Pod Insights The Pomp Podcast Bill Barhydt: Ex-CIA and Goldman Sachs Entrepreneur on What's Next for Bitcoin About this episode Bill Barhydt is the founder of Abra, a simple to use crypto-currency investment platform backed by some of the best investors in the world. In this conversation, Barhydt and Anthony Pompliano discuss working at the CIA, financial services regulation, building on Bitcoin, and where Bill thinks the crypto-currency industry is headed.
Transcript 11,822 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Anthony 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.
0:15 Anthony Pompliano? Bill Barhite is the founder of Abra, a simple to use cryptocurrency investment platform backed by some of the best investors in the world. In this conversation, we discussed working at the CIA, financial services regulation, building on Bitcoin, and where Bill thinks the cryptocurrency industry is headed. This conversation was a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy it nearly as much as I did. 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.
0:55 Anthony Pompliano? 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.
1:22 Anthony 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.
1:45 Anthony Pompliano? Alright guys, I'm super excited about this episode. I've got Bill here with me. We've got a lot to talk about. You guys are doing some really interesting things that I don't think a lot of people know about, so thank you so much for coming.
1:56 Speaker 01 My pleasure. Happy to be here.
1:57 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely. Alright, I think everyone knows you as CEO of Abra, but let's go through your background first, how you got here, because I think that kind of informs some of the stuff you guys are doing.
2:06 Speaker 01 Sure thing. Long career, kind of a strange path to get here. I was a cryptographer at the CIA when I was a kid, basically, and...
2:15 Speaker 01 Wasn't my calling, but from a technology and, you know, kind of cool factor, it was awesome. It was a great experience. I learned a lot. Spent some time as a quant at Goldman in fixed income research here in New York City. Also wasn't my calling, but served me really well. Wouldn't have been able to design the synthetic currency model for Abra without the knowledge base that I built there. It's kind of like an MBA on their dime is how I look at it. And was at Netscape in the early days, worked on a lot of early certificate authority implementations for our new SSL product, which you know is HTTPS, and a lot of e-commerce and banking projects. And over the last kind of 15 years, I've spent a lot of time working on mobile
2:56 Speaker 01 wallet and mobile banking projects, also for developing markets. I have a lot of work in compliance. I spent a lot of time on Dodd-Frank and was part of the group that worked with them to fix some of the remittance rules they created around that. So I'm also unfortunately reasonably well-versed in current money service business, predating Bitcoin even, money service business rules and e-money rules internationally and things like that. And so I feel like it's all kind of come together now in this, in this new Abra world where I feel finally qualified to do something that's going to add hopefully huge value to everyday, everyday consumers in the banking world.
3:33 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely. No, that's awesome. All right, we got to ask about the CIA. What, what does a cryptographer for the CIA do on a daily basis?
3:42 Speaker 01 So, well, this was late 80s. So I'm sure the answer today is very different.
3:46 Anthony Pompliano? Okay.
3:46 Speaker 01 Ironically, it had to do with Russian hacking from the 70s and 80s. If you're, well, you may, you're not old enough to remember, but we had built this embassy in, in Moscow in the 70s and early 80s, based upon some deal we had with them. And in their infinite wisdom, I guess it was Carter that basically did a deal which said, okay, we're going to build an embassy there and you're going to build a new embassy here. And somehow, the embassy that they were building in DC was going to be built with Soviet workers and the embassy we were building in Moscow was going to be built with Soviet workers. And we moved in, or we started to move in, and we found bugs literally every 18 inches in the concrete.
4:21 Anthony Pompliano? Shocking.
4:22 Speaker 01 Shocking, right? I'm not exaggerating. It's a well-documented thing. There's museums where you can actually see them. I don't know if they're open to the public, but they're there. And so, obviously, we never moved in. And this basically sent a kind of a tidal wave through the organization, which said, "We have to get it together in terms of how we do internal messaging and everything else." And so, we were effectively running the internal messaging systems across embassies and other facilities. And it was completely open text in those days because they assumed it was a private network. Turns out, there's no such thing. You know, things like E&M waves are detectable, right? In the hallways of the new building at the CIA when I first moved in, all the hallways are crooked. And that's because they have what we call waveguides, which absorb electromagnetic
5:05 Speaker 01 radiation, so that you couldn't detect it easily from the outside. So it turns out that, you know, nothing is undetectable. And so, encryption, all of a sudden, ironically, became a big deal again. And I was part of that early team that was working on some of that. And I'm sure it's evolved dramatically and significantly since then, but now I'm out of date, obviously.
5:25 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah. It's interesting, because the encryption debate, I think a lot of people forget. So, Zuko, actually, from Zcash, brought this up to me one time, and I thought that it was, you know, really powerful. So, most people forget that encryption was not a thing where the government was just like, "Oh, let's all use encryption."
5:40 Speaker 01 Right.
5:41 Anthony Pompliano? In the beginning, it was actually, "Why do you need to hide what you're saying and transmitting?" And, you know, that's what the criminals use.
5:46 Speaker 01 Right. And this is late 80s, so there was no public-private key kind of infrastructure, even at the private company level, right? So this was all kind of in-house proprietary cryptographers, sitting on a whiteboard, saying, "How are we going to secure this? How do we initiate sessions?" Because there was no SSL, you know? Tyre hadn't worked it all out yet from Netscape. So this was like, really figuring it out from scratch stuff, which was fun, but I couldn't really tell how it was going to change the world, right? But lo and behold, it actually is. Because a lot of the cypherpunk stuff, I believed in in those days, has finally caught up. With us.
6:21 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, well, in encryption went through the same thing, right? It was first, it was, oh criminals use this, you should never be allowed to use this. We should make it illegal, right? I think there's literally, you know, government hearings about this stuff. There's a famous, I'm gonna forget who did it and kind of it was Senate, Congress, whatever. But there's a famous speech that was given saying, listen, this is not for criminals and terrorists and all stuff. This is security and you know, there's a bunch of communication you want to actually protect. And now it's become industry best practice.
6:49 Speaker 01 So, so a lot of the youngins in the audience may not remember. I mean, we fought these wars in my Netscape days where you could not export the same version of the web browser that you used in the US because the keys or the, you know, were padded with zeros for the international version because otherwise it was considered strong cryptography or weapons grade cryptography and Commerce Department would not give you an export license for that product. And so because I was very focused on the international markets, I spent all this time with our lawyers. As a matter of fact, the head of Mozilla was the, the former head of Mozilla was the lawyer for us at the time. And I remember arguing with her on the phone going, hey, you know, this is crazy. You're killing our business because the banks won't launch banking products.
7:31 Speaker 01 This is in 96, you know, with this browser because they know that the NSA can hack it in 40 minutes. That's the whole point of not letting them export it in the first place. And of course, it wasn't her choice. She was just the, you know, the messenger. And of course, Phil Zimmerman put his, you know, PGP key on his T-shirts just to prove how ridiculous this whole thing was. And eventually other companies in Europe developed strong crypto to get around the fact that you couldn't do it here. And finally, they realized that they were fighting a losing battle and it was just stupid. And now, of course, nobody even knows that that was a problem 25 years ago. But we have a history of, you know, repeating these issues.
