The Pomp Podcast - #535 Wouter Witvoet on Decentralized Finance

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

Wouter Witvoet is the CEO at DeFi Technologies (NEO.DEFI) and previously founded SecFi.  In this conversation, we discuss decentralized finance, why he launched a public company, investing in Sovryn, NFTs, current adoption cycle, the legacy system, and what happens next.  ======================= Polymarket is the world’s leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most pressing global questions. Choose from a variety of markets to trade: Will Trump launch a new social media platform? Will NFT trading volume continue to skyrocket? With over 100 million dollars traded in the last 6 months, Polymarket is the go-to platform to trade on the odds of future events. Think you know more than the market? Trade on your beliefs and earn a return if you’re right. Want tomorrow’s news today? Use Polymarket to see real-time data on what the market thinks will happen. No fake news, no pundits without skin in the game. So, head over to polymarket.com and make an account today with the referral code “Pomp.” Every Monday until May 10th, you can win $500 by participating in the #PolyWhale Twitter giveaway. Click on the link for more info: polymarket.co/PolyWhale ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Wooter Witwit is a CEO at DeFi Technologies and previously co-founded SecFi. In this conversation, we discuss decentralized finance, why he launched a public company, investing in Sovereign, NFTs, current adoption cycle, the legacy system, and what happens next. I really enjoyed this conversation with Hooter, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk to you about our sponsors. First up is PolyMarket, the world's leading information markets platform, where you can trade on the most pressing global questions.

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as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Wooter here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Anthony. Really excited to be on. All right. So I'm going to cheat. We're going to start off with a bang. If all of DeFi and decentralized financial applications, regardless of where they get built, if it all works, what does the world of finance look like? What is the dream of all of this? So where I got so excited is my previous company that I built, SecFi, which some of you

will know, which raised a lot of money, $700 million in total, but in a completely centralized finance environment with all the transaction costs involved, including swift wires that cost me 50 bucks to make, I need to wait for a Fedwire cutoff date sometimes when we do options financing, like all these inefficiencies that we see in a centralized finance market. In a future where DeFi just drives a lot of these processes, I see a much more sort of frictionless environment where even, you know, you and me, Anthony, we can trade our shares if we want without a broker, intermediary, custodian for which we need to pay all these fees and many of these other applications that we see that just gets me so excited just based on the world that

I'm coming from. And I think that's really what, you know, what I see as sort of, you know, the real future looks like, if you ask me. For sure. And so when we start talking about decentralized applications. Is this something where you're thinking, hey, an entirely new world is going to get built and it's going to basically be the challengers and it's going to be exclusive of the legacy players? Or do you see a world where those legacy players eventually are going to come in and they're going to say, hey, we have to adopt the decentralized applications and kind of play in this new world because that's where all the value is going to flow? So I think you have always two camps, right? You have the sort of crypto or DeFi purists that say,

you know, DeFi will revolutionize the world of finance. It will completely replace the existing system. I'm more of the camp that say, yes, some applications, you know, might be sort of completely replaced, but we also have to be realistic. Like governments are not standing still. You have organizations, even such as the SEC that are increasingly looking at like, hey, how can these technology developments be a benefit for us? How can we sort of help the market sort of regulate this and adopt this? And I would say that, you know, the decentralized technology can actually really also help centralized institutions

or institutions that we have today just be more efficient, you know, reduce their cost of operating business and therefore in the end reduce the cost that it that it costs consumers to access those products. And I think we will see there therefore like a blend where these technologies can also help, you know, some of the products that we see today in the market. Yeah. And it's fascinating talking to you about this because you built a very successful kind of centralized financial application, right? And a product in a company. And so talk a little bit just about kind of the cognitive dissonance there, right? You were very successful building

the centralized entity. Now you're spending most of your time in the decentralized world. Is it something where you're basically saying there's a binary winner take all system? Or do you think that actually that centralized world will also still kind of coexist? Maybe it's not as popular, maybe it doesn't kind of die right away, but you know, there is some value still left there. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what we built at Sackfire for those that sort of don't know that are tuning in, we kind of pioneered the concept of providing financing based on private company assets. So we helped a lot of people in the early days of Uber, exercise their stock options got them to finance and to pay for the taxes and so on and so forth but what we had to

