On The Brink with Castle Island - Ruben Galindo (Airtm) on distributing USD to Venezuelan healthcare workers (EP.123)

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Ruben Galindo, cofounder and CEO of Airtm, joins the show. Recently, Airtm has been in the news as it was reported that Juan Guaidó, Venezuela's would-be President, was using the app to coordinate the disbursement of funds seized from the Maduro regime to healthcare workers in Venezuela. In this episode: Why Ruben cofounded Airtm  How Airtm creates local liquidity for dollars against any local currency How Airtm manages their reserve How Bitcoin and Ethereum intersect with AirUSD How Airtm creates local liquidity on their platform The size of Airtm's userbase globally and in Venezuela Why international freelancers gravitate towards AirTM The genesis of Airdrop Venezuela How Airtm linked up with Venezuelan president Juan Guaido to distribute payments to Venezuelans The genesis of the plan to distribute seized funds to Venezuelan healthcare workers How Airtm is planning to route around Maduro's attempts at censorship How Airtm manages the physical risks of running a grey market business in Venezuela Read more about Airtm here.

Hello and welcome back to On the Brink with Castle Island. Today on the show, we have Ruben Galindo, who is the co-founder and CEO of Airtem. Airtm is a company that allows users worldwide to send and receive and save in U.S. dollars without relying on traditional banking infrastructure, and they have some adjacencies to cryptocurrency. We'll explain their mechanism to get local liquidity in the episode. So I wanted to get Rubin on because just recently it was reported in the mainstream press that Juan Guaido, who is the Venezuelan president in exile, you might say, or the head of the Venezuelan opposition to Maduro, managed to get some funds unfro from the U.S. Treasury that had been confiscated from the Maduro regime. and his plan with those funds was to send them directly to Venezuelan health care workers. Now, of course, there's no banking relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela, so this is obviously

a bit of a challenge. And Guaido announced that he would be using AirTM for this task, relying on their liquidity networks and kind of establish infrastructure. So I wanted to get Rubin on the show to talk about how that came about, how exactly that is going to be instrumentalized and what the stakes are now that Maduro has started responding to this provocation and has begun to try and resist this flow of opposition dollars into the country. The stakes are extremely high here. This is another example of a crypto company making geopolitical waves, which is something that I'm sure we'll see more of in the coming year. Let's dive right into it. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

government loans American International Group AIG $85 billion. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin.

Bitcoin. Ruben Galindo is the CEO and co-founder of Airtiam, which is a company that is very much in the news lately. So we're very lucky to get him a short notice. Rubin, thanks so much for coming on. Hey, Nick, thanks for having me. I want to dig into this Juan Guaido situation, but maybe before that you can tell us a little bit about Airtm. I was kind of somewhat familiar with it because I've been looking at the kind of crypto. dollarization idea and, you know, obviously spending a lot of time thinking about Venezuela and how

that intersects with crypto markets, trying to figure out what's actually going on there. And you guys are playing a pretty key role there. So tell me about what AirTM does and kind of what your core objectives are as a company. Sure. So at RTM, we aim to give people dollar accounts. We believe that the dollar is the best type of money. It holds its value. It's accepted everywhere.

everyone in developing nations thinks of things and their value in dollars, not really in local currency. And we believe that if everyone had access to the dollar account, everyone would have better tools to achieve prosperity and to reach their goals in developing world regions. We believe that the dollars are having access to a connected dollar is basically a human right because we don't think that any one country should tell you what type of money to preserve your value because you worked for it, you earned it, it's yours, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. And one of the things is keep it in the type of money and be able to access money that holds its value. It's maybe a contrarian opinion for your crowd, but it's what we think. can we work very hard to uphold that.

So I'm really just curious about how mechanically you are giving people dollar exposure, especially in places where banks, you know, U.S. domicade banks might not be operational like Venezuela. Sure. Well, we give people dollar accounts because air PM is kind of like this wallet connected to an over-the-counter marketplace for dollars. So if you want to make a deposit into your dollar account, we will match. you with basically an AirTM dollar broker.