8:04 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely. Well, and Zuko's point was, you know, just like encryption went from only terrorists and criminals use it to now industry best practice. He actually thinks on the privacy coin side, right? All of these features that, oh, you know, why do you guys use this for Zcash or Monero or whatever is, ha, has to be nefarious activity will eventually just be standard practice for every coin.
8:24 Speaker 01 I don't know. I mean, if from a, from a crypto perspective, standard practice, maybe. From an enterprise perspective, I mean, I've been hearing this for 25 years and it just hasn't happened because people just don't, either don't get it. They don't want to go through the effort until you've been hacked, you don't understand. And that's part of what we deal with as well at Abra is that, you know, even when you say non custodial wallet to an uninitiated person, they're like, what the fuck are you talking about? I don't know what that means. I just want to buy crypto. Until you've been hacked, then you dig in a bit and you say, oh, wait a minute, they're holding my money and this isn't a bank. If they hack me and or hack you and steal the crypto, it's gone, right? But if I'm holding the keys and Abra gets hacked, there's nothing to steal. Now, if you've been hacked, you get that.
9:07 Speaker 01 If you haven't been hacked, you don't even understand why you should be having the conversation in the first place. And that's a mentality that, I'll be honest, I just don't know how to change. And it could be possible that this generation has to wait another generation to get that. And public private key crypto needs to pervade society in a way that's more fundamental for the average person to get that. That just may be the case. Or it just may have to be hidden in the background in a way that ethical companies just mask the complexity of it for you, just like Netflix doesn't require you to understand TCP IP socket programming in order to watch a movie. I don't know the answer, but the answer will eventually present itself.
9:44 Anthony Pompliano? For sure. And I think we'll get there, just a matter of time, right? And how long, nobody knows. All right, let's jump into Abra. So what is it?
9:53 Speaker 01 Right, so Abra is a simple crypto wallet combined with a built in exchange that allows you to hold investment exposure to up to 80 different currencies, 30 crypto and 50 fiat. We use a very sophisticated kind of smart contract platform in the background to enable all of this because we're not actually holding the cryptocurrencies. So you are basically holding, now I'll talk about the tech, right? So the simple consumer explanation is very simple crypto wallet. I can exchange between all 80 currencies, one button push, no complicated trading interface, bank in and out in like, I think we're up to like 35 countries now, okay? Meaning you can take money in and out of your bank account into the Abra wallet. And I'll explain the mechanics of that in a bit.
10:36 Speaker 01 But now from a technology perspective, it gets even more interesting because this is the basis for all of the future work that Abra is going to do, which you're actually Holding inside the Abra wallet is a Bitcoin collateralized multi-sig contract, all based on either the Bitcoin or in some cases Litecoin blockchain, but they both work the same way, which is why we Alright, so let's go, we gotta explain what this is, because I think a lot of people have heard you say this and they've got no clue what that means. Sure, sure, and that's from a retail perspective, we don't want people to have to understand, but we're totally, we want people who are into the tech to understand, because there's a really cool factor about this. So, so think of it this way, let me give you an example in gold, in the physical world, and then I'll translate it into the digital world.
11:18 Speaker 01 If I owed you a hundred dollars, right, I could obviously hand you a hundred dollars, I could wire you a hundred dollars, but for some strange reason, if you didn't want any of that, I could also hand you an amount of gold worth a hundred dollars. But the moment I handed you that gold, you would be taking volatility risk on the price of gold versus the amount of money I owed you, in this case a hundred dollars, meaning you'd be taking risk on the price of gold going up or down, right? Now, you could fix that by basically shorting the gold at that moment, right? And then the cost of the short, right, minus the hundred dollars minus the cost of the short would effectively guarantee that you're fixing the value of gold at a hundred dollars. Yep. Or you don't have at least any downside risk at that point. Yep. Okay, so, um, think of us doing the same thing, using Bitcoin as the asset class instead of gold, Okay.
12:03 Speaker 01 And using the multi-sig capabilities of Bitcoin, right, to facilitate Abra being the counterparty to effectively that short. So effectively, if the consumer is holding dollars in this case, they're shorting Bitcoin versus the dollar. If they're holding Ripple, they're shorting Bitcoin versus Ripple. Abra is the long counterparty to that trade. Now ethically, Abra can't enter into that contract unless I can make you whole if you're in the money. Okay, so, so And I'll explain how that works. Let's just say that I want to buy Ether Yes. On Abra. I put Fiat into my Abra wallet. Right, so what that means, let me just clarify what that means. When you're putting Fiat into your Abra wallet, the experience looks like Venmo, like a Venmo deposit, but what you're really doing is you're depositing money at an exchange,
12:48 Speaker 01 which then automatically buys Bitcoin for you, and then in the case of Ripple, enters into that multi-sig contract where you effectively short Bitcoin versus Ripple, right? And Abra takes the long position on that contract versus Ripple. So, okay. Now, all of that happened in the background without you having to know. Well, when I put, when I put my one hundred dollars in, right?
13:11 Anthony Pompliano? Is there any Bitcoin long or short position by just putting the money in?
13:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:15 Anthony Pompliano? Okay.
13:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:16 Anthony Pompliano? So when I do that, you're going-
13:18 Speaker 01 100% of the time.
13:19 Anthony Pompliano? Okay, so as soon as I put my dollar, I wire it from the bank, it goes into the Abra wallet. Immediately, Abra is buying what?
13:26 Speaker 01 Bitcoin.
13:27 Anthony Pompliano? Okay.
13:27 Speaker 01 Technically, you're buying Bitcoin.
13:29 Anthony Pompliano? Yep, so Abra, for me, buys $100 worth of Bitcoin.
13:33 Speaker 01 Correct.
13:33 Anthony Pompliano? And it shows me I have 100 US dollars?
13:37 Speaker 01 It depends which currency you deposited the money into. If you deposited into the fiat wallet, you're going to see $100.
13:44 Anthony Pompliano? Okay.
13:44 Speaker 01 If you deposited into the Bitcoin wallet, because you can also deposit Bitcoin directly. In that case, it just shows up in your Bitcoin balance.
13:49 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
13:50 Speaker 01 But it shows up in whatever wallet you've put the deposit in, usually your dollar wallet or your Bitcoin wallet.
13:56 Anthony Pompliano? Got it, okay. And so if I want to go from dollars to, let's say, Ether, right? And I go ahead and I press a button and it says, "Buy $100 of Ether," what occurs?
14:09 Speaker 01 Good question. So immediately, we, so the dollar wallet has to be converted to Ether. How does that work? Now, remember, the dollar wallet is a Bitcoin contract and the Ether wallet is a Bitcoin contract. So we immediately redeem the dollar Bitcoin contract in exchange for Bitcoin. And then we create a new multi-sig contract that fixes the value of the Bitcoin as Ether.
14:30 Anthony Pompliano? Got it.
