The Pomp Podcast - Akin Sawyerr, Team Lead at Decred: How Crypto is Bridging the Gap Between the Banked and Unbanked

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

Akin Sawyerr is helping to build the future through Decred. In this conversation, Akin and Anthony discuss the current state of banking in Africa, how consumers are discovering and using crypto there, what Decred is and how it works, and why less developed countries are poised to leapfrog the world's superpowers today with the help of cryptocurrencies. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

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Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Akeem Sawyer is helping to build the future through Decred. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of banking in Africa, how consumers are discovering and using crypto there, what Decred is and how it works, and why less developed countries are poised to leapfrog the world's superpowers today with the help of cryptocurrencies. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. bang bang i am here with a keen sawyer we'll get into the name in a second uh super excited to have you so thanks so much for uh for coming to do this yeah thanks for having me all right

uh we're gonna start off real hot we gotta talk about your name a keen sawyer we're just talking about it you gave a gave a good laugh sawyer spelled with two r's yep right so s-a-w-y-e-r-r that's correct tell us a story yeah i mean so the basic story is i have i think my great great grandfather decided to sort of branch off from the main family line and decided to add an extra r just to be different um and so now we've you know we have this curse of my name always being corrected i have i have official documents with the single r all over it and it's just not worth changing anymore so i have like bank cards that haven't misspelled and it's like whatever yeah as long as you have my social security number like it should be fine and so uh sawyer is a

common last name in west africa or yeah so i think so i think it comes from like basically from slave trade i think there was probably like a group of sawyers that came back um to liberia to freetown okay um but a number of them decided to sort of basically trace their roots back to where they thought they were from so you have sawyers all through west africa from liberia to ghana to nigeria where i grew up um so but it's it's one i think generally it's one big family that has links yeah linkages and so and one dude was just like hey man we're putting the double r on and roll yeah and so i i i have that which is is unique but it's more it's more trouble than it's worth to be honest with you yeah i i uh i guess if there's a single r then people actually think that's how

it's spelled right whereas the double r that's the one that they think they should be correct yeah at the very least too if it's a double r that you know it's like an african sawyer as opposed to like a sawyer from somewhere else maybe maybe that's maybe that's worth it i love it all All right, so let's go back to, you grew up in Nigeria? Yes, I did. So I was born in Massachusetts, actually. Okay. But a few months after I was born, my parents moved back to Nigeria.

My parents were here for college and grad school and decided to move back afterwards. And where in Nigeria did you grow up? So I grew up in Lagos. Lagos. So Lagos is the, I think it's probably the largest city in Africa now, population-wise. Yeah. But it used to be the political capital as well of Nigeria, but that was moved, I think about 25 years ago it was it was moved to a brand new city that was built from the ground up but

lagos is still the commercial capital of nigeria so i wanted to do this interview and not tell you what i'm about to tell you until you got here uh i went two years ago or three years ago to lagos okay and uh you know all the westerners all the all the white people they stay on victoria island they hang out at the hotels and all this stuff uh but the uh the friend that i went with um he basically had a buddy that lived in, uh, in Lagos, uh, near computer village. Okay. And so, uh, we stayed in a hotel and when we pulled up, uh, they had the guards outside with the AKs. And, uh, the first night I was like, Hey man, why are there guards outside with AKs? And, uh, it was one of these things where when you were looking at him, you're like, yeah,

I get that they got AKs, but if someone starts shooting, I don't think those guys are going to stick around. And so, uh, it was a really cool experience though, because, uh, we would walk to computer village um and for those that don't know computer village is basically i don't know we'd say six block by like 10 block uh area that's just packed with electronics and computers massive yeah and you get anything fixed there you can buy anything there it's it's an interesting phenomenon it's a huge market yeah and so when i came back from that trip i actually wrote something i published publicly just said look i saw the future of uh technology it was that entire area was taking people who previously didn't have access to internet computing electronics etc

and over you know i don't know if it's been 10 years or so before i had went and visited they had gone from very little access to now it was highly connected there was great inner infrastructure they had all the same devices right they had all those smartphones all this kind of stuff and there's a lot of people and it's growing incredibly fast and i don't think that a lot of people here in north america understand kind of the the demographic dynamics that are at play especially in nigeria but but in other african countries as well yeah yeah i mean i mean i think the african continent is probably the youngest continent in the world right and so if you're talking about demographics every just about everywhere in the west you know the birth rates

are dropping i think it's it's acute in japan where you know they're they have empty houses because there are enough people right to play to replace the old population so i think demographically Africa is extremely young, lots of young people, lots of labor, and it's a massively untapped resource, right? When you think about it relative to the rest of the world. And I think investors are beginning to understand that, you know, that Africa is the next frontier, it's the next big market. And you're seeing people beginning to vote with their money, right? With investments continuing to increase, particularly like, you know, to fintech and the startup ecosystems across Africa are growing. And you have more and more sources of funding just coming in.

Yeah. So give us you've got a big focus on African countries. And so maybe give us kind of like a lay of the land. Africa is not one country. It's a continent that's made up of a bunch of different countries. And obviously, when you have those different countries, there's different parts of the continent. Like, how do you view the connectivity, kind of the tech ecosystems, et cetera, across Africa? Is there generalizations in terms of the West versus the East or the North versus South? Or is it really country by country specific? Yeah, so it's kind of like ecosystems, right? So I think Nigeria is large enough that it's an entity unto itself. You know, there's a lot of tech innovation around just payments and financial services out of Kenya, because M-Pesa was basically, it's probably the most successful mobile payments deployment, arguably anywhere in the world, in terms of just adoption within the country. And so, you know, Kenya is large as well, but East Africa is almost like a block. I think some of it is because of just how close those countries are in terms of, you know, the union they have. And so in many ways, it's like there's a large ecosystem going out of like, you know, East Africa with Kenya, Kampala, Rwanda now kind of coming up. Nigeria has 200 million people.

So it's an entity of itself. You have pockets of development in Ghana and in South Africa. Right. South Africa is a large country, probably the most developed. Right. So it's kind of sits on its own. And to a large extent, North Africa is sort of separate. Like I think oftentimes people think about sub-Saharan Africa and the northern Africans have sort of more of allegiance with the Middle East and certain parts of Europe. But I think, you know, I kind of see it as three or four core ecosystems with like anchor cities that sort of then bring, you know, lots of the region together. For sure. And help me understand, like, where's the education coming from? Right. So when I was there, what it felt like to me was there was a lot of now that there's connectivity.

Hey, the Internet is this portal to information and to education and access to other people and things like that. Is that true outside of Lagos? Because to me, kind of what you're saying, like Lagos is almost feels like a little bit different than some of the other cities. Or is that one thread that's throughout all of these different ecosystems? So it varies. Right. So, I mean, so Nigeria in particular, you have Lagos, which is a huge city, which takes a lion's share of all the tech investments, right? The tech ecosystem there is pretty dynamic. Lots of investors come in, right?

So Lagos kind of is the center of tech in Nigeria. But then you have, you know, pockets in the east, southeast of Nigeria, like Uyo, Port Harcourt, which is basically an oil city, but has now sort of begun to evolve into a knowledge city, right? And, you know, the thing about tech that's interesting and particularly like, you know, coding and software development is you have a lot of people who are just smart, who never really had access to higher education, who are self-taught, right? And like you said, with connectivity, it's sort of like an apprenticeship system where you have a really good developer and he just brings up the next generation, right? So there's a lot of kind of like an apprenticeship type approach where as the ecosystem grows, it's trying to kind of replicate itself, right? And there are people who don't have, frankly, other options, right? Because it's either that university admission is very limited, and even if you do gain admission to universities, the quality is just terrible, right? So for young people who are coming out of high school, the smart thing to do is figure out how to learn to code and as much as possible kind of hack your way through the system, right?