sort of develop from a central you know central finance point of view is we need to make sure that you know the shares can't go anywhere where we when we have to financing so we need to find sort of a custodian solution we need to make sure that we have our ducks in a row in terms of the financing so at onshore funds offshore funds all kinds of legal that sort of had to sort of all address this. And the reason I got excited about DeFi is when I was speaking to my co-founder at the time, Olivier Rossi-Newton, who co-founded Hive, it's like if I had to do SecFi all over again, there would be so many different instances where I could actually leverage DeFi or a smart contract to make that entire process more efficient. So I don't think it's a winner

takes all market. I'm also very excited to see applications that will live a little bit on the edge of centralized finance and DeFi, because sometimes you still require some kind of authority, even in decentralized applications that, you know, that brings some governance to the table effectively. And I think, yeah, that's where we see, we'll see a lot of innovation happening for sure. Yeah. So let's talk about DeFi technologies. I'm an advisor to the company. You and Olivier came together and started this. Let's talk about just the impetus for the idea, You're at SecFi. You guys decided you're going to do this. What is the original idea? Why do it? So when Olivier started Hive four years ago, he had a very simple thesis of why this company

would work. Now we can go on Coinbase, which went public today and probably see a very amazing debut, where people can pretty easily buy Bitcoin. If you look four years ago, there's people still scrambling, where do I go? Which parties do I trust? There was still a lot of hacks at the time. Now a lot of these platforms have matured. But what he, in the end, and this is the genius behind what he did with Hive, he said to people, okay, look, you want to get exposure to crypto, exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum, just buy my stock. Now we're in an environment where we've had Bitcoin, we've had Ethereum smart contracts, we had a little bit of the ICO craziness that happened. But now we have an evolution of technologies that are all around

DeFi and have all these new sort of opportunities with them, whether you're talking about yield farming, staking, liquidity pools, et cetera, that have all been developed, but increasingly complicated. Like I have a computer science degree. It takes even me a long time to make some of these trades. So coming back to what Olivier did, what DeFi technology really is, is like, look, you want to get exposure to DeFi in a diversified fashion, just buy our stock. So we're giving retail investors basically exposure and also institutions to what I think is the next wave of financial innovation that is happening and bringing that to the public markets. For sure. And walk through a little bit in terms of just the way that you get a company like this into the public market and then how you capitalize it. Yeah, so the way that we got it into the market is we started DeFi as a private company.

We found a really good public company to work with in the Canadian market. So we took over that company with our company, DeFi Holdings, and then effectively did an uplisting to the NEO, which is a tier one exchange in Canada and has a superior corporate governance, especially if you want to attract institutions. And how you capitalize it is we really focused on, you know, we have had a couple of different assets already that we know we wanted to build out. So one of them is we have an ETN business, you know, where we create, where we basically allow people to buy exposure to DeFi in their brokerage accounts. You know, just like you have Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and Ethereum Trust. We effectively have now developed the first Bitcoin Zero, Ethereum Zero, coming out with some of the protocols that are on DeFi, such as Aave, Synthetic Curve, and et cetera.

And for that, of course, you need capital to sort of run that. So we did a private placement in the quarter one of this year of a $10 million Canadian, and we'll expect to sort of capitalize the business going forward as well. For sure. And as you kind of think through this, this is a whole new sector, right? I think a lot of people don't understand that just because you understand finance doesn't mean you necessarily understand decentralized finance and a lot of what's happening there. Talk to us about just what you're seeing kind of on the ground and in the trenches, right? So there's lots of activity. People are really excited, but what are you actually seeing being built and where is the adoption occurring of these products? Yeah, I think, I think a really big adoption also when

I just empirically, like if I just look at my network and stuff and how people sort of transact, You see a really big adoption happening, for example, on stablecoins, right? So you have, of course, we have USDC, we have USDT, but you also have new protocols such as FRAX, which are sort of more sort of algorithmic stablecoins. And you just see now that those things are becoming more stable, the SEC came out with some really positive guidance around stablecoins. You see that people are now increasingly more just accepting that they can wire USDC to each other rather than making a bank wire.

