The Pomp Podcast - Tom Teman, Co-Founder & CEO of Portis: Fixing Crypto's Usability Issues

Episode Date: May 27, 2019

Tom Teman is the Co-Founder & CEO of Portis. In this conversation, Tom and Anthony Pompliano discuss the usability issues in the cryptocurrency industry, how those issues could potentially be fixed, what Portis does, and why it's so essential to gaining user adoption across crypto. ----- 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. Tom Tiemann is the co-founder and CEO of Portis. In this conversation, we talked about the usability issues in the cryptocurrency industry, how those issues could potentially be fixed, what Portis does, and why it is so essential to gaining user adoption across crypto. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. 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 tom my voice a little scratchy i wish i could say it's because i'm cool but it's because blockchain week has uh been uh wearing its toll but uh thank you so much for uh for coming as as you're here in new york thank you thank you for having me for sure all right uh for those that don't know you live in Israel in Tel Aviv maybe give us a little update on your background or an

overview yeah sure so I was an officer in the intelligent core after I finished my service I did my bachelor's in computer science in Tel Aviv University and started working in a cyber security company called watchdogs and I was there for seven years it's where I met my co-founder Itai he was also in the intelligent core in the technological unit and how come every Israeli intelligence well the guys in this space usually you see a correlation and then so we worked together for three years I've been into blockchain since 2013 I remember reading the theorem white paper getting really excited about the

possibilities I got into Bitcoin before that and in 2017 there was a Facebook hackathon in Tel Aviv so we tie and I build a decentralized application and we build an app called a tender was basically for event organizers we used to do technical meetups and people would click attend but not show up so we decided an event organizer can create a deposit box people place a little bit of deposit show they're serious if they show up they get it back otherwise it goes to a charity defined in advance in the contract people loved it we won first place facebook flew us out to the global hackathon in palo alto but people who approached us saying hey we want to use this application it was impossible basically

like if you're a technical person it's hard and if you're a non-technical person it's not going to happened. At the time, MetaMask was the only option. So, you know, the first thing you got to do is give the person a list of instructions on how to use it. You know, you don't get a list of instructions when you download Instagram or Uber. It just works. It's easy. And, you know, if you want to have users on this system, it's got to be at least as easy as that. So being both developers ourselves, we decided we want to solve this challenge and we created Portis, which is a tool for developers to kind of take all of that problem off the table. The users can create a wallet inside the browser without installing anything in their existing

browser, no additional friction, and we use end-to-end encryption, which means that the user creates a wallet, encrypts it on the device, so that way he has absolute control over his private key. We're not custodians. All right. Before we get into what Portis does, let's talk about what those usability challenges are, right? So pretty much almost any application that's actually built on a blockchain is hard to use.

What are some of the obstacles that you see as the most challenging? Yeah, so a lot of the obstacles can be solved with good user experience. But the two, what we see as the two inherent issues in blockchain because of how it's architectured is the private key management and network fees. These are two things that you don't see in Web2. And those are the challenges that we're aiming to solve. So the private key management, that's the end-to-end encryption. We see that as a good starting point for a user. Now, as you gain more and more value inside your wallet, which is like your identity in a sense,

then we can start thinking about adding additional layers and more and more layers of how you protect that. But we feel like that's a good balance between the usability and the security that you want to have, which is easy for users. And the network fees, we also have an interesting solution for that that we're doing, which is, well, we'll get to it soon. Got it. Absolutely. And so as this continues to evolve as an industry, do you think that the usability gets solved just over time? Or do you think that it has to be an intentional effort from companies like you guys to really kind of drive that improvement in user experience? No, definitely the latter. it's not going to happen by itself that there are there are challenges there the the two i