So you talk about computer village, like a computer village is full of hackers who are basically self-taught technologists, right? They took apart computers, they figured out how to work, they figured out how to put it back together, right? So there's this culture of just trying to figure things out on your own and just a very strong culture of entrepreneurship. And I think you find that in Nigeria in particular, you know, but it shows up differently in other countries. You know, some other countries have just better education. So you'd go to Ghana, in my view, and you'd have a lot more university-taught developers. right because the university system there is frankly better um and just about other parts just about almost any other country in africa i think you have a slightly better high education

system nigeria um as a whole so it looks different depending on the country but all in all you know i think the narrative is lots of young people who are hungry who are looking for you know who see a future in tech and see a way to kind of to get there yeah and you mentioned the kind of like this spirit of entrepreneurship um the the most fascinating part of the entire trip to me was we went and watched a couple of uh of uh in the u.s what we call soccer but but obviously football games there and uh literally how we would watch them is we would basically walk up to what kind of looks like you're walking to somebody's like backyard and you pay them a little bit of money you know basically like a dollar equivalent here in the u.s and uh you literally walk and they've

set up benches in front of tvs there's exposed wires running to one to these tvs and it's not like two people are watching i mean these things are packed with you know 40 50 people all sitting there watching these games together and and what essentially has happened is these young entrepreneurs have figured out hey if i can figure out how to get a tv get cable to that tv get the soccer games on uh and then charge people to come in just like a bar would or anywhere else it's pretty incredible to see that entrepreneurial type um you know spirit at work even in things that aren't tech related right i mean that's just hey people want to watch this game and i've got the ability to give it to them but i think that spirit um spills over into a lot of the tech

things you're talking about as well yeah you're right and i think a lot of it is out of necessity right it's like look i need to make a living one way or the other and people look for a way to provide a service in any way they can right so you're right you have all these pop-up bars that you know show up during your premier league soccer games on a saturday or a sunday and literally someone's like business where they have one cable they have a good tv and you know they charge people to come and watch the games and sell them alcohol and food right um so you'll see that across you know many african countries where you have just just this issue of so this kind of call like non-consumption okay where for the vast majority of of africans like at the bottom of the pyramid

they can't afford cable they can't afford to have their own setup and so what you end up having is someone has figured out a way to take some commodity right and make it cost effective for everyone so now that tv and that cable box is a shared resource for the street or the neighborhood and it now makes it accessible right and so i think it's the same way even with you know i guess we're going to get into crypto, but even the way crypto is proliferating across Africa, a lot of it is actually intermediated out of necessity, right? You have people that are tech savvy, that have figured out ways to buy and acquire Bitcoin. They know that Bitcoin can be used to settle global transactions. And they essentially become intermediaries for businesses

who say, look, I need to import mobile phones, for example. I need a market. I can't access US dollars. And some guy says, look, I can get you those phones. I can sell that transaction with bitcoin like you don't know how to you don't need to know how to use bitcoin you just need to know a guy right and and so a lot of the industry is actually proliferating that way where there's some guy who's figured this thing out he's charging me a fee after a while i figure out what he's doing and then i cut him out because well i could figure it out myself right and so that's i think how a lot of things proliferate across africa and with crypto it's not different yeah and i think it uh part of what's fascinating to me about some of these markets so the african countries for sure

uh india i've heard some similar stories where people also aren't going on to like traditional exchanges to buy bitcoin they'll literally walk over to a computer village or some other area and they'll hand somebody physical cash and basically get bitcoin in what's kind of like a black market type trade um and i remember when i was there uh in lagos um that's actually how we switched U.S. dollars into the local currency was not at the airport where they're going to take, you know, 20 percent and quote you some ridiculous exchange rate. It was a guy in a village, basically. And so it's pretty interesting to see how like those systems already exist without crypto. And now crypto is just being fit into how they're culturally the people of a certain country

operate. Yeah. So, I mean, like you said, that there are these well-worn distribution channels that exist and you know 80 of africa is unbanked or underbanked um that's crazy right same thing for the economies they're majority informal so whenever you see a country that has like a banking sector like it's oftentimes a lot smaller than it should be right you know banks in nigeria primarily serve the government by buying government debt um they might serve some large conglomerates that are chummy with the government but that's really it there's no like active lending market on a retail time from a retail perspective but in that same country in nigeria we have what we call like savings groups susu groups where literally there are networks of people that

lend and borrow to each other right these affinity groups and some of them run into the hundreds of thousands right of people of members what right and and the funny thing is most of these systems particularly in nigeria still they're still run by like paper and pen right physical ledgers physical relationships your credit score is based on oh yeah i know your uncle and i know your brother and they were good for the money so you're going to be good for it right because i mean the one thing that a lot of african cultures have is like the family name is very important right and so oftentimes credit is determined by what family you're from because they know for example well if i lend you money and you sort of get in trouble your family will bill you out to preserve the

family name right and so they're all these kind of social ways in which credit and they're pretty sophisticated and how credit is determined but they're all off the books they're all non-digitized and i think the huge opportunity is now taking some of these cultural norms and figuring out ways to kind of digitize them such that you can still capture the you know those you know those systems for how credit risk is determined but now you have a digital platform that's interoperable that gets you into the world, right? Where you can start harvesting this data and actually now pumping a lot more capital

into these countries and systems. Tell me more about the savings groups. How do those work? So the savings groups, they're all over Africa and they have different names. So in Kenya, they're called SACOs, right? Now, Kenya and the East Africans, they're a lot more regulated

in that you can get a license to be a SACO in Kenya. And so you're effectively like a bank, right? Or a credit union is probably the best corollary. And basically, they typically rose out of these affinity groups where, for example, it could be a group of cattle farmers. And it's in our best interest to basically pool money together such that we can expand our assets, right? So you have 10 cattle farmers who no single one of them can afford to buy a new cow and expand his flock. But if we all contribute money to a fund and we rotate, you know, taking out that fund, every month someone buys a new cow, right? And it's funded by the group, right?

And so savings groups typically rose out of affinity groups like farmers or market women who, for example, you know, you might have market women like a dozen of them all sell oranges. And they say, look, let's get together, form a savings group, and we also can extract pricing power from our wholesalers, right? Because we can now buy in bulk. So all these systems were developed through, you know, particular groups of people that were in the same industry, basically pooling capital to grow their businesses, but also like sharing knowledge. Because the after effect of that is, look, if we're all calorie errors, right, and we're all invested in each other, if one of us figures out a better way to get, you know, an increased yield of milk, well, I want to tell everyone because we're all invested in each other. Right. So it's in my best interest to share information, to share knowledge such that because, I mean, the better you are deploying my capital, the more likely it is I'm going to get a return. Right. So that's how I think a lot of these savings groups typically grew in parts of East Africa. They're more formalized in certain ways with rules and actual regulations around them in places like Nigeria.

