The Pomp Podcast - Dan Doney, CEO of Securrency: National Security Debate - Bitcoin vs. The Dollar

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Dan Doney is the CEO of Securrency, a financial markets infrastructure technology company focused on enhancing capital formation and stimulating global liquidity. In this conversation, Dan and Anthony discuss his time working as the Chief Innovation Officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency, how innovation works in the CIA and NSA, why a focus on innovation inside large organizations is important, what he’s building with Securrency, and why capital formation and global liquidity is important to improve via a blockchain. 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/pomp and build your crypto portfolio the smart way. -----If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off the Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony 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. Dan Donnie is the CEO of Securrency, a financial markets infrastructure technology company focused on enhancing capital formation and stimulating global liquidity. In this conversation, we discuss Dan's time working as the Chief Innovation Officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency, how innovation works in the CIA and NSA, why a focus on innovation inside large organizations is important, what he is building with Securrency, and why capital formation and global liquidity is important to improve via blockchain. I really enjoyed this conversation. Before we get into it, though, I want to talk about the two sponsors for this episode. The first sponsor, me. I need your guys' help. I need you guys to head on over to YouTube, search Anthony Pompliano, scroll down, click on the channel,

and subscribe. My goal for 2020 is to reach 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and you're going to be the people who help me do it. So head on over to YouTube and subscribe to the channel where you can view all of the videos on YouTube of these interviews. Also head over to offthechainmerchandise.com. That's right. We got fresh gear. Go to offthechainmerchandise.com and you can buy t-shirts, hats, mugs, cell phone carriers, all kinds of cool stuff. offthechainmerchandise.com. Now, the other sponsor, who's not me this time, is eToro. eToro has been killing it. They started out offering stocks, commodities, traditional currencies, and cryptocurrencies to users around the world. But last year, they hopped on over

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They're so impressive that I even invested. Here's a little known secret. eToro is larger than Robinhood. Just don't tell anyone in the US. They don't like to hear it. So head on over to eToro.com and sign up for an account. Let me know what you think about their social trading and copy trading. When you hit eToro.com, let them know I sent you.

Feel free to tag them on social media and me and let them know that I'm the one who sent you. They really hate when you do that. So check out eToro.com, check out offthechainmerchandise.com and check out YouTube to go subscribe to the new Off The Chain channel there as well. I hope that you enjoyed this episode with Dan. I really took a liking to him and enjoyed recording it. So let's get into it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pom or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp 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. Bang, bang. I'm here with Dan. We got a whole bunch of stuff to cover. I'm super excited about this because you've got a very different past, I think, than most people who come on the show in the defense world and intelligence world. And then now you're working on tokenization and compliance tools. So a whole gamut of things. But thanks so much for coming and doing this. Thanks, Paul.

Really looking forward to it. We're recording this on a nice cold day in New York City, so we're warm now inside. And I forgot my jacket, of all things. I had to suffer through the streets out there. It's, yeah, it's cold, but it could be worse, right? Let's start from the very beginning. where where'd you grow up and kind of how did you get into the defense and intelligence stuff so i i'm a farm boy from western pennsylvania okay what part near pittsburgh south greensburg

okay i don't know god's country when i when i uh when i got deployed to uh iraq i was there with a bunch of guys from western pennsylvania um but more like brookville and all that stuff yeah yinzers for the folks at home who uh are tracking we don't even need to go into that so i i started coding as a uh as a 10 year old um built cattle auction programs as a teenager went off um didn't really frankly know a whole lot about what was going on in the world as uh i was in a closed in backwoods uh tiny town turkey town is actually the name of my hometown um turkey town turkey town pennsylvania we got only in pennsylvania yeah more more cows than people um i uh my older brother went off to the naval academy and i saw him come back from from

there a different man and uh positive or negative oh completely positive i mean he left as a boy came back as a man and uh that made an impression on me so that was the path i chose went into the naval academy um was fortunate enough to go to mit for grad school straight out and spent um several years on a sub a couple years teaching at the academy and then got out in 2000 just before 9-11 got it um and when you got out what was the uh the thought process like what you want to do started having kids and so it was time to hop out so i actually went to work for a startup this is very formative for me um the name of the company was virtual logic and it was built around a concept of a virtual company where you have a shell at the top of just administrative systems

things that you need to, to function as an employee, but underneath that was a bunch of entrepreneurs. And so they were really creating conditions where you would go and, and eat your own. And so as you came into this, you're really being mentored by entrepreneurs. Um, in the DC area, it was one of the fastest growing companies in, uh, in DC purchased by a big company. I won't say who, um, and they completely obliterated the entrepreneurial spirit and, uh, a number of us Decided to leave. 9-11 hit. I had been doing AI research starting my grad thesis was AI control of the nuclear reactor at MIT.

So I'd been working in AI, was recruited to NSA and worked there for almost a decade in artificial intelligence. So we got to talk about nuclear reactors because I had Mark Schneider come on the podcast who spent 20 years in the Navy and worked in a number of the nuclear energy and kind of power aspects of the Navy. And I was shocked at just how obvious it is that nuclear power is important, right? And kind of that I understand there's a bunch of controversy around it to some degree. But what is AI-controlled nuclear power? Yeah, so obviously safety is a huge thing. And, um, so mechanisms to allow you to detect when things are going wrong early, um, AI is a really great tool, even in the early nineties to be able to pick up early signs of problems that are coming.

And this is, uh, things like there's problems within the facility or there's problems external to the facility that may start to, uh, inhibit what we're trying to do at the facility. Really all of the above, but specifically in this case, detecting anomalies in the reactor, problems with pumps, among other things, early signs of boiling, among other things, that shouldn't happen. And so having effective tools to combine all the information to be able to make a decision faster, obviously, is important. Got it. The irony, you know, people seeing the movie Chernobyl, that's even in the early 90s, the kinds of technologies that were being produced for nuclear energy of self-safe reactors that could not, even if someone was malicious, explode, cause damage, were produced. Yeah. You just couldn't get them to market because there was so much fear around the industry. So the irony is the reactors that stayed around were ones that were using older technologies that weren't better.

