The Pomp Podcast - Simon Yu, CEO & Co-Founder of Storm: The 3 Year Outlook on Crypto

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Simon Yu is the CEO & Co-Founder of Storm. In this conversation, Simon and Anthony Pompliano discuss cryptocurrency adoption, incentives, and where crypto is headed over the next few years. ----- Curious about Cryptocurrency but don’t know where to begin? Storm Play is a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for you time. Simply download, register and discover microtasks that meet your interests and be rewarded with Storm Bolts. These Bolts can then be converted and withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including Storm Token, Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC.).  Earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool products! Download the app to start earning crypto here! https://bit.ly/30pSxh9 (Available for iOS and Android). ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at:https://www.blockworksgroup.io

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. Simon Yu is the co-founder and CEO of Storm. In this conversation, we discuss cryptocurrency adoption, incentives, and where crypto is headed over the next few years. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Are you curious about cryptocurrency and you don't know where to begin? You can use Stormplay, a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for your time. That's right. You don't necessarily have to make a financial investment to begin. You can simply download, register, and then discover these micro tasks that they present

you that meet your interest, and then you're rewarded with these Stormbolts. The bolts are then converted and can be withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including the Storm token, Ethereum, or my favorite, Bitcoin. If you go and download the Storm Play app today, you can earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool new products. It's worth a try, and it's a great way to get started. Remember, go check out Storm Play in the App Store today. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp 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. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm here with Simon. Super excited to have you come on.

So thanks for taking time to do this. Yeah, thanks, Pomp. I'm really excited to be here. For sure. All right, let's just jump right into your background. You got a pretty wild backstory here. So let's start at the beginning and see how I got to StormX. Yeah.

So we started StormX back in 2014. So part of my entrepreneurial journey started when I was 19 when my parents went bankrupt. So I was forced to drop out of college. And I was working full time as a bank teller and I didn't have enough money to pay for rent. So I decided to sell Korean tacos. creating barbecues pretty good and make tacos and deliver it to students around my college at University of Washington and it you know did well eventually and I was able to go back to school with some scholarships graduate and my first job out of college I was an underwriter for a bank and

I also started this food truck and so you know while I was at the bank a lot of articles started coming out on Bitcoin because of Mt. Gox and Silk Road and it's all for the wrong reasons about how it was money laundering or drug smuggling but um you know i i was really fascinated so when i looked into it um i noticed how it could start disrupting uh fees and how we send money and value to people anywhere across the world and so i just needed to get in and i happened to meet my co-founder um who was building this app that you know paid very small amounts of bitcoin uh to users who watch short video um so this is around 2014-15 and in the beginning i i thought this app was really uh you know ridiculous because you're like i thought who's gonna use this app

that um pays you two tenths of a penny um but surprisingly it was growing really quickly um monthly i think growth at the time was like almost a triple digit since certain months and so i thought there was something there um and one of the things that excited people was that people were really excited about Bitcoin, but not a lot of people had the risk appetite to go and risk their money and buying it from an exchange because it had tanked so much after the Mt. Gox incident. And so we were one of those ways that rewarded, you know, an easy way for users to try Bitcoin. And I think this time around, especially after the bear market, it's interesting how this

cycle came back. But that's sort of how we started. And we realized that, you know, you can send microtransactions to people across the world for essentially, you know, very small fees, which was never possible before. And this is really interesting. And so, you know, we started a bootstrap for a while because, you know, investors didn't really want to touch Bitcoin because they thought it was, you know, like the money laundering, drug smuggling. So we bootstrapped and at the end of 2016, we were able to secure an angel round from the CEO of Bittrex and several others. And we built this product that eventually allowed users to directly connect with different products and services. So think like, you know, you want to try out Uber for the first time.

