Alex Mashinsky: What Decentralization Really Means

Alex Mashinsky is the founder and CEO of Celsius Network. He has invented and built a number of disruptive technologies over the years, including Voice Over IP. In this conversation, Mashinsky and Anthony Pompliano discuss Bitcoin, crypto lending, and building sustainable companies around disruptive tech.

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Alex Mashinsky is the founder and CEO of Celsius Network. He has invented or built a number of disruptive technologies over the years, including voiceover IP and ride sharing. We cover a lot in this conversation, from Bitcoin to crypto lending to building sustainable companies around disruptive tech. I had fun recording this, so I hope you enjoy it as well.

• 0:37Anthony Pompliano?

  This podcast is presented by Blockworks Group, the only blockchain event and media production company I trust. If you're an investor, lawyer, accountant, or entrepreneur, and want to attend exclusive events and dinners, visit them at blockworksgroup.io. I promise you won't be disappointed.

• 0:55Speaker 01

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

• 1:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we get into this episode, I want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors. Soluna is a blockchain computing company powered by its own renewable energy. The team is planning to build a 900-megawatt facility on top of a 37,000-acre location, one of the best wind sites in the world in southern Morocco. You'll hear more from them later in this episode, but I'd love if you could go check out their website. You can find them at soluna.io.

• 1:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, I'm super excited. We've got Alex here. Thank you so much for coming.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Sure, thanks for having us.

• 1:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, we got a lot to get through because you've got a long and storied career. So let's start from the very beginning and let's talk about all the things you've done kind of pre-crypto.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  So for context, right, I was born in the Ukraine, grew up in Israel, came here just over 30 years ago. So communism, socialism, and capitalism, right? I tested all three systems.

• 2:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Which one's better?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Well, capitalism is definitely better for people like me, but I don't think capitalism covers it for the seven billion, seven and a half billion people that live on this planet. So I think, you know, I view blockchain and crypto is almost like the fourth system, right? It's a system that can liberate all of us to have a different reason for living because instead of just profit accumulation, we can actually create value through our contribution to society. And that's the opportunity. If you look at Ethereum, for example, right? Vitalik, his contribution, right? He used to work for blockchain.com and bitcoin.com and came to the Bitcoin Foundation, proposed

• 3:00Speaker 02

  the smart contract and they're like, eh, we don't think we're gonna include that. And he goes and he creates this amazing new platform that created a whole plethora of new, right? Like a Cambrian explosion of innovation, right? So that kind of value creation, which really empowers almost everybody on the planet, is just not possible, wasn't possible because all this concentrated in Silicon Valley and just few cities in the United States. And now I think the blockchain enables that, makes it fungible across the entire planet.

• 3:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right. So get to the US, what do you do first?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  So I was trading commodities, physical commodities, sugar.

• 3:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh god, you're a trader. Literally a trader. All right, let's hear it.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Physical deliveries of sugar, urea, sodium cyanide, gold, name it, right? And then I was like...

• 3:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Where are you doing this at?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  I had my own trading company out of Luxembourg.

• 3:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Target Trading Systems, that was the name of the company. And I just didn't like what I was doing. I was, you know, it was all about just, you know, talking to people and not really creating anything. And then I decided to get into technology. So my first company was actually a voicemail company. We created the first PC-based voicemail.

• 4:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Those annoying things that answer the phone. But back then it was revolutionary because we were competing with Octel and VMX, which were like a mainframe solutions. And I did the same thing for one tenth of the price. But how do you get into that from trading? Well, I have a technical background, and so I've been tinkering with technical things since I was, you know, a teenager. Yep. So I started electrical engineering and so on. So I have a very good technical background. Uh, and I found out it to be really exciting, the ability to take a few boards, put them in a PC and, and voila, you can do anything you wanted, right? And then we just started connecting it to bigger and bigger phone lines.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  And I realized that I could actually build a phone switch, uh, that replaced the traditional, you know, uh, system that Bell Labs and all the other guys built, right? So, so we built a whole phone switch that cost one one hundreds of what, uh, Bell Labs charged AT&T. And our breakthrough was in like 94, when, uh, I wrote the VoIP protocol. I wrote the first, uh, patents about that, October 1994. And I went to AT&T and I showed them that I can take a phone call, compress it, put it on the internet, and, uh, uh, ship it anywhere, basically, and put it back on the phone network on the other side. That was a breakthrough idea. And they immediately gave me a contract to put in a few countries in Japan and Korea, a few other places. And it was,

• 5:44Speaker 02

  it was front page in the New York Times, 1995. I think it was like August of 1995. How did you come up with that idea, though? Well, it was kind of obvious for me because when I saw the internet, I real, it was obvious that the internet is gonna be a billion times bigger than the phone network. Back then, if you wanted to get on the internet, you had to dial, use a phone line to dial in and use your 9.6 kilobit modem to connect. And that was like the fastest modem you can buy. So I was like, no, that's, all that is gonna be eliminated. Your phone is gonna be able to be always connected, always on, which everybody promised, is gonna be here faster than we can even think about. So voice is just gonna be an application on the internet.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  And if voice is an application on the internet, let's build a protocol that enables that. Right, so how do we integrate with the system seven, right, the signaling system? How do we sample it, right? Do we take TDM and put it on IP? Do we use TCP/IP? Do we use UDP? Right, all the signaling, what happens if we lose some of the packets, all that stuff, right? How do you move from one network to another? All these things were things that no one has solved before. And, you know, I wrote like fifty patents on that. I was like, I didn't get any sleep for like two years and, and it was, it was just amazing time. It was just like the, one of the funnest, most fun time of my life. Uh, knowing that you're like the first, you're like trailblazing everything.

• 7:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So you think you've got, let's call it fifty or about fifty patents?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Over fifty issued patents.

• 7:15Anthony Pompliano?

  On, on the voiceover IP and, I mean, you are on-

• 7:19Speaker 02

  And other things, yeah.

• 7:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but you are on the front lines of this and-

• 7:23Speaker 02

  First patent, first foundational patent for voiceover IP.

• 7:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. And, and as you're building this, what are people telling you? They believe in it? They don't believe in it? They think you're crazy? What, what's the reaction as you start telling people?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  So our break was, and you know, in, in retrospect, you look at it and say it's obvious, but we, I didn't know that. When I went to AT&T and showed it to them, they had a project they were working with, with Bell Labs where they were supposed to deploy. Basically, the, the State Department came to them and said, "We're tired of paying all these phone companies all over the world's billions of dollars because there was three times as much, uh, traffic coming from the US to Japan, for example, than the other way around." Because the prices in the US were half the price from Japan. So, and the State Department just said, "The settlement rate doesn't make any sense. We're tired of paying all these settlements." And then tasked AT&T to solve the problem. So AT&T went to Bell Labs and, and after a year, Bell Labs didn't deliver anything. And then we show up with this box and they're like,

• 8:19Speaker 02

  "Take this box, go to Japan, install it and bypass the phone company over there, KDD." It was the, the main, the exclusive international voice provider for Japan.

• 8:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we're gonna get into the good stuff now.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  So we went to ATT Gens, which was the local subsidiary that had local lines, bypassed KDD, connected it directly to the international switches here, gateway, VoIP gateway there, VoIP gateway in the US. And that was, the rest was history.

• 8:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Let, let me recap this for people. So you took voice from the United States, sent it over the internet, right, connected it in a foreign country, and you were able to bypass the incumbent infrastructure that was previously necessary in order to allow that voice to transmit across country lines.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  And that was what the patent was about.

• 9:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. When you do that, what is KDD, who's the incumbent? What's their reaction?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Well, look, I, there's a long story about that because I actually physically, I went on a plane with the box, and the installation was in the KDD building in Shinjuku, okay?

• 9:25Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way, they don't let people on planes with boxes anymore.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. And there's a long story of other things that were problematic. And, and Dialogic, which made the boards, gave me defective boards. So when I plugged in the NTT line, Japan is like a specialized T1 line. It's not like the US old T1 lines. It has its own protocol and whatever. And we plugged that in, a red light went on instead of a green light. And I was like freaking out. I was like there for the whole night, trying to figure out why the phone lines are now working. And it ended up being just the Dialogic misplaced the LEDs. They put the red one in the place where the green one was, and all the time, everything was working. All I had to do is do a test call and it would work. But anyway, so things like that, that like, nothing was easy, right?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  So, so I install it, I do the testing, and we start terminating traffic, bypassing KDD. And the next morning, it's front page in the New York Times, which again, ATT leaked that intentionally as per the instruction of the State Department. They wouldn't do that otherwise. And, and there was just a war between AT&T and KDD. And they ended up lowering the, the settlement rate from like $3 to like $1.75 or something like that.