And I think that frictionless payment sort of system that is happening on the blockchain, I think that's one of the things I am super excited about. And where you see a lot of, I think, good innovation happening is, for example, the price discovery on Coinbase that is happening was already public on FTX, for example. So Coinbase shares were already traded, I think, for about three to six months on, for example, FTX, where people were doing price discovery and it seems to be pretty close to where it's going to open open today i think other areas where we see a lot of like uh innovation of course happening is is in uh is is one of the key use cases is lending right so you have anywhere from aveda curve uh there's there there's a lot of

stuff um uh stuff happening there and it's it's kind of very interesting to follow sort of where that's um where that will go but these are kind of the three sort of main areas that i that i that i'm tracking and that sort of i'm following and i'm excited about for sure and so when you think about the team walk us through kind of who makes up the team today and then how you guys are thinking about adding people in the future yeah we have um we have a pretty distributed diverse team so um uh maybe just talking around like what what we do so so we have of course our our etn business so we acquired an asset that uh olivia and i also built the last three years uh called velour structured products we have um we have an amazing ceo in place that called uh called diana

bix who used to uh head up hsbc uh innovation and uh also their their sort of crypto crypto division and a lot of the um the things that uh hsbc did in that market so she is she's running that business for us uh together with johan buttonstrom which is the one of the founders of coin shares which also went public uh recently so as the wealth of knowledge on the on the kind of the trading side we have another trading desk in uh switzerland um where we have most of our trading happens some some seasoned professionals from uh from ubs and the likes and um and who sort of oversee that business then on our our venture side so as you may have seen we invested of course in sovereign which we're super happy to sort of join and we have an entire team in

on the west coast that kind of sources all those deals and that's really great right because for public markets investors especially retail investors they're just not going to have exposure to this type of deal flow. You also know probably it's really concentrated in the 1% of the 1% that sees the best deals and is able to evaluate them. And we do that for our customers so that we provide them early access to this. And then we have my co-founder Olivier Rossigny, who founded Hive Blockchain Technologies and is one of the most traded companies in Canada pretty much every day one of the most liquid uh so he has a lot of wealth uh wealth of experience in kind of the canadian capital markets and kind of also growing a public company and that's kind of the sort of i

would say like the main um the main team and then we have have also an amazing guy um curtis on board who does all of our marketing and kind of helps to sort of build the brand and you know just launching the website and and and oversees all of that so that's uh that's kind of like how everything comes together. And then you asked about hiring. Yeah, we're definitely looking to hire on the ETM business. So if I can pluck that, I will pluck that any day. Traders or on the tech side always need help there. So that's kind of where we're really looking to expand coming a few months. For sure. And so talk a little bit about this idea of, hey, there's one stock somebody can buy and they can get exposure to kind of multiple businesses within this kind of subsector really

of the crypto industry. When you talk to investors, what's the pros of having that single stock to buy? And then what are the risks or the downside? Yeah, I think the pros, I would really compare it to investing in Coinbase. So if you're investing in Coinbase, even though, of course, we're not a $100 billion market cap company yet, but if you could just compare it on the investment pieces, Coinbase will make money, whether it's really Bitcoin that's going up or whether it's avi or something else they they just if you invest in coinbase you're probably taking a long-term uh a long-term long position on actually where crypto is going and how that company is performing so i think for for investors we're really good in that kind of concept right

whether people buy our etns in ave or in synthetics or in curve or or any kind of other it doesn't really matter like we make money of course on on kind of the products that we offer and same thing goes for some for the other products that i mentioned before so that's really the advantage that you can take a more sort of diversified view and that's really good for people that don't want to that don't fully understand maybe like what kind of uh exposure to buy and defy um and the downside is of course is that you probably if you really understand let's say frax or you really understand uh synthetics or ave and you know you could of course have superior returns by simply buying that one token or that one protocol that you really like. So that's kind of one of the

downsides. A more diversified approach also means that you have a sort of dampened return on some of the outliers. That's kind of what I would say. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. Also, I think part of this holding company strategy, if I can call it that, is you get both investments plus operating businesses as well, right? And I think that's part of, you know, I first started talking to you guys about it. What becomes really interesting for somebody like me is like, one, I get to learn a bunch that's going on. But two is you have the direct capital exposure, but also even in a bull or bear market, you've got these operating businesses that should perform as well. And so it's kind of a very unique structure. Let's talk a little bit about NFTs. It seems like everyone