Yeah. And obviously, the way the Russians built their reactors was not safe. Yeah, it's just fascinating to me. My favorite part of the conversation with Mark was that they put the rods in a pool and it just sits in the pool for 10 years. I was like, man, this is like a homemade, you know, science experiment that actually works. Right. But but but it was very clear, I think, just the the complexity right involved in this. And it becomes very obvious that machines are probably going to be better at doing it. I would have thought in the future, but it sounds like even in the 90s, the machines were actually better at it than humans. Well, so it's one thing to do a research thesis at MIT. It's another thing to have it in a production reactor. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, all right. So you go, you join

the NSA first, then you spend time at Department of Homeland Security, and then you spend time at the Defense Intelligence Agency. So for those at home, I'm going to use acronyms. So NSA is the National Security Agency. DHS is the Department of Homeland Security. And then DIA is the Department of Intelligence Agency. I feel like I've got my alphabet soup down for the day. What'd you do at the NSA? I was part of what was originally known as ARDA, the Advanced Research Development Activity there. It later became IARPA as it merged with CIA's research arm. And so I spent that decade in Arda and then IARPA. My focus was AI. So I was there, the early programs, one called

Novel Intelligence for Massive Data. Another one that I worked with was Acquaint, Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence. So those programs were, Acquaint, for example, was about teaching machines to answer questions. And the intent was analytic questions. I worked with the founders of IBM's Watson capabilities. So the capabilities that competed on Jeopardy actually started in that early work in the early 2000s. And so you guys are looking at this as we think that this is possible. So let's go find today's technologies and try to build the capabilities to ask a machine a question, have an answer, et cetera. Or are you kind of reverse engineering? How does that work? Because I think the defense organizations and kind of community has done a great job of

driving research and development over the years and then commercializing the technology, how does that kind of come together as you're there working on it? Yeah. So in advanced research activities, you're really looking at the time horizon 10, 20 years out. So, you know, again, at the time working quantum computing among other things and the roots of AI and specifically the focus there was on natural language processing and really building the foundation. And why does the intelligence community care? Why does DOD care?

It's about decision advantage. So the impacts of failed intelligence decisions are obvious. 9-11 was failed intelligence. So we need decision advantage. We need it on the battlefield. So throughout history, battles are won based on decision advantage. so the question is how can you get better information than the adversary how can you make decisions faster and better than the adversary and that involves processing information

faster in in finance it's known as alpha and so it's the same basic mechanism so our our focus first is how can you process a large amount of pros in order to help an analyst get effectively a bionic knowledge worker allowing a person to reach out further into the information space and my specific focus was on how do you blend human intuition and machine speed in the space and we did a lot of work there so one of the things that i want to clarify because um i feel really strongly about a part of this work and then the other part i think is less controversial uh there's the front end of like what data do we have right which is all of the collection surveillance and all that kind of stuff and i think um i don't want to have that conversation

today because i think that part of the conversation uh one is controversial uh two um it's a really really nuanced conversation that would take hours for us to go through uh what i really want to focus on is kind of where you had an expertise and a lot of experience which is there's data that's provided to you right and it's how do we analyze the data that we have regardless of whether we should have it not have it is it's from citizens militaries you know adversaries or whatever you're really focused on okay we have this data how do we look at this data and analyze it for insights and then also to make decisions from it but that's a pretty wide open kind of you know white space like like how do you start to to look at that and say this is the areas we want to

focus on or start building it yeah well look the fundamental challenge is this so search engines that people know are really about how does a person find the information that they need well in a massive amount of data it's actually the opposite question that's important how does the data find the person who needs it so that comes down to valuing information obviously there's a massive amount of information what do i need to know right now and uh the metrics for the at the very end of my research one of the things that we discovered that was profound still profound is that value information matters um to to folks it's relative so a piece of information that's relative to me and what i do is different so there's no universal sense of value but it came

down to four fundamental parameters or dimensions obviously relevance matters things that are relevant to you different than me and if i'm getting a bunch of information not relevant to you that's that's not useful but it's profoundly important to get novel data that is data that you haven't you something you didn't know before okay well here's what was profound about that search engines google's page rank algorithm among others really drive popularity popularity and novelty are almost the inverse of each other. So in other words, if you're a knowledge, an expert in a field, getting a feed of what's popular for folks is actually giving you stuff you already know. That's not useful. So the very algorithms that drive more towards centrality are not useful

in terms of delivering valuable information. You need novelty. And mathematically, it's a much harder problem. And novelty meaning, so if you take that search algorithm, the things that show on the first page are the most popular pieces of information it's the most discovered kind of the most widely accepted as fact or truth etc novelty would be what's the thing on the 472nd page of the google search results so it's related it's just either not very well integrated into that um that kind of web of information on the first page or also hasn't been as discovered or as popular etc is that yeah so mathematically what's hard about it is exactly that so novelty is what is not known okay and so by but almost by the essence of it it's if you were just to use an information

theoretic approach and put your finger right in the center of what facts about something those will be the what is well known yep so the important and hard problem is how you get to what is new not close to the center but related to the center and so there's some hard challenges associated with doing that by the way search engines don't do this well yeah so and actually they're built to do the opposite, right? Like they don't want to surface the novel information at the forefront of the results because that is unlikely to be what the majority of people are looking for. That's right. So this opened up an interesting line of research, but then I was off to DHS to do other things of how do you actually get valuable things that you don't

know that you need? So what was the work there? DHS, I went to work in the enterprise service delivery office. And I'd been a coder and really an algorithm developer since early on and since I was a kid. There I learned to develop enterprise systems. And the DHS was made up post 9-11 of 14 different components that came together. That's a train wreck. If you ever had government agencies try to work together or components, especially when they're brought together, it's hard to work in that setting and creating systems that could work in a coalition environment where people have different authority competing interests is a hard challenge it turns out to be central to the financial system so i really learned some key skills there um i happened to work on a very

important project that led to some of the things that we did later okay um what was that project it's called self-check so i was the lead architect on on the system it was a front to e-verify so many people know e-verify it's a mechanism to determine if one's eligible to work here in the states it was full of errors and the government had spent a lot and what that means on the ground if it's if it's giving the wrong information as someone who's actually eligible to work is not able to work that's a problem and um so congress knew it they spent a lot of money trying to fix it and uh the team came up with a novel approach to go after this which is let people check their own government held privacy data now and make sure it's right and if there's an error

then allow the person to to raise a flag and then the government to go about fixing it what that requires is if i'm going to check what the government knows about me from a privacy perspective it better be me who's checking on my data and you you know i shouldn't be able to see yours and vice versa so that came down to identity proofing who how do you know that someone is who they say they are. And that piece, when we combine that on the back end engine of E-Verify, we created a system that was very effective. Steve Trang What were the ways that you could verify?