They're kind of pretty much off the books. And for a lot of people, that is the financial services. access. That's how some people borrow money to send their kids to university abroad. That's how people borrow money to buy a car so I could be an Uber driver, for example. And all those things are informal. And the real opportunity is how do you now take those informal things and systems and digitize them? It's fascinating. One of the frameworks that has really caught my attention, and I think I've started to pay more attention to over time, is this idea that 80% unbanked or underbanked. Most people, I think, would look and say, you know, African countries were very far behind the West. Well, over the last five, 10 years, there's been kind of this leapfrog effect

when it comes to at least mobile banking. Right. So things like M-PACE obviously helped usher that in. But there's others as well. Talk a little bit about how, you know, is there an advantage for technologists who are building without the legacy systems in place? Are they able to kind of accelerate the adoption and development or is that maybe just there's some edge cases where people point to and say yeah that happened but that might not be the norm um so i'd say yes or no depends on the context right or the country i think there are scenarios where um so so i'll kind of paint two stories right in kenya with mpessa you had sort of like certain things that align themselves. You had a government who backed it. You had a telco that had, I think, about 80%

market share, right? Safaricom. And you had an incentive system that allowed agent networks to be built out, right? So the commission-based system. And what was happening in the early years of M-Pesa was that I could be a middle-class person with a great job, and I'll actually fund like five payout points, right? Literally go to those stores, pay for them to get the infrastructure, pay for them to stand it up, and then it's a business I'm funding. I get the return as the investor, right? And so that ensured that M-Pesa proliferated because you had all these points where you could spend and use it. So the distribution channel was incentivized to grow. You had a massive company that had singular market share. Just about everyone had a

Safaricom phone. So many things, and then the government really backed it, right? So a number of things aligned, and all of a sudden now you have this core infrastructure, which is mobile money that, you know, became basically larger than cash. Now, once you have that ecosystem where there was orders of magnitude of GDP flowing through M-Pesa, people started iterating on that by doing lending with M-Shawahiri, all these innovations on top of it because you had a core payment platform in place. Now, in Nigeria, it kind of evolved a little bit differently because in Nigeria, you had very powerful incumbent banks and you had telcos. And there There was sort of like a lot of the telcos were more diverse in terms of the makeup of capital, right?

MTN is the largest. It's South African. You had Airtel that had some Arab money invested. But for most cases, Nigerian banks are primarily wholly owned by Nigerians. So politically, the banks had more power, and the banks wanted to ensure that no one encroached on the power they had in the financial system. So the way mobile money has not evolved as well in Nigeria is because regulation and banking power has stifled things. And up until, I think, this year, telcos were not allowed to get into mobile money. I think MTN just got the first license as part of this.

Why did that change? I think it changed because, maybe for a couple of reasons. I think, one, because it was clear that the Nigerian model for mobile money was failing. It was clear that even if we look at the most of fintech and lots of funding that's gone into fintech, it's still catering to the bank. So it's an improvement on the user experience for folks who are already banked. So I have a bank account, but now I have an app that lets me make USSD payments at point of sale. But it's still attached to my bank account. The guy that doesn't have a bank account is not going to use that product.

So if you think of what's been happening in Nigeria in particular is a lot of iteration has been basically just cannibalizing the same group of customers, right, within the same pie. It's not really growing the pie. And I think the central bank in Nigeria is realizing, one way or the other, that that model is not getting the results that it should be, and other countries are moving ahead. So it's either that you change course and say, look, the telcos are frankly, naturally the best place for mobile money to operate out of, right? Because they own the core infrastructure. People are effectively, even in Nigeria, people are effectively finding hacks around mobile money. Like in Nigeria today, what people were doing was, you know, most cell phone services across Africa and in Nigeria is prepaid. So you buy a scratch card, you scratch off a code, and you load up money onto your phone.

Now, what people were doing was, you know, you could actually buy a scratch card, right, get on the phone, and I owe someone money across the country. So rather than, like, send him 50 bucks, which I can't really get to him, I'll just buy a scratch card in Lagos, right, and give him the code over the phone or text it to him. And that basically is money, right, because he can take that code and either load up his phone or he can resell it at a discount, right? So he could say, look, someone sent me a $50 crash card. I actually need the cash. You need to buy credit? I'll sell it to you for $48. So I'll give you an incentive to basically get a discount.

So people were already using these mobile services as payment platforms. So it tells you that there is a market that says, look, I want to use this utility and this phone as a way to transact. And so I think the Nigerian model is beginning to shift. I think MTN has gotten a license. I think other telcos will follow. So I think we should get a better outcome, a better result. But I think it's literally just, look, the current policy isn't working, and there's a lot of frustration in the system as to why we're not getting the results in terms of financial inclusion that the government is targeting. Yeah. And speaking of government, what is the general sense of the trust in the government, right?

So some countries around the world, there's fairly democratic processes. processes people yeah they know bad stuff happens but for the most part they trust their governments or at least don't think their governments are actively working against them uh in other parts it's clear as day hey my country is uh government is corrupt and you know nobody here trusts them where do some of these uh african countries actually fall in that spectrum um so probably the lower end of the scale okay um in terms of they they don't have high degrees yeah so a lack of trust in the system right and it's it varies right some countries are improving and getting better and are better governed and on a more positive trajectory but say like the bulk of

african countries at the very least the citizens look at the government a very high suspicion um because i mean the right for corruption i think nigeria is the model for that right for corruption weak infrastructure people are not seeing like physical investments they're not seen their lives improve, right? And you're also in a system where most things are informal, right? I was saying earlier today in another conversation that, you know, part of the problem in Nigeria as a nation is, you know, the majority of government revenue comes from oil sales, right? Oil is bought by foreign multinationals and foreign entities, right? So the Nigerian government, frankly, is getting no revenue from the people. And so even just that tells you that

they're more likely to do the bidding of countries buying their oil right and setting it up such that that revenue continues than serving the populace and their and and their people they're catering to their customer exactly and the customer is not the Nigerian citizen right Nigerian citizen is just someone you just have to make sure you know things don't tip over to revolution right and so but what that has created um to your point is you know very very low trust in government very low trust in institutions very low trust in banks anything that's formal typically comes with some level of a sense that that entity is trying to take advantage of me as a citizen and not give me like my my due and i think that's created a system where it's not only low trust but people

have to fend for themselves right even just like getting power reliable power is a problem in nigeria right and so i think what that's created is a property that really says look i'm in it for me. I need to figure things for myself. And I think because of that, in many ways, I think you have a, you have a captive audience for crypto because crypto is the ultimate like individual sovereignty tool that look, I can kind of take things on my own. I now have a currency, have a way to transact. And by the way, the government doesn't really care about me anyway. Right. So when I, so it also goes back to when people talk about regulation as an issue, I think for most African countries, the regulator doesn't even have the wherewithal to know what's even going on in

those countries let alone have any policy that can stop crypto in any material way yeah it's almost like the lack of sophistication uh gives them less insight right so if everything's cash based if everything's kind of gray or black market type uh transactions you have these informal economies these savings groups etc uh that can't you know in the u.s the government knows what's happening because they look at the data right exactly everything's kind of documented in some way I recently interviewed Congressman Davidson from Ohio, and he at one point even said, look, we've essentially empowered the banks to spy on their customers for the government, right? Well, if the people don't trust banks in Nigeria or some other African country, so they don't put their wealth there, well, the government has no clue what they're doing, right? And so it's almost like the regulations can't affect them, right?