is talking about that every day right now. What are you guys doing there? What are you personally interested in um and then kind of how do you see that industry as it continues to evolve yeah so so personally like i'm super bullish on the entire space i think that um when you when you look at uh so i'm uh i'm actually by uh you know when i was 16 i was actually a professional professional gamer and i still remember that you know you have you know what always made the rounds is like who had the coolest wallpapers right it's always being showed around and it's all these people that do the animes and there's a real market for these type of digital assets and i think it is beyond what people believe there to exist right there i think there that market is actually bigger than

people that people think but they're you know up until now there's not really a way to you know reward these reward these creators right we've also seen the entire sort of meme wave where there is a real there's a real like want of people like i want to have that meme because that's the coolest meme and there's this entire community which i think people are overlooking that that creates value and this is not really so different if you compare it to maybe and i mean that not without disrespect uh with with disrespect for something old money that wants to have this fan go in their house you know or wants to have a certain monet or something else it's just a different way of doing things and a new sort of the new millennials and stuff the new generation is much more you know

open to how art is being created and i think that is a fluid concept so from that perspective i'm super bullish on the industry i think it will have this natural this is a market that will naturally have its like sort of ups and then it will cut people will kind of see where it settles i think that will definitely happen like i tried to you know i tried to be funny and tried to buy an nft for a friend of mine and i couldn't find something under like 1800 or something so and so that was kind of something that i cut very short um and it's something from a d5 perspective that we're we're looking at as well so we're we're not really in the in the in the business of of trading you know these nfts i don't think that's our expertise but we we would be looking at like interesting

assets that we can you know potentially collaborate with fund uh take a minority or majority position in uh in order to you know grow the sort of um uh yeah exposure that we can give our users to what is what is essentially also a decentralized market so yeah that's how we're looking at it Got it. And so when you start thinking about, let's take NFTs as an example, it seems like it's a very global market, right? This is not just a Western finance market. Talk a little bit about just what you're seeing across the globe. If there's specific, you know, maybe geographies that you're really excited about, or if there's conversations that you've had with people around the world, any kind of learnings or takeaways for people on that kind of global perspective? Well, what I think is interesting from a global perspective is that, you know, I'm a big fan of, you know, a few Japanese artists, for example. And if I want to buy, you know, on Artsy, for example, I've been looking for a really long time for specific, you know, pieces of art that I would like to buy from this artist. And they are like, they're prints, you know, but there's a limited edition prints. And where I'm going with this is that a lot of these prints are being sold in China, you know.

and and the thing is there you don't really know like if it's real you know or if it's maybe a counterfeit or there's a lot of things happening there and i think what makes it so interesting from a global perspective is that nft can really bring with it sort of a provenance for those who don't know that you can kind of like trace you know from from who it owns today all the way back to its owner so in a traditional painting you you could all go in a van gogh you could go to like the museum that currently holds it all the way to when van gogh actually painted committed, for example, that needs to be there, otherwise your painting is not considered real or genuine in most cases.

And what is interesting for the NFTs is that I can just trace what the provenance is. I can see it on the blockchain. So from a global perspective, I think it really broadens your mind in terms of buying NFT art from, for example, China or Japan or French art that is owned by a Chinese person where you may consider like it might be thought in a traditional world, but now I can actually trace it and look at it. So I think that makes this world of art much more global and much more interesting and inclusive. That's why I'm on it. Yeah, no, I think that makes a ton of sense. And so let's go back to this idea of there's a new world and kind of an old world, right? And those

aren't necessarily completely descriptive, but we'll use them just for the conversation. And so if we start thinking about like the analog legacy world, it seems like some of those organizations have woken up, right? The reason why Goldman Sachs has been around for a century is because they've navigated every technology trend as it's popped up and become a threat, and they figure out how to kind of do it. Are there specific things that you think in DeFi, regardless of where it's being built, that will naturally be the first entry points for some of these legacy organizations? Is it decentralized lending? Is it, no, they're just going to go trade on decentralized exchanges? How do you think they kind of interface with a lot of this new technology