14:30 Speaker 01 And then you're acting as one of the signatures on your phone. Abra is acting as the second. There's this oracle concept, which we can come back to, but effectively, which guarantees for the consumer that if Abra goes away, things are still good. But effectively, that's what's happening. You're converting one Bitcoin contract to another Bitcoin contract.
14:50 Anthony Pompliano? Got it. Why does this matter for retail investors?
14:54 Speaker 01 Okay, this, well, the long play for Abra is to develop a crypto bank, right? So what does a crypto bank mean? In my, from my perspective, it reverses the model of a bank, a central bank-based custodianship model, to one where the consumer is in control of their own funds. Whether it's for investing, which there are lots of examples beyond just investing in crypto, credits, or person-to-person money transfer and remittances, which is one of the big reasons I started Abra in the first place. You can actually do all- Of those transaction types in a model where you're in control of your own money for the first time. Without having to understand the nuances of how the crypto works. Or Abra having to be licensed in 175 countries to execute those transactions.
15:34 Speaker 01 So we've developed a model which is free of effectively SEC, CFTC, or European e-money style regulation. Because of the fact that we're not a custodian of consumer funds. We're not developing swap execution facilities or other kind of, you know, security-based products doing this. We're into very simple crypto contracts, which are effectively able to roll over. You know, either daily, weekly, monthly, whatever system we set up. And that also gets around a lot of the nuances of CFTC regulation as well. For people who say this looks a lot like CFDs, which are illegal in the US. That's true, but we're not actually implementing them the same way that a leveraged European-style CFD is implemented.
16:16 Speaker 01 These are zero-leverage, instant, you know, capability for rollover. Abra's always the counterparty, which, you know, again, gets around a lot of those regulations. So the point is, I can effectively develop a legal crypto-based bank in every country in the world minus the OFAC sanctioned countries with zero licensing that puts the consumer in control of their own money. That's not hackable from Abra's perspective, because if you hack me, yes, you might be able to steal my crypto, but you can't steal the consumer's crypto.
16:43 Anthony Pompliano? Got it. And so what's the regulatory thought around this, right? So obviously, the regulations are put in place for protection of consumers, to, you know, guarantee these kind of safe, efficient markets. And what you've done is you've looked at those regulations and said, you know, okay, the criteria is A, B, C, D. We aren't going to operate where we do A, B, C, D. And yet you're still able to provide value to a retail investor. Are regulators okay with this? Are they worried about this?
17:17 Speaker 01 I think it's too early to say the regulators are worried about this, because I don't think they're going to understand most of this discussion. At least there are pockets of people now who've dug in who might understand, in the US maybe. But I've met with central banks all over. Over the world, they would be lost in most of this conversation. But that's not really the primary point. The primary point is, is that if you give consumers ones and zeros that they can hold on a hard disk on their own, right, that's generally not regulated. Now, if those ones and zeros represent child porn, for example, obviously, that's that's regulated. But other than that, it really isn't something that the regulators are looking to oversee, right? Even in China, it's not illegal to hold your own private keys on a hard disk or a smartphone.
18:00 Speaker 01 The interaction with the banking system for those ones and zeros as they relate to Bitcoin is regulated, right?
18:05 Anthony Pompliano? Would it be fair to say that the regulators today regulate transactions? And they regulate centralized authorities. But they usually, I can't think of an example where they regulate the content of which you own.
18:21 Speaker 01 Right, that's right. I mean, First Amendment actually does apply to a certain degree to Bitcoin. And we've used, you know, First Amendment principles in some of our arguments. But in terms of understanding what my rights are to manage my own keys, right? But but at the end of the day, most of the regulation has to do with touching the traditional financial system. Right? If you look at most companies that have either applied for licensing, or, you know, think they need licensing or have foregone, for example, operation in New York because of the Bit license. It's because I have to operate inside the banking system. I'm managing keys in a centralized model or some combination of the two. Or I'm developing derivatives that do that, like in the case of like a Ledger X, for example.
19:00 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
19:00 Speaker 01 Those are really the models that the regulators are looking at today. Because it's very clear where they fit in vis a vis existing regulation without having to develop new laws. I actually would posit that the Bit license didn't need to exist. If New York wanted people to have money transfer licenses, they could have done it within the existing framework, which is clarifying the existing rules. They just chose to go a crazy step deeper.
19:25 Anthony Pompliano? Got it. And so what's the ramification here in terms of? The current regulatory environment doesn't address this approach, right? So they obviously could change that in the future. They could just let it go, whatever they choose to do. How do you think retail investors should think about security, regulatory protections, etc. Right? So there's the, as a business, obviously, you want to operate in a way that provides value to those retail investors and you want to operate in a way that is compliant in the sense of you don't want to violate any rules, right?
20:00 Speaker 01 Right.
20:01 Anthony Pompliano? And so if you put the onus on the retail investor around their key management, their security, etc., a lot of people would argue that's good, right? There's some people who would argue, do you actually trust individuals to do that, you know, somewhat complex, technical work or management? How do you guys think about that, right? Like, is it through education or how do you just kind of help them?
20:24 Speaker 01 Okay, let's break that down. So, first of all, the key here to start, pardon the pun, is make this really simple, right? So when you start Abra for the first time, you don't have to do anything. I mean, literally, nothing. You get a wallet interface and you can just play around with the app. The first time you try to do a transaction, the app prompts you to verify your recovery phrase.
20:48 Anthony Pompliano? Okay.
20:49 Speaker 01 And it gives you a couple of warnings and I think the third time, it won't let you continue using the app unless you do that. So we have like over 99% compliance with that because either you do it or you can't.
20:58 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah.
20:59 Speaker 01 Right. And ethically, we felt compelled to do that. We didn't have to do that, right? We could say, hey, you know, use it at your own risk. And we did some split testing on that and we found that people liked the fact that Abra recognized, hey, this is my money, they're going overboard to protect my money and to make it clear that they have no access to my money.
21:19 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
21:20 Speaker 01 So we do have over 99% compliance with that, which is, like I said, a self fulfilling prophecy since we lock you out if you don't, if you don't do it. And that's probably the best you can do in the short term. Now, there are other things you can do by splitting up keys, secret sharing, but the user experience for that becomes unwieldy. And we haven't found a way to integrate the best of breed biometrics or anything inside the app that, you know, goes beyond just, you know, having a recovery phrase. Now, the good news is, is with hundreds of thousands of users, I don't know of any significant money loss. Yet in the system. Is it likely to happen that eventually somebody loses their backup phrase and coincidentally loses the phone? Yes, it is likely to happen eventually. But if you're going to put consumers in charge of their own money,
22:05 Speaker 01 if you're going to allow people to put cash in a wallet and carry it around, and you have millions of people doing that, eventually somebody is going to lose their wallet. That's the nature of human nature, right? So, so over time, we want to get better at this and give people more and better ways to manage their own money. But the user experience is the key to get people in. The good news is, is that the retail investor here is not putting millions of dollars in this. It's usually hundreds and thousands. And we've made that recovery process. So at Christmas time, for example, we've got now one, one season of experience doing this, where people got new phones and had to migrate, right? Invariably, everybody was able to do it, right? We would, if they didn't get it intuitively, they'd contact support.
