TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #204: Max Keidun

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Max Keidun from HodlHodl to discuss: - HodlHodl's new non-custodial loan product - How lenders and borrowers interact - How HodlHodl's lending product differs from DeFi - What stablecoins are available - Prediction markets - Liquid - RGB - Integration with Blue Wallet - much more Follow Max on Twitter Check out HodlHodl Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. Matt and I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with good friend Max Keaton from HodlHodl to talk about the launch of their non-custodial loan product that they just launched yesterday. Really great conversation, covered a bunch of topics including how the product works, uh how it compares to similar products on defi how it compares to similar products uh in the bitcoin world uh some of the centralized products uh as well as uh more liquid talk in this podcast talk to rgb a little bit uh very wild integrations a bunch of stuff you're gonna hear it you're gonna hear it before you hear it i'll let you know this episode was brought to you by our good friends

at the motherfucking cash app you already know all about them all right they're holding you stack sats sats sats i messed up there they're helping you stack sats send sats receive sats and sell sats and we're saying sats sats sats sats because sats are the standard on the app and if you listen to rhr last night you would know that you can dca into sats daily weekly bi-weekly and if you want to front run matt odell you're going to wake up at 4 30 a.m east coast time and set a daily stack so you can front run him he's trying to front run the u.s market it on Cash App at 5 a.m. every morning. We are trying to actively front run Matt O'Dell. I'm going to make it a point to do that myself. So I'm going to set my alarm clock for 4.15

tomorrow, get up early, go to bed early tonight, get up early and front run our boy Matt on the Cash App. You can do that. That's great. On top of that, they have other products as well, including Cash App Investing, which lets you stock, stock, stack slivers of stonks. If you have a favorite stonk if you're into the stonk market and you're stacking stonks and your favorite stonks a little too expensive you can buy as little as one dollar via cash app investing on top of that they're allowing you to direct deposit paychecks into the app it's basically a new bank you get an account number and a routing number and you can use the cash app as your bank they have their boost program which allows you to go to partner merchants and excuse me and save

money you hit the boost you go shop at the merchant you get you get a certain percentage or dollar amount off depending on what the particular boost is at any given point in time cash that's building an incredible product very proud to have them as a sponsor so if you have not downloaded the app yet please make sure when you do you use the code stacking sats that's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're going to get ten dollars and ten dollars going to go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse enjoy this rep great conversation max is incredible dude huddle huddle is an incredible team and product very excited to see what they bring to market as we move forward into the future enjoy

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt.

We've got an early morning coffee rip here where I am. Our guest, it's not early morning there. Our guest is coming all the way to us from Latvia. We're sitting down with Max Keaton from Hodl Hodl. Just released a hot new product. We're here to talk all about it. Max, how the hell are you doing? uh we're doing fine sup freaks as you say uh hello everyone i'm happy to be here again

it's the second time uh the first one was we were drinking just uh before the christmas i think two years ago and then discussing all the whole stuff yes it is um yeah we uh at bitcoin 2019 we also were able to meet in person at a vineyard that was a great day as well yeah yeah yeah so and and then baltic honey badger i think uh at least uh at least matt was there we switched off as i remember marty was at 2018 i was at 2019 and hopefully we'll both be at 2021. yeah hopefully and also marty we had a pleasure uh to go to napa valley i think for wine drinking yeah that was was i was hoping actually to see multiple wineries but in fact it it ended with multiple wine bottles in one place so uh yeah great experience so far i really enjoyed that trip

um that was a fun well we uh we mentioned baltic honey badger right before we hit record you're telling us that actually not being able to throw it this year uh allowed you guys to get this product out pretty quickly so what's your year but what's your year been like why did you decide build this product and you're saying it's been it's been a bang up first day well actually we had this idea like uh since last year we understood that there's a you can use the same multi-sig tag that we're using in trading and prediction markets for landing contracts and uh we saw that there's uh multiple uh d5 products built on top of ethereum with the landing uh like with with landing in mind. I'm still not a big fan of Ethereum stuff but I think that you

can learn a lot in terms of ideas and maybe even bad experience or good experience something like that so I I'm still Bitcoin maxi but anyway we thought that it should be a good thing then I read in this winter I read the Bitcoin Reformation by Tour de Mister. He specifically mentioned that Bitcoin is a pretty solid liquid collateral, which is an obvious fact because in many traditional lending, you have real estate, you have cars, you have all that weird stuff that is not liquid. You need to go and sell it. Well, with Bitcoin, it's pretty obvious. You can go to any exchange or any trading platform and sell it pretty quickly so it's good collateral and then I saw the tweet by