first yeah it's it's a very good question and i think you know organizations such as you mentioned like goldman sachs and stuff and then this is of course this is not really based on my conversation with goldman or any of these institutions but if i if i were to look at this i would probably look at okay what are my operational processes in my own business and how can i make those more efficient right so for example um you know ripple maybe to use them as an example like in the back end and some of these processes whether it's visa or mastercard or some of the others that they have in kind of their, you know, sort of network, if you will, they're already using what is essentially blockchain technology to make their own internal processes, either more

efficient or more transparent, or just saver, right, because everything is sort of built on the blockchain. So I think where you see the, you know, sort of low hanging fruit is probably going to be those solutions. I think if you look at really like decentralized lending, I think institutions will need some time in order to really become the major liquidity providers. I think currently it's still like high net worth, maybe family offices at the maximum that is kind of in this space.

It's a lot of individuals. I think there's stuff that needs to be answered around. Also KYC, like who's the other party, AML. And I think there's a lot of interesting things happening there, for example, with Shift Network, where we invested, that is kind of addressing some of these things. Before that, we would see real adoption there

But that's kind of like how I see maybe some of the paths there to to to to adoption in a more traditional sense. Yeah. And what's so fascinating to me is the conversation and question around, like, do we need the legacy institutions? Right. If the legacy institutions never come in, can this be successful and can it kind of stand on its own without any of their support or participation? Yeah, I think, again, it's like it's like, you know, it's where sort of the real future and what sort of the middle, you know, where are we? Where are we today? And I think, you know, DeFi went, of course, from about 500 million two years ago to now $52 billion market cap. But the same thing is, is like, which is amazing if, you know,

that's your market cap of maybe Uber when it went public or something. But if you look at the global financial market, I mean, we're talking about a different animal, right? We're talking about trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. If you just look at the end of the U.S., their stimulus latest stimulus package, that's 1.9 billion. But it's still like a drop in the water. if you look at like what the global financial system is so the answer there is kind of like

will we need those institutions well those institutions are funded typically also a lot by by lps that will have their own cash right so maybe it's it's part of the institutions maybe part of lp money that will kind of move into this space but yeah i do think you need the big you know some of the big institutions to also come in and then we're not talking about 52 billion anymore which could be a single fund right we're looking at multiples of that and seeing that grow like that. And then DeFi needs liquidity, right? That's where a lot of the yield is coming from at the moment. So there's lots of opportunity there. Yeah. One of the most interesting aspects of just all the on-chain applications is this whole idea of the transparency of data, right? And the fact

that Coinbase versus, let's say, Uniswap. Coinbase, we all wait for the financial kind of reveal, right? We wait for the conference call. We're all trying to figure out what are they doing? And then we basically get this periodic check-in on a quarterly basis. But with a decentralized exchange, we get to see it every day, minute by minute, and we know exactly what's going on. And so it's like, as an investor, which one is actually better? Well, I would love the real-time data rather than the kind of static periodic data. And so it just feels like some of the centralized companies aren't ever going to be able to get there just because of the way that they're built. But the new kind of era or the new industry is going to eventually become

default and the standard that's right and even if you look at today right i mean coinbase and i mean the markets were open i think 9 9 30 a.m um you know coinbase is you know supposed to be public right but it it's still at 250 at least before i checked before the call and that's because it takes some time for these systems to work and the shares to list and you know which and it's you know at the end of the day it's the system works but if you look at like you know let's say that you want to list uh you know you want to list sovereign you know what we did today you can do that probably on ftx and it will it will be listed like you know the next second right if you prepare it properly so i think you know there's a real and that's i think what people love in the end

and that's what people get also sometimes i wouldn't say addicted but they get addicted to the sort of screens and like playing with it it's it is um it's creating a lot of value for people and the information is very helpful for people to uh yeah to kind of trade and make up their own minds so that's i definitely agree with that yeah i i think it's absolutely fascinating and you can see people, which obviously trading is one thing, but also it just feels like when you have more information, people come with all kinds of crazy stuff to participate in. The last thing I want to talk about before we get into the rapid fire questions is virtual worlds. And so it seems like this is tangentially related to a lot of the decentralized financial

