Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Ben Bollen & Jason Goldberg: Simple Token – Bringing Tokens to Mainstream Consumer Applications

Episode Date: October 11, 2017

As the ICO boom continues to drive funding and interest in cryptocurrencies, mainstream consumer applications are increasingly looking towards tokenization. One of these was social network Pepo, founded by veteran entrepreneur and previous founder of fab.com Jason Goldberg. Faced with the difficulties of integrating blockchain, they decided to start Simple Token – a company focused on building easy solutions for mainstream applications to use blockchain. Simple Token CEO Jason Goldberg and Chief Technology Strategist joined us to discuss the case for branded token, Simple Tokens architecture and the balance between easy user experience and decentralization. Topics covered in this episode: Jason’s long history as an entrepreneur and the turbulent story of fab.com The perils of raising too much money How the quest to tokenize social network Pepo lead to founding Simple Token The opportunity in tokenizing mainstream consumer applications How Simple Token uses Ethereum and sidechains to allow companies to issue branded tokens How Simple Token backs branded tokens through a staking contract on Ethereum The economics of Simple Token and upcoming ICO Episode links: Simple Token | The Bridge between Cryptocurrencies and Consumer Apps. Jason Goldberg - This Week In Startups Simple Token Pitch Deck Simple Token Technical Whitepaper On the Rebound from Epic Failure – Hacker Noon Simple Token Telegram Channel This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/204

This is Epicenter, episode 204 with guests, Jason Goldberg and Ben Bolin. The Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Sebastian Quirio. And my name is Brian Fabin-Ferain. We're here today with Ben Bolin and Jason Goldberg. So they are the founders of SimpleToke. Now, of course, I've known Ben for a long time because we used to work together at Monax.

And so we recently heard about Simple Token. It's a really interesting concept. So I'm excited to have both of you guys on today. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Likewise. So appreciate it. So maybe we can start with you, Jason.

So you have a long and interesting history as a startup founder, sort of a senior veteran known of many wars. Most importantly, and perhaps best known, you were the founder and CEO of a company called App.com, which many of the listeners, some of the listeners will probably have some big memory of because it was once, you know, one of the fastest growing, most hyped, most exciting startups and then had a somewhat spectacular and equally sudden demise. So do you mind sharing us a little bit? Like, how did you originally get into startups and entrepreneurship? And what

was your kind of journey through that? Sure, sure. I mean, my background with like startups technology actually goes back to the mid-90s. I was working in Clinton White House, basically during the birth of the Internet. And there were a couple guys in the White House with me. I was there from 93 and 98 who started looking at things like early browsers and websites and started saying, all right, this could really be kind of a big thing. In 1998, I decided that I really wanted to jump into that. And so left the White House and went on to Stanford Business in the height of the dot-com boom and bubble. And end up working with a number of startups in the 90s

and ended up and worked for AOL, back when AOL was basically the internet for a while. And so the summer of 1998, actually I think yesterday they announced that AIM is shutting down after 20 years. And I remember actually writing a strategy proposal to the executives at AOL back in 1998 about how they should shut down the dial-up service and they aim the centerpiece of a new communication device that included a media player and group chat and all this kind of stuff. They thought it was crazy.

So anyways, maybe the story would end up different if we've gone that direction because we had things like WeChat and Skype, something like now. But yeah, so after business school, I actually went back to AOL and Grant. is to help start international broadband initiatives very well and then help launch T-Mobile Hot Spot was the first kind of product I managed,

which is the nationwide Wi-Fi service roll out across the U.S. and Starbucks and Airlines clubs. I worked on the software side of that, so really trying to figure out the user experience when you onboard people to Wi-Fi. And this is, you know, we take our granted right now that our laptops and our phones all have Wi-Fi,

you're built-in, you don't have to have a connector, but back then it wasn't like that. It's almost like, you can see you can draw some parallels of things we're thinking on that right now with how do you onboarded with watching or to crypto wallets. So that, you know, it might seem so commonplace today kind of Wi-Fi, but back then it was like, you know, it was really, really hard. And so, yeah, we built like an on-ramp to Wi-Fi hotspots then. And then I wrote out of that and started my own company. First one that started was in 2002, 2003, a couple of Jobster, which is in the social recruiting space. and this was before Facebook, before the social web,

and we looked at how do you help, you know, from enterprise standpoint, help companies hire people through the people that their employees know. And so it was like a who knows who knows who kind of software for social networking. And then from that, I met a guy named Nishit Shaw during that experience, and Nishit is my longtime collaborator now. We've been working together since 2007 across. a number of companies, and he's one of our co-founders of Sybiltoven today. But so in 2008, January 2008, Nishith and I and about 12 other guys, we started coming

about social media, which was a pioneer in kind of decentralized, collaborative news filtering. I mean, it was a notion that instead of the news organizations telling you what to read every day, you can figure out what news news news that matters most to you based on what other people that are, whose chair here comments are also reading and always interested. And that was,

again, kind of early before its time is before the iPhone app store. So it was basically just a website. And we grew

to 5 million plus users in like five months. It was like a huge like a run away success back when you do that. And we sold the company after 11 months to Zing, which you guys

probably know is like the LinkedIn of Europe. And, yeah, so I'm a kid. the chief product officer at Zing, public company, initiative from the team came over with me as well. And then in 2010, we started a company called Fabulous,

which was a gay social network. And then in 2011, we relaunched that sb.com as a design e-commerce website. And, yeah, they grew like a weed, and it was unbelievable. We did $18 million in sales on our first six months, and then 112 in the next 12. And we sold over $300 million in merchandise and the meteoric rise of FAB. And just as fast as it rose,

it fell as well, super fast. And we could probably spend several hours and weeks of podcasts about all the mistakes we made on FAB and lessons learned. But I think it's very hard to divide the laws of physics. And we grew way too fast as the number one. thing. And, you know, it's also a lesson of, you know, raising lots and globs and lots of venture capital or money doesn't solve everything. You've got to get the blocking attacking right. That was a really, really good business for the first, you know, year to 18 months. And then we just expanded

too fast and tried to rule the world too fast and it just couldn't keep up with it. And And then at the same time also we ran into something called Amazon, which in the early days of Fab, we counted it was like less than 10% of the products that we were curating of that you can find on Amazon and buy our, you know, about a month 30, basically about a month 30 of the business. I mean, it was like 90% plus. You'd sell something on Fab. And the next day you'd see it on Amazon for, you know, lower price free shipping.