Matt where he described his how would I say displeasure frustration this pleasure with block fee and I understand well there's actually there's a lot of centralized custodial lenders in Bitcoin and obviously the market is booming but there's no peer-to-peer non-custodial lending platforms and I honestly think that in terms of lending peer-to-peer can be way more effective way more user friendly and actually better than the centralized and custodial lending so yeah that's that was the general idea we started building this product in the beginning of this year what I did tell

you that if we would do Baltic honey badger this year the most probably we would postpone the launch of this product because like honey badger it's a great event everyone likes it I like it personally although I hate it two weeks before and two weeks after that I love it personally I love meeting people I I love the vibe but it takes so much time and resources so I highly doubt that we would be able to receive to release the landing platform like we did it yesterday obviously and I think if we would do a multi kind of budget that most probably we would do release the landing platform next January

someone like that so for us it's like we are disappointed that we didn't do a conference this year but well we have a solid product now and I'm pretty excited about that and yeah again the the market reaction was pretty crazy because like as I mentioned before that it's 24 hours since the launch we already have half a million of liquidity available on the platform and we already have multiple loans issued on the platforms to people are peer-to-peer lending and borrowing now so I mean I think this could become like your most successful product pretty quickly I'm actually a bit worried that this landing stuff could cannibalize the

trading part that we have and prediction markets because we thought we've put so much effort to that we hired a special UI UX designer if you will go like currently us is not available but as I I've already showed to some extent will be available in few weeks from now but you can go to the testnet version you can go and try to create an offer and you will see how simple is that that is we did a pretty extensive market research trying to land and borrow on centralized platform we did a comparison with it how they work how they do and And it's not only the peer-to-peer wipe and not doing KYC and being non-custodial.

No, it's actually in terms of UI, UX, it's way more simpler than using centralized platform. It's 10 times simpler, I think. So let's jump in and walk through the product. How does a lender and a borrower, how do they meet in the marketplace? What do they need to do to, number one, give a loan and then receive a loan? yeah how was how was huddle huddle involved and then uh really interested to learn about the particular stable coins that you guys decided to to work with as well yeah so i will start with the fi with the last question about the stable coins so we decided to choose seven stable coins

uh well obviously there's four types of usdt because it's the most liquid stable coin we have USDT on Omni, on Tron, on Ethereum and on Liquid and we have DAI, we have USDC and we have Pax. We did choose them because they're most liquid and they have a higher capitalization comparing to others and they are actually traded on multiple different solid platforms. We take the price feed from these platforms and that's why we choose them so how the process works well let's say you are lender I'm a borrower I create offer or you create offer we meet each other on on a platform let's say you have an

offer you're fine to lend me 1000 USDT on a liquid and I go to the platform I your offer I'm fine with your conditions like paying you 1% interest per month we create a contract upon the creation of the contract all the huddle generates a unique multi signature escrow on the public Bitcoin blockchain with three signatures one goes to lander one to the buyer and one to huddle huddle now I as a buyer see that this escrow was created I sent my Bitcoin as a collateral to this a multi-signature escrow when the collateral is there hodl hodl informs both parties that hey guys everything is good collateral is there you are good to transfer me liquid tether

you transfer me liquid tether click on the button i transfer the liquid treasure the contract is automatically goes to the status of uh being in progress and then after one month i return you your liquid tether with your interest and you release bitcoins from collateral to my wallet back that's how it works so because we're non-custodial obviously you don't need to go through the kyc all the lending and borrowing process goes through the through both parties like peer-to-peer and that's how it works and how do you guys do conflict resolution like if somebody doesn't release their bitcoin you're there to sign uh uh the cool thing about this product is that we only use stable coins and we can actually check the blockchain

explorers of these stable coins because each time you make a payment with stable coins you need to upload the payment link that you did that payment particular like for example when you are paying me alone in USDT liquid we ask you before you click on the button that I have made payment to that to add a a link to the blockchain explorer that shows that the transfer was made. So we verify this and with Stablecoin it's pretty easy to resolve all this dispute because everything is on the blockchain, whether it's Ethereum blockchain, whether it's liquid blockchain, whether it's, I don't know, Tron or Omni blockchain, whatever.

So yeah, that's how we verify this and in case if, for example, after one month I came back and they say hey Marty I don't have money to return you your loan we just liquidate this this this this this lending contract get liquidated and you will be repaid with bitcoins locked in this collateral so that's how it works throughout the duration of the loan as the price of Bitcoin max has a Yeah. All good. All good.

No worries. Sorry. I just closed the door. No, it's all good. Throughout the duration alone, as the price of Bitcoin is fluctuating, does the borrower need to add or add collateral to the contract at all? Of course. We have different options.

