does that also put an importance, and I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but does that put an importance on the way that people communicate the proposals? Right? So it's almost like, the merit of my idea is important, obviously, but also the way that I can rally support around my idea, given that it is more of a democratic process. You know, if you and I have the same quality of idea, but I'm better at rallying support than you are, then I have an advantage. Do you worry about that or think about it?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, well, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. So typically, the more successful proposals are the things that increase your likelihood of being successful is being known. Right? So, for example, you've been part of the community, you showed up on our chat channels, you've asked questions. Like typically, the best proposals are ones where someone has an idea and they start basically talking to constituents. Like, I think we should do this, here's my idea, and you get feedback, right?

• 55:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like politics, they build consensus.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Right. And, and you get, so you get immediate feedback saying, well, that sounds great, but maybe you should think about this, maybe you should think about that. So what typically happens is, for the vast majority of proposals, by the time they actually hit the platform, like, a lot of people in the community have heard about it, have given feedback and have shaped the proposal. Right? And that really, to me, is what you want. You want to be able to, you know, go through a process, which is still relatively informal, it's informal, but it's a way to kind of get buy-in to what you're doing, get people's inputs, potentially, you know, make compromises here and there, or improve the proposal such that, once it hits Politea, you already have like a group of people who are like commenting and supporting it because they've been clued into what's been going on. Right? So I think-

• 55:52Speaker 01

  You know, there's a premium on people knowing who you are, you being visible, and people knowing that you're aligned with Decred. And because at the end of the day, it's still about knowing the entity you're dealing with. I think we're hyper, in particular, and for good reason, you know, we're hyper against transactional folks who are just coming, they see something they can take and they can leave, or more about people who see this as a repeated game, who are here for the long haul and who really want to stay and help grow the community.

• 56:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And I'm assuming that the miners, one of the aspects I'm really interested in is kind of goes back to a little bit of the conversation with African countries and also the hybrid component of Decred, whether you're mining Bitcoin, Decred, something else, this income generation that crypto unlocks, right? It really democratizes the ability for people to earn a living, right? And I think we've seen that in some countries like Venezuela, where, you know, the income of an average citizen is so low that literally one single S9 or S17 could double or triple their income, right? And it's just, all you gotta do is plug

• 57:02Anthony Pompliano?

  it in and connect it to the internet. Do you see that in either African countries, just in crypto in general, or do you see some of this taking hold with Decred in terms of like income generation or democratization of the ability to earn?

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, so I think it's manifesting a little bit differently with Decred, right? So if you think about being able to sort of mine a cryptocurrency, there's CapEx related to with that, right? So I have to have, and even if it's accessible-

• 57:32Anthony Pompliano?

  You gotta get the hardware.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Right, you get the hardware, and it's becoming even harder for most chains to actually even mine it without some serious hardware. Now, I think in the case of Decred, we have a process through which contributors get paid for their input, right? So even if you're, for example, you're organizing meetups on Decred, we have lots of resources you can tap into, presentations, things that anyone who's really bought in and excited can say, "Look, I want to host a meetup," and you can get paid and reimbursed for it. Right? That's income, right? And that takes just some savvy, some ability to promote and market the event. And it's a, you know, what I consider like a low skill level of contribution. And you can get reimbursed for hosting the event depending on the turnout.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  And that's pretty transparent. And, and so that's one way. We have developers who are part of Decred, who are across a number of African countries, and they contribute to the platform, they build code, they deploy code, and they get paid in Decred. And, you know, Decred, regardless of where you are, coming into the community as a developer, you get paid the same amount of money. Now, that becomes very compelling from, for some, from an African in a secondary city with very, very low cost of living. And I did some back of the envelope math, you know, I think, you know, most of our developers or devs in Africa are probably making, you know, three to five X what they would if they're a full-time deployed locally at a company, right?

• 59:02Speaker 01

  And so all of a sudden, it makes it a very, very compelling case to contribute in meaningful ways and get paid by the network in this non-sovereign store of value that you can, that only you knows that even exists and you can access anywhere. I think, you know, and there are lots of protections around that as well, such that, you know, you're not, you know, you're not putting your money in a bad bank that's like, you know, killing you and taking all the value and extracting costs. If you have to flee the country because of the conflict, as long as you know your keys, you know, you can recover your account.