• 10:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So the incumbents weren't happy with this, obviously?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  They were furious. They were furious. And they found out where and we installed it. But they couldn't terminate it because we were using legal lines. We were using boards that were authorized to be used in Japan. So we didn't do anything illegal. But they were freaking out that there was a way suddenly to bypass the infrastructure.

• 11:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And what do they do? So they're mad, right? And they figure out what you guys did. They realize that it's legal. What's their reaction, though?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Well, in the beginning, they were like, they hated us. But then, you know, KDD became my customer and they wanted us to install it in in Brazil and other places where they had a problem with settlement. It's like, listen, this is a really bad idea, but now we're gonna use it and lower our own termination prices in all the countries where we have expats.

• 11:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's kind of like the Gandhi quote, right? First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And that's basically what you went through.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  But like with the blockchain, they all thought this was a great tool for them to improve their profitability. They didn't see this as something that's going to evolve into a free service for all that bypasses. I mean, today, AT&T is losing money on their international voice.

• 11:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Right? They're offering it just because they have to. You're not, because you're gonna switch to Verizon if you, they didn't offer you in voice, in international voice. But all the revenues are coming from the seller service, not for, from the other stuff. So, so back, so that that transition, and same thing today. I mean, if you look at JP Morgan implementing blockchain, they're not thinking about crypto or how crypto is going to become the dominant store of value and a payment platform worldwide. They're saying, hey, first, let's steal the Mona Lisa of these guys. Let's take Ethereum, call it somewhere, something else, and convince all the banks to work with us. Oh, we said we're not gonna say bad things about people.

• 12:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and so I think that, you know, part of this story is we've seen this disruption playbook play out so many times throughout history that it's almost predictable, right?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  But you have to find the crack in the wall, and you gotta get through it, and you gotta... We were lucky. I mean, I didn't know that the State Department sanctioned this and everybody was looking for it. I was, they called me the rubber man because I could do anything with my little switch, right? They couldn't get their big switches to do any of that stuff. And they would just start plugging me in everywhere they needed a rubber man to fix their problems. So, so Arbinet ended up being a public company, 1.7 billion market cap. And I made a lot of money and today's three and a half billion people use VoIP for free. The bigger question is, why isn't the other three billion using it? Why, why are three billion people on the planet after 25 years still paying for their phone lines? I don't understand that.

• 13:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Because the technology adoption, like Steve, you know, Bill Gates said that, right? That's it's always slower than what you predict in the first five years and it's always much bigger.

• 13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You overestimate what we can do in two years and underestimate what we can do in 10. Absolutely. All right, so after you get through the VoIP phase of your life, right? You read all these patents.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  You never get over the VoIP phase of your life. It's like, you know, when you become a star in your 20 and then you can top that? That's how I am.

• 13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  You peaked in the VoIP phase?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  That's it. It was all downhill from there.

• 13:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So, all right, so you do this, right? And what ends up happening is you guys obviously disrupt the heck out of these guys and they say, "Look, actually, we want to use technology ourselves." And so you kind of win, right? You eclipse what they were doing before. It's cheaper, it's faster, it's better, etc. What do you do next?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  So, 2003, right before Arbin actually went public, I come up with this idea that ground transportation is going to be on your phone and you're going to have it there real easy. You can order any driver and they're going to be coming to you and take you anywhere you want to go. And we build it on the BlackBerry and we were the first ones to launch on the iPhone, 2007, and we're the first ones to launch on Android. And by 2008, we have over 35 million in revenues, 50 million in capital that we raised from VCs, and we're in over 100 countries.

• 14:51Anthony Pompliano?

  What's it called?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Ground Link.

• 14:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Still around, still in more cities than Uber today, but obviously not the huge success that Uber was. And my mistake was choosing PE investors instead of VC investors. And the funny thing, I was sitting with Bill Gurley a week before he invested in Uber. So it was me and Travis, right? And I, you know, I know Travis. I was, I told Bill, "Look, you know me for 15 years." By then, I already had over a billion in exits. I made money for all my investors every time I touched something. Travis failed in the first 10 companies he started. Failed, lost all the money every time on every company he founded prior to Uber, right? And I said, "Who are you going to invest in?

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Are you going to invest in Mashinsky or are you going to invest in Travis?" And he looks at me, he's like, "Ah, you know, he's local, he's pure play, you're all over the place. Yeah, we're going to go with Uber, you know? Uber Taxi, as it was called back then." And my investors basically didn't want to pick the fight and cut the prices by half because we were profitable, right? And Uber just decimated us. I mean, it was, it was very, very painful. It was the most painful experience, besides being in the military and almost getting killed. This was the most terrifying, kind of painful, destructive experience of my life.

• 16:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, do you think that they were just more ruthless in terms of price cutting and just expansion and the way that they use data?

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is that right? Or is there something else?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  They, they realized much faster than anyone else that you can actually break every law, every state law and not go to jail. And that the community is going to back you up. And by mistake, all of this happened by mistake because their prices were higher than ours when they started in San Francisco. And then because Lyft showed up in San Francisco, they decided to cut the prices by half. And when they saw the hockey stick on the adoption curve, they said, hey, keep losing money. Let's lose money on every transaction. We're going to make it up in volume, right? Eventually, after you raise 20 billion and...

• 17:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Network effects.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Network effects.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  But, but again, I, look, I know the team. I'm telling you, they didn't plan any of that upfront. You know, like all of that happened, kind of like it was...

• 17:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Innovation out of necessity.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  The dominoes fell perfectly for them and for us, nothing went out right. Just like everything is going right for us in Celsius, nothing went right for me in GroundLink. You know, it's just horrible. And, and sometimes you're just not in the right place and not at the right time. I was way too early. And by the time, in 2008, being seen in a limo after the collapse was a disaster.

• 17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  You know, people were like, it's not just that we couldn't advertise, I couldn't even tell people that I was running like a limo company, right? So, so, so I think they could put a young spin on it. But they really, the thing that made this industry what it is...

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Is the fact that anyone could become a driver. The fact that anyone could get a smartphone, take the navigation system, didn't need to know the streets in Manhattan, didn't need to know how to get to the airport, enabled millions of new people to be part timers or join this revolution. And because they had all these drivers, they could then basically somehow get closer and closer and closer to the price point that they were at. So the losses were actually going down.

• 18:15Anthony Pompliano?

  The supply, the supply side was the innovation.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  While they were building a critical mass. And we, we didn't understand that until it was too late. And, and, and, cause what we did was we partnered with 45 taxi and limo companies all over the world. So anywhere you landed, we provided you three or four choices, which was whoever bid to be the best price. But it was always twice the price of Uber, right? But we had 10 times many cities. So, so, uh, anyway, look, I wanted, I wanted to go head to head with those guys and, and, I, when I saw that they're not gonna do it, I just resigned the CEO in 2010 and, and just said, I'm gonna go and do the next thing. And the funniest thing, one of my ex-employees sends me Satoshi's paper. And, and I look at this, he says, you gotta do this, this is for you.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  You know, you, you're the best guy to do this, you know? And I looked at it and I said, it's slow, it's inefficient, it's never gonna scale. That was my analysis of it in, in 2010, which, which ended up being true, but not true, you know? So obviously I'm here.