You can add more to collateral because you have a certain LTV ratio. If you go below a certain breach or certain level of this LTV ratio, not actually below the LTV ratio, but if it will go close to LTV ratio, then we will just liquidate you automatically. So of course you can add more to your collateral in order to balance the LTV ratio so you can send more Bitcoins to escrow. You can do a partial repayment of your loan. say you don't have 1000 liquid Tether at the moment but you have 200 or 300 so

you can transfer this and say I repaid this would also balance your LTV ratio or you can just make an early repayment like you have this thousand USDT and you want to return to make it like repayment earlier so and there will be actually more flexible options in future like repaying your loan partially with Bitcoin and with stable coins for example and all different types of things but why you have now is basically MVP so many more features are coming in great features I would say but yeah at the moment there's three different options how to how to uh not to be liquidated so on on march 12th when we had uh

the price fall that the drastic price fall that's when a lot of people kind of learned how these products worked right because their ltv ratio was falling and they couldn't get bitcoin into the services quick enough because fees spiked at the same time so i was wondering do you guys have any plan there i mean you have liquid tether on the right side maybe yeah liquid bitcoin support would allow you to get past that fee pressure right like if if people could enter yeah the funny thing about about the liquidation process that it's actually triggered automatically but you still have 24 hours in order to resolve this issue so if you say like hey guys the mempool is full i'm going to send this payment I'm going to do this still the the support support

manager can like can resolve this dispute in favor of the person who for example took like took up money and took a lot took a loan so there's different options also the funny thing is that we we did actually pretty extensive market research as I mentioned most of our competitors they sent to notifications like hey you will be liquidated soon hey you're liquidated like this we decided that we will send four different types of notifications starting from like when you have still when you have some still like pretty much amount above the LTV ratio and going lower and lower and lower so we start early and another

thing that currently at the moment you can only the the maximum LTV can be 70% percent and even during the march uh 12th bitcoin didn't uh fall that much down i think it was 10 or 15 still it's like 85 no i think it felt like 50 or something it was like fucking no the 50 no it was it was uh this fall was actually distributed to many days it wasn't like in one day you know 50 fall down but i need to double check as well but the maximum ltv that you can get is actually 70 so you still have 30 uh like buffer reserve let's say yeah but i guess where yeah my question is so right now liquid bitcoin isn't supported right it's just on chain bitcoin no no on chain bitcoin do you have any consideration of adding liquid bitcoin since we

already have liquid tether yeah we might think about it in the future but yeah it's it's always an option like liquid Bitcoin maybe there's RGB coming in you know with with all this lightning assets issued that might be an option as well at the moment we see that there's a demand for on-chain Bitcoin and actually we already did our research as well for this 24 hours the average ltv ratio actually now is 50 so still a lot of reserve there but anyway yeah we are thinking about other assets but now we just what we want now to do is basically add some features that could be useful uh for platform users and then we will start thinking

of adding new assets new stable coins and new maybe liquid bitcoin or lightning bitcoin something like that who knows so that's another question i have um with with liquid tether liquid has confidential transactions so you can't see the amount how how are you confirming the liquid tether is being like the right amount of liquid tether is sent by the it's actually confirmed by the borrower he he confirms that uh i've received everything fine he like manually clicks confirm yeah yeah yeah yeah so there's two confirmations basically one from the lender who sends this transaction he just uploads this and another one from borrower and the contract doesn't initiate till both confirm or yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah when they both agree

that makes sense so i guess actually like the erc20 the the ethereum stable coins are are kind of are more verifiable right on your platform because you don't need because it's transparent there's no confidential transaction yeah it's true it's true it's true but we will see again it's like you you never know and uh uh again i'm not like so much against ethereum not like i'm going to build something on top of ethereum but okay the stable coins are definitely the use case for for ethereum which which is fine you know if we say that both fiat and altcoins are coins then uh i would prefer having altcoins because at least they they they have some peer-to-peer stuff and with fiat you always have a middleman most of the time it's a coin

on the shit coin yeah well that's uh that brings up an interesting point like the different trade offs between the quote-unquote defy on ethereum and the products that you're offering uh which i think would be interesting to dive into because i think the product that you're offering is uh enough of a security trade-off that i'd be completely comfortable with it and actually probably more comfortable because of you guys huddle huddle being there as sort of like an ESCO arbitrator, whereas some of the other DeFi products on Ethereum are like automatic liquidation, like you don't even have the four notifications or anything like that that you would get.