• 59:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It sounds like you're, you're really kind of convinced that, that sovereignty of, of crypto, you know, Bitcoin, Decred, et cetera, the ability to give you the power as an individual. It aligns a lot with the, the psychological state that various people in countries in Africa already are kind of contributing to their society or participating in their society. They're in that mindset.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  They are.

• 1:00:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And now you're getting a piece of technology that is just kind of putting that in hyperdrive almost.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Right. And if you think about the delta, right? What I like to explain it is, when I think about crypto in the advanced world, the first world. Like it's an evolution, right? Yeah, I can get banking services. Yeah, my banks might not be the most optimum, but I can access cash. I can access the financial system if I'm not nefarious in the US very, very easily. Right? If I have a good credit from a good credit risk, I can access lending and loans. Right? And so in many ways, I think crypto is a massive improvement on many fronts, but it's an evolution. I think in the African context, it's a revolution, right? Because you're dealing now with giving people access to things that they never had. Right? So I never had a way to sort of have, um, you know, value stored in a form that now could become collateral,

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  such that I can borrow against that. Right? I never had a way to be part of a global network where, like I said, I could potentially source, right? Um, um, financial products, very, very low fiction, very, very low cost, and I can deploy it where I, where I am. Right? And I think that makes a, a big difference. Because I think crypto, I think for a lot of people in Africa, crypto will be very, be the very first financial services product they interact with in any formal way.

• 1:01:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That's wild. That's absolutely wild for people in the West to think about, right?

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Or crypto-based platform of some sort.

• 1:01:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and, but it does make sense. And, and I think this goes to the argument, uh, maybe the guys like MultiCoin have, have talked a lot about kind of the exchanges, uh, are quickly becoming, uh, the financial service providers, uh, globally. Right? So if you think of, um, you know, kind of North American, uh, um, ecosystems on the financial side, pretty well developed. Europe, pretty well developed in, uh, in a number of countries, uh, even China, right? Pretty well developed, et cetera. The continent of Africa, not well developed, right? South America, a lot of places, not very well developed. Uh, if you look in kind of Southeast Asia, not very well developed in a lot of cases. And so, uh, if that first interaction is with a crypto exchange or a digital wallet, et cetera,

• 1:02:08Anthony Pompliano?

  those people are actually at the tip of the spear, those products at building out an entire suite of financial service products that can give people access to income, to credit, to, you know, all these tools that you or I think are kind of normal. Obviously in those countries, they just either, uh, don't have it in a, in a very popular way, or they don't have access at all. And so giving them access can, uh, be pretty, um, pretty important.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think so. And I think, you know, when you, when you add to the fact that beyond that, I think some of the tools are building a de-cred will also address some of the people aspects of crypto around governance, around how decisions are made, around empowering people, but also just making sure it's transparent, then you're also solving other problems that are inherent with lots of African nation-states, where you have poor governance, top-down, from governments to institutions. And if you can now create a fairer blockchain-based system, where the governance process cannot be gamed, is fairly clear, decision-making could be decentralized, right? All of a sudden, I think you, you have

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  a means through which you have a new operating model for institutions on the African continent, potentially, such that anyone who's now funding initiatives in Africa through these channels has certain assurances they had never had, right? So counterparty risk now becomes something that can be solved, because there are new ways that can identify who you are, there are new ways that can lock capital and release it on a certain schedule through smart contracts, right? There are many tools now you can employ leveraging blockchain that actually solve for these structural issues you see in these emerging economies, that all of a sudden, if it takes out all these transactions costs, it makes investing to these nations more compelling, right? It makes it more compelling if the jurisdiction

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  through which arbitration is handled is on a blockchain. It's not subject to an unfair legal system that basically is, you know, is in favor of those who are powerful.

• 1:04:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll take it even a step further. Alex Gladstein, the, the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, who's the first person to turn me on to this idea. He said, "Imagine foreign aid." He goes, "In a lot of cases, foreign aid that goes into countries all around the world, not just, not just African countries, but anywhere in the world. A lot of times, that foreign aid's given, knowing that there's a corruption tax, right? So we're gonna, we're gonna give Nigeria $100 million. $80 million, maybe, we'll make it to some form of a charity or, or an aid-type organization. There's another tax at that point, right? And the people may get $30 million of that 100. But that $70 million that quote-unquote "got taxed," that went into the hands of the people who control the organizations, the government, the banks, etc."