And it was like, how the fuck you could be with that. Yeah. So, but, yeah, obviously, you learned a lot of lessons from that. And after FAB, we had a spin-out from FAB. So we sold FAB to a company called PCH International. We sold the U.S. part of the company in 2014. And then we had a private label design company, basically branded side of FAB. That was based here in Berlin.

And we launched that as hem.com, HGM.com. Kind of thing about the Warby Parker for design, furniture. And that was a really cool experience in 2015. We built that up and sold that to the Beecher Corporation, which is Swiss-German, Burntram Maker, a billion dollar plus and revenue. They own all the rights of the Eames products. And HEM.com is live today.

It's built a beautiful website. Teams doing really well there. Super proud of what they've done. Fab.com is also a live website today. It has its own ownership now, that has its own direction to take you in. And, yeah, then early 2016, I started a company called PEPO, PEPO. And the idea behind PEPO is kind of the kernel nugget, that concept that took us to

simple token today. The idea with PEPO was to democratize the market for expertise and advice on user-generated kind of reviews and tips about places and things to do in any city or travel. And the idea from the beginning was rather than the existing models like TripAdvisor and Yelp, it's a motto, the like, where everyone just gives away their content for free, we could create kind of an economy around influencers, advisors, kind of giving people other tips and getting rewarded for that and then selling other services around it. And it was, you know, it's 18 months plus now that we kind of started looking at how to build a token economy inside of. of PEPO and really took it on seriously, I'd say, over the last nine months and the ideas behind civil token were all, you know, thankfully, you know, incubated inside of PEPO. The investors in PEPO are very thankful to as well that really supported us doing that.

From the early days of kind of the concepts of how we would tokenize PEPO to six months ago when I said, hey, guys, the answer here is not to tokenize an app. it's to build the protocol and the software that enables any app to tokenize. And everyone said, go work on that. Keep going. Keep going. That's been really inspiring. Yeah, I'll shut up and let you guys ask questions. But I'll say, the one thing I'll say is it's the, I've been done a lot in my career.

And this is far in a way, the most intellectually stimulating, the most exciting project that it could have the most far-reaching value and impact in the world. And it's also just really great to be back to building kind of tech. again. I've done e-commerce, which I felt like in the beginning, we built all of our technology at that. But I felt like after the first year of building the technology, it felt like it was really just running a store. And I ran that store for three years and then ran another store for a year. And PEPO is very much a consumer app thus far. And it's really great to be back kind of building technology again.

Cool. And I got to say, as a young e-commerce project manager working in an agency back in like the late 2000s, Fab, more than once was in my presentations as like having good UX and like, you know, on the cutting edge of, you know, user experience in e-commerce. And so that was, that was always one of the sites that we would reference as a site as being sort of on the cutting edge there. I would say that you have all the lessons, obviously tons of lessons learned from the FAB experience. And I would say that one of them that I say is, you know, I'm a product manager and I love building product and designing user experiences. And if I had just stuck to that perhaps and kind of had someone else around the operations and e-commerce business, maybe it turned out entirely different. So thanks for your compliment. I'm really proud of what we built there. Well, so we mentioned, touched a little bit on the sort of, you know, raising lots of money, fast. of course, this is something that, I mean, you did back then and that's happening all the time now in the blockchain space.

What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I think a couple thoughts on that. I mean, first, when I look at like the broader kind of story of where we're out on the blockchain and decentralized applications, is we're kind of in the 909 equivalent to the 1993 internet with the 1999-2000 hype. And so it's like it's still so early, early, early days. I mean, if you think about like the internet in 1993, it was like, you know, pre-Nesscape browser in 1994, right? It's like, it's, you know, before my friend David Bonnet, who I did with him Thursday,

in New York, he started a couple of GeoCities, who probably most of the people listening to podcast I've never heard of, but it was like basically the first way to build your own website like on the internet. It was like before Tumblr, kind of like a long, long time ago, right? Before blogger before. And GeoCities was like, it doesn't exist anymore. He built, you know, he launched it, I think, in 1995, 96, and that. sold to Yahoo in 9899.

And it's like, you know, think about how many generations past GeoCities we are at this point in terms of the consumer internet. And I look at the, what's happening right now is that the world's gone through this 20-year kind of evolution of the internet and seeing things kind of move so fast in, but it was a 20-year period.

And in blockchain, everyone kind of wants to run to the answer already when it comes to the investment, but without kind of doing the blocking tackling to build the infrastructure and the technology. I think there's a lot of good projects out there of people who are trying to build that infrastructure and kind of prove out the value of technology. But realistically speaking, I mean, it's early, early, early days.

And what I kind of repel from is like the speculators and the hype that kind of there's way too much money going to the space for the wrong reasons at this point. And, you know, it's because, you know, how do we get here, right? We got here because people see that this could be the future decentralized Internet that it could be. spawn kind of whole new kind of infrastructure for thousands of different types of use cases and applications and whether it's B2B or B2C and kind of new ways of the entire global payment system could change, entire global legal system can change. And people see that and they're like, you know, the speculators are driving kind of the hype and kind of the money behind it.

And then frankly, you also just have kind of, you know, you have something like, you know, Bitcoin, which is, you know, whatever your thoughts are on Bitcoin is, you know, the value in Bitcoin is still, it's very much kind of a value, kind of like a currency, not a utility. And so the value of Bitcoin is how much the next person is willing to pay for it. And right now, the next person is willing to pay $4,300 per Bitcoin, which is, it's come quite a long way, you know, super fast. What I'm more excited it is about is, you know, obviously things like Ethereum that have come around, which is like, all right, how do you go from value chain to utility chain?

And actually have you build applications and services that make all this really meaningful and approachable. But everyone's seeing, okay, so Bitcoin went from basically zero to $4,300 and so fast. And then people started that Ethereum could be kind of a developer platform for this. And now it's going to have its own meter or apprise. And everyone in my mind just needs to catch their breath, although it's probably not going to happen. but it's the thing catch your breath

that's a right you know let's be practical here and realize that it's going to

you to build applications to build services to build businesses takes time and a lot

of these projects will fail and that's I think one thing that a lot of people

don't kind of kind of factor into their equation is that you know just because

you give someone $100 million dollars does not mean they can succeed in many cases it means they're less likely

to succeed and And yeah, and so, I mean, even take FAB, like, we raised a lot of money, but, you know, we raised money over a long period of time. I mean, the first amount of money we raised for FAB, you know, back when it was fabulous, I put $750,000 in myself matched by BCs you put in $1.25 million. And, you know, we ran out of that money, like, you know, and right around the same time that we realized that we had something in our hands that people liked buying design products that we're curating.

and we kind of said, oh, pivot the business towards this, and then we raised, literally, it was like $500,000 to launch that. Like, and that was, that was like, it was proven on $500,000. And then we proved it, like, within 30 days, we raised, I think it was like $4 million. It wasn't like anyone said, here's $100 million, go have fun, right? Which is kind of this crazy world that we're in today. But yes, I think, you know, it's, it's, there's been an extreme amount of hype. It's, it's, um, all sorts of warning signs.