Steve Trang So first, what do you know, other biometrics, other components, now, oftentimes, the very people we were trying to verify, were folks who weren't here in the States for long. So they were here, right. So you may not have a whole lot of data, but you can look through records, ask questions the mechanisms that you detect you get to a high level of certainty that they are who they say they are have continued to evolve even since since that time got it but but there's a lot of tools now and there's a lot of players in the financial services space who have worked on

or are working on effective identity proofing models but it's important problem for the financial services space in general and the problem that we find fascinating now is not just can we verify you are who you say you are but how do we verify that you're permitted to perform a function yeah and we'll get into that yeah for sure and so you spent time at dhs did a whole bunch of work there you guys won some awards and things like that but uh then you ended up at the dia and the dia is it's fascinating to me because most people know of the cia right the central intelligence agency uh the defense intelligence agency uh is much less known uh but equally as cool in my opinion uh so kind of one just gives a description of what the dia is and then kind of

some of the work you did there yeah Hollywood doesn't favor DIA if you've seen the movie American Sniper they're actually mentioned in there we all thought that was cool um but yeah so the defense intelligence agency has a specific mission of serving the warfighter so the central intelligence agencies for really national security but it's important that the someone who's out in the field is getting the information they need to I always thought of as CIA is more diplomatic uh and kind of quote-unquote spy and you know all that kind of stuff whereas the DIA is much more ingrained in the uh military and um those uh soldiers airmen etc that's right so it's it's a different delivery uh target you're actually trying to get your information to folks out at

the at the customer good better way of saying it that's right um so it in the um in in performing that mission there i've really got it my role was chief innovation officer so to be clear i don't have the cool stories that some folks have you know when they're out that you have you know really out there on the edge. Mine was really how does an agency, a government agency, get the best things that emerge into the hands of the people who need it? And this is a fascinating challenge. It's actually a really critical challenge for banks because banks are really struggling with this right now. They know they need to reform. How do they get the best stuff? And oftentimes in government settings, folks think advanced research is the answer. You know, that's where the kind of

community that I came from. We go figure out a hard problem. We'll go and solve it. It's almost the wrong approach to innovation. So I'm going to break down two problems. I used to joke, if you think R&D and innovation are the same thing, you don't do either one well. R&D is about knowing that there's a hard problem and going, really breaking down that hard problem really over years, like building a quantum computer and then solving that hard problem. Innovation is you don't know the problem, but there's a lot of cool solutions out there. Great things are happening in Silicon Valley. How do we get to use those? That's very much, there's a great quote from Joey Ito, really one of the fathers of innovation. If you want to be innovative, lower the cost of

failure. So that's fundamentally it. R&D programs by their structure, they're long-term, big planned, they're expensive. Internal blockchain R&D efforts at a bank can be quite expensive. The real answer is to, as quickly as possible, try the new things that are emerging outside and building the techniques that allow you to quickly sift through those and deliver them into mission settings. That requires an integration framework. So what you'll see about our technology approach is we've made blockchain very easy to integrate into enterprises. So banks can get access to the great technologies. Part of, you know, you got some great, cool night vision technology developed somewhere, maybe even overseas. How do you get it in the hands of the warfighter when it has to interact with all of the other systems that they work with?

Well, it's important to have quick integration frameworks to make that possible. And these were the kinds of challenges. I honed my skills there. Got it. And so what were some of the things that you guys worked on while at DIA? Because we were talking beforehand. Some of them I expected and some of them I did not expect. Yeah, look, so the emergence of quantum computing, as it became practical, advanced cyber attack, defense techniques, just cool technologies across the board, mostly about information processing, and this cool technology called blockchain.

This was obviously of interest, and I'll tell you, the interest in 2012 was tracing what was happening in the blockchain space. So this is crazy because you are not the first to tell me either on the podcast or off kind of after recordings of somebody who worked in the defense law enforcement regulation sectors that 2012 is actually the year multiple times has been mentioned where government agencies realized this is real. we need to pay attention and started working on some aspect of Bitcoin, blockchain, etc. For you guys, it sounds like you guys were in 2012 already realizing, hey, there's transactions occurring here. There's this immutable ledger. We don't actually understand who these people are that are transacting. How do we take the identity work and overlay it with transactions and start figuring this out, right? What was the goal or why did you guys think that was important work to focus on well i'll tell you so i'll give you exactly the moment so i did my first bitcoin

transaction i was out at the aspen institute i'm getting it's like wow this was this is amazing really cool and you know then our interest was chain analysis so it's really in figuring out the intent behind a transaction why did someone just move this money and so you look across it and patterns just stick out uh immediately as to what they are and whenever you see this pattern you see ransomware when you see that pattern um you see trafficking or laundering etc sticks out so there you know obviously that matters and so then the intelligence community doesn't care about who uh satoshi is it doesn't care it does care about you know when the north koreans are using it to to to attack our private sector components and then laundering the money out so they they

care about that and an attack in that situation is they're basically hacking uh the sony hack is about others you know so they break into people's wallets remind me what happened with the sony hack um so let's see what the time frame was it's probably 2015 2016 the north koreans um came after sony sony put out a movie um that made fun of the north korean leader and um so north korea the bear there poked the bear um and basically broke into all the sony systems and then took their intellectual property their private emails splayed it all over the place and basically trying to embarrass sony embarrass them and they did but not only embarrass them um but tactically hurt them their movie scripts all of the things that were coming out suddenly splayed out there on the