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think, I think the global... Or the legacy global NGO market is a big ruse. Like, literally, it's a big subsidy for these countries because if you look at charities just on average, like, over half of the monies they come in just go to operating these charities, right, all these NGOs. So the first slump is you're creating jobs for, you know, Americans, wherever the source of funding comes from. Right now, that, the peace that goes to, gets into the country, corruption erodes a bunch of it. And where does that money typically land? It lands in foreign business accounts, right? So all of a sudden, that money's in Swiss accounts, right? Piling up in these Swiss accounts and it's developing European economies, right? Because what's the Swiss bank gonna do?

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  It's gonna put into the system and invest it, right? So in many ways, it might, you know, it's a huge subsidy and actually, not only does it not benefit the beneficiaries locally in these African countries, it leaves these African countries underhook for the debt, where most of the benefits are accrued to the originator of the, of, of, of the investment in the first place. Right? And I think that, you know, funny enough, I think that even, that's one area that I particularly and personally wanna see crypto and blockchain totally just revolutionize.

• 1:06:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Because especially if you can give the aid right to the people.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? You, you literally avoid all of that nonsense. And it's just, what's your digital wallet, right? And I have 100,000 people now that have digital wallets, and I'm gonna make sure every single person gets their equal fair share of that aid.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Right. And, but even in the operations of a charity, like, for example, like, some of the work that Binance Charity has been doing in Uganda is remarkable, where I think effectively, Binance covers the operating cost of the charity. I think the charity gets donations from other third parties, but dollar for dollar, every dollar that goes towards beneficiaries ends up in the hands of the beneficiary. And there's a path to sort of audit that and see where that money's going. And so I think in many ways, I'd love to see, you know, blockchain and crypto basically destroy this market where, frankly, the beneficiaries are not receiving the funding they should.

• 1:07:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  So I think there's a lot of- There's a lot of interesting areas where I think crypto can bring in transparency, reduce friction, and actually help people more, more so than they're being helped in current systems today.

• 1:07:17Anthony Pompliano?

  What is, what's either the craziest or the most inspiring story that you've seen with somebody on the continent of Africa interacting with crypto or blockchain? What would be the one story if you could tell people, here's a great example, or a crazy example, what would it be?

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Hmm, crypto in Africa, crazy example.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Trying to think, I think that, you know, like I said earlier on, some of the examples I've seen is you have, you have these cottage industries growing around leveraging crypto as a utility, right? So for example, I'll give you an example, there are a number of exchanges across Africa now, like real digital exchanges, but there's been a whole industry of effectively, what I consider like liquidity and wholesale providers that have come into the space.

• 1:08:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Where, for example, I have access to an exchange in the wherewithal to acquire Bitcoin, but then I'm reselling that Bitcoin or access to those pools to others that don't have the wherewithal. But I'm actually giving them utility, they're paying me a fee for my trouble, right? But the, the market is expanding because someone has seen an opportunity, one, to get a return. I mean, there've been varying periods of time across Africa where the price of Bitcoin was an order of magnitude higher than it was in other markets. Like examples where Zimbabwe, when Zimbabwe was close to the brink of blowing up.

• 1:08:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It was like 50% higher.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  I think of the time when Bitcoin hit 20,000 or got close to 20,000, at one point in some exchanges in Zimbabwe, Bitcoin was selling for $60,000.

• 1:08:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Right? And so, so when you, when you think about the margin that's there to, to be had, of course people are going to enter that market and try to then intermediated, right? So there's a lot of crazy stuff happening where you now have these sort of like fly by night bankers effectively running these informal shops. But what that is doing is I think is increasing awareness because, you know, when you, when you want a transaction on my behalf, the next question I'm going to ask is, what did you do and how did you do it? And I'm effectively trying to eventually get you out. So I think that's helping to kind of proliferate.