Right now, Uber is paying, you know, Google or Facebook for someone clicking on their advertisement. But it's more valuable for them to actually have users that actually try the product. And so, you know, part of blockchain is connecting two parties together, and we were able to do so. And once we built this feature out in February 2017, we had this huge growth in terms of, you know, both revenue and user base. And in the summer of 2017, we were able to build, we were able to raise the seed round from Ari Paul, Anthony Dion, and a couple of others, and continue this momentum. them. But we ultimately decided to tokenize because Bitcoin and Ethereum, we just had so much trouble with scaling. And that's because right now we have, I think, over two and a half million people that have downloaded and earned through our app. But Ethereum transactions can

only process about 20 per second, and that's just very limiting. So when Bitcoin transactions went from zero to 50 cents uh all of a sudden you know to send out uh seven thousand dollars worth of payments a week uh it would have cost us ten thousand dollars and so we ran into this really dire situation uh and then so we had to pivot to ethereum um but then ethereum also had the same issue when all of a sudden it went up from ten to four hundred thirty dollars and the gas fees just became really expensive and so to facilitate microtransactions it just uh it was just very difficult with the current status of the blockchain and so we decided to create our own hybrid solution so we use a combination of what we call bolts and storm token and we have

this batching solution that we reward users once a week and because of this we're able to send very small amounts of people just really efficiently and you know the next steps what we're looking at right now is you know people really enjoy earning our through our app it's easy and cryptocurrency allows you to be able to just set up an account without having a bank account you can just set up a wallet to earn and so we can essentially target almost every country in the world and that to us is really fascinating and our goal is to try to expand the number of offers or jobs or tasks in our platform um so users can earn more and make it more impactful towards their daily life in terms of you know how much money that it can provide for them

so let's go back for a second right when you first started looking at um the cryptocurrency space like what was the original idea that you wanted to go after yeah i mean for us was uh we really saw this huge opportunity in really the payment space so you know you have like companies like ripple um trying to disrupt the banking industry but for us was you know look at how uh people are earning money right now and you know when i look at some of these sites like task rabbit it's very fascinating because personally having struggled financially during college I was online trying to find like side gigs that I can do while I was going to school because like one of the reasons I started the food truck business was because you know I just

didn't have enough money from my day job and the bank teller job just didn't pay me enough and it was also very hard to be a part-time student while working because they wouldn't let me take times off or you know taking a final or going to classes and so I need something more flexible but at that time you know like uber and airbnb or some of these side gigs didn't exist um but then if you look at task rapid right so like somebody can stand in a line for like two hours and earn 25 to 30 an hour um and you know there's people especially in seattle there's a lot of people working at amazon warehouses and some of these guys can be better off working on these specialized jobs as long as there's enough demand on and there's public school teachers here

as well that are tutoring in more of the wealthier areas that are making a better living working fewer hours and more flexible times than they are with their day jobs just because that's just how the industry is but you know when um i you know part of being a korean american immigrant we used like phone cards uh back in the 90s to call our relatives over there and used to cost like 20 dollars for a prepaid card i think it would last like 50 or 60 minutes um but then as you know voice over internet protocol came out and things like msn and aol allowed you to call people for free and now we have facebook and whatsapp and all these different channels um calling internationally just became just no fees and it just doesn't right and so we thought this is going

to happen the same way for banking uh but not just for you know having a store of value but how we send money and how we receive value in general and one of the reasons that we thought this uh you know the way that we work and the freelance opportunities wasn't able to expand to the potential was because of these barriers right now with uh the financial cost it is to send you know someone like five dollars to someone in india or china it would cost you 50 or 100 because of wire transfer fees and etc so but with blockchain um you know this was going to zero which was the next step and this is where we valued we started with microtransactions but the earning opportunity was really what we wanted to start disrupting and how people earned.

Got it. And so that first product that you built, right, how has it evolved over time? Because Storm today, you know, when I look at it, it essentially allows you to try new things or play with products. And as you're, you know, basically spending your time, your energy or your mental capacity uh in your eyeballs and engagement you're getting rewarded for that right so it's kind of the reverse of what we see in most social media platforms where they're taking our time energy eyeballs and they're monetizing it we don't see that money they get it in this situation the user is actually getting paid to do this stuff what does that product look like you know in the beginning um and how's it evolved to today yeah and so you know as i mentioned before in the beginning it

It was just watch a short 30 second video and you get two tenths of a penny in Bitcoin. So it's a very small rewards app, but we continue to evolve. And, you know, where we're at currently is more of you engage with these products and services. And so you get paid for trying out, you know, the Ubers or the Hulus or the different products that are on the application. But what we're trying to accomplish is trying to allow people to earn money. So this is where we started, sort of more of an ad tech company. And this is because this is where there's just demand from the supplier side that can help fill ways that users can earn money. So we're just reallocating their marketing budgets to, you know, directly to users and allowing the users to get paid for their time instead of having all these, you know, bus or banner ads getting paid instead.