We call them agents that will sell dollars to our clients whenever a client wants to make a deposit. AirTM just makes it very easy to interact with one of these agents, your dollar brokers, and very quick and safe. If you want to then withdraw dollars from your AirTM account back to your local currency, then we'll match it with an agent that will buy those dollars from you in exchange for for sending you a local bank transfer. So it's basically like PayPal meets dollar or local bitcoins.

And that's how we are able to deliver a dollar accounts to everyone anywhere. And this dollar account is used not only to preserve your wealth, but also to receive cross-border payments. For instance, if you are a freelancer and you need to get paid, AirTM is the best way to get paid in Latin America. We charge very low fixed fees, which makes ERTM a viable alternative for a micropayment. that is a payment that's maybe $50 in the less. And also instead of taking six days, which is very common for other e-wallets like PayPal, we take about 15 minutes. And that's why we not only give people a dollar access tool,

but also a connected dollar access tool because it allows people to receive cross-quarter payments. May them be from payments that they received were work, they did for someone abroad, or maybe because their family members live abroad and they just use their team to send them or family remittance. So would you describe your product AirUSD as a stable coin per se or more in the vein of a kind of PayPal dollar IOU? Well, it's kind of a mix in between the two

because it's not necessarily, well, it's, it's, it's backed by U.S.D.C. and by Dye. And even though it is not a stable coin basket living on a blockchain, necessarily our reserve is basically held in stable coins. That's really interesting. So you, because you're kind of a, the second derivative of stablecoins, you're a kind of stable coin IOU. But I guess that makes sense because you're, users don't necessarily want to transact on-chain and they don't want to hold private keys. So you include another level of abstraction on top of that. Yeah, cryptos are not very inclusive technically, just because they have a bunch of complexity.

I know that the space is working towards making crypto more accessible and that means lowering the technological barrier of entry to it. But in the time being, for the time being, we build technology for, from the ground up. We look at our clients, we say, hey, there's people that are not necessarily very tech savvy, but that need access to this new type of money. And crypto might bring us somewhat closer to giving them the financial service we need. So let's use this and that technology to bring whatever services we want to give them, but not necessarily, or that doesn't necessarily mean that we use the whole stack of crypto products.

natively to give her clients financial services. Do you find that your users are keen on determining that your reserves match your kind of liabilities? Is that something that they ask about or are they not necessarily too concerned about that? No, it's very funny. The space solves for problems that don't really exist. I mean, when you're talking to people and you're helping them solve these problems, they just want a dollar account.

They want to be able to send money to them from each other. They want to, yeah, they want to know it's a safe thing. They want to know that they're not losing a ton of money to high fees. They want speed. But all the other problems that the space is very keen and focused on solving. I've maybe heard them once or twice from. I don't know, hundreds of thousands of clients that we've serviced. Nonetheless, we do comply with, well, we are a regulated entity and we do comply with a bunch of regulation that makes sure that we're not doing any weird with people's money.

And we do not do anything with it that we can't, or not licensed to do. For instance, we don't, or we can't loan people's money out. We have a full reserve. Yeah. But that doesn't necessarily mean that our clients care about it. Yeah, that's really interesting. So are you guys U.S. domiciled in that case? Yeah, we are Delaware company. But just operational in a kind of in a variety of jurisdictions, I guess mostly in Latin America, right?

We have users in every single country in the world, but mainly in Latin America. We are primarily focused on being the best way for money to flow into consumers. pockets for cross-border payments from the U.S. into Latin America. We can deliver a payment better than anyone else in our opinion. Was it a deliberate focus when you started the company to focus on, you know, some of these inflationary countries in Latin America, or did it just turn out that way that they had an affinity for your project? No, we built RTM expressly for people in Venezuela and Argentina.