22:48 Speaker 01 We would say, just type in your backup phrase, your recovery phrase into the new phone, and it'll merge the wallets and you're good to go.
22:54 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
22:55 Speaker 01 Right.
22:56 Anthony Pompliano? Why choose retail investors over institutions?
22:58 Speaker 01 Because this is part of our, I mean, our mission is to provide democratized access to financial services for the global consumer. That's it, right?
23:10 Speaker 01 Investing is one of those, you know, core capabilities. Credit is another. Payments and money transfer is the third over time. So the fact that you can invest in crypto, that's just the first asset class we chose to enable via these Bitcoin collateralized contracts. Eventually, you're going to see equities, commodities, mutual funds, mashups of all of them, right? We launched that the Bit10 index token a few days ago, which represented a mashup of the price feeds of different tokens into one Bitcoin collateralized contract. That just sets the stage for showing people that we can mash up any asset classes into one investment token effectively via this model. So I could give you exposure to equities and crypto in one token, right? And so, so.
23:55 Anthony Pompliano? And that means like I could have a. A Bitcoin Apple share.
23:59 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
24:00 Anthony Pompliano? One share that's 50% Bitcoin, 50% Apple.
24:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And so what one of my things, one of the things I'd like to do eventually is give people a screen where they can say, hey, I want to specify the kind of risk exposure I want. So if I'm an investor in Hong Kong, who can't normally invest in like the S and P 500 easily, or Mexico, where there's like tens of millions of people, but like less than a million investment accounts in the entire country, right? I can now give them investment exposure, for example, to US spiders, the S and P 500, right, tracking stock, and say, I can mash that up with Bitcoin, so that I have 80% exposure to the S and P and 20% exposure to Bitcoin in one investment. And so my risk and my alpha beta is kind of mashed up there in a very easy to clarify risk
24:45 Speaker 01 profile, right? And the idea to be able to do that globally is very compelling. But over time, to answer your question, this becomes kind of that democratized access to banking services play that I think crypto is essential for, right? That's where I think crypto solves problems that you can't solve without crypto, which is how do you provide access to this on a global scale, right? In a way that puts the consumer in control of their own money.
25:12 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely. What would be the number one reason why this would fail?
25:17 Speaker 01 Well, if there was some catastrophic failure of Bitcoin itself.
25:21 Anthony Pompliano? Okay.
25:21 Speaker 01 And we hadn't, for example, migrated this to also support Ether based contracts, which we'll do eventually, so you have both, we would have a problem.
25:30 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah.
25:30 Speaker 01 So the contracts also assume that the price of Bitcoin doesn't go to zero quickly. If it went to, if it went to zero slowly, we would be able to get people out of the contracts. But if it went to zero overnight, you know, that would be a problem.
25:42 Anthony Pompliano? And so let's talk about this, right? Because what you're basically doing is you're the counterparty in these contracts, and you're taking risk, right? How do you protect against the downside risk? When you enter into one of these Bitcoin-based contracts and all of a sudden price drops dramatically, not to zero, but dramatically, what is your risk profile there and how do you guys mitigate that?
26:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, let's use the first half of 2018 as an example to explain this because the price of Bitcoin obviously was falling precipitously the whole year.
26:10 Anthony Pompliano? So 20 to 6 is a big drop?
26:14 Speaker 01 It fell enough to make the point to answer your question with a real-world example. So explicitly, Abra didn't lose a penny when that happened and our consumers were always made whole, 100%. They didn't lose a penny. So what happens is in these contracts, to be clear, the consumer is shorting Bitcoin, which means they're betting the price will fall, but Abra is taking the opposite bet, which means when the price does fall, I'm making them whole on the bet. So that means I have short exposure to losses. So how do I mitigate that short exposure so that, like I said in this example, I didn't lose a penny? Okay, so Abra is basically borrowing Bitcoin on the open market at relatively low rates because the lenders see that there's no principal risk, which I'll come back to in a second, on those borrowings. We sell those borrowings in exchange for whatever the consumer is betting against.
26:59 Speaker 01 In this case, they're betting Bitcoin against, let's say, Ripple. And so we're buying Ripple using the Bitcoin. Okay, so if the price of Bitcoin versus Ripple goes down, I owe you more Bitcoin. But it turns out that the Ripple I'm holding buys more Bitcoin than it used to because the price went down. But it turns out it's just enough to make the consumer whole and pay back the lender.
27:26 Anthony Pompliano? Got it. So you're basically both sides of the trade to a degree.
27:28 Speaker 01 Correct.
27:29 Anthony Pompliano? And so whichever way the price moves, you're able to make either yourself whole or the consumer whole.
27:34 Speaker 01 Correct. And the key is to keep that interest rate low enough so that any spread I have to charge as a risk on the trade is also low enough to be compelling for the consumer. And we've been doing this now to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in volume, which, relative to institutional money, is small, but for retail is actually quite large. I believe we're one of the largest borrowers of Bitcoin in the world. And so that actually doesn't scale, by the way, which I'm happy to admit. But there are other kind of NDF-based models, non-deliverable forward contracts that we can enter into, right? You probably saw that Morgan Stanley launched a kind of a swap or product a couple of weeks ago, and I'm sure Goldman is working on the same thing, and there are others like Galaxy that I know that are looking at this stuff.
28:14 Speaker 01 I believe that you'll be able to offset not doing the borrowings with cheaper NDF products over time.
28:21 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
28:21 Speaker 01 Right. And that actually is really good for the consumer, because in the background, they won't know that we're doing this, but that'll actually allow us to lower the spreads on a lot of those exchanges over time.
28:31 Anthony Pompliano? Got it. No, I think this makes a lot of sense. And really what you're building on is you're building on the idea that Bitcoin is programmable money.
28:39 Speaker 01 That's right.
28:40 Anthony Pompliano? The, you know, as you get into crypto and price movements and all this stuff, I think people forget, you know, there is a Bitcoin network, right, which is highly secure and programmable, right? Walk me through kind of the importance of that and how you guys, you know, in the future, see the ability, not maybe not even just for you guys, but everyone in the industry to leverage that, you know, powerful moment.
29:09 Speaker 01 Right. Bitcoin couldn't be more perfect in its current form, with one exception for what we're trying to do, right? Go back to the original gold analogy I gave you a few minutes ago, where I said, if I wanted to fix the value of gold to be $100, I could basically give you $100 worth of gold and then enter into a short at the same spot price immediately, and then effectively minus the cost of the short, I fix the value of the gold. If I wanted to do that with Bitcoin, I basically need three requirements to be fulfilled, and then eventually a fourth. The first is, the gold has to be worth a lot of money, or the Bitcoin has to be worth a lot of money, so if millions of people were doing this, I could break it up into tiny pieces so that everybody could participate. Second, if I have people doing this in 100 countries, the Bitcoin has to be liquid
29:51 Speaker 01 versus the on and off ramps, namely fiat bank accounts in 100 countries, right, to be able to get my money into the system in the first place, meaning my old money in exchange for the new money, right? And luckily, there are exchanges all over the place that are relatively liquid in Bitcoin now, maybe not in other crypto assets, but certainly in Bitcoin, right? The third is, I need to be able to enter into multi-sig contracts that allow Abra to act as the counterparty to those transactions in a way that allows the consumer to hold their own keys, so that I don't actually function as a bank. Or an e-money company or an MSB in any of these countries, right? And Bitcoin does that as well. The fourth thing that I need is I need to be able to scale these to lots and lots and lots of transactions simultaneously over time.