So this is what we're starting. But what we notice from the users in our application is people come to us because they want to earn money. You know, checking out products and services is more of a subset and it's just a secondary task of what they have to do in order to get money. And so for us is, you know, how can we constantly increase more ways that people can earn? And so to scale, definitely having people create their own tasks is one of the better ways for us to be able to expand. But that also has its limitations as well. And as a U.S. company, we're also seeing difficulties in that in terms of, you know, like whether you need a money transmission license or not. Even if it's on a smart contract, there's different opinions that we get from, you know, legal and compliance. And so we're trying to work with third-party partners who have all that set up before we can even start this and things like that.

Got it. That makes sense. And so before we were talking, I was asking you about challenges. And you said two challenges that you guys have faced as you've built the product and the company are regulations and user experience. Let's start with the user experience side. Explain what you mean when you said that user experience is a challenge. Yeah, definitely. So, you know, we've been fortunate to have, I think, like two and a half million people earn so far using application. But a lot of these guys are very technical and they're willing to go in and understand how to set up a crypto wallet, for example, and learn how to withdraw on everything.

But we one of our biggest challenges right now is just the user experience of blockchain in general. it's it's too hard for the average person to really be able to dive deep because and i can give you an example so i have a chiropractor who's in her late 40s and i i explained to her what i did and she was very fascinated and she said okay you know i want to try out your app and so she started earning some bolts and she completed a couple tasks and by the time that she was ready to withdraw her crypto she asked me how do i do it uh and so i explained to her there's you know two good ways to do it so one is you have to convert the storm that you get to an exchange like binance or bittrex and you have to convert it from storm to bitcoin and or eth and then you

have to send it to one that supports fiat like coinbase or gemini and then you have to withdraw to your bank account and so that user experience was really difficult because she had to essentially go through kyc on two exchanges twice in order to just get a few bucks uh and then the second option i told her was you know you can open a wallet like my crypto um and then she's like okay cool and then so if you withdraw it like how do i withdraw it later again and she meant you know i tell her you have to buy this other cryptocurrency called ether and and that's that's when i lost her and she's like what you know i i don't want to do that and you're super complex yeah it's just uh it's too much there's too much friction in between so you know this year though i i have seen a lot

of products coming out where it's allowing you know like people to be able to spend a lot easier and i think you know gemini is working with spend um that's how you pronounce it and a couple of the other i think at&t just announced that they're going to allow crypto spending whatsapp is allowing spending so there's more partners that are coming out and that's what i've really enjoyed over the past few years is there's these guys that are helping make making that friction uh a lot easier for normal people to be able to engage with crypto but until now our biggest challenge has been there just to get average people onboarded it's it's pretty difficult um and so uh on the plus side though because there are so many intelligent people working on cool products in the space

things are evolving so quickly and we're starting to integrate with these partners as well to try to remove that friction absolutely and so what do you think the solutions are on like an industry basis right so obviously you guys are facing some of these issues that you're not the only ones what can happen is it just we need more time and it kind of gets better over a certain time period or there's specific things that you think you can identify and say if we can solve x then the overall user experience of using this stuff will uh will drastically improve yeah i think with time um as you mentioned we're just seeing the progress happening and that was one you know one of the biggest pain points for us was the direct conversion to viat if users wanted to spend it

and those are coming out and you know essentially even i i think when people are looking at blockchain too often they're expecting instant results just because so much capital has flooded into this industry but even with the internet era and the dot-com bubble it took so long i mean how how many years was people relying on aol and their dial-up internets be disconnected from our phone phone lines before it even moved to dsl and cable when it started really to help us scale you know i still remember i was using aol and i i got in trouble for having to disconnect my phone line because my dad tried calling home and i was stuck with that for about five years from what i remember um but it just takes time and now we see you know internet as a part of everyone's

lives across billions of people across the world but i think with blockchain the advantage that we do have is we have the internet to actually speed this up so it'll happen faster than you know the adoption for internet than in our generation absolutely and so then what about the on the regulation side right so user experience obviously is a huge problem and then on the regulation side what do you mean that that's a challenge yeah and as a you know crypto company in the u.s so this is definitely one of our biggest challenges um so you know things are very unclear and i think there are certain countries like singapore and malta that's a little bit more clear in terms of how you know cryptocurrencies or even utility tokens work in general but um and i can give

you an example like several months ago when the sec came out with the memo we contacted six different law firms and each law firm gave us very different advice um it's just because nobody really knows and everyone's trying to guess what's going to happen but because there's a lack of legal clarity we just sort of have to take the most conservative approach and try to predict what will be the law in a few years but that can get very expensive and time consuming and even if we do all the steps to try to you know comply in the right direction it could be wrong if you know the regulations in six months comes out and says something differently and this happened like multiple times when we're trying to do a token sale,