Yeah, there's like, you know, we've had the small beef yesterday on Twitter with a couple of Ethereum DeFi proponents and also in Telegram I had a beef. well okay guys i i did specifically mention in in all interviews and articles it's bitcoin defy it's not ethereum defy you know you have a different story you have different tools you have a different it might be way more sophisticated in terms of doing very very smart smart contracts and doing you know decentralized oracles and governance and all that stuff okay fine i'm fine with that completely fine with that and many of these solutions are actually great just to watch and to to actually understand the idea behind them i'm not against that we learned a

lot from them but um the bitcoin is a bit different stuff i would say that there's it's not like in bitcoin it's not d5 it's more like semi-defi you still have some centralized governance or some centralized something points like arbiter who came in but again i did my own research and many websites that are um d5 project aggregators on ethereum they say they actually released projects that are not defied at all uh you know like they have a central authorities behind the product they can actually uh remove any country ban diploc form any user do whatever they want and many of these products actually works in the same way that hodl hodl works yet when you say it's a Bitcoin DeFi they become crazy and they

say it's not a proper DeFi you know it's like like I don't know it doesn't work like this and this is DeFi this is not DeFi so there's a Ministry of Truth who is offended somehow about that and they're crazy running around and saying like hey we have the the true defy you are not truly fine i'm fine with that guys you can call it just a like non-custodial peer-to-peer landing fine with this naming i don't care about the names i care about the results and about delivering good products and actually that's the very valid point because many of people who we talk with they say i'm fine with the not ultimate automated liquidation where i can you know for example maybe your oracle is wrong maybe uh the exchange that

you are taking price feed from hacked and the price of btc or btc versus usdt falls sharply there but it's actually not true because the exchange was hacked and then you have been liquidated because oracle told you that it's liquidated so i don't know there's always a trade-offs we are of course we are striving for a proper decentralization and we we most probably will add some features to increase decentralization of both of huddle huddle and both of landing platform but anyway it's different story you know yeah and it's it's interesting to see them these products growing in parallel and what will went out in the longer like 500 000 or excuse me yeah half a million dollars worth of liquidity in one day is pretty impressive and so you mentioned

there that you plan on building in uh aspects to your products that that add to the decentralization what what would those aspects look like well again we're we're looking to now for example we're taking price feed for your contract from most liquid exchanges like binance for example or Coinbase or Kraken, depending on the stable coin. We can change that to taking the price feed from decentralized oracles, like now happens in Ethereum, for example, which I find is pretty logical and it's pretty good idea, to be honest. Now, there's also in terms of open sourcing the projects and doing stuff like that, there could be some ways of decentralization, like building that stuff and again what Matt actually mentioned that liquid BTC versus liquid

Tether or RGB we can actually remove completely us as a dispute resolution and leave it all up for users you know some kind of ways of doing this lending stuff maybe without even involvement of hodl hodl so who knows I'm just you know we're just constantly exploring things and doing our own research but hopefully we will become more and more decentralized in any case and actually the funny thing about the ethereum people is that i recently like check it out i'm i'm always for any type of conversation i'm I'm not so aggressive anymore as I was like two years ago. I'm completely for listening and opinion,

but somehow I get a perception and a feeling that Ethereum community are becoming way more aggressive lately. And they were accusing Bitcoin maximalists that they are very aggressive and not tolerate anyone else. They're actually not better now. and and i think much worse uh in many cases because when you post something like hey guys we did build that we've been inspired inspired by multiple defy developers globally and they say well again it's not true defy your defy is bad defy it's not defy it's c5 and whatever

i'm like okay guys i won't spend my time anymore with you yeah the whole defy c5 memes a little exhausting yeah it's like the the these guys were like uh screaming about the tribalism now they're like pure essence of the tribalism to be honest like it's like i see where way more uh tolerate tolerant uh bitcoiners that accept other opinion uh rather than people who are uh in ethereum community i don't know maybe that's just my perception i could i mean yeah because there's definitely pockets of both sides right yeah it's uh everyone's a hypocrite yes see you i like to i just like to say see you on the field we'll see uh we'll see what happens yeah yeah yeah i mean when ethereum was an upstart like they were you know saying everyone

be inclusive and then once they got any kind of of market capitalization of course they started talking down on everyone else right yes yeah it's like yeah it's it's funny to see how people who are getting yeah they have a successful products uh and i'm pretty impressed by by some of them But it's funny how people are changing. I believe it's wrong, but again, it's just my single opinion. So I've been, I mean, both of us have been kind of, one of our things on this podcast is we kind of always shit on stable coins. And we say that they're not stable coins and that Bitcoins are stable coin.

But what's interesting here with this product, and I kind of wanted to highlight it, is, you know, you have two other products right now. you have predictions but you have your main product is buying and selling uh yeah and the main friction there with that product from what i've heard because it's not available in the u.s yet is the is the fiat side so yeah so when you trade altcoins when you trade like monero and bitcoin with each other it works really well but if you do if you do the fiat side you have the risk of chargeback depending on which fiat is used so i think it's really interesting with this

product you just said fuck it we're not going to support any traditional fiat we're just going to use all these different stable coins and let the user choose which which stable coin has the best trade-offs for them um that reduces a shit ton of friction and reduces a shit ton of risk do you guys have any intention of adding stable coin support to your buy sell product all right so it's actually already there so we have payment methods uh that you can go and choose and use stable coin so the same like same way you know bitcoin is locked in multisig and the payment happens with uh teaser or whatever oh you do now awesome yeah the the idea it's actually pretty easy to add a payment method any user can do that by themselves and the idea about the stable coins