The difference between setting regulation and enforcing regulation, if you have no way to enforce it, then you might as well not even have the regulation to some degree. Exactly. And I think and I think that's that's the nature of what's on the ground in the majority of countries. So that makes it very, very interesting. And then you think about it, too, the fact that there are many industries or many sectors that are just greenfields. Like it's like there's no no one is servicing those people. Right. I think it creates a massive opportunity because you don't have a lot of incumbents to like work to fight against. Right. The banking lobby in the United States is pretty powerful. right? That understatement of the entire podcast. It's hard to see them be on the losing side of

some sort of grand bargain, right? Now in Africa, most people don't even have banks. So you're not even competing with those entities. You're now trying to, you're basically competing with creating a pathway or a product that people can afford to consume, right? You're trying to solve the problem um inherently and if you can figure out ways to sort of provide utility to that marketplace figure out a good ui and ux to serve them then as a massive opportunity because i think inherently um the way i kind of see africa evolving is it's the ideal place for to empower like sovereign individuals right it's the ideal way to say look you can be your own bank You can be your own financial service provider, and moreover, you can be networked to this global marketplace where you can acquire products from anywhere, right?

So I see a future where Africans will source mortgages, source loans globally, not from their local banks. It'll be from some, you know, blockchain based protocol where they can source, you know, capital from cheap, you know, low or negative interest environments, figure out ways to program, you know, to take out the risk in terms of interest rate risk. You just kind of figure out ways to program it into it. And all of a sudden you have a product that can like sell like, you know, you know, hundreds of millions of people that never had access. want to know who has the best url crypto.com that's right crypto.com they're a crypto platform with one goal motherfucking mass adoption that's why we're all here we're trying to get crypto in every wallet crypto.com is helping people do that through buying earning lending and card payment everything you could want at crypto.com go help your boy out tell him pomp sent you download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know

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tell them pomp sent you and thank me later one more word from our sponsor blockfi their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your bitcoin or ether at blockfi and receive six percent annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency this rate actually compounds so you receive a 6.2 apy which is very attractive given the alternatives so you can actually take your bitcoin you can deposit it with blockfi and get paid an interest rate of six percent in return go check out blockfi.com slash pomp again blockfi.com slash pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today so before we get to the crypto and blockchain stuff the last question i have for you is are there examples where um the the distrust in the institutions

and the banks etc um the banks have like done bad stuff or is it more of just hey i don't think you have my best interest at heart because you know your customer somebody else and and it's more kind of psychological or are there examples where you know like the cypress where they know they took 10 of our money right and and they actually seized assets or are there that type of examples or is it more kind of psychological there's some of those but they they kind of they kind of become things like so if you think the nature of banks particularly you know lots of african banks nigerian banks they tend to see their customers as a revenue source okay right so i lodge money in the bank and all of a sudden i start seeing all these weird

fees i have this stamp duty this fee right so there are all these costs but then all these weird shenanigans that tend to happen where you know i might have a savings account and a checking account and it might cost me a small fee to move money between my accounts all of a sudden you see that i made 50 transactions between my two those two accounts which i never initiated but somehow Now someone in the bank, maybe due to weak controls or something, there's some nefarious activity where they're now creating systems to basically tax or pull or charge me for things I didn't authorize. So it's almost worse, right? Like if they just seized the money, at least, yeah, they took my money. But this is like a silent theft of the money.

Right. And the thing that I think emboldens institutions is the lack of just strong civil organizations. Like there's very little recourse, right? So I have a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Like am I going to sue the bank? like i don't even have the resources to hire someone so the power dynamic is is so skewed that powerful institutions can get away with all sorts of all sorts of you know illegal activity and get away with it so i as the customer has very little recourse and you know lots of strong

reasons to distrust these institutions so what do people do with their wealth like where do they store their money uh pre crypto and knowing about that and then what's the culture of investing versus savings? So a lot of people, a lot of people still store, I think the biggest store of value I would say in Nigeria is real estate. Okay. Right. So I think kind of like in the U.S. is this culture of, oh, I want to have a house that I can live in. I want to have a house in my hometown. Like it's a source of pride, a source of, okay, you've made it. Right. So I moved to the city and I haven't really made it till I build a house back home. Right. So there's just a general culture of having property um but i think out of necessity it's the one store of value that

just about everyone i mean practically makes sense to put money into because even in high inflationary environments there will be asset inflation too right so it's sort of like inflation drives the asset price right right and so you sort of have this inflation somewhat inflation protected asset it's easy to acquire land and physical property you can see it feel it and then even for like nefarious and illegal activity it's easy to hide money money in a house right i can i can i can hide it behind a corporate structure i could have it as my cousin actually is a beneficial owner when i am right so typically like i think the primary store value partially because we don't have a lot of financial innovation in terms of just other asset classes the stock

markets are relatively small as i said most of the environment is informal so people's wealth is typically started in landed property or maybe in a business that they're running but even businesses tend to be more um cash flow entities right people tend to take cash out of their businesses and store it in housing as opposed to grow necessarily grow the business because there's a lot of risk in tying up capital for lots of people in their business all sorts of external risks which disincentivize people from wanting to kind of grow um their businesses so it's more about cash flow what can i get today how can i turn that over and how can i store it got it um let's talk about bitcoin then we'll do decred and then we'll do kind of the broader

ecosystem sure um how does bitcoin fit into this and how do you think about uh awareness and adoption of bitcoin um across the various ecosystems in africa so i mean i think it's It's one of those things that if you don't, because our markets are so informal, I think a lot of people underestimate what's going on, right? I think there are lots of people who have been historically cut off from global financial services, right? Literally, your ability to acquire things globally out of a country like Nigeria, if you're not banked or fairly well connected, is hard. You can't acquire foreign exchange. And Nigeria is a very, very, and a good number of African countries are very import dependent, right? So, basically, the formula is, you know, foreign countries extract raw materials, they create finished goods, and they come back and sell it to us, right?

So, everything from cornflakes to rice, like, we import everything, right? And because of that, lots of businesses are based out of trade, right? Sourcing goods, putting a margin on, selling it off, basic necessities. But you can imagine that every time you have, like, an economic shock. Like, so the last recession Nigeria had, obviously, all of a sudden, foreign exchange got scarce because everyone wants dollars, either to store and hide their value because the currency was short to depreciate, or they needed foreign exchange in increasing numbers to keep buying their goods and running their businesses. But it was scarce, right? And from that shock, some people realized, oh, there's this thing called Bitcoin I can use to sell transactions, right? And I don't need to kind of figure out how to get dollars on the street.

I don't need to go to the central bank. and that out of necessity got people into leveraging crypto and so you had a handful of you know so like bitcoin based payment companies that kind of came out of that um you know some of them got slapped on the wrist and got into a little bit of trouble running afoul of rules but basically that i think was the first use case this idea that i can settle global transactions and acquire goods internationally to run my business and i could use bitcoin yeah it's fascinating to me that the permissionless aspect of Bitcoin is exactly like a product market fit for those consumers, right? Those people who say, it's not because I want to do something that the

authorities don't want necessarily, as much as it is, I don't have access, right? And so the permissionless nature of something like Bitcoin is, yes, it can circumvent authority and kind of rules and regulations at times but if you don't have any access to begin with you aren't worried about rules and regulations because you don't have access and now this says hey if you have an internet connection you now get access yep it's pretty uh it's pretty special uh and then you spent a bunch of time uh working on uh on decred so talk a little bit about uh what decred is kind of um where your um your interest there is and then what uh what's going on in africa with decred yeah so i mean so so decred i mean at a high level is iterating on bitcoin right and so

is this idea that you can have a solving store of value but we believe that you know blockchain as a protocol has and will have many many many many more uses beyond just being a store of value exchange right so i think the ethos of decred is this idea that you can build you know a decentralized autonomous organization, right? So a lot of what we do at Decred is effectively building all the parts and features that would allow us to evolve into this fully autonomous entity, right? So things like governance become very, very important because we see ourselves more like a, almost like an economy or a nation state than just a simple money protocol. Now you still have to be a strong store of value. You still have to have all the security. And I think

with our hybrid proof-of-work, proof-of-stake system, you know, unit for unit, we're 20 times more secure than Bitcoin, right? How does that work? So unlike Bitcoin, you know, Decred is a hybrid proof-of-work, proof-of-stake protocol, right? We still mine blocks similar to Bitcoin. We're still going to have a $21 million supply.