I think we got delayed for three months just because things kept changing so rapidly. And, you know, it's very difficult, you know, when we're trying to just focus on building product and making a good user experience and making it more accessible and things like that. And then we get distracted because certain laws change or, you know, we have to spend time with lawyers

to make sure that we do everything in the correct way. And it can get very expensive and just time-consuming absolutely and so like as you're going through this process you're talking to these different law firms do the law firms necessarily disagree like is it one says hey you can do x and the other law firm says you can do y and those two things are actually um in direct conflict with each other or is it just that they all generally think you know head down option a route but there's different variations to it like i guess how much is the uh dissent between the uh the law firms yeah i we've had such different opinions um from the

different law firms that we've talked to which is really surprising you would think that it's very similar in a way but you know i think one of the biggest questions too is like how token companies interact with exchanges and that's definitely one of the big question marks and you know i talked to you know ceos and other token related projects as well too and each person with different law firms has a different opinion you know one is as conservative as don't get listed at all like one is you know it's okay to just completely be on the other side like work within the exchange and one is, you know, this, the opinion is too different. And, you know, lawyer's job is to protect you, which is the right thing to do. But each law firm will have a different opinion on how to protect

you. And that can get very expensive. Got it. And then we've seen recently, you know, a lot of conversation from Kik, from Circle, where they're actually making specific changes to their business because of the regulation environment. Have you guys been forced to actually make some changes or is this all been more kind of proactive? You've not done something because of it. So you didn't necessarily have made changes. You just have made different decisions understanding that regulatory environment. No, both for sure. We've definitely made changes in terms of how things operate in the business. And then also on the proactive side, we're definitely always trying to take the more conservative route and making sure that we're

compliant um and yeah it's just it's just one of the barriers to the this industry i think with having to deal with the extra work that's involved and i mean even like things outside of just the cryptocurrency realm to the gdpr the implementation that went out in europe up we had to stop everything and make sure that you know we were compliant with that regulation and that set us back you know two or three months just to be able to comply with that and it's just yeah that's just one of the challenges of running the business absolutely and so as you guys look at you know where you're going now is this something where you continue to build the product and you keep an eye on regulation,

you're waiting for the user experience to improve, but that core experience of users being incentivized to take certain actions or spend time viewing or using things and they'll get paid will stay the same? Or do you see some kind of major evolutions of the product over the next, let's say, 18, 24 months? Yeah, and so we're trying to re-aggregate all the different ways that you can earn money online through our platform.

So the, you know, the tribe products and services platform that we launched is just the first step of what we're trying to do in the long term, which is, you know, look at like 10 best ways to earn money online and they'll give you upward fiber task, like machine learning tasks and all these different avenues. And how could we put all of that into one platform? So let's just say like, hey, I really want to earn 40 bucks, go to our application. And then, you know, whether you check our products or whether you want to be a designer for a couple of hours, you can choose. And we've just figured out on our side how to really efficiently pay users across the world because of this blockchain application. For sure. And so as you're looking at this, why haven't other messaging applications or social media companies done this yet? Do you think it's just a matter of, you know, it's just not a big enough opportunity yet?

The technology is hard. You guys have been at this for a while and continue to make progress. Why haven't the big boys stepped in yet? Yeah, I think it's, you know, all those reasons plus more that you just mentioned. Like one, technology just isn't there too. like you know when you have ethereum that processes you know less than 20 transactions per second like how do you actually get a viral app out there and then we had to create our own solution and be creative to figure this problem out um second is yeah dealing with the legal hurdles

and all these issues it's just it's it's a lot of work and there's a lot of uncertainty and it's not easy having to do this and i i think third two is the industry so early that you know there's a lot of um it's just like for example it's like you know being a ceo of a crypto company almost it's like a job description to get trolled on twitter um and it's it's not an easy task right to um be able to build something that takes a while but at the same time you're expected to provide instant results and um it's definitely you know stressful and then if i think when entrepreneurs are thinking of like hey you know what do i want to start there's all these different check boxes and pros and cons that they go over and you know do they want to go through all the