• 19:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So what do you do from 2010 till crypto?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  So I sat on a few boards, I ran a public company, uh, uh, okay. So in parallel to, uh, uh, Groundlink, my friend, my best friend, Haga Sheffi, died on September 11th, you know, in the towers. And I said, I'm gonna do something for the city. I'm gonna do something to make this a better place, right? And, and I, I ended up zeroing in on the subway and how the fact that it didn't have any connectivity in the subway, and I went and fought with MTA for years, right? To convince them to put wireless in the subways. And after like three or four years of fighting, they basically said, okay, go do a survey. Of course, I paid for the survey. You know, 70% of the people said, of course, we want connectivity.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  And this is back when Selig penetration in New York City was less than 50%. You know, so, so then they put it out for bid, 400 people bid out, right? Uh, to participate in the project. Then it's down to like 40. And, and, you know, and my wife, one morning, Sunday morning, throws the Times on my, on my lap and says, hey, you're in the paper. And then she like looks at me and says, you're either the dumbest guy around or the smartest guy. At this moment, I don't know why. And I'm like, why, what happened? And I read the article. It says Transit Wireless, our company, gets the award from the MTA to build and, and run the, you know, the city, 300 underground stations, one of the wireless service.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  And we paid 46 million for it. And then it says the four carriers, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and so on, paid $4. Their bid was $4. So she's like, you think you overpaid? You know, and I'm like, no, you don't understand. I'm sure I'm gonna call the reporter and the MTA and it's like 40 million. They just, it's a typo on the, on the printout. So first I called the MTA and I'm like, couldn't you guys call me and tell me that we won? I have to find it out in the paper, you know? And he's like, and, and the other thing, that's $4, is that really 40 million? He's like, no, it's $4, $1 per carrier. They basically said to themselves, there's no way the MTA is gonna give it to some shitty little company. They're gonna give it to the four big carriers who colluded together to create their own company to provide the service.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Guess, you know, like, seriously? I can't believe the MTA even would allow that. Anyway, so, so I overpaid for the franchise.

• 21:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So, hold on, hold on, hold on.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  By like, what is it, 1,000x or 10,000x?

• 21:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, so they all bid $4 and you built?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  46 million dollars.

• 21:48Anthony Pompliano?

  46 million dollars. If you could go back, would you have bid $5 or would you still have bid 46 million?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Look, you needed, you needed to be the law to convince the MTA to even try you because if you bid, whatever, $100,000, they would be like, ah, for 100,000, it's not worth the risk. For 46 million, it's worth the risk. So who knows if 20 million was enough or 10 million or 5 million? But, but giving them that, you know, you know, that carrot was definitely, not, not just that. We, we had two things that allowed us to win. And this is the first time this is public. So no one knows, no one heard that story before. One is we, my partner at the NAB construction is a third generation construction company in New York City. And he and his dad built half of the station, renovated them. So we had CAD CAM designs of all the stations.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  So we knew that, we knew where the crossings were, we knew where the lines were, we knew where we could get power. Where all of our competitors really didn't have access to that information, right? And, and so we had a design that required the minimum amount of crossings of the rails. Because we, so we provided the least amount of disruption for the city. We basically said, we can do the whole project and we can do it down to like seven days of disruption for all the lines, right? Where everybody else would have to disrupt them hundreds of times. Every time you have to run a cable under the rails, you have to stop the train.

• 23:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Right? So, so and you know how disruption in the city, people hate them anyway. So we basically guaranteed the highest price and the least amount of disruption. And that was enough for the MTA to take a risk on us. And then 2008 happens, our partner Merrill Lynch basically defaults on funding us. They're like, no, this can't fund you, we're selling itself out to Bank of America, go find a new parent. So that was a disaster and, and so I was, I was teaching this in, in Columbia and another school. Like I was giving this to the student, what would you do? You know, how would you get out of the hole? You're 46 million in the hole and your funding partner just left you, you know, like, and it's 2008, no one funding anything.

• 23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  What'd you do?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  And, and we ended up finding a strategic partner, Broadcast Australia, who came in, took half of the project. And, and you know, and helped us build it up. And today, eight million people use it every day for free and they love it. You know, I, I, we, we usually go and, and interview people in the subway just to ask them, I use the subway every day. And I ask people about the phone and when did they start using it? And do you know who built it? No one knows who built it, right? No one has a clue. And, and many of them complained, many of them say, yeah, I'm using it, but I hate the fact that people next to me are talking, you know, I want some silence. You can't win. You can't, you know, when you build it, they, they, they, they, uh, they don't want it.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  And when you have it, they want it quiet, you know, so anyway, so that was a lot of fun and, and it's a great project. I think again, this is another giving power to the people. It's something that the carriers didn't want, cause, cause the carriers charge you unlimited their service anyway. So if you're in the subway for an hour, it's like a gym membership, right? They don't want you to occupy the airwaves, occupy the network. Uh, so they did not want this thing to happen.

• 24:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right. So.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  But I love them as customers.

• 25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, listen, you're, you're, you're, you're giving the telecom companies a hard time from the nineties all the way through to the two thousands.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  The, the rubber man keeps, keeps jumping out of, uh, yeah, yeah.

• 25:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I love it. All right. So 2010, somebody sent you, uh, Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper. You read it and say.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  And he rubbed it in my face in 2016. He's like, hey, you know, I showed it to you.

• 25:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. All right. So you do nothing with crypto.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Nothing, nothing. Mon Gox happens and I see this thing recovers and I'm like, wow. This is, uh, an, uh, an atomic bomb just went off and no one has any side effects. You know, it's like, it, this thing has legs, you know, this thing is gonna be bigger than I think. What am I missing? So I started studying, studying, studying, right? Like just trying to find why am I missing what I'm missing, right? Cause usually I'm the early guy. I'm usually the guy five years ahead, not five years behind. And, and, and I realized that the power of consensus is the power of the blockchain. And that, that, that there are applications that could not exist without consensus, without an open ledger, without the ability to take something and make it fungible across the planet

• 26:08Speaker 02

  as a single largest database, single largest computer that ever, ever was created. So, so, and then I said to myself, okay, what are those killer apps, right? Cause it's definitely not, uh, trading coins with each other, right? And, and, and, and I started investing. I started looking at projects, being an advisor, putting money into different things and I'm probably on, I don't know how many, uh, 20, 25 projects that I thought had merit. Um, and, and, uh, but almost none of them, uh, have really scaled, right? Uh, most of them are still building, still experimenting. So again, this, this Cambrian explosion of innovation. And 5,000 projects, ICOs, right, and so on. I think that most of them are missing the mark.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  They're not understanding where is the power and the fact that you need to reinvent the healthcare business or the real estate business or the finance business. Not take a syringe and inject the blockchain into a bank, but rather reinvent the whole idea of a bank or the whole idea of healthcare using these platforms as as technologies and enablers.

• 27:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right. What are you doing right now?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  So I couldn't find anything and I was trying to get into fintech since like 2010. So, so when I, when I left Groundlink, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go into fintech because that was like the hot thing and I couldn't find anything in fintech. It was all incremental. I don't do incremental. All right. For me, it's like if it's not disruptive, it's not worth my time, you know? And, and I'd rather fail in a disruptive effort than try to do some incremental bullshit about trying to do a better PayPal or whatever.

• 27:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. You're, you're ready for this? When I first moved to Silicon Valley, uh, somebody gave me a piece of advice. They said, uh, I think it's a piece of advice. First was keep your personal burn rate as low as possible so you always have optionality. Right? Good piece of advice. And, and then the second piece of advice that he said was you will be rewarded here for taking big swings more than you will be rewarded for having small success. Right? And the example he used was Napster. He said, listen, Napster was so disruptive, it was such a big idea. It was so painful for the incumbents and it didn't work.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? It got shut down, but it left a crater in the earth. And when Sean Parker showed up for his next thing, everyone was riding with him. Right? Because they said, look, this guy goes big. And if you go big, there's always the binary, it's gonna work or it's not. But people would rather in the venture business, ride with people who go big than people who are, you know, highly, high probability of small success.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  And funds are getting paid to take the risk, right?

• 28:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  I mean, so, so, so the biggest thinkers get on a plane and go in Silicon Valley. I mean, you have the highest concentration of the biggest thinkers. That's what Silicon Valley really is.

• 28:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Right? And it's a combination of, it's a marketplace, right? The highest, biggest thinkers and the biggest risk takers. So, and I, I, I had several opportunities to move to the valley, but I have six kids, a beautiful wife was, you know, like I, every time I, you know, kid number one, kid number two, kid number three, I, I just, you know, I got tied down to New York. So the roots are here, so.

• 29:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right. So, so, uh, let's talk about Celsius, right? What exactly are you guys doing? And kind of where are you guys?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so three simple things, right? We pay interest on crypto. Jesus, what a simple idea, right? How come no one's doing it?

• 29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So pay interest in crypto.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Second thing, right? That we issue dollar loans, so similar to BlockFi or Salt or Nexo. But the big difference there is that those guys, uh, basically issue loans, charge a lot of money, and they have to return the capital that they receive, the interest that they receive to the people that gave them the capital. So they have to charge 15, 18, 24% because the cost of capital is a single, you know, single, double digits, right?