We, like I assume, a lot of people in a space at one point felt a deep sense of injustice when we heard that there were people living in countries where money lost its value and there were currency controls preventing them from having access to a stable form of value where a way to preserve their wealth. We thought or felt that deep sense of injustice just because, I don't know, we were libertarians, but even or now even more so, we feel there's need to give everyone access to a dollar account because we are even more married with our mission than never before. As we we work towards developing RTM and we grow and we're used for delivering, for instance,

aid to 62,000 healthcare workers in Venezuela where no one else could do it, then that reinforces the reason for us to exist. It makes it more, even more ingrained in our company's soul, the need for it came to exist. But yeah, that was our first thing and it continues to be, even though we have expanded our service offering to more countries than to service a wider variety of use cases. So I can see how you would be able to get local accrues. for your clients in terms of fiat off ramps in countries that have you know crypto exchanges where USC or die might you know eventually be convertible into the local currency so that kind of all makes sense to me in terms of the off ramp but in a

country like Venezuela where there are no kind of major centralized crypto exchanges how do you solve that last mile problem where you're taking us DC and you're trying to convert that into Bolivars and someone's bank account. So I think maybe I need to go back a bit for the first explanation of how RETM works, but essentially whenever someone, let's say a client, Nick wants to buy dollars in their ATM because he wants to make a deposit. He'll go into RETM, click on the deposit button. He'll say, hey, I'd like to buy $50. He'll submit this request to the network, similarly as you will request an Uber on Uber driver on the Uber app.

Then this order will be served to a bunch of agents. These are people, participants of the gig economy, they're looking to make money facilitating airtip transactions. Then one of them, say Ruben will accept your order, Nick, to buy $50 or to make a $50 deposit from me, Ruben, the agent. Ruben is basically, again, this person trying to make some extra money, some extra money and additional income. He already has the $50 pre-funded in his ERTM account.

Of course, it's AirUSD. And it gets escrowed. Those dollars get ex-escroat from my account and are held in this provisional, mean-es escrow so that you make feel safe to send money from your Bank of Venezuela account to my or to Ruben's Bank of Venezuela account. And whenever Reuben confirms that you receive the local equivalent of those $50, let's say it's a million bolivars, he will tell ERTM and their team will release that escrow to you. But then, Nick, if you are done saving the money, because let's say you've had those $50 for a month,

and now you want to withdraw because maybe you need to pay for your rent, you'll go into RTM, you'll click on the withdrawal button. You'll say, I want to withdraw, let's say, $25, assuming that you're going to $RTM, you'll click on the withdrawal button. $5. Assuming there is a 50% inflation now, you'll get the same amount of Bolivar's a million of them. An agent will accept your transaction. Basically, an agent will accept your order to sell dollars and this agent will essentially send a million bolivars back to your bank account from, and it's not necessarily the same

agent. In fact, it's probably not. And whenever you confirm that you received the agent's million bolivars in exchange for those $25, then your money. which was previously being held in this provisional escrow, will get released to the agent's account. And so that way, we are able to give access to dollars anywhere through our network of agents who are over-the-counter dollar market,

which is very similar to local bitcoins. And so that way, we won't really need USDC convertibility. We don't need a centralized exchange. And in fact, the main reason why Erichin was chosen for this is because it's very, very difficult to sense their RETAM. We have more than 20,000 agents just in Venezuela that are willing to take one of these transactions from one of these health heroes, for instance, at any given point whenever they want to withdraw from their RETM account through local currency. These agents, any one of them will accept the orders or the hero's order to sell dollars and we'll send them a

local transfer in exchange for those dollars. And that's how RTM works. That's how we're able to to, I guess, on board and off board, yacht in any single country. And the most important thing we do for the crypto space is that we are the best on and off ramp for crypto into any development nation. Similarly to what we do with Circle or with USDC and die, well, we could give any other crypto.

That level of connectivity to develop the world money. Okay, okay, so that makes sense to me. So it is very similar to the local Bitcoin's flow. Yeah. It's just that the asset in question is this kind of this US dollar IOU, which is being exchanged against the local sovereign currency. Exactly. And our agents are people that are more crypto savvy and they are able to using local

bitcoins or some exchange in some country get their hands on Bitcoin, Ethereum or die. And they can deposit directly those cryptocurrencies into ERTM. They could hold them as a cryptocurrency or they could sell it in exchange for dollars. And then those dollars are essentially AirUSD that they can later sell to our clients. Of course, then they remove one level of extraction from cryptocurrency and bring them to the level of dollars, AirUSD. And that level is compatible with our clients who are a bit less crypto-friendly or savvy. So what is the intersection with Bitcoin here? Because obviously we know, you know, local