But the difference is every block, as it's mined by miners, minors also has to be validated by proof of stakeholders. So that's people who own Decred. You can buy what we call tickets. And this ticket basically gives you a vote. And what that vote essentially does is every time a block is mined, there's a pool of these tickets.

I think the optimal number is about close to 41,000 of these tickets have been purchased. And five of these tickets get called up pseudo-randomly to basically vote to validate that block. and you have to have at least three, you know, three tickets voting and a majority voting in affirmative. So what that does is it does two things. One, it aligns incentives of stakeholders and miners, right? Because effectively the miners cannot operate outside of the will of ticket holders who could basically invalidate blocks if those blocks violate a rule or a tenet of Decred in any way. What happens if the miners validate and the stakers don't? Is the block invalid? The block is invalid and the miners lose the reward. So the incentive now for miners is you

have to basically comply. So everything from, you know, unlike I think Bitcoin, Bitcoin is backward compatible. Decred isn't. So when we have a change to the code base, basically all the miners over a period of time, which oftentimes is generous, you have to kind of upgrade to be able to now be on the active or valid copy. And so if a miner, for example, is working off a different version of the software, like all those blocks will be invalidated because you're not on the current version of the software. And I guess it works the same way if the miners don't validate a block, then stakers as well. You need both, right? You need the kind of consensus. So you kind of need both, right? So it becomes this symbolic relationship where both sides need

the other but ultimately ticket holders effectively are like the senate or if you think about lower house and upper house like they hold more sway and you have to get them um aligned um so we have a hybrid proof of work proof of state system um but we also have you know 60 percent of block rewards go to miners 30 percent go to ticket holders i mean and 10 percent goes into our treasury right and this is basically where all the funding for the network comes from so developers who are building, myself, anyone who works with the network or the full-time or part-time is paid out of this treasury that's getting 10% of every block reward.

But that becomes very, very integral to basically the long-term goals of Decred where we believe that over time there will be features that become critical and important. So we released a privacy implementation on Decred a couple months ago because privacy is important. The ability to opt into to have private transactions as a second layer, So it's not on our base chain, but as a second layer, we think it's important. And we think there are constituencies within Decred that would want that as a feature.

We went through a proposal, am I going to build a DEX on Decred? Because we think that most DEXs today are not really DEXs, or true DEXs. There's someone in the middle capturing some rent, right? And so we think that is not just important to Decred in terms of being able to, over time, be interoperable with other tokens and have a more, you know, active ecosystem. But we just think for the ecosystem, we need a real DEX that is permissionless and open to everyone, right? So effectively, what Decred really is, is we're saying, look, we think Bitcoin solved

for some really large fundamental problems, but we think that we can iterate upon those things and expand it even and project it out. So I think there will be a future where you'll have corporations that are built on the blockchain that have means of exchange, have governance, have voting rights, can program that in any way they want, but they're not subject to necessarily the borders of any single country. And we already see that begin to happen with multinationals, where large multinationals like Apple or these large companies, they're pretty powerful. And it's kind of hard to put them within one nation state. Like, so how do you regulate and manage an Apple or a Microsoft that is in, you know, over 100 countries and multiple domiciles and is effectively in many ways behaves like a nation state in and of itself? We think that, you know, cryptocurrency and blockchain platforms are that next iteration that basically take out all the friction in markets. And we think that governance becomes really, really critical because it needs to be transparent, needs to be a fair game that anyone can participate in, and as much as possible, you want to avoid ways for it to be gamed.

And so personally, I think that delegated systems create problems, right? Delegated systems are systems that are not quite clear, where there's some intermediary who's now I'm delegating my vote to. That just opens things up for the same problems we have with nation states where it's open for capture, it's open for corruption. And we think eventually, especially as value accrues to the network, the stakes get higher. There's more incentive. There's more incentive to basically game the system and capture it by a small group of people who might be savvy or whatever it might be. And we think those are huge risks broadly to the crypto space. But specifically for Decred, you know, those are things that we actively are designed and we actively look at to make sure and solve for.

So that's how the kind of the hybrid mining and staking model works and kind of what Decred at the base chain layer is. What are some of the ecosystem things that either you're most excited about or you think are the most popular in and around Decred? So I think fundamentally, the thing that I think makes Zcred very interesting is, so Politea is our off-chain governance platform. What is it called? Politea. Okay. And so it's basically a way for, so I talked about that treasury, it's basically a way for anyone to propose ideas that get funded by the treasury. Okay.

How much is the treasury in terms of like on an annual basis right now? So I think currently Treasury, depending on the price of Decred, is probably in the range of $12 to $14 million. And that's what's sitting in there or that's kind of like the annual revenue to the Treasury? So that's what's sitting there currently. Okay. I'm not sure what the annual revenue is, but our burn rate is basically, we're burning what is coming in and we're not necessarily like eroding the current base. Got it. Okay. In terms of numbers.

But hopefully, you know, as the price goes up, then you should be able to be retaining more and more Decred and dollar terms. But anyone in the community, anyone, anybody can basically have a Polteria account, propose ideas. And the idea here is that, you know, that fund is to fund things that are beneficial to the network. And I think the thing that's very interesting about Decred and unique in many ways, it's not just that we have this platform, but it's about how we reach consensus. And so one of our taglines is, you know, we want to make the best decision based on the sum total knowledge of the network. And whenever proposals come in, one thing I've found to be very fascinating is that there's a process of debating the merits of a proposal. People chime in, people chime in on social media and also the platforms. And part of the goal, one, is to learn.

So people are asking questions and pushing things saying, why do we need this? Why is this valuable? And you find that other people who are knowledgeable in the community are essentially trying to inform everyone as to why this is a good idea. So there's a process of basically, in my view, upskilling in terms of knowledge the community such that ultimately, hopefully, we're making the best decision. But I think that process also creates a system of trust building in many ways, right? Because you begin to sort of identify folks within the community that seem to have good ideas, who know very particular things. And I think it attracts people who want to engage in this very democratic process in many ways, where you have a stake in the game, but you have a say in how basically the value in the network is spent and doled out. I mean, I think in the first year, Politea has been live for about, I think, 13 months now.

A lot of the proposals that have come through, a lot of them are sort of heavily around like marketing. So we hired Ditto as a PR firm because we needed more awareness for Decred. Recently, we passed a proposal that was competitive for market makers to just improve the liquidity of Decred on certain exchanges because we'd heard that there are lots of potential investors who are interested in investing in Decred, but it's not liquid enough. So we're able to basically, in many ways, just in time, rally around the community to invest wisely in things that we think will benefit the community. Does that also put an importance, and I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but does that put an importance on the way that people communicate the proposals, right? So it's almost like the merit of my idea is important, obviously, but also the way that I can rally support around my idea, given that it is more of a democratic process. You know, if you and I have the same quality of idea, but I'm better at rallying support than you are, then I have an advantage. Do you worry about that or think about it?

Yeah, so, well, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. So typically, the more successful proposals or the things that increase your likelihood of being successful is being known, right? So, for example, you've been part of the community. You showed up on our chat channels. You've asked questions. Like, typically, the best proposals are ones where someone has an idea, and they start basically talking to constituents. Like, I think we should do this. Here's my idea.