• 29:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so hold on, you're paying interest on crypto? You're issuing loans? What's the third thing?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  The, the third thing is about mass adoption. How do we bring the next 100 million people into crypto? Right? And what is that blocking element, right? How come people are not joining? And when you think about it today, uh, to, you have to explain it. You have to get people to trust it. You have to have people figure out how to open a wallet. They have to understand what addressing is. They have to understand, they have to trust their technical ability to move stuff. Like I said, after 25 years, people don't know how to download a VoIP app and make a free VoIP call. So crypto is way complicated.

• 30:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  So, so early adopters may be great at it, but, but the average Joe has no clue how to do this stuff. So we, we call, we have a cell pay service. And cell pay basically allows you to send or receive crypto from anyone on the planet without knowing their address, without coordinating with them, asking them, what's your wallet ID? Do you have a, a Litecoin address, a, you know, wallet? Or do you have Celsius tokens or whatever? You can just send anything or receive anything. And, and that transaction can be done via SMS or email or social media or any other medium. And you don't need to have, know any, have any knowledge about the blockchain or cryptocurrencies or anything like that.

• 31:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So, all right, so three things are you're paying interest on crypto, you're doing loans and you've got this, uh, we'll call it a PayPal or Venmo type, style, uh, service. The, the PayPal or Venmo style service is I can have crypto in a wallet. I want to send it to you whether you have a wallet or not. I can email it, I can text it, et cetera, to you. You get a link, you then click that link and then you basically get a wallet and you're able to access.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Automatically creates a wallet for you and the money is sitting there in the wallet. And then you can redistribute it, send it to other people, you can add more coins that you already have. Or whatever they gave you can start earning interest. You don't have to do anything, it starts earning interest immediately.

• 31:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, so, okay, so that's on the PayPal Venmo side, right, but for crypto. Uh, on the loan side, just asset back lending, right? People put collateral up and then you're giving them dollar loans. And then when you get to.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  But.

• 32:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Go ahead.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  We do it at 5%.

• 32:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so you do 5% loans.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Right, annual, annualized, right? So, so most of the people on the planet, like farmers in Africa pay 30%, sometimes 35%, right? Most people on their credit card, 20, 24%. And we asked ourselves, how come when you borrow against your house, you can get 5% interest rate?

• 32:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  But when you put in crypto as collateral, you have to pay 24%? That's just ridiculous. So we decided to create a model in which we will charge as little as possible and give as much of that as possible back to the community. So the money would stay inside the crypto world.

• 32:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, okay.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  That's the whole point, the whole point, it's like, it's like a, a community bank where, the old school community bank where you, you made a deposit and the banker used it to give your neighbors a mortgage.

• 32:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  And then the interest from the mortgage used up, was used up to build a basketball court in your community. Today that mortgage is being sold to Germany or Japan and there's no connection between the bank. And the guy who took the mortgage or the guy that owned the mortgage.

• 33:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. That makes sense. And then on the paying interest, how does that work? Right. So when you pay interest on crypto.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  So it's a proof of stake implementation, right? So we basically create a giant pool of BTC. All the people that deposited the BTC are the collateral that we get. We use that collateral to get access to dollars, cheap dollars, because it's asset backed, right? But we have hundreds of millions of dollars of stuff. And we go to the, we issue the loans and the interest from the loans is distributed pro rata to the people in the pool. So if you come in, you put 1% of the BTC in the pool, you will get 1% distribution. Every week we distribute what we can get and the interest level dictates. Uh, how much did we do a good job? Did we get six or seven percent? We did a horrible job and we're only paying 2%.

• 33:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  So the, the, and that's why people ask me, oh, it sounds like Bitconnect. I'm like, yeah, Bitconnect used the new guy money to buy their token. And, and basically everybody came and bought it at a higher and higher, higher price. There's no token here. You, you get back the same BTC that you put in, right? The issue is just the, the value, if we cannot create any income, then the interest distribution is zero. But everybody still has a BTC and we only do asset backed lending. So we have hedge funds that come to us and say, oh, you have 10,000 BTC? I want a short BTC. I'll pay you 12% to borrow BTC from you and go short. And it'll give you ether or dollars as collateral. Great. You give me 150% collateral and I get to charge you 12%.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  That's going to bump my weekly payments to my community. I love doing that.

• 34:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes, uh, makes a lot of sense there. Um, all right.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  So anyone cannot explain to you how they make money.

• 34:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Be wary of that. Anyone that can explain it, you can go and audit that. And so the, the piece that is the most important piece of Celsius is we, then we, then we take all the data that we just talked about. And we publish it as an open book to the community. There's no bank that does that.

• 35:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  And that's the beauty of the blockchain. So anyone, if you're a member, if you're a depositor, if you're a borrower, can go and look. It's public addresses. I mean, you can go and look everything. How many deposits we. How many loans do we issue? How much do we have in collateral? Right, because you can see all these transactions. And you can do your own audit and decide, are we doing the right thing? Or we're not doing the right thing? Are we delivering back to the community 80% of the income as we promised? Are we only giving 65%? Well, why are you giving 65%? And so on, so on, so on. So people already created websites, independent websites, nothing to do with us, that are auditing us on the information we publish, on the blockchain, which I love. You know, my guys came to me and said, "Hey, look at these guys that are publishing our data." I'm like, "That's what we want! That's what we were dreaming for."

• 35:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So where are we going with all this, right? Blockchain, Bitcoin, crypto. There's a bunch of promises to the technology, right? In terms of, you know, it's distributed, it's decentralized, it's immutable. Kind of all of these buzzwords, I think, that people are now throwing around this industry. And they see a bunch of intellectual capital and financial capital rushing in. Where, what's going to be the final product, right? Or kind of what is the impact of all of this motion? Are we actually going to make progress? Or is it just motion?

• 36:17Speaker 02

  So I term it from VoIP to MoIP, right? From a voice of IP to money of IP.

• 36:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  And it's the freedom and the independence and the fungibility of, like, in America, most, you know, most Americans don't, again, I was born overseas, I grew up, I went to the military, I did, you know, I suffered overseas. And I always tell Americans, especially ones that never have the passport or traveled anywhere, that you really don't appreciate what you have here, right? You take for granted all this stuff. So we, every one of us has multiple credit cards. Every one of us has multiple bank accounts, right? Multiple, many of us have multiple cars and multiple homes. Most people on the planet don't have any of these things, right? And they don't even have the access for it, right? So for the first time, the blockchain takes it and makes it fungible across the planet. It takes the interest rate that you have in the US,

• 37:07Speaker 02

  and you can give it to a guy in Vietnam, you can give it to a guy in Namibia, you can give it to a guy in India. And they can, they can harness that to improve their life and join the middle class.

• 37:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  And that's the opportunity. The opportunity is that seven billion people who are not part of the middle class can join the middle class because suddenly they can get access to the same, just like, you know, the internet made information and, and work basically fungible across the planet. Now the blockchain is making money and the access to funds, funds and, and, and creation of value fungible across the planet. And, and that's what I'm saying. Like I don't, I don't feel like people are working on that. When people are trading and manipulating stuff and exchanges are doing all the bad stuff that they do, that everybody's just looking at tomorrow. How do I make money tomorrow? They're not thinking about the opportunity.

• 37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Let, let's talk about the exchanges for a second, because I know you've got a bunch of thoughts here.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  I love exchanges.

• 38:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what are, what are the exchanges doing that you're concerned about and you think, uh, is unsustainable?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  So first I understand what they're doing. I understand why they're doing it. It's just that what I don't understand is all the people that give them their coins. Why are they doing it?

• 38:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Well, let's start with just, what are the exchanges doing?

• 38:23Speaker 02

  So, so almost every exchange out there front runs its own customers.

• 38:28Anthony Pompliano?

  They front, they front run their customers?

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And what is, and describe what that means.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  So when they see the orders coming in, they know what the book looks like. They know where everybody else's position is, and they know that the price of the Bitcoin or the Ether is going to go either up or down. And then they take action before they execute the orders of their own customers. So.

• 38:46Anthony Pompliano?

  To make money?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  To make money. Right. So to enhance their own profits, right? So trading their own account on the information that they have from their own customers, not acting in the best interest of their own customers.