30:36 Speaker 01 That's where Bitcoin falls a little bit short today, but I think, you know, capabilities like Lightning and other things for me are showing a lot of promise in being able to
30:43 Anthony Pompliano? address that. Because you would be able to use those layer two, layer three technologies.
30:46 Speaker 01 We would, we would, because we wouldn't be, now, some of them may end up being MSBs, but the key for me, pardon the pun, is that Abra itself is not going to be the MSB. We don't want to have licenses in 150 countries. You know, eventually, we may have to bite the bullet and decide to become Lightning nodes ourselves, for example, but I don't want to have to go there right now in order for this to scale. There's so many things that we're working on.
31:06 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely.
31:07 Speaker 01 But we're big believers in Lightning and where it's going. I would love to see that with a combination of on-chain scaling as well over time, because even as a settlement layer, we need more scalability in the system. But I think that once Lightning is working, I think the core developers will recognize that even as a settlement layer, we need to have a modicum of on-chain scaling for Lightning to work as well. And so that is kind of the fourth currently soft requirement, because we're scaling okay right now, but eventually hard requirement to get to, you know, a half a billion consumers.
31:36 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
31:37 Speaker 01 Right? If Abra all of a sudden had an influx of 500 million users doing this, we'd be back to $50 mining fees, because Abra would be driving 100% of, you know, filling the current blocks.
31:48 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely. The part that is so amazing to me, right, is there's an underground revolution where people understand the power of Bitcoin as programmable money, the power of giving this technology to a global user base, all this stuff. It directly attacks the heart of what the centralized Western financial system has stood for, benefited from, etc. Why are they not jumping in on it as fast? Some of them are slowly starting to understand it. What's your take on their perspective?
32:24 Speaker 01 So I'll challenge the idea that some of them are slowly starting to understand it. I think that everybody is aware of Bitcoin as a digital gold asset class now. And I'm speaking relative to central banks. Obviously, there's a lot of pockets of consumers in Africa that probably don't know what Bitcoin is. But I recently spent half a day with Banco de Mexico, the central bank of Mexico, where we had a whiteboard session on how Bitcoin works, how Abra works, how we basically give people a transition using the model I described from the old world to the new world. They had no idea that Bitcoin at its core was programmable money. They just knew it as a token that had value. Right?
33:02 Anthony Pompliano? And what's their reaction when they figure that out? That it is programmable money?
33:06 Speaker 01 So their perspective is interesting because they recognize what a big deal remittances and money transfers are to their core economy, right? It represents, you know, single-digit percentages of their entire GDP. You know, farmers in the US sending money back home. And so when they realize that you can use the synthetic currency model to do peer-to-peer transfers that have on-ramps and off-ramps to the peso, that they can't stop anyway, right? They're like, wow, this is amazing. Why is it that people don't understand? Well, you know, it's again, it's the Netflix analogy of understanding how TCP IP works, right? When
33:41 Anthony Pompliano? Just give me my account and I want to watch my movie.
33:42 Speaker 01 Exactly, but when a layman digs in and understands the power of a network of networks and the way TCP IP works, it's like, my God, this is incredible. No wonder the Internet is so amazing, right? And I think that people are having that aha moment when they're able to dig in with Bitcoin, but most people aren't digging in to that fundamental degree. Certainly not at the government level. I think obviously, you know, the cryptographically initiated are digging in and they're having that, those aha wow moments, but most people are not.
34:11 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, and most of the retail investors definitely won't, right? Kind of mass consumers, they'll never look into it.
34:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, but that's like asking how a credit card works. What happens when I swipe? The fact that there are four banks and Visa and other players involved is obviously, you know, people are ignorant of that, right?
34:25 Anthony Pompliano? Well, I'm actually proud of the human race that they even know to swipe the card.
34:29 Anthony Pompliano? Getting people to understand that's a big enough task.
34:31 Speaker 01 Right, well, there are 500 million kids in China who've never swiped a card but use QR codes, by the way, so.
34:37 Anthony Pompliano? That's a great point, absolutely. Okay, so let's say that Somehow heroically, governments, central banks, you know, kind of Wall Street financial firms, they, the secret's out, right? They figure out, look, this is programmable money. What is like the farthest, most wild scenario or financial environment you can imagine being built on top of Bitcoin?
35:01 Speaker 01 Oh, I see an entire shadow banking system. And I don't say shadow in the, in the negative kind of, it's just a bad sense. I say shadow in terms of finally being competition to the man. Okay?
35:11 Anthony Pompliano? Explain this more.
35:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, so think about a model whereby all of the analogous services you have are now able to, or now function for a poor farmer in the Philippines, as well as a rich banker in New York. And that means the ability to invest in mutual funds, the ability to invest in money market accounts, the ability to do small dollar peer-to-peer loans, where somebody in New York may be lending somebody in the Philippines, and the credit models are obvious, and the collections use like these sophisticated multi-sig contracts in the background, but you don't have to know how they work. You're able to do payments and money transfer directly out of your account, right? With the equivalent of a Swiftwire that settles instantly as opposed to three days. And it has no transaction fee, but might have a, you know, 150 basis point spread,
35:56 Speaker 01 as opposed to, you know, a $60 wire fee that settles in three days, right? All of this is possible via the infrastructure that Abra has built. And it's a question of our ability to launch more features and consumer awareness, and, and building this out along with the consumer as we go. Because we don't want to do too much too fast, because the consumer won't, you know, won't be able to follow. So that effectively looks to me like a shadow banking system, where anybody with a $20 Android phone effectively becomes their own bank, and can do these transactions with on-ramps and off-ramps, where they don't actually have to understand Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin can become the currency that you're overtly holding, meaning I know that my wallet has, you know, 50 Bitcoin in, whatever, whatever that balances.
36:38 Speaker 01 But it can also say, hey, I've got, you know, $300,000 in my savings account, right? As opposed to that 50 Bitcoin, right? But it really is Bitcoin underneath it, right? And so this now gives people an on-ramp and off-ramp from the old to the new world, without having to understand what the value of one Bitcoin even means, or what the value of programmable money means. And, and that's part of why I'm very encouraged, you know, by this approach, because it does give you a segue. Into the new world without having to completely understand all the nuances of the new world and that's something that's been missing up until now and and why I'm such I'm so bullish on what we've built at Abra.
37:19 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely and in that it's almost like it's not a shadow banking system, it's an alternative.
37:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:26 Anthony Pompliano? Banking system, right?
37:27 Speaker 01 Exactly.