internet so they they successfully carried out a cyber attack there now they do other things as well they you know there's many folks i'm sure probably in the space who are attacked i've had folks come after me um nation states who do in this space so you know it's a distinct threat they steal they launder um but the thing that really made it um apparent to me that there was an important need to regulate and this industry was when you saw the nexus between bitcoin transactions at the time and human trafficking so you could see the linkages in terms of how these things were being used to move human beings. And the bottom line, no matter how you come down on this in terms of the community,

is governments have a responsibility to protect their people. This is a thing that societies cannot accept. So the need to intervene, as there's many advocates for anonymity, you can't have it. Anytime you have anonymous transactions, you can have private transactions, and we work our tail off for privacy. But anonymity is not – can't stand in a setting like this because all through human history, when you've allowed for anonymous financial transactions, what follows is untoward, the kind of things that governments have to step in. So two questions. One, cash is anonymous transactions for the most part. How does the defense sector kind of go to sleep at night okay with physical cash versus anything that's, you know, using a keyboard? Well, look, so first, lots more bad things happen with the U.S. dollar than with Bitcoin.

So, you know, I'm not a purist in this. But so if I give you $20 right now, people would know because they're watching. But if we did it out on the streets, no one would know that I just did that. So you're right. I can do an anonymous transaction with cash. I can move. I can give you $100. I can give you a million dollars and you'll see that leave the bank.

And someone's going to say, where'd that go as part of this? But what I can't do practically is carry a million dollars worth of cash to Iran. Now, it can be done to be sure, but there are laws against moving more than 10,000, or at least you must report when you move more than $10,000 across borders. It can be seized. So there's significant risks associated with it. It's precisely for this region. So cash can't move anonymously anywhere in the world efficiently.

and yes so but breaking that down i think it's important uh you can do it it's just much more difficult because when you got to carry the physical cash too there's a bunch of checks that are uh kind of invoked um and it literally involves the physical movement of things right whether that's people planes cash etc you can't do it legally without government oversight and if you do it illegally there's risk i can send um 10 million dollars 100 million dollars of bitcoin if i had it i wish i did you know to to someone in iran and within a few minutes they could could use it and so that's the point or i could send it to a human trafficker in in thailand that that's the thing where government has to care about that they have to care so this is a big thing

with stable coins that we are intent on doing regulated stable coins and we have the tools to do regulated stable coins there's this feeling sort of in the industry well it's a managed stable coin, that should be enough. In other words, it can go wherever it wants to go. And it's only when it crosses into the financial sector that it matters. That's not true. It can't be true. I mean, it is true now, only because it's happening at small scales. But FinCEN's already said, you know, look, at a certain scale, we're stepping in here. And so how, how do you think about the trade off between the privacy and kind of the individual rights versus what I'll describe it from the extreme more as a mental exercise but like the surveillance state right hey the the man

the government is watching and preventing me from doing things etc versus uh i have privacy and my individual rights that that are um you know kind of inherent in the american democracy yeah so privacy is a fundamental right it absolutely is and um it must be respected it's an important thing that even in the intelligence community folks are are taught there's uh uh an executive voter called 12333 the three-letter agencies that we've talked about actually are not permitted to survey u.s persons without a direct warrant and this is actually taught trained in calcated it's a serious thing so privacy matters you know even in in places where people don't expect that it matters but it especially matters to us in this business i'm not affiliated with the u.s government

anymore it's not my job but i am intent on doing private transactions you will see bitcoin like transactions go away because they're not private they're they're they're pseudonymous sure enough they're not private the very things that i was telling you about anyone can look in on the ledger and see what's moving around means that's not a private transaction through zero knowledge proof there's a better way those transactions can be obfuscated such that only those with the need to know will know and the next part of that then is how do you know who has a need to know we'll go into that tier in a little bit but then this what's really cool about the blockchain that same immutable ledger that allows you to see uh to verify that a transaction took place also allows

you to verify who looked at this data so if someone's looking at data for an unauthorized region reason it becomes a matter of the record because you can actually protect that data on blockchain itself so now you have a trace of every time someone has done something looked at something that they should have or shouldn't have seen and under what authority they looked at it that gives that should give a lot of comfort to folks who now currently have their data looked at by who knows whom um in in ways that they aren't aware of yeah so we believe in self-sovereign identity in in a concept which allows you to protect your own privacy data now what's cool about the blockchain generally is you can obfuscate so you can take and tie behind the scenes

a person's privacy data from just a unique identifier and even there that the unique identifier can be obfuscated it's important for compliance reasons that that's tied to an attribute so you spoke about a great interview with uh wrong chen and you pulled out your your id and you say look most people just care had someone verified that this is me and they don't you know as i show them my driver's license they're getting a whole lot of information really don't need. In fact, for most financial transactions, like for example, I'm transacting in a Reg D token. There's only a small number of attributes that you need to know. And those attributes are not privacy indicated. So I'm a U.S. person. That's necessary in this transaction

to know that. But there's a lot of U.S. persons. I'm an accredited investor. There's lots of accredited investors. I'm not a principal in the company, in some company. And, you know, those things can be known without having to give up the PII. Yeah. So basically there's a privacy in the aggregation and anonymization of your details, right? Basically I can, I can describe you without saying who you are. And because that description could be many, many people, it's really hard for me to pinpoint that as you selling me an asset versus somebody else. The only person, the only thing that a regulator or frankly anyone engaged in a transaction really cares about is this person a legitimate is this a legitimate transaction and so that that's what

needs to be known there's there's ways you can um you can verify these things but there's a underneath that is a really important role that that we find to be central and we call this a verification agent so if somebody ky sees me does know your customer check on me how do i know that the person who did that check is in fact legitimate because you end up with a race to the bottom problem if anyone can apply that attribute. Well, the financial system has rules for that. It requires you to be a regulated financial institution with a compliance function to be able to verify a person. But there's other attributes that matter for securities transactions. And it's not just a credit investor, which is what most of the security token offerings in the space