• 1:09:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And this happens in every market, right? I mean, like, literally, it's, hey, you and I live in a village. We don't have access to a car. We know someone who has access to a car. They're gonna go to the city. They can go buy X, Y, or Z thing that's available in the city, not available in our village. Hey, pick that up for me and I'll pay you some fee when you bring it back. It's essentially what's happening here, right? It's just you have access to that exchange because you've actually gotten an account, you know how to use it. I want Bitcoin. I give you some cash. You go buy the Bitcoin.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  I mean, they're they're even like weirder custody things, solutions I've seen in Africa, where, you know, you can buy Bitcoin over the counter. I go to a store, I give them some cash, and they give me literally like a code. I saw this, I don't think it's really, it doesn't give you the secret key or your private key, but it give you a code that basically is good for a certain amount of Bitcoin. And people, people are trading those receipts, right? Because it's a store of value somewhere. It's like it's stamped somehow to value that it's a valid receipt, right? But I can basically, you know, it's almost like going to a pawn shop where I'm like, I give you some cash, right? You give me a receipt that represents an amount of Bitcoin. Look, Bitcoin mooned last night. I'm coming back to cash in and getting more cash. So you have all these sorts of interesting ways that people are

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  now creating a user experience that allows for others to use it, right? And taking advantage of these opportunities.

• 1:10:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And this happens in, another example that I use a lot is innovation comes out of necessity a lot of times, right? And so if you're there, you don't have access to the exchange to actually buy it, but you want the benefits of the store of value, people come up with these types of things. My favorite example of all of this is the economies that are built within prisons in the United States, right? So they trade toilet paper, they trade ramen noodles, they trade cigarettes, right? All these things that begin to have monetary type properties because they become medium of exchanges.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Or stores of value. It's because innovation is the product of necessity, right? They don't have anything else.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  The mother of invention.

• 1:11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so I think that that is, you know, it's funny how this replicates. Over and over and over again in countries all around the world. And now we're seeing, I think Bitcoin and crypto be the beneficiary of it across the ecosystem. Before I wrap up, rapid fire questions, what would you say is the most important company in crypto today? Other than Decred?

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  I was about to jump up and say Decred.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  The most important company other than Decred?

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  So this is one that popped into mind, placeholder.

• 1:12:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, oh, interesting.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  And I think the reason for that.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  So I think personally for me in my crypto journey, Chris Berninski has been very, very pivotal.

• 1:12:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So those that don't know, placeholder is an investment firm based in New York, run by two guys, Chris Berninski and Joel, is that right?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Joel Monegro.

• 1:12:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's right. And they've been big proponents of Decred along with a whole bunch of other stuff, but have been pretty early and done a lot of work in terms of publishing their ideas and things like that.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I think for me, it's personally in that, I think a lot of my early crypto journey, I kind of relied on Chris quite a bit and he was quite accessible. Right, just bugging him, asking him stupid questions. So that's one, but I also think that I kind of brought him up and Chris and placeholder in particular for just sort of like the culture of asking questions and trying to figure out what's next. Right, so this idea that, you know, innovation didn't end with Bitcoin, but there's so much more we can uncover. Right, and the whole ethos around them really trying to invest in the future, trying to, not just in terms of making investments in companies, but also kind of pushing further like research, position papers.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I think a lot of my perspective on how I see the markets have come from some other like seminal blog posts on fat protocols and idea that, you know, okay, maybe value is not going to accrue to middleware. And the fact that they're more than willing. In many ways to contradict themselves as they get more information. Right? So the fat protocol thesis was, we think that our value is going to accrue to these base layer chains. And as more information as the market has evolved, you can see how their positioning is changing. And they're now saying, look, things are changing, things are evolving. We think the dynamic is shifting and that certain things and our thesis is maturing and evolving. And I think just having that culture and ethos that you don't, we don't know what the future looks like, but we want to be part of it. And we want to be part of bringing it to bear.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  I think not only serves the ecosystem well, but in many ways, I think it's, it's a lot of the basis on which Decred is also built. This idea that we want to iterate, iterate into the future. We want to see what's next and we want to be able to build, implement and execute on the features that the network is going to need.

• 1:14:32Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  In what domicile here in the US?

• 1:14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Wherever you want, you pick.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  The one regulation?

• 1:14:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I like talking to people who have global mindsets because you can, now you've heard you gotta make multiple decisions here.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  So there's a body. So, well, I don't know if I'll call it a regulation.

• 1:14:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, there are a number of laws, but the whole body of laws that have basically allowed monetary policy, global monetary policy powers to reside in the United States. Right? I think if you, if you think about, you know, and it's a whole, it's a whole number of laws, but.