applications that are being built. But there's concepts like identity and pseudonymity. There's things like, hey, I'm going to go and hang out in the metaverse with my avatar. Anything there that you guys are seeing that has kind of caught your eye or that you're paying attention to? Or is it something that you think, while tangentially related, is just completely outside of the circle of competence? And so you guys focus more on the financial applications.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely interesting. And also, like I said, I was a gamer before. I've lived most of my teenage years on a virtual world, whether it's World of Warcraft or some of the other things that are played out there. So to that extent, I can completely relate and see the market there. I think it's less something that we focus on in DeFi,

but you do see for example um you just give me one example an investment we made is in for example maps right which is kind of trying to bridge like where i am right now in the world so it's not really virtual world but it's you know it's giving you all kinds of information of where you are at the moment and trying to you know lay layer on top of that like augmented reality and those kind of things but also now defy so they're launching like for example um defy applications within maps so depending on where you are it will offer you decentralized applications that you can interact with so i think that's a really interesting bridge like a pure virtual like when you look at like second life or like don't those kind of things we haven't i haven't really

seen but yeah if it if you know if it comes your way anthony would always you know look at it of course to see if it's really interesting for d5 technologies for sure i love it i love it um all right uh what is the number one thing that you've learned what's your biggest takeaway or lesson over the last couple of months as you guys have gotten this up running and started to scale it Yeah, I think that the biggest thing is, you know, I always learn about how little I know about DeFi and how much of a road they're still ahead. And it's just about like, you know, for me also, I try to learn and I try a lot of the strategies that my traders recommend. I try them personally and I do them, you know, through Uniswap and, you know, through some of these other platforms. And I think we're just so at the forefront of, you know, you know, I think me sort of fully understanding it and then sort of getting on that on that learning curve.

And I think there's so much still ahead. And the developments go so fast, so quickly, that I think that's what's really exciting. And that makes it also an intellectual challenge for me. So I am very much driven by intellectual challenges. And I think DeFi is offering that, just like SecFi gave me an intellectual challenge of how can I lend against private assets that I cannot value on a day-by-day intra-market trading basis? How do I do that?

And I think the DeFi has the same sort of interesting sort of steep learning curve that I'm fascinated by and that I'm still learning about every day. Yeah, I love it. It makes a ton of sense. I got three questions, rapid fire, and then you'll get to ask me one to wrap us up. The first is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? wow that's a that's a very good question so i am like i am not really like a book reader but i read a lot i am um i'm a massive fan of documentaries and there is uh there is a documentary on uh on masterclass actually uh which is one of the best that it's by it's a canadian astronaut uh that talks about like what it takes to get into space and what he really taught me is that like in space and in space travel nothing is done by chance so he's never nervous and he goes and explains like why that's the case is because every every single outcome

they have sort of predefined and they know about and they have sort of um they've thought about and he's done it in his head and what makes me so fascinating is about how calm he can be and how sort of a methodological he can be about here like his thinking process and how he does that and i take a lot of learning learning from that also when you have complicated problems in you know in business or whether it's like i'm a computer science major when it's whether it's about like programming sort of problems to really think, apply that methodology to kind of see how you can get to an answer. And that's one of the most fascinating series that I've seen in a very long time. Yeah, I haven't seen it. I'll have to watch it. It sounds very, very interesting.

And I love that you like documentaries because I'm the same way. I was just watching White Boy Rick on Netflix, which is the whole Detroit drug dealer that maybe wasn't as big of a deal as they thought he was. Second question comes from our friends over at Eight Sleep. They've got this thermoregulated bed and essentially I sleep on like an ice cube and I used to sleep like six, seven hours or really five or six hours and now sleep like eight hours a night. Completely changed my life and makes me much more well-rested. What's your sleep schedule? How much do you sleep? How has that changed over the years? My sleep schedule is terrible. So I have this brain that I can't shut off. So when I go to bed, the reason I watch so many documentaries

is I look for those that, you know, and it's like David Attenborough or Brian Cox or like some of these more intellectual sort of stimulating documentaries, because at some point they'll make me go to sleep. And I've actually, it's funny you mentioned this because a friend of mine actually recommended something the same. He has like this sort of, it's like a water bath or it's something that makes it cooler that apparently makes you sleep better. So that's, and he's apparently uh for my birthday which is tomorrow he's apparently sending me one of those uh one of those to my hotel so we'll see oh that's amazing all right well i'll let you know on our next episode i love it uh last question is aliens are you a believer or a non-believer