think that's all you really need to know. You need a lot more than that. But once you know those things and they're verified by an entity who's authorized to do so, you don't need any more. all other compliance functions can happen automatically in a decentralized way that's radically different than the way the financial system works today and so it's once you get that foundation built on identity and then layered on top of that compliance you can do international commerce in a way that is better than the existing financial system that completely gives the regulators assurance that only legitimate things are happening at practically no cost that revolutionizes all of finance everything we know about finance and and so i guess as part of this

um before we go talk about security uh one last question about the dia um nsa dhs etc uh one of the things that i found fascinating uh in some of my other conversations is that some of these government organizations were finding ways to acquire bitcoin for um either investigations research etc uh it was pure pretty bureaucratic i think at that time and people didn't understand what are we buying you know are we basically just lighting our money on fire or whatever uh so there was mining um in some of these organizations etc during your time like were you guys buying bitcoin were you using it to kind of send around and and analyze how money moved like like how were you guys actually doing some of this uh and not so much in a like academic versus

practical way but just more of like when you when you step in in 2012 it's not like today where there's all this information available or you can just google around you can learn a lot i think a lot of people were kind of hey we got to learn by doing things right so kind of like what was that like yeah so look i can't speak for all of government all of research even in particular agency where a lot of things are going on what what our particular cut on this was just looking at the blockchain itself so you didn't even have to have bitcoin to do to analyze the transactions that were taking place on bitcoin but i mean this may may or may not be surprising there was a lot has seized Bitcoin. Of course. Take down Silk Road. That's a lot of Bitcoin. So the government

had a lot of Bitcoin and the government, we'll leave it at that. I could probably say more than you can. My understanding is that there's certain organizations that when they seize Bitcoin, they turn around, they auction it off. And there's other organizations that when they seize Bitcoin, they hold onto it. And I'm sure that can be used for a whole bunch of different things um all right so you uh leave when you leave dia what year 2015 2015 and kind of how do we go from 2015 to the start of uh security i founded security in 2015 and it was really wasted no time i don't know so it was really on this on this concept so we saw that you layer identity and and then later we found out compliance on top of blockchain you have the perfect financial

institution but the other observation was there was a lack of stable value in the space So I couldn't invest my kid's college education in Bitcoin, which I had, but it's just not a reliable investment thesis. And so there needed to be a reliable investment thesis. And so we saw the opportunity. It started with commercial real estate income streams to bundle those streams into dividend paying currencies. There was no such thing as a security token at the time. The concept had not been developed, but that's what we're looking at is these new kinds of dividend paying instruments. We, we saw that they would have the benefit of a security and a currency, and that's where the name security came from. Okay. So we found it under that name in,

in 2015. Um, and then we couldn't deny that there were securities. They were, of course they were securities. That was the name of our company was that there were securities. So we had to build out the compliance layer to make it safe to transact in, in these instruments. Um, so I thought, given how quickly we were able to tokenize things like income streams, I thought it'd take us about six months to build out the compliance tools. I was off by about four years. There was a lot of work to really build the foundation to be able to take securities regulations from Singapore, from the UK, from the UAE. Since a security token can go anywhere, you have to respect all of those laws to make it possible to build a framework that could,

that was flexible and where the laws could change and that was not tied to a specific ledger, that took a while. So we went about building that somewhat quietly as we sensed that we were on to something that was a lot bigger than what most folks saw in the space. It was also a topic that no one really cared about then.

Man, when we talked to VCs about compliance in the blockchain space, many of them were just getting familiar with blockchain generally, but they certainly didn't see any reason for compliance before 2017. So we stayed very low profile during that time as we built out the tools. So the other early observation that we made is interoperability matters. So we're ledger agnostic.

And again, the interview you had with Rong Chen, where he basically said there can't be one ledger. There won't be one ledger. If there's ever one ledger, it means the end of innovation. and so it's right to teach treat ledgers as something like a database technology as a practical matter just let's just say your wisdom tree and you issue your your etf fund on ethereum the last thing you'd you'd hate if 10 years from now you're stuck in a ledger which is no longer used because it's outdated something better has come along etc so from the very get-go you want to be ledger agnostic. And so we recognize the importance of that approach and built tools that

actually allows security tokens to move between ledgers. The user can really decide based on the characteristics they want from a ledger where they want it to go. Got it. And so what have you guys built today? Right. Because I think you guys have kind of obviously been at this a long time, built a whole bunch of different things. And you're taking kind of a unique approach to how do you digitize or tokenize assets? Most people are going and finding illiquid assets that um you know currently aren't available in liquid markets you guys are kind of doing the opposite yeah yeah so um the it's good observation the centerpiece of all of our system starts with the compliance where token framework it's not a protocol it's a framework where as a first

principle you do compliance that framework it gets layered into different ledgers so we're we can be private permission ledgers public ledgers we happen to believe strongly that public ledgers are the right way to go, but we don't really care. You lay the framework in and the compliance tools follow. And what that means is you have a mechanism by which you can create any token, attach a set of a policy to it, and the token then knows what it's allowed to do and will only allow itself to engage in transactions between known and qualified participants. This can be whether the value is a security, the value is a piece of data, the rules are very flexible they can be designed and the it's a special purpose language around compliance

the policies are portable so you build it you show it to the regulator regulator says yep that matches my rules you test it and then you use it over and over again as a practical matter so that was the starting point on this is you have to have tokens that follow the rules and it matters not just the rules in the u.s but anywhere on top of that we've got an interoperability framework and So what our target always was institutional investors. So the thinking that you tokenize a piece of real estate or a piece of art, that you're going to suddenly get liquidity. If you don't have a liquid investment thesis, you're not going to have liquidity. So in other words, if I can't know if that piece of real estate is in good standing without looking at it, there needs to be proper disclosures associated with it.

And if I'm not in a walled garden, you know, the natural access to a whole bunch of investors is not going to be there. So you need to be outside a walled garden. It means the token should be able to go anywhere as long as it follows the rules. And what you want is a liquid investment thesis. Well, what are the most liquid instruments on the planet? Exchange traded funds. So they have strong pricing functions. And so as we interacted with WisdomTree in the middle of the year last year, they were seeing their industry radically changing.