is what uh we want you to have as less frictions when you are like interacting with with your counterparty whether it's lending or trading or whatever and then it's up to you how you will solve the issue of uh you know uh getting those stable coins into fiat i would say if we say like crypto or bitcoin allows you to be your own bank then as your own bank you need to solve the issue of getting your stable coin into fiat if you need that and that's it we just want to remove frictions between two people like lender and borrower in this case and leave up to borrower and lender to do whatever they want to do with stable coins like you know it's just a payment method but with less frictions yes and i want to be clear matthew uh i after having many

conversations with people like matt alborg i think stable coins are inherently unstable in the long run but i think they will play a a sort of stepping stone bridge uh role yeah as we as we transition to a bitcoin standard and there's actually now i know that there's stable coins built on top of rsk which is uh bitcoin uh bitcoin based uh i don't know side chain or language the guys who did that they're from latin america and they have a pretty interesting uh like community out there and i think they're like the the they're growing uh they've already approached us they want uh us to list uh their stable coin and uh actual liquid as well like you know it's it's on top of it's a bitcoin related product and you have usdt there which is like it's stable

coin yes based on bitcoin well yes definitely worth of of checking in yes yeah we had a very interesting conversation with a developer by the name of uh adam saltice last week who's very interested in liquid and we got a good education around liquid i think matt's a liquid bull now well i i think your product here with liquid tether could be like the first big retail use case for liquid yeah and actually adam yesterday already like showed us to some extent on twitter he mentioned that we're doing this and the guys are supporting us and block stream is listed as our partners on the main page of landing and we are liquid Federation members in the end so I think yeah I think like liquid tether can be

very much used and I will tell you one thing which is an interesting fact which didn't disclose publicly but actually the first lending contract that we had was liquid issued USDT versus Bitcoin so like use case is there I hope we will be able to help liquid and ourselves of course grow yeah it's again it's gonna be interesting seeing all these very similar projects on different protocols working in parallel i've always been under the impression that there's an order of operations to building out all these products i think bitcoin based on proof of work get the core protocol down do as little as you need to on the core protocol and then build these side chains

second layers like lightning third layers like rgb uh state change to to scale up and i think uh i think the second layer solutions are starting to surprise the market outside of bitcoin to the upside as as they become more fleshed out more mature over time yeah it definitely takes some time and i i wouldn't expect that like one year two years from the release we will we see some huge improvements but like guys are developing pretty awesome stuff both lightning and liquid and rgb so hopefully it will be huge success in the end yeah so talking about these second layer solutions particularly rgb and then for your predictions market do you think about incorporating dlcs at all um uh i know that uh there's teams teams who are doing this and

developers who are doing this we didn't research DLC because like last nine months we were like developing this landing product and took a lot of effort but anyway it's DLC is really interesting and we might consider it in the future for our prediction market but actually the prediction market currently It's underdeveloped by us because we actually made a lot of mistakes when we released it more than a year ago. Actually, we did a release when I was in the U.S. when we met each other in a winery. The case is pretty simple. We didn't give much effort.

We just wanted to build a product and see how it goes. So we didn't put a lot of work in that. in terms of you know spreading the news marketing and all that stuff and it's also in my personal opinion pretty bad in terms of UI UI UX but what we did we've actually three months ago we started redesigning predictions and hopefully by the beginning of 2021 we will release a new version of prediction which will be in like several times better user-friendly but this year actually allowed us to understand what our predictions valuable for and they're

only valuable for price discovery so we had like hundreds of different types of prediction contracts on the prediction platform and 99% of them was just bitcoin price prediction nobody cares about the political stuff nobody cares about sports event everyone only cares about the bitcoin price so we will yeah we will be focusing on crypto price prediction the platform will be very simple very easy to use and like it will be like a few clicks and you are ready to go with your prediction but we will use multisig for now for a back-end definitely multisig and we will see how the dlc will evolve maybe we will offer offer dlc stuff but to be honest i would say to you both guys i'm pretty skeptical about prediction markets in

general like you know i i don't think uh maybe we're too early there maybe uh but i don't think it's it's it will get huge traction in in in like upcoming years but maybe i'm wrong who knows i've been irrationally bullish about prediction markets for years now yeah me too waiting for them to explode i think like guys well it's it's obviously you know you can make a price prediction you can like uh lock into a multi-sig escrow bitcoin and you can get the like more bitcoin out of that if you're right or you can hedge your risk with predictions you know uh longing bitcoin in your spot portfolio and then making price predictions hedging the risk that bitcoin will fall eventually that's a good hedging tool but you know only me and couple other people thinks that