• 38:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Right? So when, I'll give you a simple example, right? So take Binance, uh, look at the profit. They already announced they're going to make over a billion dollars this year. They announce every day how many trades they have. You know their fee structure. If you take all the trades they make times the fee, that's less than half of a billion dollars. So more than half of a billion dollars comes from them doing activities that are not in the best interest of their customers. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have Coinbase. Coinbase declared to the SEC that they're not trading. They don't have proprietary trading. They do not do front running and they do not short any of the coins that they list. Right? So we, for example, we did the ICO in March. We have not listed on a single exchange. You know why? We went exchange by exchange and said, people came to us, Binance came to us, gave us an offer.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  And we said, we want you, we're acting on the best interest of our community. That's the most important thing for me. My credibility with my community is everything. Right? Because they trusted me not just with the coins, but for me to act in their best interest. Right? And I said to Binance, good, you send me an email that says you're not doing any of these things and I will list with you and I'll pay you even the listing fees. I have no problem. Of course, they didn't send me that email. Every exchange we met with, until recently, we finally found two exchanges that send us that confirmation that they're not doing any of these things and we agreed to list with them. Right? But that's what I want the entire community to do. I'm calling for the entire community to withdraw their coins from all these guys who are acting

• 40:25Speaker 02

  against us, BitMEX and Binance and all these guys, and really go and deposit it with people who are acting in the best interest of the community. Coinbase is acting in the best interest of the community and few other ones. Right? What's the name? Blocktopia or something? What's the name of the guys in New Zealand? Cryptotopia, love those guys. Okay? I checked them out, looked at everything they're doing, small exchange. But if you take out all of the fake trades that everybody has, they're top 10 in the world.

• 40:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so if you look at, so front running is a huge issue in your opinion, right? What other things are the exchanges doing?

• 41:03Speaker 02

  So several exchanges, I'm not going to name names, got caught shorting coins that they listed. So they would basically come to you as an ICO and say, hey, list with us, we'll charge you whatever, half a million, a million, sometimes $3 million to list. You must hire this market maker, which is going to use computers to create fake trades to pump up your coin or token. And then they would short, they would look at, they know the analysis, they can see where it's peaking. And then they would come into the market because you have to give the exchange a few million coins, they require that in the contract. And then they just dumped out on the market at the highest price. And then everybody liquidates and obviously they cover their short at a much lower price.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  So, so several exchanges, when analysis was made about these pump and dump schemes.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  The volume came from within the exchange. There was no new coins being deposited. You could see that these transactions came from inside the exchange, right? So you could very easily settle that these were not external actions, but internal actions.

• 42:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so what you're saying here is not only was there front running going on or still going on, you're claiming that there is wash trading happening to, to push the price up. And then at the peak, whenever an exchange decides that they then are shorting the tokens and suppressing the price, covering their short at the bottom.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  They would dump the coins that were provided to them to do market making.

• 42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  In the, in, under the disguise of market making, really it was just a profit enhancer. And these profit enhancers are 20, 30, 50 million dollars a pop, right? So these are, you're talking about when a, when a coin gets to a billion or two billion dollar valuation, it's very easy to make 50 million dollars on it. It doesn't have to move much.

• 42:41Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So, so we got front running, wash trading, shorting the tokens.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Do you need more?

• 42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to hear it all. I want to hear, I want to hear everything.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  So, so, so exchanges do a lot of trades, fake trades to create volume, right? And, and again, you don't think that these things hurt you, but what hurts you is the fact that there is no real pricing. The price you see is not a real price. For example, BitMEX, which is all synthetic trading, right? It's not real, real coins. It is the dog that is wagging, that is, you know, it's, it's the, it's instead of the dog wagging the tail, it's a tail that's wagging the dog. Because now pricing on, on real exchanges is based on fake trading that's happening on BitMEX, you know?

• 43:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna get Arthur Hayes, right? Arthur Hayes is a gangster, man. I'm telling you.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  I have no problem. I'll, I'll go.

• 43:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring you back and you and Arthur Hayes.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Forces Israeli military, 15 rounds, ready to go.

• 43:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna get you and Arthur Hayes in a room and you guys could debate this out, all right?

• 43:38Speaker 02

  I was in Lebanon in 1984. No problem. I'll take anybody.

• 43:42Anthony Pompliano?

  He, the, the one thing that Arthur has said that, that just absolutely cracked me up was he said, uh, real traders go both ways.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Look, he was on CNBC, I'm quoting him on CNBC. People asked him, is it going up and down? He said, I could care less about Bitcoin. I don't care if it goes up and down. I'm just here to make money. So when you deposit, I'm quoting him.

• 44:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I know, but hold on, so, so hold on though.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  So I'm here to say the opposite.

• 44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I know, but let's say he said that.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Do you want to change humanity? Or do you want to just put few more coins in your wallet?

• 44:12Anthony Pompliano?

  But here's what I think what his response to that would be, right? Everyone who's involved in any capitalistic endeavor, right? At some percentage, it could be 1% of their motivation. It could be 100% of their motivation, has the motivation to make money.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  He's the largest exchange on the planet. Okay, have some sensibility, some responsibility, you know? Even the worst guy, the worst offenders on Wall Street have some charitable activities and whatever. Okay, so going and getting two floors in Hong Kong and pretending like you you're in the Seychelles Islands and you have nothing to do with any laws or any, no one can go after me, come on. Okay, I'm a rich guy too. I'm part of the 1%, okay? And I'm doing everything to give it back to the people. Cause that's where I came from. I came in with a hundred dollars and a plastic bag to this country, you know? And when I looked, I turned 50, I look at myself in the mirror and I couldn't tell myself I gave back more than I took. I definitely took more. And I'm dedicating the rest of my life to giving back.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  But, I mean, you know, again, I'm not going to name names. Well, we got a bunch of billionaires in this business. Okay, you know, all my neighbors in East Hampton, you know? Not, not, not calling names, but like, how much more do you need?

• 45:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  We can change the fucking world here.

• 45:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right, so, so here's the.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Only 7 billion people are depending on us to do the right thing, the few of us.

• 45:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so here's my question. If everyone was to do the right thing.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Can I drop the mic?

• 45:41Anthony Pompliano?

  No, you can't. And, and so if everyone was to do what you consider to be the right thing, right? And, and start to create this democratization of access to financial services and money and kind of everything that is the promise of crypto, blockchain, Bitcoin, et cetera. What are the banks gonna do? What's the legacy financial system? What's their reaction?

• 46:05Speaker 02

  It's a great question because what did the phone companies do?

• 46:09Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why I'm asking you.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Right, so the phone company today. AT&T realized, "Oh shit, we are gonna get killed by this VoIP thing." And they bought all the cable companies in the United States, right? They became the largest cable guy. And that didn't work out. And then they said, "You know what? Why don't we become like a wireless company? Because we're not gonna make any money on anything else." Right? So the banks are gonna have to find a new business to be in. Because, and look, the biggest offenders are not in the United States. I can give you a few countries in Africa where no one trusts anyone and all the transactions have to go back to Paris. And those guys make 15 to 20% on every transaction. A farmer wants a loan and it has to be approved by some guy in Paris and they take a 20% fee, you know, as a toll collector.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  So, so I'm not sitting here telling you US banks are bad or whatever. US banks, Jamie Dimon is doing everything he can to produce value for himself and his shareholders. And he's doing an excellent job at that, okay? And he's doing his job. I mean, I'm not sitting here saying he's not doing his job.

• 47:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  I'm just saying that no one is doing the job of... And again, you know, you can't stop innovation. You can't stop destruction, disruption, right? And sometimes you have destruction with disruption, right? So, so here, again, the Bitcoin is 10 years old and we have 6 million active wallets. I mean, it's just painful. It's like, you know, we're giving this amazing new DNA, right? That can solve, cure all the diseases on the planet and we're using it to, you know, to light the room or something. I don't know. I mean, it's just painful.

• 47:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think?

• 47:47Speaker 02

  I have to find a better analogy.

• 47:48Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think a bank's gonna do, right? So the legacy financial system, they say, "We see what's going on. We don't want this to happen." How do they fight it?

• 47:57Speaker 02

  So let's see, let's take... So JP Morgan takes, makes a copy of the Ethereum platform. Call it Core, what do they call it? Corum.

• 48:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Goes to their bunch of banks and says, "Look, are we gonna let these guys have the cream and have the cake and have the desserts and everything else? No, let's create our own platform. Let's replace Swift and IBAN and everybody else with our own network. Why are we giving it to Ripple or giving it to Ethereum or anyone else?" Right? So they took our Mona Lisa, called it something else, created their own consortium, and now they're gonna try to basically create...

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Tens of billions of dollars of additional profits for themselves.