I think that you have companies that, are considering ICOs for all the wrong reasons. They just see the dollar signs. They just see that they could raise money. I think good news on that front is the regulators are coming in, and I'm very pro-regulation when it comes to this. I'm pro-consumer protection when it comes to this. I think it's like, for instance, in the U.S. right now, there's no reputable law firm that will support an ICO for a token that's not a utility token unless you go through all the processes of actually declaring yourself a security, which I don't think anyone the right mind would want to do in a token sale. And so that kind of has put a real slowdown on

kind of bad kind of deals in the U.S. And you see some folks that have then said, okay, we just want to sell the U.S. investors or buyers. And so they, you know, well, so if you can't sell to the U.S., you can't sell out of China, who are you selling to? And, you know, because that's a large, you know, percentage of the population right there. You just basically just cut out. And it's also, frankly, if you're just selling a security, you're going to get, you know, you're going to get nail for it. And so I think, you know, there's all sorts of questions that you need to have from a consumer investor standpoint anywhere in the world that's going to come up. And so whether it's, you know, U.S., Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, UK, doesn't, you know, it's like, it's not

going to last too long. So I think what we're going to see is a movement towards good projects that are around providing utility that a token is required in order to provide that utility. Otherwise, there should be a token involved. And that we're going to see a lot of people building kind of the necessary on-ramps and infrastructure that are going to enable more applications and services in the future. And that's, I think, where we should be at this moment of time. Cool.

Well, that was an insightful analysis. Well, so you, Ben, can you hear a little bit about your own journey? I know you worked at Mitesafe back then and Monax later. What are the kind of the most important things that you've learned in that time that you want to take with you when it comes to simple token? So, yeah, actually, you also mentioned that I started out in Madesafe early days, like 2014. I quit university. And I really set out for the open blockchain space privacy on decentralized systems.

And actually there's some lessons that, we learned there that can be carried forward and maybe we'll get to that. But then most of, from 2015 onwards, I joined you and actually thanks to you, right, like got in touch with you you and then you hooked me into then Eris and now Monax, where we really worked on enterprise blockchain technology, right? And the reason that I chose that for myself at that point was to separate out the incentive, the mechanism that. design and really allow myself to sort of study the technology of blockchain and Ethereum and get familiar with that.

But while I was doing that and learning that, I also, I mean, I knew this from the beginning, but the frustration there was like without the incentive design, without the mechanism design, a blockchain doesn't necessarily mean anything, right? So we can get into that, but there's a whole different discussion. And so when the I feel like that, June happened. I started asking one question, namely is it a zero-sum game, right? Like, on the one hand, you have open systems like Ethereum Public Blockchain. They have the actual values of why we want to build blockchain systems,

but they're very expensive to run on. It's more of a scheduler. It's a simple ledger, but it's not really a decentralized computing system. And on the other hand, you have these enterprise, these technologies that are far more powerful, but are devoid of actual meaning if you don't have the stake externalized in a system where you can lose it. And so I fundamentally believe that it's not a zero-sum game. And the thoughts that were arising there is like you can actually combine these two technologies

and build something that is far more powerful. If you have the value on public Ethereum, but you do the computation. on a just a helping substrate that in itself doesn't carry any value but but has all its value externalized on public Ethereum then you can have best of both worlds you can have the the crypto economics of Ethereum and you can have enough performance to actually start doing something and and so those thoughts started maturing over over the summer and then I've been friends with Jason for a long time and so I knew he was working on Simple

token as well and so so that would really kick the kicked it off there for us or for me to jump on board full-time with Simple token rather because they'd been working on this for a long time and so so on a point to that right like what I found really attractive to Simple token project was that they really worked from a business case first from from like economic ideas and from legal ideas of how would you use this technology to solve real-work problems for actual existing consumer applications at scale. And so to then design the technology for that was really too exciting to not join in on.

So moving to the topic of SimpleToken, in the documentation on the website and the white paper, you explain that SimpleToken will be first deployed in its first use case on a service or a website called PEPO. Can you tell us about PEPO and then perhaps move into SimpleToken and how it will be useful in that context? Sure. So I mean, so what I think about PEPO is we wanted to build a democratized user-generated tips in the new service where people who are influenced, people who have contributed their tips, their content, could earn money by helping other people with their advice. And that's whether it's where, you know, place to travel, place to dinner tonight, you're

walking tours of your favorite city, whatever it might be. And the notion was that, you know, we wouldn't want to build an economic model around this where, you know, you have kind of like the Instagramization of the world where everyone thinks they're an influencer. But yet, you still have people giving away their content. and for free to these large and centralized applications. And you have very large companies like TripAdvisor and Yelp and others like them who have basically built their businesses and advertising models in the backs of all this free contributing content

from users. And so we had this theory that if we created this kind of platform for people first to interact and contribute their tips and reviews and then a way for them to actually kind of mind monetize people finding those tips and reviews relevant, but then around that you can build an economy around people selling related services, whether it's someone creating a personalized itinerary for you or a tour guide wherever it might be, and ultimately it came down to kind of a, you know, becomes an economy when the end consumer, the end user has a choice when they want to purchase something, that they either, they understand they either can take out their

wallet and buy it where they could take up a time or content or data and earn it. And then you have people kind of start before like Bitcoin being just basically a form of payment, you go towards more like something where actually people are earning a living or earning through a currency and then you start to develop an economy. So we started developing these ideas behind kind of, you know, the modernization and economy of PEPO over a year ago. It was basically June, July of last year. We kind of developed some kind of like the economic theory behind it.

We built out kind of models around things like, how do you monetize upvotes? How would you maybe give people some kind of incentive kind of currency or token or whatever we're calling a token? We're calling people points wherever it might be that that had some economic value to it. that they could then contribute when they're liking other people's content and that people are earning, you know, based on seeing that the more they contribute, the more people like the content, the more they can earn. And then from that, they then could use the points or the tokens of their earning towards buying products that are related to the marketplace.