mentioned but others as well and there will have to be an effort by the companies to solve that you know at the end the final result should be that it's you know users don't really care about blockchain they shouldn't care about about it either it's like you know people care about the value that your product delivers to them they don't care how you do it you know you're using the web2 applications you don't care about tcp ip and the underlying things you care that you can send a cute picture of a kid into your friend and memes and stuff and that's the value you get you don't really care how it works and i remember when i was preaching about ethereum to everybody i knew back then i used to say that like the problem the hard problem about bitcoin is that it's very hard

to explain to people and with ethereum hopefully you wouldn't have to because you know you kind of abstract that away for the user and i definitely agree that people don't care about the underlying technology right they just care about what they're able to accomplish like can you solve my problem or not right so i think about it um it feels like uh the people who use something built on mongodb or an excel spreadsheet or anything else they're not being told what the underlying tech is is this something that maybe the developer community is just focused on the technology because that's where they spend most of their time and we don't yet have kind of the people who are product or marketing focused or do you think it's more pervasive than that meaning that

it's not just the technologist and the engineers that are focused on the technology it's actually the marketers the business people the product people like the entire industry is too focused on the technology i think we don't have enough marketing people and product people and people who will take this to the to the next level and it's funny you saw a similar situation both in the early days of the internet when it was very hard to use because the people in this system in this ecosystem were very technical people you also signed in places like even gaming in the 80s you know when and when you used to play super nintendo you had games and well not super nintendo even the regular nintendo you had a problem that games were very very hard there was a couple i

can mention like contra and battle toads or whatever they were really hard to play because the people who build them were you know gamers who play these games day and night and they were kind of you know blind to what the people the average person will be able to accomplish and you sometimes see that in in this ecosystem as well the people who are building this stuff they're very tech savvy they they're also very motivated because they have this belief that this is something that should happen and while i agree with that you can't expect your users to be that motivated and that you know sophisticated we need more product people more marketing people more people that user experience that can bring us to the same level of what we have in web 2

like i mentioned before there are a couple two what i believe inherent issues in blockchain that you can't ignore which is the private key management and the network fees those are things inherent in how blockchain works you know with great power comes great responsibility you got to have your private keys we're very we were very it was very important to us that we are not custodians of private keys there are some solution that go that path we feel that's kind of like taking a shortcut but you're you know if someone build the next decentralized facebook what good does it help if you have someone in the middle who's like you know the the zuckerberg who's holding everybody's private keys kind of defeats the purpose not to mention the liability and so

So what is Portis? What are you guys actually building? So our goal is to make sure developers don't need to worry about this whole issue of onboarding the user and letting them use your dApp. You have enough on your plate. You're writing the smart contract. You're worried about the user flow inside your application. There should be a solution for developers, just like if you need payments, you're using Stripe, you're using messaging, you're using Twilio. then Portis solves the whole problem of the private key management signing transaction getting more crypto into your wallet and a host of a lot of other stuff that users have to do when you're using a decentralized application so we

give the developers an SDK it's you know it's standard web3 we're supporting other blockchains as well we recently added support for EOS and we're we're adding a on and we have a lot of other EVM compatible blockchains and simply because we want to make sure that any developer on any ecosystem can use, you know, can solve that challenge, but also for our users. They don't care, just as much as they don't care about blockchain, they don't care which blockchain.

You know, it's the same. This is Mongo, like you said, this is SQL. It should work the same for both. So we give the developers this SDK, they integrate it. It's the standard way that if they use MetaMask, it's the same code. They don't have to change anything, but now their users don't have to install anything,

don't have to understand complicated terms, just use an email and a password. They encrypt the wallet on their side, and now they're in control, and they can access it from any device they want and on their existing browser. And so as you're thinking about this, it sounds similar to like a Facebook Connect, right? Facebook basically has a single button that you can press anywhere on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of websites around the world, ask you for a username and password, and then you're permissioned in to use that site under the account that you have at Facebook. With this, maybe there's not the account back at the centralized entity, right, like Facebook,

but it's very similar in that I can go to a whole number of different applications, and rather than using private keys or different various levels of cryptography, I can actually just use my email and password to then get permissioned in to use the application. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's accurate, but there is a private key behind the scene. We just don't want to bother the user with that. If you want to go inside your wallet, you can export your private key if you're that kind of user, and we're not boxing anyone in.