And so the exchange-traded fund displaced and disrupt the mutual fund. They sense that their industry is going to be transformed by what comes next, the blockchain-enabled fund. And so they were looking for solutions really to move into this new space, but they couldn't compromise on compliance. Institutional players can't. So when we came together, we saw an opportunity to really solve a big problem in the blockchain space. Got it. And so walk us through today. You've got WisdomTrader is now an investor. You guys have the ability to, what's fascinating to me is you're digitizing or tokenizing already liquid funds. ETFs are trading on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, wherever.

You're actually tokenizing those same ETFs. And so now there is a ability to go on a regulated crypto exchange and buy a token just like you can go on a regulated traditional exchange and buy an ETF share. It's the same asset, right? It's just in two different technology form factors. Why do that, right? Why create the tokenized format of something that's already liquid in a public market? Yeah, perfect. So look, the fundamental benefits of blockchain to the traditional ETF space.

So just to be clear, some folks are working on creating exchange-traded funds of crypto assets. So traditionally traded shares, non-traditional assets. So the Bitcoin ETF is what you're talking about. The Winklevoss twins, Bitwise, VanEck, all these folks who have filed for, I want an ETF that allows somebody to buy a traditional share on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ that gives them access to Bitcoin. Yeah, the exposure to Bitcoin. This is not that. This is the opposite of that. It's a tokenized share of a traditional asset, treasury, gold, S&P 500 behind the scenes. So what's the advantage to them? Their shares are already liquid. Why do they need tokenization? Two fundamental advantages. First is the cost

function. So blockchain allows for automation of the back office functions associated with these assets. Their industry is already under cost pressure as the margins are going down. you can obliterate the cost structures. You can effectively automate all of fund management through smart contracts. So it drives the cost of actually executing a fund to zero. That benefits, of course, investors within the space. Second key benefit in the long run is greater distribution, actually in the short run, greater distribution. So they produce a fund. It trades here in the US on, let's say, the New York Stock Exchange. They're getting access to a large pool of US investors at the retail and institutional level, it's a little hard anyway to get access to those

exposures in Japan and Singapore, et cetera. They'd like to be able to go big in all markets at one time. Greater distribution, which leads to greater size portfolios so that you could, a investor in the UAE could get easy access and exposure to U.S. treasuries. U.S. investors could get easy exposure to European treasuries or to European stock exchange, et cetera. You want that and that requires you to have instruments. Traditional financial instruments don't cross borders easily. Tokens that know the rules of all the borders actually can. And that's a new kind of market. Yeah. And I guess part of this is it's an access play, right? To me, the part that um gets misunderstood or isn't widely talked about is there's a lot of people

in the world who can't buy an asset on the new york stock exchange or on the nasdaq and to people here in the united states they think that's a ridiculous idea but to the people who don't have access because they don't have a u.s bank account they don't have a brokerage account right they don't meet certain uh capital requirements etc they don't have access and therefore that ultimately leads to a huge component of income inequality and and exploitation so just as a um an example of exactly that point so look just boiling down fundamental benefits of blockchain uh consensus immutability is is central uh the distributed authority is central and accessibility is central all of these things are critically important like you said accessibility is really

important. Early on in our project, 2016, we worked through MIT connections with a company to do securitized loans in developing world farm settings. These people don't have access to low cost capital. The kind of exploitation that occurs in settings, they were paying roughly 200% interest on their loans in those settings because they didn't have access to capital in the way that we know it. There's terrible exploitation and terrible stories of what happened to those people before we were able to introduce low-cost capital in those settings. It is a human tragedy, frankly, that there isn't accessibility there. It also is an investor benefit. So let's not kid ourselves. Institutional investors really benefit

from having diverse investment opportunities at global scale. So being able to get access to the growth in real estate in Eastern Europe. That's a great exposure to get when Western economies slow down, et cetera. They don't currently have practical and liquid access to those things. And so through accessibility, you can really change that. Yeah. And to me, you start out with the already accessible assets to some portion of the population and just expand that population percentage, right? So let's say 70% of the world has access to buying on the new york stock exchange if you can expand that to 100 or 99 or whatever the number is that's actually much easier than saying let's go find an asset that only two

percent have exposure to and let's bring that to 50 yeah pomp look so this is a big big point right now so the kinds of assets that are in the security token space are generally limited to accredited investors it's a very small pool wisdom trees offerings are publicly traded exchange traded funds you obliterate that small circle of folks who can actually enter the blockchain space with these new kinds of instruments. They're not so limited. So you can, we can access pools of folks and give them high quality, um, investment grade instruments in the blockchain space that folks didn't previously have access to. That's a big story just by itself. And so give us an example of, uh, one of the funds that you guys are doing this with, and we can kind of talk through how

that works. Yeah. Um, that's a piece for you to ask wisdom tree. Look, so they wisdom tree is going to be quiet right now okay yeah so that that's uh if you listen in on their interviews they they talk they have a number of marquee funds right so among the most liquid gold funds among the most liquid treasury funds um you can get exposures to foreign currencies etc these are great starting points um i i have let me show you this interesting problem all financial transactions are really movement of value between three dimensions, liquidity, yield or return, and stability. So when I take money out of the bank to get cash,

that cash is depreciating. I'm moving from yield to convenience, utility. So that's a fourth dimension that tokenization brings in, which is utility. Within the blockchain space, the volatility, because you don't have a stable asset to allow you to pivot between those dimensions, you haven't been able to form efficient markets here. Within the security space, there is no such

thing as utility. I can't take my shares of Apple and use them in transactions. I have to cash them in for dollars and use them. In this new world, you can. So suddenly you're opening up a new dimension for folks to move between. What does that mean? The concept of a traditional savings account where you put your money at rest in a very low yield instrument suddenly goes away when you can put it into a higher yield treasury components or um even more uh looking at securitization or other yield or return and then when you want to use it you can convert it to cash to to make conduct a payment um really instantaneously so those things really transform the way that securities behave yeah what is the biggest obstacle for you guys is it on the compliance

side or just something else it's probably institutional adoption generally we've been friends with regulators from the beginning friends is not the right term we've been focused on relationships with regulators from the beginning one thing we haven't talked about is we're overseas in we have a fair sized office in the UAE in Abu Dhabi why we went there because that we cared about liquidity that's a region characterized by lack of liquidity they had massive real estate funds um massive energy funds etc that need liquidity so we decided that was the market for us to attack to go into and um we found that it was heaven for us the the sovereigns there

recognize that they need they're very interested in blockchain they need to pivot their economies from oil-based economies to new type models. The regulators know that the sovereigns want to get into this market in a big way, so they want to do it the right way. So we entered the market with compliance tools and really got moved front of line. So we could work directly with the regulators there.