And so you can see every time that you have an economic choice, do I want to, you know, spend my night writing 50 reviews and hopefully people like them. board I just want to jump the line and buy some points and buy the service. And so we flesh out kind of an economy behind this. And to be, to be fair, you know, folks like, you know, Reddit influence some of this with some of the things they've done, but obviously not attached to a cryptocurrency. Steam it. You know, when Steam first came around, we looked at this and we said, okay, really cool idea here, but gosh, there's a lot we could do to prove on kind of the user experience and the transparency.

and we really saw some opportunities there. I had, like, it must be a dozen people, especially the BCs I know really well, when Steam launched and said, you know, look at this and make it times better if you can. And I was like, all right, we'll get there and try. So, and then basically what happened is we kind of said, all right, let's just focus on the core technology of PEPO for the rest of 2016. And we'll turn back to the token economy in 2017. And our plan was basically mid-2017 to really take on kind of the token.

organization of PEPO and kind of an earnest. And a couple of things collide at the same time in early 2017. So one is my longtime collaborator, co-collaborator, Nishif, who had taken 2016 off, he came back from his year sabbatical and said, hey, I've just been studying blockchain. And I know you're talking about kind of how to create an economy around PEPO and I've been studying this year for last year. And it really should consider whether we would bring parts of the PEPO app on a blockchain and think about kind of a token economy.

And I said, oh, I have to think about this also, you know, in terms of looking at things like, you know, steam and other things. And we brought up the economy. And then we also modeled out kind of user experience and what that might look like. Started talking to kind of some of the key actors and influencers in the marketplace, kind of seeing how they would want to earn and what kind of things regular consumers would want to kind of spend on and that sort of stuff. And then obviously you had the ICO kind of craziness that happened, you know, starting

since I guess like March or April of this year. And a lot of people started just saying, all right, you guys are there in terms of, you know, having kind of design token economics. You've designed your user experience. You know, why don't you go ahead and kind of go forward and try to think through how you would, you know, kind of launch a people coin token.

And there were a couple of aha moments that kind of led to simple token. And I'd say so like one really cool project on PEPO has led to something that's much, much, much, much bigger and much greater and that have a much bigger impact. And so the two AHA moments were one, basically back in starting in May, we really started like dating into what would be involved in just tokenizing PEPO. And just went and we looked at, if you put aside even like the cost of doing an ICO, which rents over a million dollars. I don't think people realize this today,

but just all the work you got to put into it from the legal, regulatory tax, preparation. I mean, it's super, like, it's not easy, and it's not cheap. If you want to do it right, I guess if you want to do it, as a shady project, go for it and see what happens. But then you just put that aside

and you just look at, we looked at all the technology that we would need to build in order to basically tokenize one app. And, you know, we looked at, all right, things that we would need to overcome. We would need to overcome, you know, public Ethereum isn't yet scalable to consumer applications. We would need to come up with some sonic solution, whether it's private chain, off chain, permission chain, side chain, whatever it is.

And that's kind of, you know, I've known been for a long time here in Berlin and we start talking about some of these concepts and how to achieve that. And, but, you know, even just, and, you know, most consumer app developers are not going to figure out that part of their own. But then we looked at, all right, so what would we need in terms of inside of, you know, PEPO? well, we had this notion of having kind of warm up or restricted tokens where basically you would give tokens to users to kind of warm them up to kind of get them used to the kind of spending certain activity. So they would have almost be like a locked token that you could, you couldn't just, the user can't just cash it out themselves. But once they transfer to another party, you can even say once it's transferred between, you know, to two or three parties that maybe someone could actually cash it out. So we had to kind of do some innovations on that front. We looked at how innovations we would need to do in terms of, you know,

we would need to build KYC into our app. We would need to build to when people are caching out. You're required to know who your customer is when they're kind of turning their points or tokens into real money. You would, or Fiat, it's all real money now. You would need to, you know, innovations around user-friendly wallets, around setting up various transaction types. So maybe sometimes the transactions are peer-to-peer, completely decentralized with no intermediary and no transaction fee.

But maybe other types of transactions are going through kind of the community manager, in that case, Pepo, who is taking a transaction fee on certain types of transactions. Maybe you enable users to sell services directly to each other. You would need to kind of enable, kind of how do you set that stuff, almost like setting up skews on Shopify or something like that. And we kept unraveling, we have to do this, and we have to do this and do this. And then, you know, we also have a lot of experience our team on building, like, internal tools, like, admin dashboards. And I think a lot of people will realize, like, if you're going to tokenize an app, you need to, like, manage an economy, right? So you need to understand all the sources and uses, understand, like, are people hoarding tokens? Where are they earning?

Be able to monitor every single user and kind of look at trends in the token economy. And I know this might sound like a lot of, like, oversight from, like, decentralized world. but from an app developer. This is something's critical for managing your economy, not just letting it be a free-for-all and kind of say, right, whatever happens, happens. And so we looked at all this stuff that we would have to build. And it was just like this, you know, duh,

like, you know, if we're going to build all this for one app, that'd be crazy. We should build this for everyone. And I think what it spoke to was that there is a lot of amazing, you know, kind of infrastructure plumbing projects that have been going on in the blockchain world. And, you know, even, you know, us at Simple Token, we will leverage many of them. But for a consumer app developer or any app developer for that standpoint, who does not have their own blockchain developers, you know, they would need to first have their developers learn blockchain technology and then cobble together this and this and this and bring us together and kind of, you know, that would take years for them to kind of build, to be able to kind of create their own token economy in a meeting way for one app.

And we realized what was needed is kind of this middleware layer that would enable kind of a, kind of a, kind of a, an on-ramp for app developers to be able to embrace, you know, blockchain technology. It's almost the equivalent of, let's say, you know, Uber and Airbnb, they didn't have to build their own messaging services, but they didn't because it's not their core business. So instead they used Twilio. Or, you know, if you're launching an e-commerce site today, you know, very few build it from scratch the way we give a fad. most of them will just start with Shopify or big commerce and like that. And we look at it's like one of the things that's kind of missing and kind of opportunity or white space in the tokenization of blockchain world was to create kind of a very robust, very useful middleware layer

that app developers could use as they're on ramp to both create and manage their token economy. And I think then the other AHA, which again might not be the same religion as everyone in the blockchain world we've had was our approach with PEPO is the same approach that I've had with or heard back from lots of other consumer app developers is you know basically you know we don't buy into this notion that everything has to be a centralized app

not everything is going to be a DAAP or a DAO or DAAP and DAO it's like it is possible that thousands, tens of thousands, millions of companies can benefit from having parts of their business on a blockchain without having the entire business on a And that opens up a whole new set of opportunities that, you know, we think can be critical to taking, you know, blockchain technologies from what is today a very, very, very, very, very small end consumer adoption to more of a mass market adoption. That if it's just going to be all about decentralized applications, I think it's a little naive and I think utopian to think that the entire world is going to become decentralized. I think there will be both decentralized apps, there will be both centralized apps,

there will be hybrids in between, and we see a great opportunity to be kind of a bridge between them. Cool. Jason, can you walk us through an example? So let's say now PEPO says, okay, we're going to use Simple Token to create our own token economy, to create a PEPA coin.