You can export your wallet and go to whatever other wallet you want and import your mnemonic phrase, private key, whatever you want inside. But yeah, as you mentioned, as opposed to something like Facebook Connect, we don't hold anybody's private keys. a good equivalent is lastpass or one password if you're familiar with them which is the same concept they recently lastpass was approached by the authorities in the u.s and they told them they wanted to get someone who was using lastpass and they asked for their passwords and lastpass were just like guys we can't we literally can't and and by the way we have the same challenge when

a user approaches us and say look i forgot my password i never wrote down my recovery phrase help me and we're like sorry we can't now we want we're looking to solve that we're adding social recovery and other means that will let the user, you know, find a way to solve the problem if they lose their private key and also smart contract wallets, which is, but these are things that we want to, you know, the user has to progressively move into that because when they're just starting off, when this is the first application they ever see, they don't have, they're not invested so much. So it has to be just email, password, boom, that works, but you have your private key, it's yours. I'm not holding it for you. We don't want that. It's a liability and it goes against the

whole ethos of the ecosystem and so as you're doing this keep with the kind of last pass or one password um walk me through not from the user side but from the developer side what is a developer required to do in order to on you know use this uh use portis um and then what's the benefit to them is it just simply a much easier user experience well it's a much easier user experience but it's it's not just on the level of okay you have a prettier button or anything like that and you're removing the need for a user and in terms of what it takes to integrate by the way it's very simple it's just like two lines of code since like for instance in theorem we're standard web

3 provider so if you have metamask working just import us and it works the same so trying it out shouldn't take you more than a couple of minutes now in terms of what you give to your users so we mentioned they don't have to install anything it works on their existing browser and they can access it from everywhere but the other challenge that i mentioned is the network fees is which is a very alien experience like you're walking to a website they're not saying oh you got to pay for my aws fees or my hosting fees that doesn't exist now in blockchain you got to have that and when you're talking about something like bitcoin that's not that much of a challenge because if you're updating this state of the

blockchain and you have to pay network fees in bitcoin that means you already have bitcoin so paying a little bit extra okay no worries but with ethereum a lot of the use cases that we're seeing is the user comes into a dap they're getting maybe some weird dap tokens that give them like reputation in that system or whatever but they don't have ether they can't pay the network yet but they want to update the global you know blockchain state so that's a big challenge for them like now you're telling me i have to go to an exchange do kyc do all the things and only then i can like vote for something i'm not going to do that how do you handle the kyc aml if i sign up right uh and i have a portis wallet um i have my email my password to basically authorize or

confirm that it's me am i kyc and amled at the portis level and then every time i go somewhere that kyc and aml goes with me or is there no kyc aml done and each individual service is required to kyc and aml me well we kyc and amlu through wire when you want to buy something okay so and we're not focused on the people who want to buy you know a hundred thousand dollars to speculate and to invest we're focused on the average user who wants us to you know use an application so the kyc is very low the bar and we allow you to buy up to forty dollars a day through wire with a debit card and uh kyc is just your email and phone number that's it like you know your your credit card details and address but there's no taking a picture with a passport or anything like

that because you're not buying that many and that much sorry and if you want to buy more you can do it through ach and then you just log in into your bank account using plate which is just like what you do in venmo and then you can buy up to 2500 a day but the kw but the kyc is an interesting bit we do allow you to share it but that ties into how we tackle the network fees challenge and so when we started off well you know there weren't that many depths out there so what we did is we gave each new user just $1 for free we asked them to you know verify their phone number with a pin code and we give them $1 for free now we had to block off some some countries because it was abused but in