And you get feedback, right? It's like politics. They build consensus. Right. And so you get immediate feedback saying, well, that sounds great, but maybe you should think about this, maybe you should think about that. So what typically happens is for the vast majority of proposals, by the time they actually hit the platform, like a lot of people in the community have heard about it, have given feedback and have shaped the proposal. And that really, to me, is what you want. You want to be able to, you know, go through a process, which is still relatively informal.

It's informal, but it's a way to kind of get, buy into what you're doing, get people's inputs, potentially, you know, make compromises here and there or improve the proposal such that once it hits Politea, you already have like a group of people who are like commenting and supporting it because they've been clued into what's been going on. Right. So I think, you know, there's a premium on people knowing who you are, you being visible and people knowing that you're aligned with Decred. Because at the end of the day, it's still about knowing the entity you're dealing with. And I think we're hyper in particular, and for good reason, you know, we're hyper against transactional folks who are just coming, they see something they can take, and they can leave. We're more about people who see this as a repeated game, who are here for the long haul, and who really want to stay and help grow the community. Got it. And I'm assuming that the miners, one of the aspects I'm really interested in is kind of goes back to a little bit of the conversation with African countries and also the hybrid component of Decred, whether you're mining Bitcoin, Decred, something else, this income generation that crypto unlocks, right? It really democratizes the ability for people to earn a living, right?

And I think we've seen that in some countries like the Venezuela where the income of an average citizen is so low that literally one single S9 or S17 could double or triple their income, right? And it's just – all you got to do is plug it in and connect it to the internet. Do you see that in either African countries just in crypto in general or do you see some of this taking hold with Decred in terms of like income generation or democratization of the ability to earn? Yeah, I think it's manifesting a little bit differently with Decred, right? So if you think about being able to sort of mine a cryptocurrency, there's CapEx related with that, right? For sure. So I have to have, and even if it's accessible. You've got to get the hardware.

Right, you've got to get the hardware. And it's becoming even harder for most chains to actually even mine it without some serious hardware. Now, I think in the case of Decred, we have a process through which contributors get paid for their input, right? So even if you're, for example, you're organizing meetups on Decred, we have lots of resources you can tap into, presentations, things that anyone who's really bought in and savvy can say, look, I want to host a meetup. And you can get paid and reimbursed for it, right? That's income, right? And that takes just some savvy, some ability to promote and market the event. And it's, you know, what I consider like a low skill level of contribution.

And you can get reimbursed for hosting the event depending on the turnout. And that's pretty transparent. And so that's one way. We have developers who are part of Decred who are across a number of African countries. And they contribute to the platform. They build code. They deploy code. And they get paid in Decred.

And, you know, Decred, regardless of where you are, coming into the community as a developer, you get paid the same amount of money. Now, that becomes very compelling for an African in a secondary city with very, very low cost of living. I mean, I did some back of the envelope math. You know, I think, you know, most of our developers or devs in Africa are probably making, you know, three to five X or what they would if they're a full time deployed locally at a company. And so all of a sudden, it makes it a very, very compelling case to contribute in meaningful ways and get paid by the network in this non-sovereign store of value that only you know that even exists and you can access anywhere. I think there are lots of protections around that as well, such that you're not putting your money in a bad bank that's killing you and taking all the value and extracting costs. If you have to flee the country because there's a conflict, as long as you know your keys, you can recover your account. It sounds like you're really kind of convinced that that sovereignty of crypto, Bitcoin, Decred, et cetera, the ability to give you the power as an individual,

It aligns a lot with the psychological state that various people in countries in Africa already are kind of contributing to their society or participating in their society. They're already in that mindset. They are. And now you're getting a piece of technology that is just kind of putting that in hyperdrive almost. Right. And you think about the delta, right? The way I like to explain it is when I think about crypto in the advanced world, the first world, like it's an evolution, right? Yeah, I can get banking services.

Yeah, my banks might not be the most optimum, but I can access cash. I can access the financial system if I'm not an afferent in the U.S. very, very easily. Right. If I have a good credit, if I'm a good credit risk, I can access lending and loans. Right. And so in many ways, I think crypto is a massive improvement on many fronts, but it's an evolution. I think in the African context, it's a revolution. Right. Because you're dealing now with giving people access to things that they never had. Right. So I never had a way to sort of have, you know, value stored in a form that now could become collateral such that I can borrow against that, right? I never had a way to be part of a global network where, like I said, I could potentially source, right, financial products, very, very low fiction, very, very low cost, and I can deploy it where I am, right?

And I think that makes a big difference because I think for a lot of people in Africa, crypto will be the very first financial services product to interact with in any formal way. That's wild. That's absolutely wild for people in the West to think about, right? Well, a crypto-based platform of some sort. Yeah. But it does make sense. And I think this goes to the argument, maybe the guys like Multicoin have talked a lot about kind of the exchanges are quickly becoming the financial service providers globally. Right. So if you think of, you know, kind of North American ecosystems on the financial side, pretty well developed Europe, pretty well developed in a number of countries, even China.

Right. Pretty well developed, et cetera. The continent of Africa, not well developed. Right. South America, a lot of places not very well developed. If you look in kind of Southeast Asia, not very well developed in a lot of cases. And so if that first interaction is with a crypto exchange or a digital wallet, et cetera, those people are actually at the tip of the spear, those products, at building out an entire suite of financial service products that can give people access to income, to credit, to all these tools that you or I think are kind of normal. Obviously, in those countries, they just either don't have it in a very popular way or they don't have access at all. And so giving them access can be pretty, pretty important. Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, when you when you add to the fact that beyond that, I think some of the tools are building a decred will also address some of the people aspects of crypto around governance, around how decisions are made, around empowering people, but also just making sure it's transparent. Then you're also solving other problems that are inherent with lots of African nation states where you have poor governance top down from governments to institutions. And if you can now create a fairer blockchain-based system where the governance process cannot be gamed, it's fairly clear, decision-making can be decentralized, right?

All of a sudden, I think you have a means through which you have a new operating model for institutions on the African continent, potentially, such that anyone who's now funding initiatives in Africa through these channels has certain assurances that they have never had, right? So counterparty risk now becomes something that can be solved because there are new ways that can identify who you are. There are new ways that can lock capital and release it on a certain schedule through smart contracts, right? There are many tools now you can employ leveraging blockchain that actually solve for these structural issues you see in these emerging economies that all of a sudden, if it takes out all these transactions costs, it makes investing to these nations more compelling, right? It makes it more compelling if the jurisdiction through which arbitration is handled is on a blockchain. It's not subject to an unfair legal system that basically is, you know, is in favor of those who are powerful. I'll take it even a step further. Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, he was the first person to turn me on to this idea. He said, imagine foreign aid. He goes, in a lot of cases, foreign aid that goes into countries all around the world, not just African countries, but anywhere in the world. A lot of times that foreign aid's given knowing that there's a corruption tax, right? So we're going to we're going to give Nigeria $100 million, $80 million, maybe we'll make it to some form of a charity or an aid type organization.

There's another tax at that point. Right. And the people may get $30 million of that hundred. But that $70 million that, quote unquote, got taxed, that went into the hands of the people who control the organizations, the government, the banks, etc. I mean, I think the global or the legacy global NGO market is a big ruse. Like, literally, it's a big subsidy for these countries because if you look at charities just on average, like, over half of the monies that come in just go to operating these charities, right, or these NGOs. So the first lump is you're creating jobs for, you know, Americans, wherever the source of funding comes from, right? Now, the piece that gets into the country, corruption erodes a bunch of it. And where does that money typically land? It lands in foreign business accounts.