37:28 Anthony Pompliano? That can really allow people choice, right? And one of the things that I've thought quite a bit about around Bitcoin adoption itself, right? So the the actual token or asset is as people begin to lose trust in whatever their currency of choice is today, right, so their fiat currency of choice, they lose trust in, they start to lose trust in their government, Bitcoin is not the only replacement, right? There's other currencies, there's other things they can do, they can real assets, etc. But it becomes a viable option.
38:02 Speaker 01 That's right.
38:03 Anthony Pompliano? Right? And what you're doing is you're allowing individuals who have the most context, the most choice, the most freedom, right, to say, I want to put my wealth in X asset.
38:15 Speaker 01 Right.
38:16 Anthony Pompliano? And previously Bitcoin was not part of that menu.
38:18 Speaker 01 That's right.
38:19 Anthony Pompliano? Today it is.
38:20 Speaker 01 That's totally right. I agree 100% with that.
38:22 Anthony Pompliano? And when you allow that to happen, it doesn't mean 100% of people are going to choose Bitcoin and they shouldn't, right? But today that's on an asset by asset basis. What you're describing is having one or two or more financial systems or banking systems to choose from, right? You're giving the consumer choice as to do you want to participate in a centralized one or a decentralized one, functionality matches on both and it's really your choice as to where you want to participate.
38:49 Speaker 01 And that's a very, that's a very Western perspective, right? Meaning if if if Anthony has a choice as to which bank he's going to use, is he going to use a decentralized crypto based bank or is he going to use Bank of America? If you're in Africa, you don't have that choice, right? You probably don't have access to a bank today because you're not a profitable consumer for the average retail bank, right? So this now democratizes access in a way where you may not have a choice, this may be your only option, or if you're a global middle class, rich consumer, you actually do have a choice because you already have an option.
39:18 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, but I would argue that. African countries, for the most part, are more advanced in mobile banking than in the United States.
39:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, but but that mobile banking is very limited.
39:29 Anthony Pompliano? That's true.
39:30 Speaker 01 Right.
39:30 Anthony Pompliano? That's absolutely true.
39:31 Speaker 01 Look at it in terms of the three.
39:32 Anthony Pompliano? The functionality of it.
39:34 Speaker 01 Right, the ability to do micro vesting in equities is a nonstarter for an M-Pesa user today.
39:39 Anthony Pompliano? You're talking about the advanced functionality that a bank can provide to a Western user is not available to somebody not in the Western.
39:45 Speaker 01 Right, the idea of a pooled stored value system, which is what M-Pesa is, has obviously tremendous value since it processes 35% of Kenyan GDP, but it's actually stopped there, right, like it hasn't grown significantly in terms of the percentage of GDP that it's processing since it reached that kind of, my understanding, since it reached that value or level a couple of years ago, because it doesn't add even more value after that. Companies have tried, but they haven't been able to take it to the next level. And I think a lot of that is a function of the fact that they're now hitting walls in terms of compliance and other rules around what they can do around KYC and other things within that existing framework.
40:24 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny, because, you know, we've thought a lot about a thesis. I actually don't know if we even agree with this, right? But this idea that citizens in African countries were able to leapfrog American mobile banking standards or kind of functionality to some degree, right? So in certain situations, they actually have better mobile banking than we do. We have more advanced functionality. We've got access to certain things they don't, but for the most part, in the things we go head to head on, they've actually been able to leapfrog us. Crypto provides an opportunity, doesn't mean that it's going to happen, but it does provide an opportunity for a lot of the unbanked, right? Or these people who are already familiar with mobile banking to leapfrog the US Western-centric
41:09 Anthony Pompliano? centralized financial system.
41:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:11 Anthony Pompliano? And if that happens, access to capital, access to credit, right? All of these things that we know drove massive advantages for the US, especially through the Industrial Revolution and all this stuff, if that becomes available to the rest of the world, we're going to see some pretty crazy innovations. We're going to see some pretty crazy wealth redistribution. All of these things that can come from it and it's a net positive for the world.
41:35 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Like I said, for us, the idea that we can democratize access to financial services. I have tried a lot of different ways to do this and I mean by literally putting my money where my mouth is. I ran Boom Financial, which was trying to deploy mobile banking services in developing markets. I ran a foundation in Haiti where we were using old fashioned T9 text input à la M-Pesa to open up simple bank accounts for consumers to receive remittances from taxi drivers in Miami, meaning their family that's sending money back home after the earthquake. And we hit wall after wall in terms of regulation, being able to get access to local bank accounts, to pool those stored value systems. And eventually I gave up and you know, Digicel, which is our largest shareholder, took over the company.
42:18 Speaker 01 And they use it as their mobile banking platform, but that wasn't my vision. My vision was to have a single system everywhere. And now with Abra, we have that system today. We have users in over 100 countries out of the gate, right? I think I have three people, more or less full time, in compliance. We take compliance seriously, but it's right sized for how we work as a company.
42:40 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
42:41 Speaker 01 Not ruled by compliance, right? It's the opposite approach of the banking system. We do take it seriously, but the fact that I'm not storing your money liberates us in a way where we can look at this from a consumer centric perspective as opposed to a government centric perspective.
42:58 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah. So I think there's a lot of people listening to this would ask questions like, how do you stop terrorists from using it? Or how do you stop the, how do you, every single system, every industry, bad people do bad things, right? So it's not that crypto is bad, it's just if you're a bad person and you want to do something, choose your financial system, you're going to go do something bad.
43:17 Speaker 01 Sure.
43:17 Anthony Pompliano? How do you prevent that stuff if the model looks different than the centralized financial system?
43:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. So Abra is a multi-sig Bitcoin wallet. It's not an open source Bitcoin wallet, right? So where it's one key, one transaction. That means it's almost impossible for a consumer to hide themselves within the Abra network. We don't do KYC on a consumer until they touch the banking system. So if you just deposit Bitcoin into Abra and store that as fiat, I actually don't need to know who you are, right? Because you're not actually touching the banking system in any way and I'm not holding your money. Now that having been said, 100% of our transactions are on-chain. Right, so for the average consumer, you're not going to hide yourself.
43:54 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
43:54 Speaker 01 Right, and the FBI has basically said, "Hey, we like Bitcoin for exactly this reason." Right, so the first thing that happens when you start Abra is we check your IP address, and if you're in an OFAC sanctioned country, we're not allowed to let you use the app. Right, so those users are out.
44:08 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
44:08 Speaker 01 I don't like that, but they're out.
44:10 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
44:10 Speaker 01 And then the second thing is, is that, like I said, all these transactions are on-chain.
44:15 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
44:15 Speaker 01 Right, which means that if the FBI wants to know, "Hey, here's my subpoena. I want to know the phone number for anybody who did a transaction from this IP address." I have to give it to them legally.
44:26 Anthony Pompliano? Yep, yep.
44:27 Speaker 01 Right.
44:27 Anthony Pompliano? I think it was a DEA agent who told me one time, "Every criminal, when they commit the crime, I want their hand on the keyboard."
44:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:34 Anthony Pompliano? Right, absolutely.