the US and Europe it worked well it wasn't scalable it was just so people can have a little bit of gas in their tank so they can take this car on the test drive and see how it feels to use a depth we were trying to show how easy it can be but this was still a problem giving everybody one dollar for free people just took that one dollar sometimes and just you know moved it into a different wallet and said thank you and we didn't want that wasn't our goal so and recently the guys at Tabuki it's a it's another company that they released something called the gas station network now the gas station

network is something that was, you know, it was released after a long time of discussions in the community. There's the meta cartel community and it deals with meta transactions, which is letting someone else pay for the gas fees of your transaction. So you sign a transaction with your private key. It's you. Nobody can tamper with that. And then you send it to someone else who, you know, tax on the gas and sends that to the network. So this whole architecture that they created is very interesting it has a lot of game theory in it basically what it does it lets us tell the dap hey you can sponsor your users gas fees now that sounds great but you mentioned the reputation before the kyc so think of it like a collect call when you did you when you called

when you call someone in a collect call how how do they know they want to accept the charges well they recognize their your voice they know what reputation you have with them so they say okay I'll pay for that so we need something similar so we you know piggyback on the KYC and AML that we already do for users when they buy or through other means if it's the email verification they did or phone verification just for you know when not necessarily if they want to buy just if they want to do that KYC so the dap can say okay we trust you we'll sponsor your gas fees so if the user agrees to he will then share his reputation with the dap the dap will say okay I'll pay I'll I'll accept the charges, and they'll pay your network fees.

And then there's no friction. Then you're coming to a DAP on your browser. You don't have to install anything. The DAP is paying your network fees, so you can just start using it right away. And so as you're doing this, I guess one of my questions is the user experience component is really compelling, right? So there's less friction for me. The developer use case is definitely compelling in that there is a more efficient way to get people to onboard, right? There's less friction there.

And also it offloads some of the risk and complexity with managing who my users are, how, what's their credentials, all that kind of stuff. all of that said there's added risk in that you now are um adding a level of uh complexity right there's another layer or more software that's involved so the user experience gets better because you kind of build this on top of um you know the digital wallet wallet etc how concerned are you about security and some of the regulatory components that i think other companies um you know, really kind of, I don't want to say they fear, but it touches on, do you see that as part of the business and things you have to pay attention to, or is that kind of outside of what you guys are doing?

Well, security is a concern from day one. That's like, we're always trying to make sure that we're not, you know, compromising the security for the sake of usability, but we also think that you don't have to compromise usability. You can find the right balance. And in terms of regulation, well, thankfully our life are a bit easier just because of fact that we don't hold any private keys we're not the custodians of money we're not holding the private keys so we're not custodians we're not dealing we're

not actually we don't have access to the users you know funds so in a sense regulation wise that's easier we have stuff like GDPR and things like that but that that also applies to non crypto challenges yeah and I'm assuming it helps that you're not based in the US either I don't know I'm not sure if it does but yeah and Israel also has its own various regulations for stuff yeah what does the tell me more about the Israeli regulatory environment good bad overall I think it's good there I think it's very similar to the US in some regards in terms of the tax for for any holdings you have it's pretty much the

same and it's it's happy I think we have the same approach as the US which is you know we can't just let everybody do whatever they want but we don't want to stifle it because we don't want to get left behind by other countries which might be a little bit more lenient so and and it seems to me i think when i was in israel last uh there was a lot of talk of like uh trying to become crypto nation right because i think that the the language that was being used um how's the progress towards crypto nation coming um well i hope it's good i mean you have a lot of very strong cryptographic capabilities in israel and that obviously ties in very well with cryptocurrency because that's the underlying concept which is

you know we don't have to trust anybody we trust that the math works and there's a lot of great projects that came out of Israel and yeah to book you which I mentioned a guest station at work that's an Israeli team as well really yeah what what's one or two other projects in Israel that you're super excited about well there's Bancor which everybody knows and it's a pretty popular one yeah Yeah, and I'm trying to think of any others that come to mind right now. I can't recall at the moment. Okay, that's fine.