So all of a sudden, that money is in Swiss accounts, piling up in these Swiss accounts, and it's developing European economies. Because what's the Swiss bank going to do? It's going to put it into the system and invest it. So in many ways, it's a huge subsidy. And actually, not only does it not benefit the beneficiaries locally in these African countries, it leaves African countries on the hook for the debt where most of the

benefits are accrued to the origin of the investment in the first place and I think that funny enough I think that even that's one area that I particularly and personally want to see crypto and blockchain totally

just revolutionize especially if you can give the aid right to the people you literally avoid all of that nonsense and it's just what's your digital wallet right and i have a hundred thousand people now that have digital wallets and i'm going to make sure every single person gets their equal fair share of that aid right and but even in the operations of the charity like for example like some of the work that binance charity has been doing in uganda is remarkable where i think effectively binance

covers the operating costs of the charity um i think the charity gets um donations from other third parties but dollar for dollar every dollar that goes towards beneficiaries ends up in the hands of the beneficiary and there's a path to sort of audit that and see where that money is going and so i think in many ways i'd love to see you know blockchain and crypto basically destroy this market where um frankly the beneficiaries are not receiving the funding they should yeah um so i think there's a lot of there's a lot of interesting areas where i think crypto um can bring in transparency reduce friction and and actually help people more more so than they're being helped in current systems today what is um what's either the

craziest or the the most inspiring story that you've seen with somebody on the continent of africa interacting with uh crypto or blockchain like what would be the the one story if you could tell people here's a great example uh or a crazy example uh what would it be crypto in africa Crazy example. I'm trying to think. I think that, like I said earlier on, some of the examples I've seen is you have these cottage industries growing around leveraging crypto as a utility. So, for example, I'll give you an example. There are a number of exchanges across Africa now, like real digital exchanges.

but there's been a whole industry of effectively what I consider like liquidity and wholesale providers that have come into the space okay where for example I have access to an exchange in the wherewithal to acquire a bitcoin but then I'm reselling that bitcoin or access to the to those pools to others that don't have the wherewithal but I'm actually giving them utility they're paying me a fee for my trouble right but the the market is expanding because someone has seen an opportunity, one, to get a return. I mean, there have been varying periods of time across Africa where the price of Bitcoin was an order of magnitude higher than it was in other markets.

Like examples were Zimbabwe, when Zimbabwe was close to the brink of blowing up. It was like 50% higher. I think at the time when Bitcoin hit $20,000 or got close to $20,000, at one point in some exchanges in Zimbabwe, Bitcoin was selling for $60,000. Crazy. Right? And so when you think about the margin that's there to be had, of course, people are going to enter that market and try to then intermediate it, right? So there's a lot of crazy stuff happening where you now have these sort of like fly-by-night bankers effectively running these informal shops.

But what that is doing is I think it's increasing awareness because, you know, when you want a transaction on my behalf, the next question I'm going to ask is, what did you do and how did you do it? and I'm effectively trying to eventually get you out. So I think that's helping to kind of proliferate. And this happens in every market, right? I mean, like literally it's, hey, you and I live in a village. We don't have access to a car. We know someone who has access to a car.

They're gonna go to the city. They can go buy X, Y, or Z thing that's available in the city, not available in our village. Hey, pick that up for me and I'll pay you some fee when you bring it back. It's essentially what's happening here, right? It's just you have access to that exchange

because you've actually gotten an account you know how to use it i want bitcoin i give you some cash you go buy the bitcoin i mean they're they do they even like weirder custody thing solutions i've seen in africa where you know you can buy bitcoin over the counter i go to a store i give them some cash and they give me literally like a code that's not i don't think it's really they don't give you the secret key or your private key but they give you a code that basically is good for a certain amount of bitcoin and people people are trading those receipts right because it's a store of value somewhere it's like it's stamped somehow to value that it's a valid receipt right but i can basically you know it's almost like going to a pawn shop where i'm like i give you

some cash right you give me a receipt that represents the amount of bitcoin look a bitcoin moon last night i'm coming back to cash in i'm getting more cash so you have all these sorts of interesting ways that people are now creating a user experience that allows for others to use it right um and taking advantage of these opportunities and this happens in another example that i use a lot is uh innovation it comes out of necessity a lot of times right and so if you're there you don't have access to the exchange to actually buy it but you want the benefits of the store value people come up with these types of things right um my favorite example of all of this is uh the economies that are built within uh prisons in the united states right so uh they

trade toilet paper they trade ramen noodles they trade cigarettes right all these things that begin to have monetary type properties because they become medium of exchanges that's right stores of value it's because innovation is the product of necessity right they don't have anything else yeah and so i think that that is um you know it's funny how this replicates over and over and over again in countries all around the world. And now we're seeing, I think, Bitcoin and crypto be the beneficiary of it across the ecosystem. Before I wrap up, rapid fire questions. What would you say is the most important company in crypto today, other than Decred? I was about to jump on and say Decred. The most important company other than Decred.

So this is one that popped into mind, Placeholder. Okay. Oh, interesting. And I think the reason for that, so I think personally for me in my crypto journey, Chris Berniski has been very, very pivotal. So for those that don't know, Placeholder is an investment firm based in New York, run by two guys, Chris Berniski and Joel, is that right? Joel Manegro. Yeah, yeah, that's right. um and uh and they've been big proponents of uh decred along with a whole bunch of other stuff but but i've been pretty early and uh and done a lot of work in terms of publishing their ideas

and things like that yeah and so i think for me personally in that i think a lot of my early crypto journey i kind of relied on chris quite a bit and he was quite accessible right just bugging him asking him stupid questions and um so that's one but i also think that i kind of brought him up and chris and place a little in particular for just sort of like the culture of asking questions and trying to figure out what's next right so this idea that you know innovation didn't end with bitcoin but there's so much more we can uncover right and the whole ethos around them really trying to invest in the future trying to not just in terms of making investments in companies but also kind of pushing further like research position papers i mean i

think a lot of my perspective on how i see the markets have come from some other like seminal blog posts on you know fat protocols and the idea that you know okay maybe value is not going to accrue to middleware and the fact that they're they're more than willing in many ways to contradict themselves as they get more information right so the fat protocol thesis was we think that our value is going to accrue to these base layer chains and as more information as the market has evolved you can see how their positioning is changing and they're now saying look things are changing things are evolving we think the dynamic is shifting and that certain things and And our thesis is maturing and evolving.

And I think just having that culture and ethos that we don't know what the future looks like, but we want to be part of it. And we want to be part of bringing it to bear. I think not only serves the ecosystem well, but in many ways, I think it's a lot of the basis on which Decred is also built. This idea that we want to iterate into the future. We want to see what's next. And we want to be able to build, implement, and execute on the features that the network is going to need. For sure. What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

In what domicile? Here in the U.S.? Wherever you want. You pick. The one regulation? I like talking to people who have global mindsets because you've got to make multiple decisions here. So there's a body. So, well, I don't know if I'll call it a regulation.

Okay. So I think, you know, there are a number of laws, but the whole body of laws that have basically allowed monetary policy, global monetary policy power to reside in the United States. Right. I think if you think about, you know, and it's a whole number of laws. Man, you're bringing out the big shots. I mean, after the Patriot Act, there are a whole bunch of laws around global financial systems that got passed through. Most people didn't even know what was going on, right? But over the years, increasingly, the U.S. has gotten a much more dominant position and say, I mean, all commodities are priced in dollars.