it's thinks that it's really bullish and there should be a market yet there's no market for that at the moment yeah it's been a big meme in the space like augur was very highly touted at some point um yeah i'm not a gambler so it's like doesn't really interest me at all and and actually i know personally from couple of vcs and from from from other projects that i follow that there has been a multiple prediction like platforms or projects in in couple of last years and most of them actually failed because like they don't get they don't get the proper traction that's it that'll be uh there has to be demand because online gambling is fucking massive like a a sports betting website is essentially a prediction market it's just you know centralized

and narrow focused yeah yeah but again you need to put a lot of effort towards ui ux and uh But multiple companies and projects forget about that. They think like, hey, Bitcoin is awesome. Let's build some mumbo-jumbo on top of Bitcoin. Everyone will use it because Bitcoin is awesome. And it doesn't work that way. You need to simplify stuff so my grandma can use that or anyone else, whatever. But you need to put a lot of effort to your UX, like really a lot.

like i would say like the two most successful bitcoin prediction markets are like bitmex and like nitrogen sports dot eu which nitrogen is sports betting and bitmex was no kyc price price speculation right yeah bitmex definitely is i think for a long time it will stay and will be uh the most successful prediction market out there or although they say they're not prediction markets yeah we'll see how the uh the kyc being added to that affects their liquidity um we actually matt we forgot to mention that on rhr last night we skipped that topic are they accelerating kyc yeah so freaks if you listen rhr we uh we meant to warn you if you're using pipmex they're going to ninja launch kyc on you no it's still not ninja you have you have till december 4th

withdraw your coin without kyc i think i think fifth fifth of november something like that that's for trading but if you want to withdraw you have to the fourth of december not that anyone should wait that long but still that's that's pretty good in terms of they have like the long dick of the law going after them and they're giving you that much time yeah 12 days we actually have a pretty interesting idea about the lending platform about new types of landing contracts i won't disclose it now because i don't understand until the end myself how this stuff works but romo was pretty excited about that he described it he it took him two days to describe this uh new type of landing contracts to me i i still didn't understand that but sounds awesome you know

how is our friend roman doing ah he's doing fine he's doing fine all good with him in like again a lot of work and he's doing his stuff I'm doing my stuff you know yeah shilling products all over the places so you said the the addition of this collateralized lending product helped you guys raise a series a congratulations yeah thank you thank you very much what what do you guys plan on doing that you're gonna hire more engineers try to build out the team or just definitely definitely we're going to hire more people not only engineers but also support members and of course the effort will be towards the engineering

like units but also supports as well and we're going to use it actually to expand to new markets like us for example and definitely going to spend some money on marketing because you know to like in uh in three years since the the we we started appearing on the radar we didn't spend i think our market marketing expenses for past three years are below 100 bucks something like that or or holy crap or or or maybe below okay maybe below 1 000 uh because uh obviously we we've used the word of mouth so people were just you know uh like matt he's he's been referring some people to us through twitter it's the best way the best marketing there is yeah organic hills yeah it's it's basically the best market we've we've actually spent a lot of money on developing

products and now uh we've released the landing part we're still in process of redesigning the the hodl hodl trading part we did 70 of our job this year we are still 30 we need like still 30 of hodl hodl trading platforming to be redesigned we already every everything is already in place we just need to complete all the stages and then we are going to redesign predictions and then most probably in my perception we will have uh pretty good tools to to sell them and to board more people so definitely we're going to increase the technical capacity of our team but also we're going to spend some money to the marketing because you know you see big custodial lending platforms they're spending a lot of money on the marketing and well they're getting back as

well so definitely for this yeah now i think another great marketing piece for you guys is the conference just the high quality the high quality of the conference and the word of mouth that comes after that it's an incredible two-day event yeah the conference is also of course it's it's like it's the only thing that we spend our budget on but uh we also uh we also get a lot from that uh but again comparing to like uh other like companies in the market it's just block fights does the exact opposite approach just massive amount of marketing spend yeah it's like just it's it's not so much money that we spend on conference yet we receive some some from the sponsorship packages that are there so also networking is very valuable so yeah

it is as it is that conference is one of the best of the year every time it's a fantastic fucking conference all the freaks are trying to make it out there especially the European freaks because it's very cheap to get over there and Latvia is beautiful

yeah and it's actually very cheap here in Latvia as well so it's not expensive at all yeah we had like an 8 person big corner steak dinner everyone had a beer and it cost like 80 bucks or something like that yeah it's not so expensive yeah that good brazilian uh steakhouse right um

meat is delicious over there yeah yeah next next time i will tell you i will i will uh take you to a latrian steakhouse here when whale ponder were were in this was in the steakhouse he told that it's second best steak that he ate in his life it cost him 30 bucks and i and i asked him what was the the best steak he told me that it was it was worth 300 bucks in new york something like that so like price versus quality was a top top notch in latvia so yeah hopefully next year i I miss everyone, and I want to organize an event again, but yeah, crazy times, guys. You never know. Yeah.