All right, and then so where do we go from here, right, from user experience standpoint? Once you've got this kind of, you know, one password or last pass type experience with Portis, what are kind of the next hurdles that need to be knocked down by, whether it's you guys or other teams, to really get the user experience to be at parity with kind of the non-crypto world. So moving forward, we do want to make sure the user can progress into, you know, I mentioned before that you don't want to put your $100,000 on it, but we still want to enable that. So we're talking with hardware wallet providers to do an integration. So your hardware wallet is like your bank safe, but you have your checking account,

but you can easily move around between them. So you can hook up your hardware wallet and now your port can take a little bit out of it every time you want, but it has a restriction up to a certain amount per day, month, whatever you feel comfortable with. And that also kind of is related to the whole recovery issue.

It's kind of weird that this is the cutting edge of technology, but we're telling people you got to write something on a piece of paper and not lose it. you know it's it's a hard thing to explain to be ridiculous yeah it's ridiculous in a way yeah and it's it's a very big challenge to private key management because even for IT professionals private key management was

a difficult problem up until blockchain hit the scene but now we're saying no it's not the IT professional has to do it it's the average person on the street it's your grandma now she has to know how to manage her private key and that's a challenge that's that's a big challenge and other than that I think we're gonna see you know blockchain by its nature is very interoperable so we're seeing a lot of interesting things happening and you know it's even in a way hard to predict because sometimes things that might sound ridiculous now will make a lot of sense later on and one of the dapps using us called my

theorem which is a game it's like magic the gathering but on the blockchain so So they have a feature where you can take a CryptoKitty, if you have it, and forge it with another card and create like a CryptoKitty dragon or something like that. So that's something you couldn't do before. You can't take one asset from one game. You can't take something from a game on PlayStation and one from Xbox and kind of have them talk to each other. With blockchain, you can. And, you know, that's part of the value that people sometimes miss out on. People sometimes focus, oh, it's anonymized or that.

but the interoperability for instance that's really important I don't think anonymization is that important in my eyes I mean the value

of other stuff I think is higher yeah no it makes sense before I finish up I always do a rapid fire set of questions what do you think is the most important

company in crypto I can't say Portis obviously you cannot say Portis that is not allowed yeah well

the most important company in crypto right now i need to think about that um give me a second no you're fine yeah yeah that's a tough question i only ask really tough hard questions on this podcast obviously no because i'm thinking like which part of the i'm not even thinking of a specific company i think like what's the thing we want to advance the most right now

and i want i think prismatic labs is a very important company oh prismatic labs i talked with them uh this is uh ethereum 2.0 yeah exactly the layer 2 scaling solution for ethereum exactly because you know scalability is a big concern now in what we're saying a lot is that we should also worry about usability because if you don't have a lot of users then you know scalability won't be a problem sadly like we're creating we're building up the ground for nothing because if there's not going to be a million users then yeah great we're scalable but nobody's here but it is something that needs to be solved and the guys at prismatic labs are doing great a great a great job it makes sense they uh they definitely are taking a big swing right yeah um what uh what's the one

regulation that you would change or improve if you could i wish people could you know buy crypto in a month you know more easily more easily yeah The KYC wouldn't be as hard. And I get why it has to be, in a way, in a sense, because there is room for doing nefarious stuff. If it isn't, I don't know, but I wish there was some way to make it easier. That's fair. What is your most controversial thought in crypto? What do you believe that a very high majority of other people would disagree with you on?