that's a very good question so i think if aliens is around like extraterrestrial life right i think you have like what is called like uh it's called the drax equation or something like that uh which of calculates the probability of there to be you know extraterrestrial life and for me it's very hard to think that there's nothing out there you know especially most of my documentaries are about space right um so so just mathematically it's very hard to think that there's nothing there but the problem is is the mathematical probability that we haven't found anything uh is also not really helping us right we should have by now maybe found something so there there's There's this constant, you know, it's not going to be a complete answer to your question,

but there's constant two voices in my head where one says, you know, there's nothing, but the other says, but there must be something. And I'm still struggling to see which one, you know, which one is going to win. It might require some more hours of documentaries. Well, I'm in the camp of like, it's there. We just aren't going to come in contact because it's too far away. Right. It's like, like the galaxy is just so big and the technology that we have, it just is

nearly impossible to go ahead and come in contact. So we'll see. What one question you have for me? Well, I think the one question I would have for you is, you know, you see DeFi, right? I'm going to stick it to sort of DeFi. You see so many of these different areas developing, right? So we at DeFi, DeFi Technologies, we track, of course, prediction markets like lending, stable coins and stuff. And you asked me that question kind of where I see that market.

But I would be interested to get your perspective. Like, where do you really see the applications developing? So really like adoption from users, right? Because there's one thing about like sort of a token going up because there's price dynamics and et cetera. But where do you really get most excited about real sort of DeFi adoption when we look at real world applications?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that every single thing that is analog is going to become digital, right? The digital versions will be bigger than the analog. And I also think all the decentralized versions of these products can be bigger than the centralized versions. And so it's pretty incredible when you start to think about, you know, just kind of where the world is headed is like digital

decentralized products end up being the most valuable things. And so obviously decentralized financial applications are going to accrue tons of value. And so, you know, I'm probably less tribal about like, where do they get built, right? If you kind of think about Sovereign being built on Bitcoin, if you think about like a Uniswap or Aave or whatever being built elsewhere, like it just ends up being this really interesting thing of like i think the the technology community is arguing over uh and debating where exactly this stuff all happens but to the average user like they're never gonna know or care right like they in the final version it's just gonna be hey does this work or not can i do what i want to do or not um and so i tend to spend more time thinking

about that more so than like you know what's the transaction speed of a specific uh blockchain or anything like that right and maybe the one follow-up question if i may is then because you have this natural thing where where i'm still struggling to see how it will evolve like let's say for example you need a mortgage for your house right a house is not something we can ever make digital right but do you do you foresee that we you know that that eventually will also happen in a decentralized fashion or do you think we are far away from those kind of like bridges between us you know centralized world effectively and a decentralized world how do you how do you see that kind of timeframe? I think that decentralization is going to be the default.

And so there will be bridges, there will be kind of this transition over time. I don't think that you kill the centralized version in totality, right? Like it will still exist. And there'll be kind of this coexistence. But I do think that it's almost like a weighing machine. Right now, it's like 99% importance in adoption of centralization and 1% decentralization. eventually that'll go to like 80 20 then 50 50 then it'll flip and it'll go you know 75 20 and 25 and then maybe at some point it gets to like 90 10 right in favor of decentralization but i think that just you know the world's not black and white it's much more gray and that's kind of how we're we're transitioning here yeah no i would i would agree with that yeah

all right where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about defy technologies yeah we just launched our uh our new website it's completely cleaned up and and kind of up to date. So it's DeFi.Tech. So it's very easy domain name. So that's kind of where you can find more. And then we have a ticker on the NEO exchange in Canada, which is just a ticker DeFi.

So that's really easy. And in the US, we're on the OTC as RDNAF, if people want to look for it. So those are the two main, I think for your audience is the two main tickers, DeFi on the NEO and an RDNAF on the OTC in the US. Awesome, man. you guys did a fantastic job. I'm, uh, I'm excited to, uh, to be along with the ride,

uh, and we will, uh, we'll have to continue to, uh, to talk as, uh, as you guys continue to build business. Awesome. Thanks for having me, uh, Anthony.