Like what would the steps be that they would go through? Yeah, so the simple way to think about Simple Token is the project consists of three parts. So the first is ERC20 token, which is basically part of a protocol, which is the OpenST protocol, so ST stands for civil token. And the protocol, which Ben can espouse more on,

is basically the process by which a company or an organization or an individual would take civil token and stake it against creating their own brand, branded tokens on high chains in a cryptographically audible manner. So that essentially you power your branded economy with simple token behind it. And we'll go into that in more detail. So part one is the simple token itself. Part two is the protocol.

And then part three is the software package that we're building, which is basically a thing by the SaaS software that enables you to create and manage your token economy. And so the process that a company would go through, I mean, the first thing we look at is, even before talking about like the functional process, like the, like we look at as one benefit of the ICO hype is that a lot of companies for the wrong reason and started thinking about tokenization because they saw dollar signs. We think, you know, if they don't have a valid token economy or reason to have a token economy, they should just kind of, those guys should just fall away. But then you had this like next set who actually, a lot of really interesting companies. have done a lot of work over the last months to try to figure out how they could use tokenization to create economic incentives, rewards, to monetize microtransactions to monetize people giving up their content, their data, their privacy, and all sorts of interesting ways to help take, say,

what today is a, you know, what should be a two-sided marketplace, but there's only one-sided and trying to kind of fuel the other side of the tokenization. And so we can go through all sorts of examples. For those guys, a lot of them then hit this kind of like this wall where they kind of say, oh, yeah, we would have to then build all this stuff. And so we want them to say, okay, we'll build on simple token because we'll give you everything you need in order to kind of get from here to there, launch your token economy. And so essentially what they go through is they basically, the starting point is you stake

simple token against creating your own branded token. And using our dashboard tools, you would basically set an exchange rate, a fixed exchange rate between Sibyl token and your branded token. So let's say you wanted to start with 1,000 euro of Sibyl token, and you want to create 101 exchange rate. So you create 100,000 of your branded token. So let's say we call it Brian coin. And you then basically have 100,000 Brian coin that are basically. at your disposal that have been created on the side chain. And you can, you know, then kind of set up various transaction types within our dashboard.

You can say we want to enable you to spend those tokens on, say, a peer-to-peer transaction where Ryan's community doesn't take any transaction fees entirely between the users. Maybe it's one user saying if you pay me, you know, they can set their own prices for it. Here's what you can buy my service. it could be an incentive transaction that you set up that incentivizes users to do take certain actions inside the application it could be rewards that they unlock by taking certain certain actions much like we've seen in games and other things over the years it could be a B2B transaction it could be for an API call it could be so basically you set up various transaction types and then basically all the transactions that happen within bryan

community are all on that side chain. And so they're all, you know, kind of, they're all kind of recorded on the chain, but they're not on public Ethereum. And it's only when, say, a user of Brian's community wants to either cash out. So basically wants to take Brian coin and get 10 euro for what they've earned. Or when that user wants to buy more Brian coin, that you need to basically go back out to the very mainnet and either acquire and stake more simple token or drop a stake token in order to support a cash out scenario. And what this enables is basically the companies involved to have somewhat of a safe environment to have kind of the trend, you have their transactions on a blockchain, to have it then tied to the actual cryptocurrency

without having the legal regulatory risk involved in their own ICO token sale, without having build their own technology to do it. And also creating a safe environment for their users, get into stuff like we're working on in terms of possible ways to do price stabilization. We provide price Oracle. So let's say users can price in their local fiat and have it automatically converted to the then price of equivalent price and civil token and the brand of token. And so enabling kind of the safe environment for these token economies to start to take off

and flourish. And so what we provide then for them is kind of this suite of tools or technology. to manage all this as well. So how do you analyze your economy, see, you know, kind of where are things, you might see certain places where people who are, you know, certain users are hoarding tokens, certain people users are, these kind of transactions seem to be working really well. You might see certain gaps in your economy where you have a lot less demand than you have supply in certain areas. How do you, as a community owner, how do you act on that? So there's a lot of things just in managing and also managing kind of potential fraud risk and that sort of stuff.

I can see the value in sort of the use case here, right? So I think the main thing that we can take away here is that we've got this, we've got this platform on which we can build tokens without all these risks, right? Whether it's legal risk or the risk associated to having an or even having to do an ICO, that's sort of a thing in itself. And also as a user, you know, you don't have to come into this with any sort of prerequisite knowledge of cryptocurrencies or even as a company, right? You're just sort of onboarding this platform that provides you all the tools and all the things that you need to build your token economy platform. What I'm curious here, And maybe Ben, you can address this, is how these side chains are managed.

So these, I guess, sort of ecosystems within simple token, how those side chains manage and who validates those chains? What was the trust model there? Because I have some sort of questions about what the model is there. So we briefly already touched on some of these points, right? So what the trust model really starts from is that it is from the protocol itself. So the protocol is built to make sure that the value is protected on Ethereum. And then once it's locked there and it's protected by proof of work validation,

then you can get more mobility of the coins. So one way that I like to think about it, if you would go back 100 years, we would have gold in the vault of the banks and we would have issued this more portable IOUs, these cash notes. The problem there is that you cannot be sure that the gold is still in the bank.