hmm and he's deep in thought which means this is a great question as well that's that's all yeah i'm two for three on the rapid fire yeah yeah wow an unpopular opinion okay i don't know yeah i guess that can be depending on which circles but you know people are sometimes kind of knocking various blockchains like for instance i mentioned eos and trust me i'm well aware of the fact that it's 21 nodes and the decentralization there is not really decentralized i'm aware of that but you know when you're talking about the world of a blockchain it's always like a blanket which you're moving you're pulling in different directions if you want to have really it's trade-offs exactly and there's room for those

blockchains as well for specific reasons it's like when you have people who are just java is the best language or C is the best language. No, depending, it's like different tools for different missions. Now, you have to be aware of the fact that it's not really as decentralized as Bitcoin, of course, as Ethereum or as other blockchains, but it has its values for specific use cases. If you're talking about gaming, for instance, sometimes you want it to be super fast and cheap just because you can stop every once in a while and make sure it's on a more decentralized blockchain. And so, you know, you shouldn't automatically say, oh, these blockchains, you just they're they're not worth anything they have they have their own use cases but you know

not for not for what ethereum does for bitcoin does what's the most important book you've ever read um i really like the book like i read tons of uh um this world books i really love the whole series it's it's great but i think like a great book is and surely you're kidding mr feinman you know that one I've never read it but I've heard of it yes it's just like

the thought process of that guy he was like the Albert Einstein of the 60s and 70s he also won a Nobel Prize and he has just

like a really interesting way of looking at stuff a lot of mental models and stuff like that right yeah exactly so it's really nice

so I asked one non-crypto related question and then you get to ask me a question to end this what do you think about aliens do you think they're real

wow i find it hard to believe that we're the only sentient life out there especially since science is showing more and more how easily it is for some sort of life to take place although we're very unique like where the earth is in position to the sun and all that i just think like you think it's like life on mars no i don't think there might have been life on mars at some point on a very like, you know, amoeba level. I wouldn't rule that out. But I think that we're not going to see

the chance that we'll see another sentient being. I always used to say that until we are able to move around the galaxy really, really quickly, we're not going to see anyone because they're all moving on these super highways and we're just stranded in some God knows where. And the chances that they'll just run into us are very low.

But if we start moving around, then the chances that we intersect with someone grow. So until we, you know, we need to talk to Elon Musk to, you know, get working on that. Speed it up, man. Speed it up, man. It's taking so long. Where's the faster than light speed? It always amazes me.

There's many countries, many planets where they believe that we may either have the technology or be getting close to having the technology that could go, right, in terms of distance. but humans could not survive the trip because it literally would take so long to get there that we would die before we got there yeah right so you think you train like a you know 25 year old it would take 40 50 60 70 years to get there with space well sometimes they're talking about like you know freezing people along the way and stuff like that and there's a there was an animated TV show when I was a kid. The Jetsons? What? No, not the Jetsons. The Jetsons is supposed to be taking place close to now, isn't it? Like, what is the Jetsons taking place in? I don't know,

but probably around now. Yeah, I think it's around now. It's not really the same. But no, it was a different TV show where they flew out to a planet to do something and they froze everybody and everything. But it took them like, let's say, 200 years together. In those 200 years, I mean, show but in those 200 years the technology advanced so quickly that when they got there other spaceships already arrived and populated so they got there and they're like yeah good thing you made it we were already here we already have everything less and it's kind of like it was that it was an educational show it was a very old show there was there's this history show where they

teach you about history with a guy with a beard you know a story about life something called so it was the same company yeah and it was just like there That's a really interesting thought, though, like this idea that the technology could actually be so outdated that you'd be the last one there. Yeah. Leave first, arrive last. In the U.S., we just call that slow. One question you have for me to finish this up. Well, what do you think is the most interesting project right now in this space?