Keep pushing the products out, but let's talk a little bit more about your push into the US here. The lending product should be made available to US citizens in the next few weeks. How did you make this happen, particularly in like a non-custodial, no KYC way? We again, we're non-custodial, then we use only stable coins. We don't use fiat. So basically we don't have any locations because we don't have any fiat. So fiat is always tied to certain location, you know, like we don't have any location

field. being non-custodial being no fiat and lending platform is good to go but honestly we've also spoke with our legal represent representative in us he told us that actually uh hodl hodl is also already can be presented to us market but we're still waiting for some final approvals just to be sure 100 that we can go there and he specifically mentioned that it's mostly because we're non-custodial and according to guidance and release in us we are exempt from doing uh verification but again i i read the coindesk uh article yesterday about us launching the landing platform and they asked another lawyer who mentioned that it's still like

non-custodial tech and multi-signature uh company companies that use multi-six it's built a gray area so regulators still don't understand how to work with this but obviously again being non-custodial and being non-fiat is the way to go because again most of defy solutions like uniswap and all other big companies they're working with us doesn't care yeah no and i think i think just launch it and like let it let it proliferate and make it hard to regulate uh yeah so we're we're pretty excited you know and uh just spoke with the team and like in two weeks from now we are going to let us users to use lending and actually lending why us it's also pretty important because uh we researched the lending market and

most of the big companies uh again as i mentioned they're custodial and centralized but they are from US and they offer lending services to US citizens of course they offer fiat which is why they're why they do the KYC stuff and all that

mumbo jumbo but well we will use stable coins we will not offer by ourselves people will use stable coins so hopefully this will be a good alternative to people who don't want to go through the KYC and all that stuff yeah well very pumped for you guys to get this product out there and excited you guys raised

around and you're going to be uh building out your products week because matt and i talk behind the scenes hodl hodl is like one of the coolest companies and doing some of the coolest stuff in the space and you're just a small team in latvia pushing out very high quality products thank you very much but we actually have distributed team i'm the only one here so most of the people are distributed globally and uh like about this remote work you know i've been approached by when when this covid stuff started uh corona stuff started i've been approached by coindesk they asked me for a comment how the how this hotel deals with in this in these hard times you know back in the march i think or in beginning of april and i told them

well guys you'll be surprised but we we've been removed since day one so for us it's just another tuesday and like we're working as it was so yeah hell yeah um outside of what you guys are working on and huddle huddle what what uh what else in the bitcoin space whether it be at the protocol level second layers excites you or you're paying attention to right now um i'm definitely paying attention to rgb because uh i know team that works uh with rgb i know giacomo pretty well he was like he's uh inspired this project and uh i know like guys from pandora who are developing this stuff and other guys who are involved and again i'm not a technical person so i still don't understand how this stuff works but but uh at least i i saw what can be done with that or

theoretically what can be done with that and i'm pretty excited about that um can you jump into i don't know i don't understand technically how rgb works to be honest like i'm just guessing here so you if you want to discuss in details with me that this will be most probably like you're speaking chinese language and i'm speaking russian you know we won't understand each other so yeah we're i mostly follow rgb i follow liquid lightning and uh dlc as well and actually honestly some hardcore bitcoiners will hate me for that but i also follow the defi space in other uh like particular in ethereum i follow i follow this pretty closely uh i'm not never used any d5 products at all i'm too lazy for that but i'm following them pretty closely

i like the marketing that they do i like this crazy stuff with japanese food kittens and all that weird weird freaky stuff i really like that unicorns this there's so much fun in there but uh like yeah i follow this as well so and of course all the drama you know bitmex and okx and all this every day is a drama every day is some kind of fight over the twitter which which is amazing for me it's never boring it's never boring never boring never boring always always funny what um all right matt you got any more questions before we wrap up here i think there's like five people that understand the specifics of rgb yeah yeah most probably i'm trying you know i'm trying to learn more i'm also actually uh following a lot um all the wallet developments now there's so many

cool wallets out there now okay and and again there's always a drama between wasabi and samurai you know it's always fights never-ending story you know and um i'm following this as well uh all the things around coinjoins and yeah wallet is definitely well it's somehow i i never understood how wallets are earning their money uh but then hey wasabi and samurai coin joints there are i think there aren't enough money from that and um it's pretty interesting how how things will evolve uh on that end um yeah and again i'm

also following uh competitors uh like uh at least competing uh i wouldn't say competitors but at least similar products that are there on bitcoin and um yeah that are built there so that's why i do on the topic of wallets we should just touch on real quick uh the hodl integration into blue wallet do you yeah we actually yeah well it's like blue wallet guys did amazing job it's pretty easy you can you can buy it you can basically stack sets through blue wallet so the blue wallet is non-custodial hodl hodl is non-custodial so you basically can can you're not leaving blue wallet and you're like buying stacking stats through your wallet in a non-custodial way and what is great about that not