hassle um i i don't know if that's you know really the case i think facebook stepping in is it's a big change and um the opportunity is big enough now and the regulations are getting more clear that you know they can step in and now whatsapp is supporting you know cryptocurrencies etc and now they're allowing advertising on facebook again and yeah we're definitely seeing a momentum change now but until now technology has been really bad you know regulation uncertainty and just the difficulty in just running a blockchain company was providing a barrier for a lot of these people absolutely and so for you are there certain applications right and what i mean by that is like certain games or products that you've seen that that have really kind of taken fire

uh on the platform that get you excited like can you give us an example or two of what people are actually uh interacting with or doing yeah so i i think we have very different user personas which is really interesting um so definitely the fastest growing regions for us is in the emerging countries like people actually you know do the tasks that are on here because it helps them with their daily life um and it's it's sort of amazing like even the two tenths of a penny and watching a bitcoin we still have that um but users are opting into the and doing those tasks on a regular basis um but then we have also the casual you know sort of the tier one country user base where you know they have income but this is more of a casual way to earn crypto and you know these

guys play games uh and any kind of service that's interesting to them so it's more of sort of like a free time kind of job um that they're just doing just because they can um and then we see more engagement with games like you know services like hulu or uber um and things like that and then yeah so it's just i think this is the part that we're really excited about is like we're even as a small company we've been able to penetrate over 180 countries um and actually have users and so the fact that it doesn't limit us to just one type of audience and that everyone can actually benefit by using this is sort of one of our motivators to you know put up with all the difficulties and continue operating as a company for sure that makes a ton of sense and

And then as you've seen this, what's like the one or two themes that four or five years ago when you first got started maybe were in existence and kind of popular that have gone away that you think could resurge back? So I'm very interested in this idea – Nathaniel Whitmore on Twitter always talks about narratives and this idea that there's some things that were popular in the past that kind of went away and fell out of favor and they come back. is there anything that jumps to mind for you um that that was a narrative previously but now uh has disappeared and you think can come back yeah i think like back then yeah like mining companies and wallet companies were the biggest rage so everyone was trying to create a company that was a one of two i think it typically happens during a bull run um with prices of bitcoin comes up you see like how many graphics card are sold and recently during the bear market there was there was such an x uh you know there was such a increased supply of third-party uh graphics cards

uh that was available in the market um and so i think we'll just see that it's it's like a cyclical thing um you know i i think wallets though it's interesting because back in that time like people weren't thinking about creating their own exchange they're only a handful it was like bitrix polonius and kraken but um you know the wallet was really the way that they thought would be uh mass adoption because everyone needed a bitcoin wallet or an ethereum wallet but there's so many different options that are really cool like trust wallet and things like that so um yeah i mean we'll we'll see what happens but i think mining will definitely come back as sort of a trend got it and then i guess are there things that you think are narratives

today that are going to go away like things that people are excited about that you're just like there is no way that that is uh viable or likely to last i i don't know i mean i think it's too early to say trends are so unpredictable and so i think that's one of the exciting parts uh i spent a lot of time just checking out other products that constantly come out and you know the idea is that i i think that might not work in two or three years i seem to get surprised on a lot of these as well too so i i i really think that depends on how hard the entrepreneur how hard the teams are willing to work to make this happen because um you know each company has a vision and if they can execute it um then you know you can make it happen right so um you know like henry

forward uh if he asked uh you know if he asked his users like what they wanted they would have said they wanted faster horses but he created a car yeah so people didn't even know that they wanted cars until he made it for them and sort of the teams that can execute like people might not realize that they might need this product but you know eventually their minds can be changed if it's if it's actually really good absolutely that uh that makes a lot of sense um all right And then any speculation on what you think the Facebooks and other social media sites in the world are going to create here? You're kind of probably one of two or three people who have spent the most time thinking about this. What do you think that they're going to launch here?