Bitcoin. Why? If I can follow up on that question. It's the most important. Right. In the sense that Bitcoin stands to disrupt the very foundation of money, economics, global power, etc., right? And so when you look at it from that lens of what is likely to be the most disruptive, coupled with it probably being one of the simplest, right? to me that's just it's really interesting it's really important uh and it's really powerful

right and so so i always say that and i think that that's um it's an easy answer right so a lot of people like oh come on like you know what do you mean but but i mean it because uh i think that a lot of times when folks talk about crypto it's like bitcoin's too simple it's too easy right like oh we all know about bitcoin like what else and you know to me that just shows that we are underestimating the potential it has and then the power it has um so it'll be kind of interesting to watch this play out over the next you know 20 25 years no i agree sometimes it's something that just does one simple thing it's much better than you know trying to get everything inside but let's say you know there are a couple of bitcoin equivalents out there which sometimes

even improves on some of the problems of bitcoin you think like bitcoin right now is just has that network effect and that's just like network effect it is brand awareness it is the the security the regulatory acceptance right so it's not a security it's a commodity it's got the institutional adoption or what appears to be demand for adoption right it just has all of these components it's got infrastructure right that a lot of these other things don't yet support it's just got a lot of things that uh other cryptocurrencies or even competitors don't have that i think give it a significant advantage can i follow up on the question of course so if i had a chance to

rephrase my first question besides bitcoin what do you think is the most important project or interesting doesn't have to be important necessarily but like yeah so i'll talk about a company, many people have heard me talk about it. It's called Figure. We're an investor in the business. Mike Cagney, who formerly founded SoFi, is building a business to

digitize legacy assets. He started with mortgages and reverse mortgages. He essentially takes, if you think of a mortgage, there's a borrower and a lender. You've got, it's called five to seven middlemen, seven to eight percent fees. He wrote software and basically automates away

the middleman. And he can compress those fees because he owns the whole stack in the transaction down to about 5%. And then what he's able to do is you can actually go online and apply for a mortgage. Within five minutes, he tells me whether you're going to get it or not. And within five days, he funds it. And so it's really interesting because what this does is, again, he's digitizing a legacy asset. He's creating more efficiencies. He's bringing the cost down. But the best part is he actually wrote a white paper with Morningstar and Morningstar talked about how these types of bonds are going to get higher ratings, right? So the actual debt will be rated higher because it is on a blockchain. It is transparent, it is secure, it is more compliant,

you know, all these things that I think are really interesting. And so for me, everyone always talks about, you know, do you want something that's cheaper or faster, right? It's trade-offs. In this case, you're talking about something that's cheaper, it's more efficient, and it gets a higher rating, right? You kind of get multiple positive impact. And so when you get that, I think you can just build a really, really big company. And he's done a great job so far in terms of going from zero to a lot of money in revenue, and I think he'll continue to do that. That's interesting. And it runs on Ethereum or a different blockchain?

It's a blockchain called Providence, which they built. They built their own blockchain? It did. That's always the kind of stuff that I find kind of problematic. Because will you have enough of a network size to make it, you know... Well, he's working with financial service organizations, right? So they're serving... Because remember, in that world, the advantages of a public blockchain are not necessarily needed in the legacy system, right?

A lot of these banks, they already work with each other, right? So they want to have their own consortium blockchain. I think that's generally, you know, in a directional way, correct. I don't want to speak for them because I don't quite know exactly how they think about it. But what I would just say is, in many cases, I think that JP Morgan actually is another good example. I think a lot of these folks are going to start with these private blockchains or semi-private blockchains, and they're going to move to public ones over time. You guys are going to communicate with each other.

You know, they're going to work with the private, and sometimes you've got to tap into the public because you're talking to another private consortium, yeah. Absolutely. So, you know,

and again, I don't know exactly how it's going to play out, but I do think that's probably the project or company

that, you know, is the most interesting. Cool. So, listen, I appreciate you doing this.

It's been a long week for everyone. Yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, what you guys

are doing is pretty cool and anytime that we can start to reduce the friction and user experience for people in Bitcoin, crypto, and the blockchain ecosystem.

It's a positive thing. So I'll be cheering you on. And let's do this again in the future as you guys make progress. I'd be happy to. Thank you for having me. Hey, everyone. Pomp here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain

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