• 48:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Isn't that their right?

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. I'm not saying...

• 48:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It's open source, right?

• 48:45Speaker 02

  It is.

• 48:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  I'm saying they're allowed to do everything they can.

• 48:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Okay? So, they, they, it's their job to do everything they can to defend their turf, defend their moat, defend their moat, or, or, or anything like that, right? But at the same time, as they're leaving, they're throwing an atomic bomb, right? By, by basically discrediting all the people that created everything they're using. By badmouthing crypto, calling it a scam, right? Look at Nouriel Roubini, right? I had two debates with him, right? I mean, just, just...

• 49:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so here, so here's, here's the one thing...

• 49:18Speaker 02

  And not having any, Jamie Dimon or Nouriel Roubini do not have a single valid argument that they can defend. Not one, okay? So, bring him out here, let's have a conversation.

• 49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but here, so, here's who I will defend. I'll defend the employees that are working on the blockchain teams and the crypto teams at the big banks, right? I think that their thought process, their motivations, their work, is not reflective of the leadership's public statements, right? And here's, here's why I say that.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  No, I don't agree with you.

• 49:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, well, well, so here, here's my take on it, and then you tell me why you disagree. Most of these people are pro Bitcoin, they're pro crypto, right? And they're trying to use the technology, and they're saying that they can actually create more change by leveraging the legacy financial system's resources and being in those rooms, taking the open source software, and then creating change. So, take VoIP for a second. 3 billion people use it, 3 billion people don't. And so if we can get all 6 billion people to use it, some people are going to use the upstarts who created VoIP, but the other 3 billion people are going to use it from incumbents, right?

• 50:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you look at the blockchain space, if, let's say that 6 billion people end up using some sort of, you know, decentralized blockchain-based financial product, right? If half of those people come from what you and I would consider new crypto startups, companies, et cetera, right? This is everything from the coinbases of the world to the blockchains of the world, et cetera, right? If that serves half of the addressable market, and the other half is served by the large banks using similar technology... Don't you have a choice as a user? Right, as a individual participant in the market? You can either go use what we would consider the hardcore crypto, or you can go use the legacy financial system, but you have choice.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Of course, so look, if the job was, our job was to get 7 billion people to use VoIP, I agree with every argument you made.

• 51:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  But no bank can sit here with an honest face, look you in the face and tell you that their job is to bring 7 billion people to the middle class. They don't.

• 51:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  You know, the World Bank did a survey, and they took, I think, the bottom 5 billion people. And in total, they have 400 billion in assets. Okay? That's nothing. It's like, no bank would even bother with these people. So the issue, their job is not to bring 7 billion people into the middle class. Their job is to make sure the 1% stays 1%, and they get to do all their banking. Right? So, we all live in a pyramid, in which we wake up every morning and we work for the guy that we report to, and we have to make profit for him. And he has to make profit for his boss, and so on, so on, so on, until the CEO has to deliver, and I ran two public companies.

• 52:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Right? The CEO has to deliver the profits to the shareholders. That structure is passé, right? The whole point of decentralization, coming and disrupting centralization, which is those pyramids, and by the way, that's why Salt has a pyramid as their logo, and we have a circle as a logo, right? Just plug it in.

• 52:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Listen, here's my question.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  No, I'm answering your question, though. I'm saying that the disruption, the real disruption, is not about who's gonna use Bitcoin better, the bank, or us as a startup, or whatever.

• 52:45Anthony Pompliano?

  But shouldn't we care? But shouldn't we care about that?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Let me make my point.

• 52:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  So, there's a tsunami of, it's like, again, it's a new economic system. If you believe it's a new economic, decentralization is a new economic system, a tsunami that's gonna wash everything. And everything is gonna reappear as a decentralized platform. If you're still running a centralized platform, you will not be able to compete with a decentralized platform, because in a decentralized platform, it's not about how much profit you generate. It's about each member of the network. Showing how much they're contributing to the network, right? So it goes back to a concept like Ethernet, where every node on the network is adding, you know, two or three times more than the value of the network, right?

• 53:34Speaker 02

  So the opportunity here is to reinvent the banking world, to reinvent real estate, to reinvent every industry as a decentralized service that is allowing everybody equal participation.

• 53:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But is decentralization-

• 53:49Speaker 02

  That's the opposite of what's happening today.

• 53:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But is decentralization always the right thing?

• 53:54Speaker 02

  I believe that every existing business in the next 50 or 100 years will be reinvented as a decentralized platform. And it's going to be on an open blockchain, not a private blockchain like JP Morgan is doing. A general consensus, might not be proof of work, it might be proof of stake or some other implementation, but the point is, is that when you act in a completely transparent way on behalf of all of your stakeholders, right? There's nothing better than that. So everybody eventually, you see, the piece that everybody's missing is, is that banks don't have any power. The only reason banks are these monolithic institutions that we all fear of is because we deposit money with them every day.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  If tomorrow, everybody in America stopped depositing power, they were depositing dollars with these banks, they will all be out of business, right? So just like people stopped using the phone network and used VoIP and all the phone companies lost all their power, the same way, if you decide, if you personally, right? You get less than 1% on your money in the bank. They then turn around and give it to Jason here on his credit card and charge him 24%. And they're allowed to do it 10 to 1 with fractional reserves. So they make 240% on your 1%. Now, do you think that is in the best interest of the account holders? Or is that in the best interest of the shareholders?

• 55:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Obviously, it's in the best interest of the shareholders.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  You're not gonna fix that, that's my point.

• 55:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, let me ask this hypothetical. If it came out that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, etc. were actually creating products to drive adoption of Bitcoin, not re-hypothecation, not fractional reserve, actual drive, true adoption of Bitcoin. If they did that, would you change your mind?

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Look, they all

• 55:42Anthony Pompliano?

  No, would you, no, yes or no, would you change your mind if that's what they were doing?

• 55:46Speaker 02

  You're talking about Oscar and all these things? And none of these things are

• 55:49Anthony Pompliano?

  If all the legacy, no, it's hypothetical.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  There's no bank that could exist without leverage. Their entire business model is their fractional reserves, right? I mean, so we, we have the opposite, not just that we are one to one, but because we take two Bitcoins for every Bitcoin that we lend out, every, every $10,000, we need $20,000 in deposit. We, we always have reserves, not fractional reserve, reserves, which is what it should be. So if you take the leverage out of the system, you're actually gonna save the system. You see, the bubble is not in crypto. The bubble is in the bond market, the bubble is in real estate. All these assets are at all time highs. And the, when that bubble pops and everybody's trying to make their way into cryptocurrencies, that's when Bitcoin's gonna be worth $100,000, right?

• 56:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You think it's gonna happen?

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Of course it's gonna happen. We never had more debt in history. So, and again, it has nothing to do with who's president, or, or, you know, if there's a war, not war. Economies have their own cycles and some presidents ride them up and some presidents ride them down. It's, it has nothing to do with who's in charge, right? Ray Dalio tells that story better than anybody else. So, all I'm saying is, is that crypto is the only platform that is completely detached and unaffiliated and uncorrelated to all of these bubbles that are all correlated, are all in the same place. And the fact that the Fed used five bazookas in a row to get us out of trouble, to reflate us, doesn't mean that the next time the bazooka is gonna work.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  So, the problem we're having really is that, look, there's no, I have six kids at home. There's no chance that my kids are gonna live a better life than me. There's just no chance, because there's 23 trillion in debt and we keep adding more and more debt on top of it. There's no chance that they can repay that.

• 57:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but I would disagree with that and the data shows that we live in a safer, more prosperous time today than in any other time in history.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  It doesn't mean it will continue forever. Every empire in history, you could say that at some point. The Roman Empire survived for 1600 years.

• 57:50Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, I'm not saying just the United States, hold on, but this is important, right? So I agree, every great empire in history has fallen. Completely agree.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  We're only 270 years into it, right? So we're not even a quarter of the way.

• 58:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I fully am on board with all of the historical, you know, context there. Yeah. The other fiat currencies, average is 27, right? Kind of in modern history, it's about 40 or so, so completely get it. But what I will say is regardless of what empire's in charge, what geography you look at, today, the data shows that we live in a safer, more prosperous time than in any other point in history. And I would argue that that will continue even if the things you're describing happen in terms of the debt bubbles, all that kind of stuff, right?

• 58:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's because the human progress, right, is a trend that those things are so small compared to thousands of years of historical momentum, right?