bitcoins and Paxville and so on. Those are kind of Bitcoin-only marketplaces right now. They definitely have some vibrancy in terms of those markets down there in Venezuela, in particular. And that's been a lot of the story with Bitcoin as this kind of bridge currency. What is the intersection with Bitcoin on your platform, if any? as I said, every single dollar that exists in AirTM was at one point Bitcoin, Ethereum, or dime that we sold in exchange for dollars in our exchange partners. So all AirUSD was at one point, some form of crypto, mainly Bitcoin, that one of our agents sold in our market where, well, through one of our exchange partners in AirTM. so that he or she could later sell those dollars in the form of AirUSD, not in the form of Bitcoin, to clients who wanted to make a deposit in their key.

Okay, so that's the kind of cross-border liquidity, which initially greased the wheels and basically allowed Airtem to exist in the first place. I guess you guys wouldn't really be viable realistically if it hadn't been for those, for cryptocurrencies per se, right? exactly and that's why even though airtm to someone who was a crypto purist might not be a very crypto startup i see it or we see it in a totally different way airtm would not be possible without crypto and therefore it is a crypto startup yeah that's not in question for me and like also the fact that your reserve is held in stable coins uh that's also you know there's a big

in a section there. In terms of these agents that you have, are they kind of contractors or are they completely independent? What's kind of your relationship with them? They are independent. They are AirTM platform users and there are no different than AirTM clients. It's just that they do extra work near TM to make money. Okay. So they're kind of third party market makers which are active on the platform. Yeah, and you can think of them as the freelancer who's designing a logo on one screen, and then of the other, he has this ATM application open, accepting transactions, hoping to make, well, solid arbitrage opportunities or receive solid arbitrage opportunities.

They want to buy dollars for cheap and sell them for more expensive. So I saw some numbers about your user base. I think you showing about 500,000 users in Venezuela. Then I think there is this prior air drop, which I believe 60,000 users opted in for. So are those numbers kind of in the right ballpark? What are we looking at in terms of your sort of active user base? Well, active is a tricky word. But in essence, there has been more than 400,000 people that have.

have used their TM, well, one step up. There has been more than $1.2 million, a million accounts open. From those 400,000 have been used. And last month, there was about 120,000 of them that were active doing at least five transactions during the month. And are they primarily remitters? Are they kind of recipients of remittances from overseas? Or is there kind of of a circular economy element here with the app being treated like a Venmo alternative or kind of a mixture? Well, it's a mixture. I would say that the biggest use case is freelancers wanting to receive international payments

and using air cam as a way to receive that payment and then cash it out to their local money. As I said, because of a very low fixed fee, which is 40 cents versus sometimes up to $10, the other wallets being used in the freelancing space charge. We make payments that are $80 or less viable, and we are probably the best solution for that. Also, because they rely on pretty expensive and complex, heavily regulated, bureaucratic, cross-border payment, infrastructure, they're able to deliver cross-border payments or money to someone's bank account

in Colombia, for instance, in about six days, whereas an air agent can deliver that same payment in 15 minutes, which is just a lot better. And so that's our primary use case. And that's prominent basically throughout Latin America, because we all, including myself, I'm Mexican, have issues with connecting to the outside world. As you go south, those issues become greater and greater. The second largest use case is remittance, people receiving family remittances from abroad into the local country.

And that's a very close third with remittances, a very close second with remittances, with a sorry, wealth preservation, with people looking to save their money in dollars, so they could avoid inflation. And fourth is peer-to-peer payments, but not necessarily all within one country, but Latin Americans are pre-spread throughout the region.

It's very common for you to go see job opportunities elsewhere, not just in your country. And your camera is a very good way to stay financially connected with your family back home, just because Latin America is not very well financially connected. it's very difficult for you to send Venmo Stap payments throughout the region. That's really interesting. So you guys are kind of a liquidity and a liquidity pool trying to bridge the different kind of payments and banking systems,

which don't necessarily kind of play well together. In terms of identity verification, what's your attitude to that? I mean, do you guys have a rigid KYC process? I guess there's some kind of OFAC concerns to be aware of with Venezuela in particular. Is that something that you impose for kind of all user account types? Yeah, of course, we are registered with Vincent as the money service business. We comply with all their standards for our type of businesses. We make sure that we follow all their best practices to prevent terrorism financing and money laundering.