• 1:15:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, you're bringing out the big shots.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, they're, they're, I mean, after the Patriot Act, there are a whole bunch of laws around global financial systems that got passed through. Most people didn't even know what was going on, right? But over the years, increasingly, the US has gotten a much more dominant position and say, I mean, all commodities are priced in dollars. So basically the whole of Africa relies on Fed monetary policy that effectively determines the price of goods coming out of African countries. That's a problem, right? That's a sovereignty problem for Africa. That's a, that's a, right? And so my, so I think that whole body of laws that essentially. You know, backs the US as a reserve currency, but it also has weaponized the dollar as a

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  as a tool to cajole and and and kind of beat countries into doing the bidding of the US. I think I think I think those set of laws are not only bad for the world, I think they're ultimately bad for the United States. Because I think invariably what it's created is it's fractured all the post-World War II institutions where every country felt that they had a say or a seat at the table. And it's forcing other powerful dumbass else to say that any way in which we can weaken the dollar as a reserve currency, we're going to do. Right. And so it set the game that basically has now said, look, one way or the other, we're coming after the dollar, whether it's the Chinese, whether it's the Russians. Right.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  I think ultimately that's bad for the United States.

• 1:16:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It's almost like it's good short term, long bad term. And what you do if you look at like the political climate in the US, so there's a group of people who they call themselves never Trumper, Trumpers, right, which basically anything other than Donald Trump.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:01Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what they're in for. Right? Well, that's kind of what's happening in the geopolitical world where you're getting China, Russia, you know, a bunch of these economies and governments are saying, you know, basically never US.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:13Anthony Pompliano?

  They're just saying like anything else other than a US-based or a US-dollar-based system is better. What are other options? Right. And so I think that actually in some weird way, the US government is driving more awareness and potential adoption of Bitcoin than they realize by weaponizing their currency, by by doing all of this stuff. Because almost like they they've they realized they were powerful, they started to implement that power, then they abuse that power.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And then eventually what ends up happening? Everyone revolts.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:17:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, you know, it's one thing if you're a government and your citizens are thinking about a revolution, because you've got a lot of control, right? We see that in, you know, Hong Kong and China right now, et cetera. And there's just challenges for a group of volunteers or people to kind of coordinate, et cetera. But when it's other countries that are revolting against you and they're banding together. I don't care how powerful you are, right? You can't fight everybody all the time. And so I think that that's a really good point.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  You're right. And I think what makes it worse is, you know, the US as a government is going to fight a war on multiple fronts. Because there's a revolution from within, right? There's a backlash from within and this populist movements around this idea that globalization hasn't been fair to everyone. And so I think the US is facing an internal mutiny on some level and is now facing a crumbling of its allegiances internationally. All in the meantime, all in the while, I think we haven't figured crypto regulations, it's still kind of a very gray area. And meanwhile, other countries are accelerating full steam ahead. You know, I think we need to wake up as a country to really try to figure out what we want to be when we grow up or grow older.

• 1:18:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Grow older, right?

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  And it's not, it's not looking good because we're just in this sort of gray area and, you know, things need to change.

• 1:19:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Oh, the most important book?

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Antifragile.

• 1:19:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, why?

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  And it seems to have a tale. Well, I think because it's, so I mean, I, my first degree is in economics. And it's probably one of the first books I read that had a very, a much more practical view on sort of like behavioral economics, right? So beyond the theory and things you learn, it really talks about fundamentally, you know, certain things that make you resilient as an individual, as a company, as an entity. And this idea of antifragility, right? Where, where, you know, you're able to, you know, things that don't kill you actually make you stronger. Right? And I think just the, the tone of the book and how it kind of puts everything on top of its head.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  It sort of create, at least for me, the way I kind of read it and interpreted it is it forces you want to think differently. But it also tells you that there's a different way. Like it's another way. There's no way to look at things. There's a better way to do things. Right? And I think that's part of also the attraction to crypto and, and, and de-credit and blockchain is this idea that the system we have today in many ways works, but there's always a better way. And there's no reason why. You know, things, because they've been the same way for 50, 100 years, need to remain the same. They need to evolve.

• 1:20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Before I finish up, I'll let you ask me a question to bring us home. But aliens, real or not, you believe?

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Um, no, I don't believe that.