Yeah, I mean, it seems like a lot of tech companies are trying to be their own bank, right? So creating their own stable coins and they're really trying to discover the fintech industry. And even Apple with Apple Pay and their credit card, I think it's a big step. if those guys step into the blockchain space it totally makes sense i think that might be a neat thing um i i really thought that there was a big opportunity for cloud services to be on the blockchain and be decentralized and i know amazon and ibm and microsoft are spending a considerable amount of resources on blockchain projects a lot of them unknown but i think cloud on blockchain and not having a single point of failure would be one of the biggest disrupted a disruption

disrupting industries um so obviously payment is you know one of these which is why you know i think banking you know these companies um building stable coins and things like that are starting to disrupt and yeah we'll see i i do think that you know jp morgan creating their own stable coin is just the first step but eventually the ones that can create stable coins and have it be actually use on a daily basis is going to be banks because they already have all the money transmission licenses and all the infrastructure set up and all the demand. And if they flip it on all of a sudden, then all the people that are already customers will be able to use that right away. For sure. I think it's going to be very interesting, right? One of my exciting points

of this is they have built-in user bases so whether it's jp morgan facebook etc they have millions if not billions of people who they can immediately get um cryptocurrency in the hands of right different versions of it i wish they would do it with bitcoin but that's okay um on top of that uh there's also a fear right one of the fears i have is this idea that they could launch a stable coin they say it's backed by some commodity it sounds like jp morgan's going to do it backed by US dollars. Facebook is rumored to do it with a basket of currencies. And the fear there is that at some point in the future, they could break that peg. So they essentially do exactly what the US government did. They broke the gold standard. And when they broke that, they created

this fiat currency that was no longer backed by a commodity. And it allows us to print somewhat at will. I think very similar here. If all of a sudden JP Morgan or other type of cryptocurrency issuer can break that peg at will imagine if all of a sudden jp morgan or facebook became a central bank that could print money at will on a global scale right i think that there you know there's some ramifications there that are probably much more uh serious than um than we give them credit for at the moment yeah i think it's a shift and if these guys can disrupt banking i think it'll be a scary thought but uh at the same time i don't know they have to be backed by something like you said and all these currencies or stable coins are backed by u.s dollar for the most part

so i think the u.s dollar will still you know remain pretty strong um but yeah it'll be fascinating i definitely want these tech companies to be able to disrupt the banking fees and then the world will all of a sudden be more accessible and we'll be able to hire people from you know halfway across the world like india and china and get a lot of talent and be able to just build really quickly because we can now operate 24 7 you know so let's say we're you know we have our eight hours a day here but somebody halfway across the world could be working when we're sleeping and just you know right now it's limited to a very handful of companies but we that will grow exponentially once the payment barrier is really removed absolutely i think i think that makes a

of sense. All right. Before I finish up, I usually go through rapid fire questions. What do you think is the most important company in crypto? I have to say Bitcoin, right? So Bitcoin is the foundation. It's not a company, but... I love it. I love it. Why? I mean, yeah, so Bitcoin has to succeed for everything else to succeed. And I think that's one of the key reasons if it fails or you know there's some reports saying that you know this person is actually Satoshi or it's actually this criminal I think Satoshi or whatever but the whole idea that this can be just from

not one entity but an actual network of people contributing is the whole idea of why I think blockchain will work in the first place. I got it. I think that it is hard to find somebody who disagrees with the idea that Bitcoin is the most important thing in crypto, but they're out there, so we'll just avoid them for now. What is the regulation that you would change or improve if you could? If regulations could tell us, do X, Y, Z, or don't do A, B, C, that would be very helpful for the U.S. companies that are trying to innovate.

And we think it's just actual clarity. It's not even just a specific regulation as much as just crystal clear clarity on what you're allowed to do and what you're not. Right. So I think there's certain companies that are doing security tokens. There's certain companies that are trying to do crowd sales, not distributing tokens to U.S. holders, etc. you know being very clear be like don't allow us people to use your token you know um you know don't allow people from this country like we avoided ofac countries for example but

um that's us being precautious and that's what everyone should be doing but uh just being very clear on regulations and companies not having to spend money on legal to try to get you know uncertain answers would be very helpful got it i think that makes uh makes a lot of sense uh what you think your most controversial thought in crypto is like what do you believe that the most number of people would disagree with you with oh i mean i do think there is a use case for utility tokens um yeah because each company that have built the utility tokens um they're building their own network and essentially one of these tokens companies are going to be very successful and going to hit mass adoption and that will change the perception on how we think things

so it's imagine if fortnite only allowed you to buy b bucks uh using their token people would actually use it uh and i think that's an unpopular opinion that most people would disagree with me on that yeah i think that it is uh it's almost like the sober view of utility tokens has value right I would argue that, and I have in the past, that Amazon's AWS credits or Starbucks' stars on the mobile app, those are portions of, quote-unquote, utility tokens, right? They give you utility to do something, but they're not ICOs that raise hundreds of millions of dollars and people are buying and they're looking at an exchange hoping that the price goes up. So it's kind of more of like a sober view of what those utility tokens could be and what purpose they could serve. Yeah. All right. What's the most important book you've ever read?