We run every one of our users regardless of wherever they're from, through their sanctions lists, O-FAC sanctions lists, and we also monitor transactions very closely to make sure that no one is doing anything weird. And if they are, then we file a suspicious activity report to FinCEN. And that those are, that's how we comply with, with FinCEN.

And even though we have users from all over the world, we make sure to put them through our American compliance standards just because we are an American company and we want to comply in the States because that that's a regulatory foothold to do what we do. And if we hadn't done that, there was no way that we would have gotten UFACs kind of checked to continue forward with the Health Heroes program, for instance. Sure. Yeah. So I want to get into that, but maybe before that we can talk about the other prior AirDrop. So you had this campaign, AirDrop Venezuela.

Tell me about that and what you were trying to achieve there and whether you kind of met your objectives. Sure. So about a year and a half ago, Venezuela kind of came on the world stage as the place where crypto would be adopted. And it came at a time when the inflation was at its peak. And Maduro had, the dictator Maduro had re-elected himself. And the crypto space was in an all-time bull market.

And there was a lot of money. And we had this idea to, well, rally the crypto truths and to help people in Venezuela get access to crypto money. just because in our minds, similarly as to all the minds in the crypto space, well, we believe that if everyone knew how to use some cryptocurrency, whichever they would avoid most of their problems with money. They would be able to transact freely to store their value in whatever type of money, and most importantly, to own it, to own their money.

And that's important because their money is being held in a banking system. control by a dictator. And so we tried to donate $10, which at that time was enough for a family to eat during two weeks, to 100,000 families or 200,000 people. And we tried to do that by leveraging our contacts in the crypto space. We got a decent amount of donations from the Bitcoin Cash community, from the Zcash community, and also some die. They were the main donors, Zcash, and those have, I guess,

Luke has always been a great supporter of AITM since we started. And this was another thing. they helped, but also the Bitcoin Cash community. And we ran these education campaigns to teach people about cryptocurrency and how they could use it natively with their own wallet, with their own private keys. We didn't go as far as to teach them how to use the address, but of addresses. But of course, we did show them how to, if they wanted to learn how to access that level of privacy in regards to their money. Anyway, we were only able to raise about, I don't know,

it was $350,000 at the time. It was a bunch of crypto, but it was in an all-time low. And we distributed that to 60,000 people. And even though we did not meet the goal of 100,000 people with $10 each, we did distribute a bunch of cryptocurrency to a bunch of people, and we did teach them how to use it. Most people decided to stay within the ATM account. They wanted to keep dollars. I'm not going to use the cryptocurrency because I guess it represents a higher level of complexity.

But we are evangelists in the crypto space, and we would not go back to that. time not to do it. Just because, hey, we all helped out. I'm sure those guys, the 60,000 individuals that got a donation were very happy when they did. How did you determine the eligibility for the folks receiving those donations? Well, you had to be Venezuelan with a verified account. That's it.

Okay. Okay. And did you, were you happy with the kind of the uptake there in terms of what those users ended up doing with the funds that they received? Well, I am money agnostic. I just think that the dollars are the best type of money. And if people have access to dollars and they want to keep their money in dollars, then so be it. who mind to tell them what to keep their money in? Well, of course, I have a preference for the dollars, clearly. But if they decided to go to crypto, then that would be up to them. And if they stayed in dollars, then I'm happy that that happened as well. I'm just happy to give them the option to doing whatever they want with their money.

Sure. So let's talk about the big news item here. I mean, this is pretty staggering to me. So, Reuters reported, and probably other bunch of news outlets too, so Reuters reported that the U.S. Treasury was actually unfreezing certain Venezuelan assets, not clear exactly which assets, but I think they were frozen by OFAC. And then Juan Guaido has said that he's going to be dispersing, them to health workers in Venezuela.

And then Airtiem's name came up repeatedly as the kind of mechanism for that disbursement. So tell me about how this got started and how you guys ended up partnering up with the kind of president in exile, Juan Guaido. Sure. Well, it all started about four months ago. we were contacted by President Guido's team. He was looking for a way to distribute these payments to people in the ground. The pandemic was just getting going, and it was clear that they were going to need help.