• 58:56Speaker 02

  I don't think it has anything to do with acknowledging.

• 58:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's say the US debt situation completely blows up. The US dollar goes away. Do humans, not Americans, human lives on a global scale, all of a sudden get worse?

• 59:13Speaker 02

  It will be the largest transfer of wealth in history, right?

• 59:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I may agree with that, but do their lives actually get worse?

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Of course, it will be a disastrous, I mean, look, look at Germany. Germany, the mark before World War II, okay? Between World War I or before World War I was one of the most powerful. Uh currencies on the planet. The pound was one of the most powerful currencies up to World War II. Right? So, so, and, and then, then they were basically useless. You could, you could take a shovel worth of those things and you couldn't buy a bread with it. Right? So, and, and the reason these things happen is because people who, basically the United Kingdom or other countries had the right to print as many pounds as they wanted and everybody on the planet would, would accept them and exchange them. And that's what the US dollar is.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  The, the power of the United States, okay, is not in our military or in our technology. We are the reserve currency of the planet. Everything is denominated in dollars. It doesn't matter if it's an oil transaction between China and, and South Africa, or it's a gold transaction between, or it's a diamond transaction or anything. All, because all these things are denominated in dollars, the world runs on our economy. So we can continue printing these things and issue debt and do whatever we want to do. And we're abusing that power. I mean, what's happening is, is that our politicians and the people who are in charge are ju, and, and it's not just a Trump administration, I'm talking about people before that too. Right? Are just abusing that power because they don't understand it.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  And the, the Federal Reserve that's supposed to protect the dollar is basically, is much more worried about inflation, is much more worried about employment, rather than the power of the US dollar. Because they got this, they were awarded this exclusive franchise. Right? And, and it's not gonna last forever. I mean, don't you think the Chinese are gunning for us? I mean, they do, they're building a whole thing with Silk Road where the only accepted currency is gonna be what? You think the dollar? No. So, so you, and, and it has to do with crypto. Right? When you see England and Japan supporting crypto, it's because they lost, their currencies lost the ability to be reserve currencies. And you're seeing China and the US not really supporting is because they're fighting over it. They have it right now and they don't want to give away the power.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  So they definitely don't wanna, they, they're okay losing it to each other. They definitely want this third player called Bitcoin coming and taking it away from them.

• 1:01:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Will Bitcoin be the global reserve currency of the world?

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  If a disastrous thing happened, like you said, with, with the dollar collapsing, no one's gonna take another fiat currency. No one's gonna accept it.

• 1:01:46Anthony Pompliano?

  You think we are one major fiat currency, uh, negative event away from

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  The next bazooka is not gonna reflate our markets. Because when you have so much debt that no one is willing to accept your dollars, they're just looking at it saying, "I would never use it." Then everybody starts dumping their dollars, right? I mean, China has $3 trillion with a T worth of, of bonds that, that basically they're gonna have to dump eventually, right? I mean, they're not gonna sit and hold that stuff when they see the United States keep printing and Trump sitting there and saying, "You know, I'm not sure I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna accept all those notes back when they come and show them and ask me for, uh, this or that." So, you see, back in the Roman Empire, each coin carried its own weight in gold. You didn't have to worry about it.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  When, when it said it was backed by gold, each coin was backed by its own value, right? 1972, we go off the gold standard and since then, we've started building this bubble that has never been bigger. There's nothing in history like this bubble. Nothing like that ever existed. Because everything until now was based one-on-one on actual hard currency, gold reserve, or some commodity that you had. It didn't matter if it was diamonds or whatever you had, right? I mean, the, the South African rand was one of the most valuable, uh, currencies. Why it came in a gold-printed thing or it was backed by diamonds? And you knew that they had all the diamonds in the world.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  So, all I'm saying is that the, the catalyst, the, the, the hockey stick for Bitcoin has a much higher chance of happening if there's a disaster on the other side than us going and signing up one person at a time, as Celsius is trying to do every day, uh, because we're trying to convince them that, "Hey, take 5% alone from us."

• 1:03:36Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the one thing in the crypto space that if you could change, you think would create an inflection point? So you can't change anything in the legacy system. You can't cause an economic chaotic event, anything like that. You gotta change something in crypto. What's the one thing you would change that you think could create that inflection point?

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm a movie buff. You know, The Matrix where the guy touches him in the forehead and it turns him from a speculator to a guy who actually wants to do well and do good at the same time?

• 1:04:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  That's my dream is to take all these people and show them why. Look, it's very rare in history that you can work on something and do well and do good at the same time. Most people on Wall Street can't say that. They can't wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, "I'm doing good and I'm doing well. I'm creating value for everybody." On Wall Street, you're creating value, somebody else lost it on the other side, right? But here, like you said, I mean, look, this is, again, the blockchain is a bigger innovation wave than the internet. You needed the internet to make it happen, but now it's money, it touches everything. The internet didn't touch everything. You know, we're excited about Google and we're excited about Facebook. That's nothing.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  These little empires and monopolies that we created on the internet are gonna look like nothing compared to the monopolies that are gonna be created on a blockchain. I just want those monopolies to act in the best interest of their coin and wallet holders, not in the best interest of their shareholders.

• 1:05:03Anthony Pompliano?

  If they're monopolies, will they be decentralized?

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  That's the hope.

• 1:05:08Anthony Pompliano?

  That they'll be decentralized monopolies?

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Decentralized monopolies, yes.

• 1:05:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And?

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Because then people can vote with their feet. Because if the monopoly is not acting in your best interest, you can always hop to another blockchain, which is, again, a fork of the original one that is doing what it was supposed to do, right? Everything still works. So the beauty of the system is just, it's, when you understand it, you know? And you know, I read Satoshi's paper at least 100 times and most people don't get to page nine, which is the most interesting page, which is the page where the references are. You know, and like Newton said, we're standing on the shoulders of giants, right? And I met the people actually invented the blockchain. So this guy Scott Stornetta, who invented the blockchain in Bellcore, 1991. I went, I met with him, I talked to him, I, and I'm like, why aren't you part of the blockchain project?

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Why aren't you part of the Ethereum project? And he's like, no one is building anything I'm proud of, right? No one is trying to make this something that's gonna, and I, I worked for six months to convince him to join the Celsius project, you know, and he finally joined, right? Because, you know, we, we, it's, this is not about money. This is not about creating value. This is about enabling everybody on the planet to participate. And then, you know, intelligence is distributed equally across the planet. It's not like the, most people think the United States has the smartest people in the world because half of them are immigrants, you know, because, because they came here, not because they were born here. Right? Look at public companies. Most of them are ran by, by foreigners who, who came here.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  So intelligence in Africa, on a percentage basis, the brilliance in Africa is the same as it is in the United States. And when you enable these tools worldwide, you're gonna see the next empires being born all over the world. Because people are gonna come with the killer ideas out of Africa and out of India and out of Asia and also out of the United States, but it's not gonna be as concentrated, as exclusive as we have it today.

• 1:07:01Anthony Pompliano?

  If somebody at home is listening to this and you had two sentences to describe to them why blockchain, Bitcoin and crypto is so important, what's the two sentence elevator pitch?

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  When you're gonna be on a deathbed and you're gonna look back at your life, you're not gonna think about who died with the most toys, or I wish I won, I took more things from that guy. Or, you know, I was really nasty to this person and I, I wish I was even more nasty, right? You're gonna think about the legacy you're gonna leave on this planet. And there was never a better time, never has been a better time to leave legacy, leave your legacy and have more impact than the blockchain, because it's gonna disrupt every industry. Everything has to be reinvented. There's never an opportunity like that, right? So, so it doesn't matter what you've done your entire life. You could be the best in the world on the blockchain because the experts are maybe one year ahead of you.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  So you could take your skill set and apply it to one vertical and do that better on the blockchain. If you really understand what it's about, better than anyone else on the planet. And it doesn't matter if you're from Russia or China, or Namibia, or Israel, or from the United States. And that's the opportunity. But again, most people, you know, Churchill said, right? They stumble across the opportunity, they get up and walk away. So it's staring at us in the face. Now, it took me years, right? I mean, you know, usually I see these things in a second. It took me years to understand it because it's different than anything we had before. It's the opposite. It's inefficient. It's slow. It requires consensus by design, right?

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  All these people trying to speed up the blockchain, geez, guys, you don't get what it's all about, right? The whole point of it is consensus.

• 1:08:50Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the longest two sentences I've ever heard, but that was pretty good.