I really enjoyed Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I think that really helped me change my perception on just not working a typical eight to five job and thinking outside the box on how everything operates. And that was definitely a life changing event for me. yeah i uh it's actually one of uh one of my favorites as well and uh it's also uh people who tend to read it earlier in their life seem to get much more value out of it because the concepts are written in a pretty simple way um they're profound when you know you're still kind of in the formative aspect of uh of your life right yeah i agree i definitely recommend everyone to read that book you have to have it for sure um all right before i let you ask me a question

to finish it up uh we talk about aliens what a believer non-believer real not real definitely a believer i mean our earth is so small compared to the vast amount of galaxy just the space out there it's just there's no way that we're the only living things in existence and do you think it's something where we'll eventually come in contact with or coexist or it's just hey the probability is high that there's other intelligent sentient life out there and we we're unlikely to ever discover it no i think it'll definitely happen maybe not not in our lifetime because most planets that have some sort of life might be light years away but it's like christopher columbus uh nobody knew what was on the other side of the ocean but he ventured out and it took

a long time to make that happen but now it's just the norm and that will eventually happen i think as well yeah it'll be interesting to see who the christopher columbus of space is right maybe maybe you uh i'm not smart enough you gotta be you gotta be pretty damn smart too what's the movie um i think it's uh is it matt damon i think he goes to mars and he's like eventually figures out how to like grow plants on mars or something yeah that was a great movie so like you got to be pretty smart to uh to survive i i would be uh dead immediately um all right what uh what one question you have for me yeah i mean where do you see this industry going in the next five years and i think that people are really curious to see what the next

steps are and you're one of the top influencers in the space yeah to me it's um i i essentially have you know three core beliefs in crypto well two core beliefs um and in some some uh applications of them but two core beliefs are just bitcoin is sound money right it literally is just better money. And I think that we are going to see this kind of new explosion of what happens with this asset. And if adoption and the market goes the way that I think it's going to go, I think it's going to catch a lot of people off guard. And so it's scary to think that Bitcoin is actually being underestimated, not overestimated, right? For us that are so ingrained in the community. And then the second thing is that every stock, bond, currency, and commodity will be tokenized at some point in the future.

And so there's definitely things that are not digitized today that are more financial assets that will be. I think that's a kind of foregone conclusion at this point. But then even things that you're talking about, right, this idea of kind of platform or company-specific value for mediums of exchange or stores of value. I think all of that's coming. And I just look towards the younger generations. I'm 30 years old. And most people I know, kind of 35 and younger, they grew up with a phone in their hand. Everything that they do with money is digital. And it's just a very, very different world. and so that technology adoption is going to look different that uh that type of technology gets applied to other aspects of of our lives i think it's going to be a pretty big disruption that uh you know a lot of companies just aren't gonna they're just gonna miss the boat right that you know just classic innovators dilemma yeah but but you don't think uh they'll buy their way in and

you know buy some of their early inventors i think they'll try um you know a lot of people forget just because a large incumbent buys somebody doesn't mean that there's great integration right um and you know the other thing too is for a lot of entrepreneurs in crypto there is uh there's this really unique um there's a really unique component here of one of if you if there's an opportunity to go build companies right now you don't want to build a company sell it to a large incumbent get stuck there for three years and miss out on three years of building. So I think what I see is a lot of founders sell their companies, not go with the companies, or they're going to negotiate really short golden handcuffs to stay, you know, 12

months. And then on the six month in one day or 12 months in one day, they're going to leave. And so, you know, that's an interesting development that I don't think a lot of people have thought through yet. But it gets entrepreneurs back in the game, right? And so if entrepreneurs want to spend their time building, I'm all for it. And I encourage them to do that. Well said. Well, we're all learning together, having some fun. So listen, I really appreciate you doing this, Simon. Super cool what you guys are doing over at StormX.

And we'll have to do this again in the future as you guys continue to progress. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Are you curious about cryptocurrency and you don't know where to begin? You can use StormPlay, a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for your time. That's right. you don't necessarily have to make a financial investment to begin. You can simply download, register, and then discover these micro tasks that they present you that meet your interest,

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