And they had already been looking for ways to distribute the money. There were other alternatives that were proposed, but at the end they kind of landed on their TM. They reached out to us. We had a few meetings with them and I kind of went to this undisclosed location for about a month. I lived there because we were having constant meetings with the president's staff trying to facilitate this flow. They have an economic council, so speak to that kind of helps the president take these sort of decisions and to to execute them they're represented by by kind of like an appointed person by each of the four main parties and then one of the one representative from all the minority parties just that the smaller parties are

also represented there and they all kind of have this group and and it's the Economic Council and they reached out to RTM and they kind of went through the process of applying for this license using RTM as a median to distribute these payments. It was a very long process. It involved many conversations with many lawyers and consultants. And it was next to them that we were able to present OFAC with. satisfactory license and that we got their authorization to distribute these payments. And we're very happy to be able to work with President Guaido because we believe, or I believe personally, that this is just a way to legitimize his existence and his presidency to the whole country.

there's a guy that not only has the international community support, but also that he is helping people on the ground, and we're just very happy to be the way to help people in the ground, to help all these healthcare workers that have been fighting the pandemic with very low resources, and maybe it can make a change. And yeah, I'm sure that this is the big. beginning of a new era for Venezuela and for other kind of countries in similar situations because it kind of proves that no matter how powerful you are, then there's ways to get

to give people access to financial freedom. And so that's a very big tool that has been used in the past to oppress people. And now it's, it won't no longer be the case. And so it's very excited. It's very exciting and we're very happy to be part of that financial revolution, representing all of you in the crypto space. So from your tone, it sounds to me like you consider Guaido the kind of legitimate president of Venezuela. Is that kind of a fair assertion to make? I do.

I, Ruben Galindo, of course, do. I'm not trying to put you on the spot and make any political declaration. So one thing that was interesting to me was that I didn't really see any comment from OFAC, from the Treasury, or from the New York Fed about the disbursement of these funds. But from what you're saying, it sounds like it's obviously real. I mean, we've seen it reported in the press. Should we expect some kind of forthcoming acknowledgement of this? because it sounds, you know, like it's the U.S. putting their finger on the scale here and saying, hey, we're going to effectively, you know, force Maduro to surrender some financial power,

and we're going to reappropriate that to Guaido to kind of use as he sees fit, which is obviously with this air drop to health care workers. So that's kind of a direct sort of political intervention. can we expect to hear anything from the U.S. government directly on this? Well, I could not tell you. I could not tell you all the information we get is directly from President Guido's team. And we are working hand in hand with them and their team staff to make sure that we are able to facilitate this well. and just applying for the license we did.

NoFAC has been kind of a very big effort for both teams. But I don't know, we don't ourselves have a direct line of communication with any of the people they talk to at OFAC. But they are in essence also not just necessarily. but the reason why we're going to be able to do this and why health heroes in Venezuela will receive this aid. And even though it's Venezuela's money, and Juan Guaido is the president in charge to Venezuela right now, and he should be able to do whatever he wants for that money

to meet Venezuela's agenda and to help Venezuela be a more, prosperous country. The U.S. at the end was the, or the U.S. Treasury and OFAC were the ones holding this money, and they were, they're the ones saying, okay, why do you can access it? So I guess you can expect something, but I don't know when. I don't know if these are only my, my thoughts, but if you go to OFAC, OFAC's website or the Treasury's website, you'll be able to see their latest news. I'm assuming that never they're ready, they'll communicate about it. Do you know what the actual source of the funds were when they were frozen originally? Well, it's funds that were owned by the sovereign country of Venezuela, a republic of Venezuela,

and now they're just at the disposition of the president in charge of the country. I haven't looked at the balance sheet exactly to tell you or their P&L to tell you where exactly the income came from. So we're talking about a material sum of money though. I mean, what Reuters is saying is that 62,000 workers are going to receive $300, I think,

which would net out to about $18, 19 million. which is definitely life-changing for the people that receive it, given the cost of living down there. How are you qualifying the recipients of this distribution in particular because it's kind of more narrow than the prior one that you did? Well, it's not us. We are just a channel for these payments to flow. And President Guido and his team, well, they are the ones who are telling us who to pay out to. But essentially every single, they had a process to onboard and to verify every single healthcare worker who could verify.