• 1:20:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa, hold on, you're one of only three people have ever, you're, this is blasphemy on this show. What, why, uh, why are you a non-believer? You don't believe in aliens?

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  No, I don't believe in aliens.

• 1:20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Why? Because I think the whole design of the system of, of the earth, of the universe, or anything, I think it was created by God and God created man. And ultimately, everything was designed for whatever his goals are in terms of.

• 1:21:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Humans and the population and I, I don't think God hedged. So I don't think God created another race somewhere else. Justin crazy screwed up.

• 1:21:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What about animals?

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  No, but they're all on earth, right? So everything, right?

• 1:21:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So why do you create all the other planets?

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  I don't know, that's a good question. But we haven't found any aliens yet, so I am, I'm living within the understanding and the framework for which I think, you know, I interact with daily and I can kind of say is real. Um, but.

• 1:21:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm gonna throw you for a loop now, ready?

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  I'm sure you are.

• 1:21:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw a video recently online that I tweeted, which was a, uh, I think it was an octopus or a jellyfish, uh, or some kind of hybrid of it, deep in the ocean. And it was, uh, flying, you're like, you know, gliding, uh, in the water. And it was going over top of various, what I'll call, um, kind of environments. So one was more of a rocky, kind of light colored one. One was a darker, what looks like, kind of like, um, seaweed type environment, et cetera. And as it was going over each one of the environments, it was changing colors. And it was completely camoufl, like, it, it was scary how it did it. And at the end of the video, it goes down into the rocks and it literally looks like it hardens and turns into a rock.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:22:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And all I kept thinking to myself is, humans may be the least prepared species on this planet to deal with bad shit, because something like that is incredible.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  But, but I also think that if, if you also kind of follow the, you know, um, not creation, what's the, what's the color of creationism? If you follow this idea that, you know, things evolved over time.

• 1:22:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Evolution, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  Um, and evolutionary theory, like.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  A lot of things had to happen in perfect balance for life to actually happen on Earth.

• 1:22:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Agreed.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  And I think that I just don't think that there's anywhere else in the in the solar system where all those things align so perfectly to create life.

• 1:23:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, last question for you. Are dinosaurs real?

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Well, we have skeletons of dinosaurs who dug up, so they were real.

• 1:23:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Did we dig them up?

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:23:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Just making sure. If you went 0 for 3 with me on aliens, things in the ocean and dinosaurs.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Everything is here, all right? Everything has evolved, evolved from here. I just, I mean, there's no evidence yet against the fact, so.

• 1:23:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, it, uh, there are not a lot of people who come in here and say they don't believe aliens, but, uh, that may be a good bet, is the fact that everyone else has consensus that aliens exist. Maybe the, uh, the, the counterintuitive bet is actually the right one.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how you make outsized gains, being, being on the other side of the trade with the crowd.

• 1:23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Exactly. What, uh, what one question do you have for me to, uh, finish up?

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  Um, question for you. Uh, I guess what makes you really optimistic about the, the crypto space? Like, why have you dedicated your life and a lot of your time and effort into the space? Like, what really gets you up?

• 1:24:16Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the ultimate speaking truth to power.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:24:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, there's a lot of people who do a lot of things and they rely on their ability to coordinate resources, they rely on their ability to use information arbitrage, they rely on their ability to use violence, um, to do things to other parts of the population in every country that, uh, puts people at a systematic disadvantage, right? And so whether you look at something like inflation, that actually drives wealth inequality, whether you look at something like seizing of assets, things like that, um, I think that Bitcoin, crypto, and even blockchain more generally, uh, has the ability to empower people to fight back.

• 1:25:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And the part that I like about it, especially having you're deployed in war environment, etc., is that it's a peaceful way to fight back. Right. Right? You don't have to kind of revolt in the sense that people have historically thought of in terms of, you know, go fight or protest. You can do it in a way of just, I choose to opt out. I choose plan B, right? I choose to store my wealth somewhere else, or I choose to earn my income by securing a network, etc. And I think that that's a pretty powerful idea that just hasn't been around, you know, for very long. And I think it'll ultimately become more and more popular as people kind of get aware of it. Awesome. Cool. I agree.

• 1:25:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. You are now the resident expert on Off the Chain of all things crypto and the African continent. So we'll have to bring you back as things continue to evolve and do this again in the future. For sure. Thanks a lot.

• 1:26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.