• 1:08:55Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so I'll let you ask me one question to end this in a second. But the only other question I have for you, what's the one thought that you have? That you think the majority of other people would disagree with you on? What's your most controversial thought in crypto?

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Oh, in crypto? Okay.

• 1:09:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm scared of anything outside of crypto, so let's keep it in crypto.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  None of the existing blockchains are gonna be the winners 20 years from now.

• 1:09:25Anthony Pompliano?

  None?

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  None.

• 1:09:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Zero?

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Zero.

• 1:09:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin included?

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Bitcoin included.

• 1:09:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. Zero percent?

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Yes, and the reason for it is when you look at who won on any category, VoIP, or social media, or anything, it's the last guy to get it right, not the first guy to get it right.

• 1:09:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Almost always.

• 1:09:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'll agree with you. That has happened in multiple industries. But I will disagree with you that Bitcoin...

• 1:09:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Is not the last one. And here's why. Four major attempts at electronic cash beforehand. All had issues, technical issues, right? As far as we understand today. Bitcoin was the last of the five. And it was the one that solved every technical problem. So shouldn't Bitcoin be the last one?

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Well, everybody thinks it's the last one, you know, I I'm famous for two things. Inventing VoIP and sitting with Sergey Brin when he was still in Stanford. With him looking for the first $100,000 check to get out. And I said to him, who needs another search engine? We have AltaVista, we have Lycos, we have all these great products that have a huge. AltaVista had 80% market share back in 1998.

• 1:10:43Anthony Pompliano?

  How did that work out for them?

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. So my point is whoever you think has it. And they had an alpha chip that was 10 times faster than anything else. Right, they just didn't know what business they were in. They thought they were in the chip business. And not in the search business, so. A lot of things can go right, a lot of things can go wrong, right? It's not about Bitcoin itself. It's not like Bitcoin has bad design or whatever, right? But after 10 years, we still don't have a killer app. So in many cases, the killer app dictates who wins, not the technology dictates what's the killer app. And we haven't found the killer app yet.

• 1:11:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Is Bitcoin not the killer app?

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  No, it's not. We've proven that after six year, after 10 years, we have 6 million active accounts.

• 1:11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, see, I would disagree with that, right? Because active accounts. In an inflationary system. Activity is a sign of usage, adoption, economic progress, or economic activity, etc., right? In a disinflationary or a deflationary system. Actually, activity could be measured by who is not spending, who is not using.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  I understand, and I agree with the assumption. The issue is that that when your entire user base is speculators who are just trying to outmaneuver each other. You're not really creating any value. So so the the the whole opportunity of the blockchain is value creation in a completely new architecture, right? It's a circle that replaces this triangle that I was talking about where value is created by how much profit you generated for your boss. Here it's how much did you contribute to society? Basically, each node, each participant on Ethereum is measured by how much they're contributing to the network. Right? So, so you can measure it in transaction, or you, because transactions do generate value.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  But you need a killer app, you need an activity that creates value. When you have a bunch of speculators exchanging coins with each other, you're creating fake value, that value will create and disappear, which is the cycles we're going through. Now, you may go to new highs, I'm not just saying that. It may even get to a hundred thousand, that's not the point. It just means you have more speculators, you're not creating value.

• 1:12:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, let's wrap it up with one question that you can ask me.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Why are you in the blockchain at all? Like, you were, you were, you know, like, Mr. Silicon Valley, right? Doing tech and other startups. What made you switch and why are you so passionate about it?

• 1:13:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there's two elements that I probably don't talk about a lot, but are incredibly important. So, one is, I believe that the American mindset and perspective is actually one of our greatest obstacles to understanding the power of this technology. Right, so I do agree with you that people who have experienced other ways of life and have seen other interactions with financial institutions, with money, etc. Have an advantage in terms of understanding what this is really about.

• 1:13:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And I've traveled quite a bit, I was in, obviously, the army myself, and have seen enough to understand that this is big enough to go dedicate my time to. Right? And I think that the second thing is, you know, look, I used to run, you know, a growth team at Facebook, for example, right? And so I really, really understand the power of incentives, of network effects, right? Metcalfe's Law, all this stuff, and...

• 1:14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I tend to agree that the winners of the centralized world are going to be drastically dwarfed by the winners of the decentralized world. And I think that there are not enough people coming into this industry who have the same skillsets and experiences that I have. So I actually think the number one skillset that is missing from the entire industry, plenty of finance people, there's plenty of developers and all that stuff. It's the individuals who have run these growth teams or worked on these growth teams because they have a

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Unique perspective, yeah.

• 1:15:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And just they understand enough of the engineering side. Most of them are not engineers. I'm not an engineer. So I don't write code in terms of sit down and write something on scratch, but I understand enough. Right? I'm not a product designer, but I understand enough. Right? I'm actually not a statistician, but I understand enough. So they have this really unique kind of multidisciplinary experience and approach. And the key is they've previously applied it to incentivizing individuals to join and stay retained for networks that then increase the value of those networks. So you see this across Twitter, Facebook, all this stuff.

• 1:15:46Anthony Pompliano?

  As more and more of these people discover what is somewhat of a special skill to apply to this space, I think we're going to see them all come in. And when that happens, I think we're going to start seeing some really, really special stuff built. And so, look, I tell them all the time, I just hope to be a small part of it. It would be awesome to just be around and have some small contribution to it. And so, here I am, talking to you.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  It's funny you say that. First, it's a unique, sustainable competitive advantage, everything you just described. So cheers to you.

• 1:16:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't tell anybody my secrets. No one listens to the podcast anyways.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  And by the way, congrats on kicking Apple and getting yourself back at the top of the list.

• 1:16:29Anthony Pompliano?

  We're recording this on the day that I got back into the App Store after my mysterious disappearance.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  And the community went crazy cheering for you. So that is the best indication of support. But you know, I was just, I was just in SF with Joe Lubin from Consensus, right?

• 1:16:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  He had this competition for startups, people that have ideas. And, and I think Ether was at 18470 or something. It was like at the lowest point, you know, it was like, and I'm like sweating it, you know, I have a lot of Ether myself. And, and I'm like, look at him like, Joe, you're not worried at all? He's like, look at these people. And he showed me all these people competing. He's like, every one of them came from Google and Amazon and Microsoft. They're leaving the best jobs in the world and they're coming with their here with their crazy ideas. And they can't sleep, they, they're so passionate about this. That tells me that they have no problem. We're not going to have any issues. If the best talent in the world wants to do this, you don't have to worry about the price of the, of the coin. So, and, and, and you know, it was, you need that comfort. Even me, I'm sold, right?

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't need any encouragement, but even I needed that handholding to cross the chasm and, and, and, and get reignited and, and, and, and get through it. So, so huddling is not an easy task. And, and if you're a real believer, that's when you're tested. You're tested when it breaks new lows and, and, and you're challenging every thought you have. And, and you have to reexamine every idea you have and, and reignite yourself and keep running.

• 1:17:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I couldn't have said it any better. Listen, this is super fun. I really, really enjoy you coming on. Uh, you've got a unique perspective yourself and hopefully we can do this again.

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  This is great and thanks for having us again.

• 1:18:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 1:18:09Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys, we're back here with John Belizere, the CEO of Soluna. You can check them out at soluna.io. So John, Soluna plans to support the local economy of Morocco where your site is located. What are some of the ways that you guys are going to do that?

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  Pomp, as I mentioned, one of our core values is supporting the local economies where we work. And in Dakla, where our wind site is located, we plan to recruit, train. In fact, we plan to build an, an academy where we're going to train folks on the technology. That's going to be focused on supporting our operations there. Over time, uh, we plan to work with, uh, you know, a number of universities in the The area because we're going to become a significant employer there. We, we plan to employ hundreds, if not thousands of employees in that region. Focus on areas such as security, blockchain, mechanical engineering,

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  and a host of other areas that are going to be supporting the wind site and the data center part of, of the, of the project. And so it's going to be important for us to really build a funnel of expertise coming from these universities. In Morocco, Mohammed the fifth, for example, is a great university with great talent, actually coming out with strong technology and cybersecurity expertise that we can leverage. And then in addition to that, we have a 1% program. So 1% of our revenue will be donated to the local economy to help with schools, training, infrastructure, and the local community in the area.

• 1:19:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Very cool. Now I'm super excited about what you guys are building. And again, guys, you can go check this out at saluna.io.

• 1:19:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like 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.