And it was open and open registration. Of course, they went through a process to verify that these were indeed healthcare workers. But everyone that passed that test, then became eligible. And they are giving the same aid to every single person without discrimination. and without this commission to each person's political affiliation, which my mind is very cool, because they could have been more selective, but that would not be in the spirit of this campaign because they're all helping and all working hand in hand to fight the pandemic. So they all deserve help regardless of what they think politically.

and also they also didn't differentiate between doctors or nurses. And that's all very cool. Yeah. So I guess the interesting development was kind of maybe not that surprising, which was that Maduro subsequently blocked the RTM website in Venezuela. Currently, I believe you guys are sort of desktop only, you don't have mobile. How did that kind of affect this process and what, if anything, are you going to try and attempt to do to route around that? Well, if you go on Twitter, you'll be able to see how President Guaido is undergoing tremendous efforts to educate people to get them to understand how they can access their ATM website by either changing their DNS or by using a VPN.

And the community, not only the RTM community, but just Venezuela as a whole. In fact, the whole Latin American communities rallying together to help these health heroes get access to their ERTM account by doing something that might not be so straightforward like installing it a key on your computer. And that's a very big effort. We, of course, knew that this was going to happen. So we were prepared. I was hoping that this would not be the case because I believe that even President Maduro

would have been, I guess, okay with people that need access to money to fight the pandemic, his own pandemic, to be able to get it. Anyway, we were sadly prepared for it and we did this and just press play in this campaign. We are launching other solutions to avoid the block very soon. You'll hear about it in the upcoming weeks.

And lastly, something that we are going to start to do is to help people in Venezuela understand that if they all had access to a dollar account, then doctors would not need to rely, or health heroes would not need to rely on the state-owned and controlled and police financial system. They could all just send each other dollars and decide the dollar is their own economy.

at least for the time being and therefore not need to worry about being prosecuted by the government or by the dictatorship. Yeah, and we've seen that spontaneous dollarization in Latin America before, with Ecuador being the most commonly cited example. So it's not like it's without precedent. And I think we have seen some bottom-up dollarization in Venezuela so far, mostly relating to physical cash, but of course that has many deficiencies. And I think a spontaneous dollarization that focused on digital dollars would be kind of

of more enduring and just work better for people. I think there's this issue with small denomination bills in Venezuela. Yeah, for sure. If you go into the RTM office in Mexico, the first thing you see is 10 million bolivars from 2017 before the reconversion. It's just a reminder for why we exist. You have to carry wads of cash to buy anything so that cash is useless. And in fact, people's economy is already dollarized. It's just that it's dollarized using a variety of dollar payment methods, anything from PayPal accounts, Neteller, P&E, Scrill, even Zell is being used, which is crazy.

because not people in Venezuela don't necessarily have access to a bank account that's compatible with Zelle, but rather they use their cousins or their mothers or their brothers account in the States to do transfers locally. However, banks started cracking down on it because you can't be loaning your account to your cousin to do transactions in another country, understandably. Anyway, it's kind of already dollarized. In fact, everyone already kind of knows it. It's just that you have to have dollars that are compatible.

That's why we want to, at least the people financially interact with doctors to have access to dollar accounts with compatible dollar accounts so that doctors can financially interact with them and therefore not have a need to go to bolivars to be able to financially interact with the people that they need to do business with. So I'd heard that Zell thing and I'd also heard that there was a crackdown in particular, I think, through El Salvador's derisking. it is interesting to see all of these dollar vectors being introduced into the country, not just cash, but kind of fintech apps, even if strictly speaking, the entities running those apps aren't too happy about it. I guess the last thing I want to ask is really, you know, what's it like running a company with such geopolitical stakes? I mean, this is, you've been thrust in, or maybe you dove into the middle of this conflict between effectively a dictator and then the president and exile.