So basically, the whole of Africa relies on Fed monetary policy that effectively determines the price of goods coming out of African countries. That's a problem, right? That's a sovereignty problem for Africa. And so I think that whole body of laws that essentially backs the U.S. as a reserve currency, but it also has weaponized the dollar as a tool to cajole and kind of beat countries into doing the bidding of the U.S., I think those set of laws are not only bad for the world, I think they're ultimately bad for the United States. because I think invariably what it's created is it's fractured all the post-World War II institutions where every country felt like they had a say or a seat at the table. And it's forcing other powerful domiciles to say that any way in which we can weaken the dollar as a reserve currency, we're going to do, right?

And so it set the game that basically has now said, look, one way or the other, we're coming after the dollar. whether it's the chinese whether it's the russians right i think ultimately that's bad for the united states it's almost like uh it's good short term long bad term and what you do uh if um you look at like the political climate in the u.s um so there's a group of people who uh they call themselves never trumper uh trumpers right which basically uh anything other than donald trump right that's what they're in for right well that's kind of what's happening in the geopolitical world where you're getting China, Russia, a bunch of these economies and governments

are saying basically never US, right? They're just saying like anything else other than a US-based or a US dollar-based system is better, what are our other options, right? And so I think that actually in some weird way, the US government is driving more awareness and potential adoption of Bitcoin than they realize by weaponizing their currency,

by doing all of this stuff, Because it's almost like they realize they were powerful, then they start to implement that power, then they abuse that power, and then eventually what ends up happening? Everyone revolts. And it's one thing if you're a government and your citizens are thinking about a revolution because you've got a lot of control. We see that in Hong Kong and China right now, et cetera. And there's just challenges for a group of volunteers or people to kind of coordinate, et cetera. but when it's other countries that are revolting against you and they're banding together i don't care how powerful you are right you can't fight everybody all the time and so i think that

that's a really good point you're right and i think what makes it worse is you know the u.s as a the government is going to fight a war on multiple fronts because there's a revolution from within there's a backlash from within and there's populist movements around this idea that globalization hasn't been fair to everyone right and so i think the u.s is facing an internal mutiny on some level and is now facing a crumbling of its allegiances internationally, all in the meantime, all in the while, I think we haven't figured, you know, crypto regulations. It's still kind of a very gray area. And meanwhile, other countries are accelerating full steam ahead.

You know, I think we need to wake up as a country to really try to figure out what we want to be when we grow up or grow older. Grow older, right? And it's not looking good because we're just in this sort of gray area and, you know, things need to change. Yeah. What's the most important book you've ever read? Oh, the most important book. Antifragile.

Okay, why? Nassim Taleb. Well, I think because it's, so, I mean, my first degree is economics. And it's probably one of the first books I read that had a very, a much more practical view on sort of like behavioral economics, right? So beyond the theory and things you learn, it really talks about fundamentally, you know, certain things that make you resilient as an individual, as a company, as an entity. And this idea of anti-fragility, right? Where, you know, you're able to, you know, things that don't kill you actually make you stronger, right? And I think just the tone of the book and how it kind of puts everything on top of its head, it sort of creates, at least for me, the way I kind of read it and interpreted it is, it forces you to want to think differently, but it also tells you that there's a different way.

Like, there's another way. There's another way to look at things. There's a better way to do things. And I think that's part of also the attraction to crypto and Decred and blockchain is this idea that the system we have today in many ways works, but there's always a better way. And there's no reason why, you know, things, because they've been the same way for 50, 100 years, need to remain the same. They need to evolve. Before I finish up, I'll let you ask me a question to bring us home. But aliens, real or not, you believe?

No, I don't believe they exist. Whoa, hold on. You're one of only three people. This is blasphemy on this show. Why are you a non-believer? You don't believe in aliens? No, I don't believe in aliens. Why?

Why? Because I think the whole design of the system, of the Earth, of the universe, or anything, I think it was created by God, and God created man. And ultimately, everything was designed for whatever his goals are in terms of humans and the population. And I don't think God hedged. So I don't think God created another race somewhere else. Justin Crazy, we screwed up.

What about animals? No, but they're all on Earth, right? so everything right so why do you create all the other planets i don't know that's a good question but we haven't found any aliens yet so i am i'm living within the understanding and the framework for which i think you know i interact with daily and i can kind of say is real um but so i'm gonna throw you for a loop now ready i'm sure you are uh i saw a video recently online that i tweeted which was a uh i think it was an octopus or a jellyfish or some kind of hybrid of it deep in the ocean and it was uh flying you're like you know gliding uh in the water and it was going

over top of various what i'll call um kind of environments so one was more of a rocky kind of light colored one one was a darker what looks like kind of like um seaweed type environment etc and as it was going over each one of the environments it was changing colors and it was completely camouflaged like it was scary how it did it and at the end of the video it goes down into the rocks and it literally looks like it hardens and turns into a rock wow and all i kept thinking to myself is humans may be the least prepared species on this planet to deal with bad shit because something like that is incredible but i also think that if you also kind of follow the you know um not crazy what's the what's the core of creationism if you follow this idea that

you know things evolved oh evolution yeah um and evolutionary theory like a lot of things had to happen in perfect balance for life to actually happen on earth agreed and i think that I just don't think that there's anywhere else in the solar system where all those things align so perfectly to create life. All right. Last question for you. Are dinosaurs real? Well, we have skeletons of dinosaurs who dug up, so they were real at some point. Did we dig them up?

I think so. All right. Just making sure. If you went 0 for 3 with me on aliens, things in the ocean, and dinosaurs. Everything is here. All right. Um, everything has evolved, evolved from here. I just, I mean, there's no evidence against the fact.

So look, it, uh, there are not a lot of people who come in here and say they don't believe aliens, but, uh, that may be a good bet is the fact that everyone else has consensus that aliens exist. Maybe the, the, uh, the, the counterintuitive bet is actually the right one. Yeah. That's how you make out size gains being on the other side of the trade with the crowd. Exactly. What one question do you have for me to finish up? Question for you. I guess what makes you really optimistic about the crypto space?

Like, why have you dedicated your life and a lot of your time and effort into the space? Like, what really gets you up? It's the ultimate speaking truth to power. Like, there's a lot of people who do a lot of things, And they rely on their ability to coordinate resources. They rely on their ability to use information arbitrage. They rely on their ability to use violence to do things to other parts of the population in every country that puts people at a systematic disadvantage. And so whether you look at something like inflation that actually drives wealth inequality, whether you look at something like seizing of assets, things like that.

I think that Bitcoin, crypto, and even blockchain more generally has the ability to empower people to fight back. Awesome. And the part that I like about it, especially having deployed in war environment, et cetera, is that it's a peaceful way to fight back. Right. You don't have to kind of revolt in the sense that people have historically thought of in terms of go fight or protest. test, um, you can do it in a way of just, I choose to opt out. I choose plan B, right? I choose to store my wealth somewhere else, or I choose to earn my income by securing a network, um, et cetera. Uh, and I think that that's pretty powerful idea, um, that just hasn't been around, you know,

for very long. And I think it'll ultimately, uh, become more and more popular as people kind of get aware of it. Awesome. Cool. I agree. Listen, I appreciate you, uh, you taking the time to do this uh you are now the resident uh expert on off the chain of all things uh crypto and uh the african continent so we'll have to bring you back as uh as things continue to evolve and do this again in the future for sure thanks a lot hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the Chain homepage. Scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars

in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off The Chain.