What cryptocurrencies and blockchains allow us to do is to issue these sort of cash notes that are far more usable and have higher utility. But for each note individually, you can verify that the gold is sitting in the bank. And so that's really the mental model sort of that we build OpenST for, namely that it's two sites of the same token. On top of that, there's a lot of technology for proof of stake validation, right? so it's more efficient, but the question is, what are you staking? And so here we can actually very easily solve that problem

because the value that validators are staking on these utility chains that function as sort of workers, as replaceable workers for public Ethereum, the value that those validators are staking is held on Ethereum. And so you actually get sort of the best of both worlds, where you have a cryptographic protocol that ensures that all your values always recoverable and protected by public Ethereum, but you get to interact with it more easily, cheaper costs and faster by extending it onto this open periphery of utility chains. Who those validators then are the model that we're pursuing right now is that for any given

utility chain, it would be an assortium of member companies, potentially auditors, but it would be sort of a large pool of verified players that are both capable of running a reliable service and have non-overlapping interests to be these validators and they have to actually stake value to be validating on those chains and if something goes wrong with that process they'd lose the value and the users of the utility chains could walk back to Ethereum and prove their holdings and recover those without losing any money. So that's really the sort of the decentralization model of this.

It's an open network of utility chains that can expand, that we don't also control, obviously. People can add to that, but obviously we'll try to help the first 10 and 10,000 member companies to get that set up. The key thing is it shouldn't be us, right? So, like, we provide the protocol, we maintain an enhanced protocol, we provide the software, we do not manage the side chains.

That needs to be done to step forward to that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the points where this is interesting, right? Because I think we see on a high level, what you guys are explaining, I think, you know, it's obvious things are going in this direction. It's obvious a lot of companies want to start doing, you know, integrating tokens. And it's quite obvious and correct. I think, as you guys point out, is that, you know, they're not equipped to do that. There's all kinds of problems that have to be solved. But I think this gets interesting and sort of hard to wrap your head around is, you know, where is the sort of border between a centralized application and decentralized application, like where does a blockchain still make sense and where not?

And I think one point where that's interesting is where you guys write about that on those side chains, actually those are kind of like managed accounts. And the users generally don't control their own funds, their own seats. and for example that you're not really able to have like a secondary market on these tokens, right? You're not able to just sell it for somewhere else. And so there's still like almost, you know, very much control of the company. So why is a blockchain really needed here? So I think from a business perspective, a couple of things. So one is we first looked at, you know, consumer apps.

We want to we want to walk them towards, consumer apps. your users, we kind of want to walk them towards a lot of the challenges that might happen from having a token economy while enabling some of the benefits, right? So enabling some of the benefits in terms of, having the openness, the transparency, the immutability of transactions, enabling benefits in terms of interoperability across other kind of member companies that are also using the tokens. We'll talk through that a little bit. But at the same time, like, you give an example, like, from a business perspective, like if a consumer app had a token that was, you know, freely floating and tradable, you know,

that could cause all sorts of problems and some unintended consequences. It needs to be factored at the beginning. I think a lot of folks don't necessarily appreciate it right away. They just think, you know, we're going to do an ICO without a token. But, you know, if you're running a consumer app and you, let's say your user earns $10 with a token, today and then tomorrow it goes to be where 20 or 25. You have all sorts of boarding effects and massive cash outs from users who suddenly are rich. And then if you have the other direction, let's say it goes from $10 to $2, you know, people lose entire faith in the economy and they just

give up and they just don't participate anymore. And so that's just one notion in terms of we wanted to create an environment where there could be some protection. around some of these things like price fluctuation that the company can help mitigate within this as part of a service provide to the users so that they build the economy bit by bit. We also found that our user research has basically found that today's crypto wallets are a big impediment to consumer adoption, that if a consumer is just using one application, that they don't it's very hard to explain to them, crypto keys and seeds and kind of private keys and all that sort of stuff that we understand, but that, you know, we need to educate users and walk them

there bit by bit by bit. So we looked at how do we kind of create a path for people to, you know, so for instance, you know, how do you get to have the user understand that it is based on a cryptocurrency because they're seeing some fluctuations in its value, but not wild swings. And then they start to realize, okay, if I want to spend this token that I earn, in this one community on this other community, I see that they're both powered by simple token, and if I claim my crypto keys,

that maybe I could or have some way of kind of taking over permission for my crypto keys, then I could do that and kind of cut across these networks, and to walk people down the path towards educating consumers around crypto and crypto wallets. And then also, just from a company standpoint, I've got to say that it's kind of madness and I think just kind of silly in my mind

to even think that the world's going to, the market's going to support tens of thousands of different freely floated consumer tokens. There'll be no market for them. So they would launch all these ICOs or all these tokens, or even if they, let's say they had their token through us, but then it was, if there was a secondary market for it, there would be like no demand for it, you know. And so it's like being like the far, far, far OTC kind of stock market, but no one's buying. And, you know, that's going to, you know, have massive net.

negative impact on your economy as well. And so we said, don't have these tokens be, have a secondary market fund, don't have them floating to start, create a safer environment to build trust with users and walk them down the path of understanding crypto and seeing the benefits of being on a blockchain. And then we've also imagined though, we've imagined though that we can see ourselves not just as an on-ramp for these companies and to their users, but also that, you know, if a company within civil tokens kind of ecosystem proves out liquidity. They prove that they actually have an economic model and there's demand for their tokens. And people are buying them, people are

trading them, people are earning them. We can also enable, you know, basically the lock that we put in that enables there to be no secondary market. We basically could like, you know, unlock that and enable them to float their own token. But do so once they've already proven that there's actually a reason for that token to float and there would be demand for it in the marketplace. So it's almost like think about simple token that model be kind of a a on-ramp or an accelerator or incubator for for tokenization projects so there's a couple of things here that are very good in your question right so so obviously all of us are very much of the philosophy your coin your key your coin at the same time we

as we're actually we're bridging to consumer applications and so we we need to have a user experience for people who do not know what their private key is and how to properly protect it, right? And so recently Vlad, Vlad Zamfir coined Hart Spooning, forcefully giving coins to users. And so this is what we're effectively trying to do, right? No, that was the Cosmos team that coined that. Okay, a small comment. Jay on his latest keynote actually quoted Vlad for that. So that's why I attributed it to Vlad.

Anyway, Cosmos, Vlad, the concept of heart spooning has arisen where how do we forcefully give users crypto keys, but then we have a responsibility, right? We need to give them a good U.X to deal with these crypto tokens. Why do we care about decentralization? It's for increased resilience, right? And so in the white paper, we talk about managed keys, and it's good to stand for a moment. and elaborate what we actually mean with that. Because we definitely do not want member companies to be holding the private keys of the users. That would be just a giant liability for any of them.

Member companies, they wouldn't have the expertise, just as most users don't have expertise of how to manage private keys, nor do most member companies have the expertise to manage them. And so there are some smart tricks that you can do because you have these two parties where only in the client side of the application, you deterministically recover a private key. And then you need to be smart on how you can have users reset their password, etc.