So regulators hasn't been a challenge for us. Working with them, we would go daily with regulators to really work out the kinks. So when we first talked to the SEC, it was pleasant you know it's rare that you leave a meeting and the regulator smiling and you're smiling it was uh these were good constructive meetings we're actually developing a pilot with regulators to show how you can move value across borders and respect various jurisdictional regulations it's really institutional adoption and again institutions have a lot to lose

um within this space we are um institution friendly built for integration with institutions but they just don't move aggressively into the space balance sheet matters in finance is is another key problem balance how much cash you have in the bank determines how easy you can be sued and how easy you can be sued determines how safe you are for folks to to enter the space startups by their nature don't have balance sheet. So it's hard to get into these big settings without a big institutional partner, but they're frankly in their own way. In many cases, we were fortunate enough to find wisdom tree and they just had a brilliant vision for the future. And so now we've got the best of both worlds for sure. And so as you think through, um, working with wisdom tree,

et cetera, how do you, after you go through ETFs and kind of do that work, what's the next type of assets that you guys would focus on? Yeah. So again, for all of these things to work, for things to be convenient, you need stability. And so the ETFs had to be the starting point on this. But as you move out from there, there's really no limit in terms of core functions. When you can automate compliance, a lot of things fall into place. So whether it's just straight payments, remittances trade finance you know again our core competency is in securitization so that is taking then and creating funds out of normally illiquid things trade finance is a great example of this lending generally through blockchain you know defy is is a real movement you can do self-processing

loans and then you can pull those loans and trade those driving down the cost of finance generally Got it. Before I finish up, I always do rapid fire questions. What do you think the most important company in crypto other than your own is? Microsoft. Why? That's not an answer I was expecting. I knew I could fool you with one. And actually, let me give a little shout out to Amazon as well, because they're really in the same camp. Because here's the bottom line. In finance, all businesses are now tech businesses in the end. And as they boil down, they boil down to

infrastructure plays um we see microsoft's done great work in the infrastructure as an example look what amazon has done to fedex and and what's what's happening there so the banking system the real threat to them is the amazon microsoft's of the world as a practical matter we've recognized that and we build a layer on top of their infrastructure services which actually makes effectively bank ready but that's where the play ends in in the end is those guys own the real stuff and let's not i'm not just saying that name because i recognize that they're doing real things in this space blockchain is just like just like oracle was relational databases were it is an infrastructure technology absolutely and so that they no one can do it better than those two guys

at scale i got a great i got a great fedex story for you uh earlier this week uh some tax uh was due on january 15th for lots of americans and so i had to go mail mine in and uh there's a fedex store on the corner and so i walk in and i had uh basically i had a couple of different envelopes that i had to send i had one envelope but i needed two others and so this is the guy at fedex i said uh you have envelopes he goes we do i said all right can you help me mail this and he looks at the first envelope i'd already put i goes oh we can't send anything to po boxes i said what i never thought of well it's a post office box right and he goes yeah we're not allowed to do that i said okay that's fine uh i said well can i get the envelopes for you and then i'll go over to the

post office across the street he goes well here's the problem is if you get a fedex envelope they won't take it at the post office and i'm sitting there just like in what world does the sideload systems not work right and this is coming from somebody who i don't mail things all the time right? So I just figured it was like technology, like everything's interoperable, but even the mail system between a private company and kind of the public post office, uh, completely siloed and, and doesn't, uh, kind of coexist, which was, uh, or they coexist, but doesn't interoperate, which was pretty surprising. How much worse is the financial sector though, in the bottom line, in terms of the fragmented, yeah, right. At least now you can use your ATM, uh, your ATM card,

uh at other people's atms right which is like groundbreaking yeah um all right so what uh what do you if you could choose any regulation to change uh or law what uh what would you change or improve yeah so look you know the first going in position is uh the laws are actually pretty good so there's you know thinking in the blockchain space that you know these are antiquated they're actually there for a reason and they've stood the test of time however the The accredited investor rule, as it stands, can be changed. It is very important. It always will be important for securities regulators to protect the public from people who would prey on it.

The ICO debacle is really an example of this. However, it shouldn't be based on net wealth only. The reason for the law was in the 1930s, after the crash, people from New York City went and started preying on people's pension funds in the Midwest and were taking their life savings. what really matters is how much of your life savings you're putting at risk so if I go and put two thousand or four thousand dollars in an investment it shouldn't really matter if I'm putting a hundred thousand dollars in an investment then it should matter you know whether I'm qualified like a percentage of your net worth type requirement yeah so look the UK has laws similar to this it's really below a certain threshold you can do whatever you want as long

as you don't exceed that that threshold that's and the reason that why that's so important for the national economy and i and uh chairman clayton recognizes this is more and more things are leaving the public markets into the private markets and so the that what that means is the richer getting richer because they're the only ones who have access to these investment opportunities so the sec knows it needs to change change will happen i think yeah i agree uh most important book you've ever read? Uh, uh, the Bible is, uh, is I'm shocked. That's not that more popular answer. I think a lot of people think it and they're scared to say it. Yeah. Look, so, you know, there's good principles to live by there. Um, what I found is when I, when I follow those

rules of do unto others, as you would have them do unto you, it leads to peace and peace with my wife, peace with my kids, peace with the people around me. So, yeah, I'm about to get married. uh i'm learning quickly happy one is probably listening to this and she's like i'm gonna i'm gonna screw his day up if he fucks around uh aliens believe them not believe them real not real seen one before yeah seen one before uh no it's so um better not be real here here's here's why i don't know if you've ever seen the um there's a great piece came out in 1998 from uh MIT called the great filter. I have not. Definitely check it out. Here's, here's the basic theory. And I think this is pretty much an axiom that if, if we've not seen direct evidence of extraterrestrial