44:35 Speaker 01 So, but it's a bit of a red herring, and look, I'm not an anarchist. I am a libertarian. I do believe, you know, a certain rule of law is essential for the functioning of society. But at the same time, I also, you know, one of the kind of core principles and values of Abra is we believe in the rights of the individual to freely conduct business that doesn't harm other individuals. Right, and we believe very, very strongly in this as a guiding principle. And I think most people at their core would be very hard-pressed to disagree, or to take umbrage with that as a core value, especially if it's not hurting anyone else, which by definition, our belief is it can't be. And so, that having been said, by the way, the biggest money launderers in the world
45:20 Speaker 01 remain US banks, whether they're winning participants or not. Right, now, I've had this conversation with people from the OCC and others, and they roll their eyes at me, but they don't prove me wrong. Right, because they can't. It's like proving a negative, right? So, in a heart of hearts, I think that they know this is true. They throw up their hands at it, but they're still basically, you know, force banks to spend an insane amount of money, right, policing the good consumer, in theory, at the expense of the bad consumer.
45:49 Anthony Pompliano? It is, I don't know, a day, two ago, or whatever, you know, more bankers, I think these ones got arrested, are going to jail for rigging, you know, interest rates or something. There was the bank in, I think it was Estonia, right, like one single location laundered like 100 billion or more, right? It's just... Again, bad people are gonna do bad things regardless of the industry.
46:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, the only two industries that I'm aware of that are actively required to police people in advance to this degree, healthcare and banking. Now, in healthcare, I get it, right? I don't want people giving me shit that, you know, is gonna kill me without actually having tested it, right?
46:25 Anthony Pompliano? But the recourse after you're dead is a lot harder.
46:27 Speaker 01 Exactly. Thank you. You know, my, and I don't even know if my family is actually gonna go after them, you know? So there's not much comfort there. But, but the idea that the banking system spends like hundreds of billions of dollars a year doing the same thing, right? And, and you can actually measure the return on investment as being effectively zero, right? Just makes no sense. Now, I totally get going after criminals, and I'm all for that. But that doesn't, that's not what we're doing, right? We're basically policing 100% of the people in order to prevent the criminality in the first place. And we've effectively failed at the same time because the criminals still manage to get through the cracks, right? So do a better job of going after the criminals and disincentivizing them.
47:10 Speaker 01 My guess is that would cost a fraction of what we're spending now.
47:13 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, it is, uh, I just, I always say bad, people do bad things because it, it really does encompass, no matter what rules you put in place, no matter what you do, if they want to do it, they will find a way.
47:25 Speaker 01 Right.
47:25 Anthony Pompliano? Right? And if it's not, you know, the fiat system, uh, in terms of, you know, electronic money, then it's gonna be cash. If it's not cash, then it's crypto. If it's not crypto, it's whatever's next, right? Um, and, and the cat and mouse game is, uh, you know, look, it's difficult, right? I, I actually come from the mindset of, uh, I wouldn't want to be a regulator, right? Not because I don't agree with what they do or anything. It's because it's a hard job.
47:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:48 Anthony Pompliano? Right? And, and they're personally not incentivized in a way that they are rewarded for being successful.
47:55 Speaker 01 Right.
47:55 Anthony Pompliano? Right? And, and so imagine going to work every day, knowing that there's people around the world who are using, you know, money in whatever form to do illegal things and your job is to catch them.
48:04 Speaker 01 Right. Now, remember, the regulator, the regulator is the messenger, right? They don't set the policy. They interpret the policy set by legislators. Or they're given a certain leeway to set policy, but it's also a mandate from legislators. It's the legislators that traditionally don't understand. The nuances of the banking system.
48:21 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely.
48:22 Speaker 01 Enough to understand that it doesn't make sense to proactively police every consumer in terms of a return on investment. But that doesn't translate into votes. So therefore, they're not willing to dig deep enough to understand the nuance, right?
48:33 Anthony Pompliano? You, uh, what are the odds that a US lawmaker is a user of Abra?
48:38 Speaker 01 Uh, very high because I've met with enough of them and seen them install Abra. Where, where I know that there are at least a couple. But that's not only true in the US. I've actually been in meetings with other bankers and central bankers who've installed Abra. And whether they know it or not, I've actually seen them do it in meetings. And so actually, the odds are 100% because I've seen it. But, but yeah.
49:00 Anthony Pompliano? That's amazing.
49:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:02 Anthony Pompliano? All right. So before I end, you should do a kind of rapid fire set of questions.
49:07 Speaker 01 Okay.
49:08 Anthony Pompliano? Other than Abra, what do you think is the most important company in crypto?
49:11 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. The most important, I love Bitco. We were talking earlier about the news on Bitco's funding. Big fan of Mike Belshi, who I work with at Netscape. I think what they're doing is very important. I think the idea of doing multi-sig wallets correctly adds a lot of value. So they're the company that comes to mind first.
49:30 Anthony Pompliano? Got it. What's the most controversial thought you have in crypto? If you said it, people would disagree with you.
49:35 Speaker 01 Um, exchanges are not crypto. Exchanges are SQL databases and people that manage their own keys are actually in crypto.
49:42 Anthony Pompliano? So, oh, so people who use exchanges are not in crypto?
49:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. They're getting IOUs to crypto. And anybody who's had their money hacked and lost forever can appreciate the nuance of that statement.
49:53 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, absolutely. If you had a magic wand and you could wave it and change one regulation or improve one regulation, what would it be?
49:59 Speaker 01 Uh, I would change FinCEN's guidance on people not having to register as money transmitters to exchange cash for crypto.
50:06 Anthony Pompliano? Why?
50:07 Speaker 01 Uh, because it makes no sense. I mean, they don't regulate people exchanging baseball cards for cash. What's the difference? Right? So where does it stop? What's the difference between postage stamp, crypto, baseball cards? The guidance makes no sense whatsoever. If I, if I want to own crypto and I want to be able to exchange it for cash, it's ones and zeros in a person-to-person cash transaction. I should be able to do that without having to tell FinCEN what I'm doing. That's fair.
50:31 Anthony Pompliano? Right. What is your one memory of Netscape? That? People don't know about, but you think encompasses your experience there?
50:41 Speaker 01 I'll give you two. One is, the first memory is fighting the kind of export rules. And that led to the creation of a company called Brocat, which ended up going on public for a multi-billion dollar IPO. To allow Java outlets to be installed locally because the company was based in Germany to allow banking users to get around the strong crypto rules. Which was insane, right? I mean, that company didn't need to, I was happy for them. Yeah. They made money, but it didn't need to exist, right? And then the second was, you know, going from e-commerce project to e-commerce project. For example, I remember another project, I've mentioned Germany, I'll mention it again. You know, I worked on a Springer for like project of putting all the newspaper, newspapers they owned in Hamburg and Berlin online.
51:26 Speaker 01 And this was their first exposure to the internet as companies, as companies, right? And that was so foundational. Like it's today, it sticks in my mind is like, I got to take part in something historical. And I feel, and the reason I, that sticks out to me now is that I, I know in my heart of hearts, that's what's happening right now with crypto. You know?
51:47 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, it's so crazy, just the energy and the, the potential impact. I think that, you know, when people kind of it clicks over, right? And they say, oh, wow.
51:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:56 Anthony Pompliano? You can, you can literally see it in their eyes.
51:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:59 Anthony Pompliano? All right, so a non crypto question.
52:02 Speaker 01 Okay.
52:02 Anthony Pompliano? We just have to admit that aliens exist.
52:04 Speaker 01 Okay.
52:06 Anthony Pompliano? Usually in sci-fi, the aliens are human-like, you know, characters. Do we think that there's alien animals? Like, do the aliens that we think of as the human-like type aliens, do they have pets?
52:21 Speaker 01 Well, I think the distinction is sentience, right? I would venture that there is probably more non-sentience as aliens than there are sentience, just given the likely evolutionary state of aliens. But whether or not there's any sentience out there besides us, I have no idea. But obviously, the numbers dictate that there are plenty of alien animals out there. Whether they have our level of consciousness, and all jokes aside about what that means for the average human, but is debatable, obviously.
52:53 Anthony Pompliano? Listen, I ask this question to everybody, and I am convinced that on a pure mathematical basis, not only do aliens exist, right? But the bigger question for me is, are they looking for us?
53:09 Speaker 01 Right.
53:10 Anthony Pompliano? Right? You know, look, are we the idiots who are just looking for everybody else? And everyone else could care less about us?
53:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, it's a big universe. People can't even comprehend how big the universe is. I certainly can't. They're out there. There are sentience, mathematically speaking, who are looking for us, being a euphemism for someone else, obviously. The chances of them finding us are pretty close to zero, mathematically speaking, given how big the universe is. But, you know, in 10 billion years, who knows where evolution will allow us to have gone, where we may just sense each other, right?
53:40 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah. I am, I'm waiting for them to show up, jump off the spaceship with like, alien dogs, and we'll go grab a beer at a bar.
53:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, or just turn around in disgust.
53:48 Anthony Pompliano? Oh, you guys got those too?
53:52 Speaker 01 Exactly.
53:53 Anthony Pompliano? All right, before we end, I always let everyone ask me one question. What one question would you ask me?
54:00 Speaker 01 What do you think crypto is going to mean to the average consumer in five years? Or 10, if it's too close.
54:09 Anthony Pompliano? So, yeah, so I'm a big fan of Bill Gates' quote, you know, we overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in 10. I'm gonna change the question a little bit and just say like, let's 20, like, very long timeframe, right?
54:23 Anthony Pompliano? I really think that crypto's got a shot to take down the entire centralized financial system, right? And I don't mean that in like an anarchist way. I mean that in the Goldman's, the Morgan Stanleys, the JP Morgans, et cetera, are gonna say, this system, if we can figure out how to, you know, kind of corral the power of it, we actually can build better businesses.
54:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:46 Anthony Pompliano? Right? The example I usually use is, so the companies in the internet age that figured out growth hacking, right? They are the companies that are the powers of today, right? So this is the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Googles, et cetera. They figured out how to use the internet to incentivize people to do things. I think that the people who understand and figure out how to do that in the decentralized world, it's gonna be magnitudes bigger of wins. And some of that has to do with just the global nature of this. And, you know, we forget that many of the companies that we look up to today as these magnificent, you know, entrepreneurial endeavors that drive billions of dollars of profit and also, they're not available in some of the largest countries in the
55:31 Anthony Pompliano? world. And so what happens when you get out of a system where innovation and entrepreneurship is driven by regulation, and you allow humans all around the world to conduct commerce, to build businesses, et cetera? I think that we actually are underestimating the power of crypto, you know, blockchain, the decentralized world. And so if that is true, look at just finance. And that's why I asked, you know, the question of like, how, like, what's the wildest scenario, right? I would argue it's not even a shadow or an alternative system.
56:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:08 Anthony Pompliano? What if it becomes the system?
56:10 Speaker 01 Right.
56:10 Anthony Pompliano? And happens within 20 years?
56:12 Speaker 01 Yep. I've always believed that access to commerce is the ultimate tide that raises all boats.
56:17 Anthony Pompliano? Yep.
56:18 Speaker 01 Right?
56:18 Anthony Pompliano? That's a good point.
56:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, and I think crypto, in that regard, is simply the ultimate example of software eating the world.
56:25 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely.
56:25 Speaker 01 To provide that, that access.
56:27 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely.
56:27 Speaker 01 So I obviously agree with that point.
56:29 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah. Look, and, and I think that, you know, for me specifically, the ability for people around the world to have a level playing field, right? You're not going to correct the inequalities of yesterday by, you know, coming in, governments giving money or charity or, you know, all this stuff is, yeah, maybe makes a little bit of a dent, but it's not really going to level the playing field. I'm a huge believer that if you give everyone the same tools and you give them access to information, education, you know, communication between themselves, et cetera, they will surprise you by what they're able to accomplish, right? And I think that crypto is doing that in a very interesting way. And that's kind of why I lean towards, we're probably underestimating this whole thing.
57:14 Speaker 01 All right. Well, I look forward to the reunion podcast.
57:16 Anthony Pompliano? 20 years from now, we'll see what happens?
57:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
57:19 Anthony Pompliano? All right, man. Thank you so much. I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing. So I appreciate you coming on.
57:22 Speaker 01 Appreciate it. This was awesome. Thanks for having me.
57:26 Anthony Pompliano? All right, guys. We're here back with John Belizere, the CEO of Soluna. You can check them out at soluna.io. So John, I noticed that you guys are issuing a security token. Why'd you choose to do that rather than an ICO?
57:38 Speaker 02 So great question. Obviously ICOs have been the talk of the whole cryptocurrency market because they've been able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for a host of different projects globally. When you look at our project, you know, you're talking about a $2 billion project that we will build out in a series of phases. And when we looked at that strategy, the investors are going to be participating in this, are going to be institutional investors. And what appeals to us from an STO perspective is the structure is really tuned to that type of investor. It's merging traditional financial services and security regulation with the power and technology that comes from the blockchain. So we like security tokens for really four primary reasons. The
58:22 Speaker 02 one is, the first is transparency. By putting the token and the security that we're offering to fund this project on the blockchain, our investors have much better transparency into how we're approaching the project. The ownership for us is also transparent. Number two is liquidity. Most energy projects don't have very much liquidity. And imagine a $2 billion project that has to be developed over several phases and then the project sponsor has to find someone to buy that multi-billion dollar project before liquidity can occur for the investors. But now, if you invested $10 million or $100 million in the Soluna project, you could use the liquidity feature, if you will, of the STO to sell a portion
59:06 Speaker 02 of that if you needed to provide liquidity for your fund, for example. And then number three, the fact that we're doing this on a digital platform, we're using sort of these new STO marketing platforms to offer the security. It greatly reduces the overall cost of issuance and compliance around this. And then number four is security. So it's a platform that's really allowing us to provide a security that has all of the relevant due diligence and protection that you expect as an institutional investor. So ICO versus STO, STO was the natural choice for us.
59:44 Anthony Pompliano? Absolutely. Well, they heard it here first. So I appreciate you coming on and talking more about the project. You guys can find out more if you go to saluna.io.
59:54 Anthony Pompliano? Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.
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