And so I think we've solved that. We'll be writing a lot more on that. Maybe by the time actually this is out. Then we bridge, right? That's the whole point. We want to make sure that there is a continuous spectrum from users who do not yet know what crypto tokens are, allowing them to start using it without understanding it, and then discovering what they are.

So starting to write down their seat phrase, starting to get a standalone wallet, really having their own private keys all the way out to public Ethereum. So that we can start having the adoption of hundreds of millions of users, onto blockchain systems. I think that the only way that we can really start moving the space forward here is by having this continuous spectrum of solutions for all users to learn along their own path. Ben, we actually met this weekend this past weekend in Berlin for the 9984 summit. I just want to give a shout out to the big chain DB team for that event.

It was really, really fantastic. And when we were talking about GDPR, of course, this is the general data protection regulation in Europe that comes into effect in May of this year. And so GDPR, for those are not familiar, is a set of regulations that will impose, well, certain constraints on European businesses or businesses doing business in Europe on topics of sort of data portability, personal data, right to be forgotten, you know, consent to companies, using your data in a certain ways. So companies will have to come out and be quite open and transparent about how they use customer data before a customer engages in any sort of relationship with that company. And so companies in Europe are struggling to figure out how they're going to be compliant with this just in sort of the regular centralized company model.

I'm curious, because I know we talked about this. So what are your thoughts about how GDPR will affect your business? and your customers businesses and have you found ways to make simple token effectively a GDPR compatible or compliant? Yeah. So you're right to point out that for most companies, this is already a hard problem to solve. Like how do you get better, more informed user consent about their data being processed? And then if you take that to blockchain-inspired audiences, they'll they'll they'll, they'll

almost all unanimously come to the conclusion that these laws are written in a way incompatible with where this technology is going because the whole point of a blockchain is for there to be an immutable record that forever stays. So the most clearing example is the right to be forgotten how would that ever be affected on a blockchain. Right. And so here we actually have an interesting solution to look at that because we we we don't like Jason said right like not all of your business needs to be on a blockchain for most businesses and what does need to be on a blockchain for a token to our value is namely the balances right like how much money does a given user have and then that user is

represented by pseudo anonymous addresses and so that is a first concern that that we or criteria that we put forward is like we'll only store balances and uh uh uh uh pseudo-anonymous addresses on the chain. And we have an additional nice feature. Namely, we're doing this form of functional starting, right? Like, public Ethereum holds the grouped value for the token economy. So the total worth of that value is staked and locked on public Ethereum. And so as the individual transactions do not need to get registered on public

Ethereum because from Ethereum we cannot erase anything. But a utility chain that sort of just functions as a substrates to help this economy register and settle its transactions in a cryptographic way can have a finite lifetime, even if it's after a year and a half or two years that sort of the chains get recycled. They don't need to live on forever, whereas public Ethereum for as long as it may live and may live long and prosper will carry on it forever right so so even then you you start having these very interesting possibilities also the implementation of payment channels is much more simple if you have structure of a company handling the receipt so you have the data

availability problem much reduced and And on top of that, we can be even smart on trying to cut correlations between pseudo-anonymous addresses when they're being settled on the chain. So I'm pretty confident that we can actually connect useful user experiences with blockchain technology, externalizing the value of the tokens that you hold without exposing and so forcefully cutting on multiple points your possibly personally identifiable information and forever keeping it off these systems. And that will be very important if you try to resolve

the use of blockchain technology with data protection regulations. And again, the same way that we want to build a bridge and onboard these users, we have a bigger responsibility, right? Like we're addressing, trying to get all these millions of users onto blockchain systems, we can just forcefully have or it's not going to work if we require them to sign away their privacy neither by the GPR law or they wouldn't sign up for that. So we have a responsibility to make sure that it doesn't happen, that their personally identifiable information never gets onto the blockchain.

Yeah, that does make sense. I mean, of course, there is a little bit, I don't know, for me this sort of feeling like, okay, yeah, so you're solving this problem in some way, but it's also, You know, it's moving so far away from a blockchain that it's hard to grasp. I mean, I don't know if over time maybe simple token. Can I challenge you on? Because what do you mean when you say it's moving so far away? All the value you're interacting with is actually only on Ethereum, right?

That's the whole point of the protocol. So it sits on the second largest public blockchain. How is it moving far away? I really want to just challenge that sort of question. Okay, great. Yeah, of course. So there is the part on the Ethereum blockchain, but it's just the trust model of that of that private blockchain is It seems to be it seems to be so closely vetted to the company almost that there's no no, no, that's the whole point, right? Like we wouldn't be building a bridge if it wouldn't be cryptographically audible all the way back to Ethereum and if any user couldn't at any point without permission of either the company or anyone else

hard exit back to Ethereum, walk away with value, or if any of those utility change could on halting, not exit fully onto Ethereum, we wouldn't be doing this. If this wouldn't be cryptographically verified the whole way, yeah, you would have a point, but I don't think you have a point. It's all value is only on Ethereum. We're just making it efficient. So throwing these words of like moving away from blockchain technology to me don't really mean something because you can either say like this is the limits of the technology we have or you can try to use the technology and the core principles that we also hold and share and try to make them more usable for more people and so yeah that would be my my challenge yeah i mean as we didn't speak about this so much right

but you guys have this concept of a standalone wallet right basically where the the person kind of runs their own i guess it's kind of comparable to a cryptocurrency wallet And I see how there you have some assurance, right, because you guess locally have these proofs and you can then take them. But if you have the kind of normal, quote unquote, normal user case where somebody just uses the company's application, then, well, actually, you can't redo anything, right? Because those proofs that you may be able to take to, like, unlock the points on the Ethereum main chain, like you don't have access to them, right? because you could only get them through the application that the company itself is running. Do you do, am I missing something here? The proofs to exit, you can yourself extract from the chains.

And the chains are open and you can verify them yourself. So you could do that if the company doesn't operate or cooperate. Yeah, no, I mean, that's that is a fair point, I guess, to the extent that, yeah, the blockchain is audible. And I guess if you can identify the transactions that belong to you, how do you do that? Is there some kind of seeds that you, but then you still need, as you usually need some kind of seed to back up, no, to see you. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, but here's the point, right? Like, even if you start out with what we call the managed keys, the company cannot move your tokens without you being logged in and actually on your client side interacting with the application, right?