I mean, are you concerned about, for instance, the actual personal safety of your employees that are operational in the region? Does that kind of ever cross your mind, those kinds of really physical risks? Of course, and at many levels. First, our clients, even though we were previously targeted by Maduro, because we are at one point when we first became the exchange rate reference for the country, they came after us and they tried to censor us. They blocked us before and we had to undergo this kind of crazy activity of helping our employees in Venezuela leave. through the border with fake passports, which is crazy. So we're not new to that. And our employees are not new to that.

And our clients are not new to that. Everyone understands locally that what they're doing is frowned upon. And they understand that this is the only way to do it. And we are there regardless of it because we believe that it's people's rights. and just kind of their birthright to be able to do whatever they want with their money, same as it is for Nick in the States. And therefore, we help them at whatever costs, but of course they face risks. However, one of our requirements to do this was that we received that vital government

would be willing to legally defend people if they got in trouble for using people. ERTM, given all the attention that we were going to get. So that's something. And as far as, I guess, my personal safety, of course I'm worried. Of course I'm worried because, I don't know, you're reading about Maduro buying missiles from Iran. And you're thinking, well, this guy's clearly in war mode. And AirTM is clearly being used as this tool there.

and I call the shots here. And so, well, it would not surprise me if someone at some point read, oh, your TM CEO is not dead in his appointment. Just because it's kind of what we're doing, you know, it comes with it. But I see myself as someone in the financial revolution fighting for people's liberty. and it's not a joke. It's not a joke. I don't take it as a joke.

I assume the consequences fully, and everyone that works near TM does so as well. We, of course, had talks with everyone on the team, and before this happened, and we were okay if people didn't feel comfortable, if they didn't want to assume the risk. But we've been working very hard for this. This is the embodiment of all of our work.

And this is really a dream control to be able to help in this precise flow. And it will be very open to work with President Guido in the future to deliver even more money to more people in need. When you started the company, did you expect that it would become so serious, so close? quickly. Did you think, did you kind of weigh the consequences of waiting into this potentially kind of monetary hostility, this dollarization event? Of course not, but we were expecting an economics Nobel Prize for the exchange rates in Venezuela. And we have an email dating back I don't know. 2015, where we joked around about that,

that if we were able to find the real value of money in a country like Venezuela, it would be a big deal. But we never imagined ever in a wildest dream that Airtem would be so political. Regardless, it became evident as we progressed that Airtm would be the only one, way to do something in Venezuela, if it ever, something like this in Venezuela, if there was ever a need to or someone ever came around to. And so we've been kind of used to that idea for quite

some time now, probably a year or two. Well, this is a fascinating story. I only knew bits and pieces. This has been very elucidating. And, you know, I really hope that you guys. are able to stay operational and circumvent these potential restrictions because it does seem to be incredibly important. And impactful in terms of raising the profile of the crypto industry, too, and crypto financial rails, which are becoming much more interesting. Yeah, I wanted to thank you for coming on. I think this has been an amazing story, and I'm excited to hear what the next chapter is.

Thanks, Nick. And just for everyone in the crypto space, listening to... your podcast, there is a ton of work that needs to get done in order to get these health heroes the aid they deserve and need. If you're anyone looking to help out, we are more than willing to include you in some level to make this happen. People with expertise in just cybersecurity to helping us avoid this types of censorship, I guess, attacks is more than welcome to help out. Also, share the news about what's going on. Let's try to make sure that people around the world understand what's going on,

how doctors are prevented, and doctors and nurses are being prevented from receiving help. maybe that will increase the tension or the pressure and maybe it will change Maduro's mind. In fact, it might be in his best interest to do that. Who knows, anyway, I'm not to political strategists like that, but anyway, people need help and we need to get it to them. So just sharing will be very helpful for that. lastly making giving access to people in Venezuela to other things or places where they can make money will also be extremely helpful for them so if you work at a company that gives freelancers jobs

then we are also a channel for freelancers in Venezuela to get access to jobs and to get paid and that would also be of great help now as the pandemic catalyzes the world's greatest economic crisis. These developing nations will go through even tougher times. So thank you for listening. Thanks Nick for the invitation to your podcast. And we'll be looking forward to talking in some months now about how this all played out.

Hopefully, and not hopefully, it will go out positively. it will be difficult, but we'll make it happen. Well, thank you for coming on the show, Rubin. I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. You got it.