many people know about it but you can actually link blue wallet with cold card so blue wallet will be a watch only wallet and cold cards will be your like basically cold storage so you can use blue wallet as a trading terminal by some sets on holo and then transfer them directly to cold card which is pretty amazing if you think about it and so yeah the blue wallet integration continues and we're about to returning to landing platform where we're going to be most probably first platform that will have API so you can you will be able to put a landing markets in hodl hodl to your wallet functionality or

any other any website there is so we're going to build an API for for for the lending part as well and yeah so integrations with blue wallet is an ongoing process they did a pretty amazing job and we have a API life and we're discussing now several other integration with other wallets hopefully at some point holo photo will became one of the main liquidity providers for non custodial wallets out there I did yesterday I spoke with guys from other wallets uh they're pretty excited about what we did with the lending part and they they also want to integrate that so yeah that's pretty crazy how it's all coming together um yeah you know

yeah like non-custodial buying non-custodial storing and eventually you are in control of your funds the way bitcoin was meant to to be used right it's uh yeah i think there's an order operations to all this freaks it's going to take time but slowly but surely it seems to be coming together yeah it's going to take time and my my honest opinion and i know that many people will again say that i'm it's not true i i'm not i'm not right in that in this case but uh i i don't think that at some point non-custodial trading in bitcoin particularly will surpass the custodial trading because you know there's a huge volume some centralized exchanges people still prefer to use that most of the people don't understand the case with

giving your data to a third party you know they're fine with that they there's a trade-off between you know keeping your privacy and having the opportunity easily buy like from your payment card or whatever so I don't think that we will see soon enough that non-custodial trading is actually becoming bigger on top of bitcoin becoming bigger than custodial but uh in case with lending i do i do believe and i do think that non-custodial lending can beat custodial one because it's like still too early in that market and we still have chances interesting no and it yeah if anything it just it's good to have as an option the non-custodial buying and selling and then yeah of course of course you know yeah and

the lending market especially if uh people are able to spend the stable coins easier uh moving into the future makes a lot of sense no i mean i think this lending is going to quickly become your biggest product like i think i think you might have nailed something here and i and it's kind of funny because i didn't really think about it but when i as soon as i saw the launch i was like damn this makes a lot of sense you know it's like the funny thing about that is that uh again returning to the fiat part uh we've had liquidity providers from let's say asia or eastern europe who are saying like my market is too small for me i want to go outside i want to trade with people from latin america let's say or africa and they are actually limited by fiat because uh they are

there's no opportunity for or it's very hard for example for a person from russia or china to open a bank account or payment account somewhere in europe and trade in euro and here we're just eliminating the borders basically you can you can lend money sitting in china to a guy who's who is borrowing from brazil or you can do you can borrow money from uh i don't know any anyone in the world and the funny thing that you only disclose your crypto address so basically stable coins allows you to be to have as maximum zero kyc level as it as it possible at the moment in there so you don't disclose any banking details uh to your counterparty so it's pretty amazing because you remove the borders you can land and borrow from anyone in the world not knowing who the

person is it's pretty insane and again it's better for the user at the end of the day too which is yeah yeah yeah i know and also the great thing we don't decide what are the rates and what are the ltv ratio it's it's pure market you know you go to the offer list you see how people are putting their offers what are what is the sentiment uh i think the stable bitcoin market is the bigger ltv ratio is there the less uh interest payments are here the the less stable bitcoin market is the smaller the ltv ratio is uh the bigger interest is there so it's it's like self-controlling platform you know it's like people are market are deciding which are current conditions at the moment yeah yeah no i think you'll find a much more accurate interest rate in this scenario

where the order book just arrives at what the market deems the to get the best interest rate at the time which makes a lot of sense yeah yeah yeah it's true yeah well i'm pumped for you guys thanks uh thanks for coming on and and speaking with us about this product uh very excited to see you guys are growing your product suite you raised around and you're going to continue building this out and uh just very happy for you guys in general thank you very much guys thank you very much it's always a pleasure for me to speak with you actually and uh i hope we will be able to do this in real life like in mid space as they say so we will we will this isn't going to last forever don't worry the feeling is mutual we appreciate you yeah yeah yeah yeah you want

to wrap up or no no just i'm i'm pumped for this uh and i look forward to sharing beer with you again soon okay cool thank you very much like in two weeks guys hopefully maybe a bit earlier but you will be able to at least to check it out you know but you can go to the testnet now and check it out already the testnet version it's there it's available very sleek again the uh the the investment in ui ux uh is is evident in this product you can really tell cool thank you very much all right thank you max appreciate it um that's all we got today freaks peace and love