life, um, right now, I think we can all agree that that's true, not repeatable evidence. And we should have based on, on this life propagates. It does so aggressively. We've already seen in a short period of time since the beginning of flight that we've left our solar system so we're able to move out and in 1940 a guy his name is von neumann posited something called a von neumann probe it's basically this it's it's sort of the same thing that that bacteria does in terms of the way it goes out build a probe that goes and replicates and builds another probe and goes and you can propagate then effectively at the speed of transmission which will become something close to the speed of light the milky way is about 13 billion years old earth is about 4 billion years

old in 100 years we've seen this kind of movement so there is a great the fact that we've not encountered another civilization in a thousand years we will probably have have moved to other planets and from there be moving and von neumann almost at the point of life speed of light across the a thousand years i think that we will be on at least one other planet if not more than one and as soon as you get on to one yeah through this effect you will go everywhere and again it's we already know how to do it at a speed that's dramatic so there's an important question that's raised by the great filter is if if that's true for sentient life if you're capable of moving that fast and we have every reason to believe that you are one of two things happens this must

be true one is getting to sentient life must be so hard that there's a filter prior to this and they posit a number of different points that actually is harder than we think for it to occur in the process of evolution or sentient life destroys itself before it propagates i think we have some evidence that we can do that to ourselves and so as a matter of principle something about sentient life causes it to be self-destructive and so one of those two things are true so if in fact there are aliens at some level on this what that means is what lies ahead for us based on the probabilities is that we're going to destroy ourselves read the paper it's so profoundly important mit 1998 the great filter the great filter you can you can google it i'm

literally read it later today i uh you're touching on a point of uh whether if aliens exist do we actually want them to discover us or do we want to make sure that we discover them right and and the whole idea is uh anytime that uh humans have invaded other human populations uh usually turns out much better for the people invading than the people being invaded uh and so if you think of that in terms of humans versus aliens uh it's unlikely that we want to be discovered and it is much more likely that we want to do the discovery well look so again life propagates so at all forms in every form it grows into its environment and so it's it might be true that that's not always true but we have every reason everything that we've ever seen shows that that's

true one or the other in the event that we encounter someone else is going to propagate Um, it's crazy. What question do you have for me to finish up before I go crawl in the corner and feel like I, uh, am the smallest thing in the universe? Uh, dang. So what would you tell a 16 year old you 16 year old? What, what lesson would you pass on and say, Hey, don't do this. It wouldn't be not to do things. Uh, it would be a couple, uh, I'm going to cheese. I'm going to just one thing um i think that over time i've learned certain things that at 16 would be much more valuable uh the first being um like swing for bigger opportunities right uh when i i've told a story before but uh when i moved to silicon valley in 2014 i went and met with the only guy

that i knew uh that lived out there this guy ben smith uh was running a company called wonderful media and asked him what's the best advice you have for me he said there's two things one keep a personal burn rate as low as possible because it'll allow you to take on opportunities that uh if you have a high burn you know uh personal expense rate you just can't do right so you gotta take a job that doesn't pay a lot but could be a big opportunity second is you'll be much more rewarded for taking big opportunities and failing than you will be for having small success uh and i think that um you know another data point on that steve schwartzman in his recent book whatever it takes uh he talks about it's just as hard to do the big thing as it is the small things you

might as well go do the big thing um so i think that's kind of a reoccurring theme uh the second is um i over time realized but did not when i was 16 years old like you become the five people you hang out with uh and so um i you know pick wisely have had uh very very great friends along the way um but i think that uh as you start to understand um you can have friends and then you can have people that are those five people you spend the most time with um you kind of just level up a little bit i think that's helpful uh and then the third thing is uh this weird thing that i think uh you can't tell a 16 year old because 16 year old won't believe it uh but it's just do you like just be happy who the fuck cares what anybody else says or does no doubt um and i forget the quote

and who says it but it's something like you know you spend your 20s like thinking everyone uh is talking about you you spend your 30s 40s 50s whatever it is and then it's like and then you spend your 60s realizing no one's ever paying attention right like whatever that quote is it just always sticks in my head it's just like no literally nobody fucking cares and the people who think that they care are actually probably just jealous this was actually a trick question because i got teenagers pop so you just you took my job good job as a father what do you tell them um make their bed get the bed on time don't play video games um so not nearly as you okay so so we only got a minute or two here but uh one of the questions i have for you is how do you

how do you handle them now saying but i could be a multi-millionaire professional athlete playing video games because that'd be the first thing i would say right my father told me the same thing stop playing the fucking video games go outside you know read do all the things that a parent would say uh there was nobody that we could point to be like well that guy's a multi-million you know dollar uh professional esports player but now there's a number of them yeah yeah so it's the danger because every one of them thinks they can be of course and it's the same thing as why can't they be a multi-million dollar quarterback in the nfl because it's there are only a couple people who can do that yep so you know that's the bottom line on it and other

than that it's a lark you got to recognize that that competes with your ability to be productive in other areas and um it's everything's work-life balance uh in in all of this but if you can't keep it at work-life balance and because you have this dream it's dangerous yeah the the one thing uh you said make your bed uh the other thing that i i think a lot about is um every person that has attained some level of quote-unquote success that i've talked with uh and i asked them what was the secret majority of them will say some version of persistence like showing up every day etc and the whole making your bed is is a perfect example of just like there's things that you got to do every day right and if you can learn that habit it's uh it's pretty powerful in every and i learned

this way too late discipline in every aspect of of what you do you know that daily commitment to to doing the right thing is is this you will never go far if you do that from success you'll always be moving on the path i think it is uh we'll end on this but i think it's jocko wilnick uh who says discipline equals freedom right people think that the discipline is uh uh a bad thing but actually they realize once you have the discipline, you're able to accomplish things. When you accomplish things, it equals freedom. So, uh, transitive property, which, uh, I tend to use as an excuse all the time. All right, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. And we'll have to do it again. Thanks, Pop. Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode

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