So even then, like, there's, there's you on your client side signing the transactions. It's true that as a user, you're not aware that you have a private key. And so storing that private key just randomly in the browser would be a bigger security risk than having it only deterministically generated when you're logged in. So we, unless the user realizes it and makes the, action of getting a standalone wallet there's nowhere for that private key to go on the user's side right so so there's there's a lot of things we can do but there's no magic involved and until that user realizes that that he needs to get a standalone wallet to further up his his ownership of those private keys he we can't do anything

by storing them on on in cookies or something I think that would be worse. Yeah, thanks so much, Ben. So let's move to some, maybe just a few high-level questions again. So, Jason, where do you see this company in 10 years? Like, what do you want to look like? Yeah. So, you know, we look at it as there's, as, you know,

there's Ben's said two sides of the point, but we're looking for a project standpoint. There's two distinct parts of the project. On the one hand, there's the OpenST Foundation, which is a, you know, it's an independent, independent run foundation, it will have five directors, board members of the foundation, of which myself and Nishit, who are running the company, can only have a maximum two seats on that board. So the other three board members can always outvote us on anything.

And as opposed to, you know, we've seen a lot of projects out there where it seems like the split between foundation and company is more of a facade and that there's really some pass-through. we really set this up with kind of good governance that the company shall receive support from the foundation to the extent that it's beneficial for the foundation. And so the foundation is responsible for basically the shepherding of the protocol. And so to continue to make the OpenST protocol valuable to continue to enhance on it, get more developers to improving it, and to continue to expand on it. So it's like, you know, it's a starting point on a protocol.

It's not the end. And then also to continue to, you know, basically ensure that the ST, the SEPA, the SIPA economy, the SET economy is being managed well. And so that's from looking at, you know, what is the demand for ST? Are there good projects that are being built in ST, promoting, you know, good uses of ST? And so that's kind of the purpose and mission foundation. So we say, like, at the very high level, the mission, foundation is to, you know, to work with developers to help adopt, you know, consumer mainstream

adoption of blockchain technology, but how is, you know, through the initiatives of ST and so the token and the protocol. From the company standpoint, so the company is, you know, the simple token company is a completely independent company. It is selling a software package services that are designed to, you know, help companies with that on-gramp, without managing of their token economies. And, you know, we think what thing is great about this project is that the incentives are aligned in terms of the software company is heavily dependent on the foundation and, you know, it will build a successful business that is based on the foundation.

And the foundation, or at least in the early days, is dependent on the company support in terms of business development, sales, marketing, PR, and software development in terms of building software on top of the protocol, and that kind of helps more companies embrace ST. I should point out that, you know, while SIPLT company will be the first company developing on ST, that the foundation endeavors to have many, many developers doing it as well. And so, you know, you know, you could think about it as say Linux and Red Hat, where the foundation is like running, you know, let's say our equivalent of Linux. And Red Hat is one example of a software company that's been built on kind of promoting

and kind of developing tools and services and software for Linux. It's not an exact analogy with, I think it's somewhat close. And so the foundation over time, be looking to have more companies that are building, you know, application, software, services, like for ST. But our goals of this project is, you know, look, we want it, we want to build, you know, we want to help be the consumer on-ramp to, you know, blockchain technology as a totalization. We want to help, you know, be the service provider, the technology provider that, you know, starting with, you know, a few dozen to then a few hundred to a few thousand to tens of

thousands of application developers rely on for their managing their token economies. And, you know, I think our role models in that is whether you look at a company like Stripe, which, you know, did something similar in the payment space, a company like Twilio, which is something similar in the communication space. You know, it's B2B service providers who took something that's otherwise very complex and hard for most app developers to do, but could have a very big impact on our applications. And in our case, it's the economy behind an application that we can help power. And so that's what we want to be able to help support and provide.

And then also, I think we have a much bigger goals in terms of, you know, if we can be one of the guys out there of helping, you know, mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency, that's good for the entire community. And we can be one of the guys out there who's, you know, making kind of the impetus behind more developers getting closer and closer and closer to learning blockchain technology. And even if they start off with a little bit, a little bit and a little bit more, that we go from, you know, I think the last number I saw was that maybe it's about 13,000 hardcore blockchain developers around the world right now, to how do you go to millions of blockchain

developers or your developers who understand blockchain? And so, yeah, so we're in the kind of, how do we build a bridge company, right? how build a bridge between blockchain and cryptocurrency to mainstream adoption. Cool. Well, thanks so much for explaining the decision and coming on today. So we're going to, so one thing we didn't talk so much today about, but we're going to link to it in the show notes. So people should check out their website and resources in the show notes is that they have a simple token sale coming up, which I think when is the token sale happening? Yeah, so we are right now in pre-sale for the token sale.

And we will be allowing early registration on November the 1st. And you must register between November 1st and November 10th in order to purchase on day one of the token sale. And day one of the token sale right now is scheduled for November the 14th. And so only people who pre-register and go through KYC, AML checks, pass those checks. We'll be able to purchase on day one. And the purpose of our token sale is, you know, we need to create the ST. create the civil token to fuel this ecosystem, that you need the ST in order to stake it

against creating these branded tokens. Otherwise, this utility, this software doesn't work. So that's critical. And then also, very importantly, you know, as part of being that on-ramp, we want to, you know, a critical part of our token sale is we're reserving 30% of the token supply what we call our network accelerator program,

which basically the way I think about it is to seed fairly interesting projects. where there's developers who have either thought through a economic model for their app or they'd like some help thinking went through, but they seem like a pretty good use case. And then we can basically use some of the tokens from the token generation event towards helping seed these projects and helping them get onboarded on the simple token and to launch successful token economies based on simple token. So yes, November 14th, we're really excited for it.

But to be, you know, as someone who's raised a lot of money before, the purpose of this is not a fundraise. The purpose of this is to build an endowment for the community. And I really would hope that everyone who's, you know, considering a token sale really thinks through kind of, you know, what are you doing this for? And for us, you know, we can't have simple token without having ST and we can't have a network accelerator kind of program without creating that endowment. And those two things are coming together for the token sale. Cool, excellent. Yeah, so we're going to link, of course, to resources. You guys have some nice white papers, technical white paper presentations and quite a bit of comprehensive resources. So people can check that out. So yeah, Jason and Ben, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, too. Appreciate it too, very much. Bye. Okay, well, thanks so much for a listener for once again tuning in. So we are, you can find this episode and other app shows on lessorf Bitcoin.com. And if you're loyal listener, if you want to support the show, the internet, please help new people find the show by leaving us in iTunes review. And we look forward to being back next week.