The Pomp Podcast - Viktor Radchenko, Founder of Trust Wallet: A Ukraine Immigrant Talks the Future of the Digital Wallet Ecosystem

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Viktor Radchenko is the Founder of Trust Wallet. In this conversation, Viktor and Anthony Pompliano discuss Viktor's time growing up in Ukraine, how he immigrated to the U.S., why he initially learned to code software, what drove him to focus on the crypto space, why he sold his company to CZ and Binance, and what Viktor thinks is going to happen in the digital wallet ecosystem moving forward. ----- 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. Victor Radchenko is the founder of TrustWallet, which was recently acquired by Binance. In this conversation, we discuss Victor's time growing up in Ukraine, how he immigrated to the US, why he initially learned to code software, what drove him to focus on the crypto space, why he sold his company to CZ and Binance, and what Victor thinks is going to happen in the digital wallet ecosystem moving forward. I really enjoyed this live 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. How the hell did you get here? Yeah, totally. So I'm usually pretty, you know, kind of private person. I don't usually show up anywhere. So I usually stay pretty low in general. But, you know, the way I got here probably took me pretty much like 20 years. Yeah. So I was born... Real short trip to get here. 20 years.

20 years. Yeah, exactly. So I think I'll start kind of with my background. I was born in Ukraine and then maybe around the time when I was like seven or eight, this is when I started to help my parents and I would kind of grow and I was helping them with like growing tomatoes. And this is how my kind of life started. And then I started to make more money when I was like 80 years old. I would like grow tomatoes and I would just go to the market and sell them. And this is what I kind of spent my uh livelihood um back in Ukraine with parents and then when I was like probably like 10 I went to playing like ping pong I started to do it professionally I became like state champion so I used to be like really big in ping pong are you you're good at ping pong

I used to and then once I turned 14 I started doing parkour and then I injured my leg and first of all if you were good at ping pong and you're not good anymore and we play and I beat you, can I claim that I beat a former state champion? We can try. We can try to beat. That means that you're probably going to beat me. You said that pretty confidently. Yeah, pretty good.

As long as I have my battle, I'm pretty confident. Oh, you have like tools, okay. Exactly. And if you don't have your tools in ping pong, like it's not going to work. You know, there's like so many details in ping pong, like the way you play, it's crazy. Okay. And then parkour, for those that don't know, explain what it is. So I think it's kind of like a style of like moving.

you basically you know how to be athlete so you know how to do backflips front flips and part of parkour to basically kind of run on the streets and kind of go through different barriers and then jump from different houses and so one time i was jumping from the house like third floor and then when i landed i basically injured my leg and couldn't do anything after that so for people that don't know parkour is like the videos you've seen where people look like they're in an action movie and they're like running from the cops and they're jumping from roof to roof and flipping and doing all this stuff. You just made it sound very simple.

It looks like it's nearly impossible. Yeah, it is pretty tough. And I think there's lots of risk doing it. But at the same time, you know, you're going to like to take that risk. Why did you jump from the third floor? What were you thinking? Yeah, so we had lots of different houses

where we would just like go through different houses, jump around. And, you know, that was kind of fun. You know, I would not explain why. Okay, how old were you? I was 14 or so. Okay, and you hurt your leg? Yeah. And since then, I thought that basically I don't want to do sports as professional anymore just because it's too dangerous. And then because it took me like six months to just recover because I had this thing on my leg, I couldn't walk for two months. And then I started to learn walking again, which was pretty crazy. Yeah, it's not as easy.

Yeah. So, uh, you're a champion at ping pong. Then you did parkour and then you're just like, all right, I'm out of the sports game. And what did you do next? Yeah. So I was still helping my parents, you know, I would go to school and all summer I would spend on, you know, on the farm with them because we had a house and we had lots of lands at home. Um, and you know, part of business to just sell tomatoes. And so I would basically spend maybe like eight hours helping my parents and then just you know have some time with friends which is pretty like tough so I had to do lots of time management to be you know really efficient in that and so after that I realized that you know I'm injured can I do much and so I told my parents

to get me a computer and so I started to kind of spend my time doing stuff on the computer so most people would start building games and do different sort of stuff but for me it was different so I thought that i wanted to break things that out there so i started to play a little bit of games i learned about how to use an app called art money where you can fake how much you own in the game and since then i was just kind of started to learn how to break things and not to build them like that was my mentality back then and so so were you hacking things pretty much so this is when i started doing in what is called spade a spade i would call it security so just because we're in u.s now um and so hold on in the ukraine it's hacking but in the u.s it's security exactly so

so the way you would consider because you're based in ukraine no one really cares about that as much so you could break into different um systems and then you would use vpn no one really know who you are so you would be really private got it and as you're doing this like what types of systems are like you're breaking like government systems the local bank or like were you just doing like some you know network on the internet like a game or something so i could tell you that um probably both um but so basically when i started doing i joined some forums where people would like hang out and uh they realized that i want to have my own as well because i have that much knowledge and we had some community around and so i realized i want to start my own

community and so i started one you know we had around 10 000 different people who would mostly be focused on sharing different knowledge in just security itself. And back then there was lots of vulnerabilities in like SQL injections. So when you said about governments, maybe 30% of all the websites were vulnerable and most of it we had access to. So 30% of all websites in the world were vulnerable to security breaches. Yeah, mostly in Ukraine and then lots of websites around the globe. What is the craziest website or system that you guys broke into that you can talk about? um okay so thank you know president's website the president of ukraine's website yeah he probably wasn't excited about yeah we didn't do anything though like i don't think

you want to touch that all right that's fair so how do you go from uh hacking and security in ukraine and the forum to building trust wallet yeah okay so and then you know once i learned a lot about security. And then, you know, at some point, maybe two, three years after I found vulnerability on the bank website, I just messaged them, told them like, here's the problem. Here's how you fix it. And then two days later, I got an offer from the bank to work for them. Okay. Hold on. So you guys are playing around breaking into all these systems, right? And, uh, my last question about that side is, were you doing this from a black hat, white hat, gray hat situation dependent like what was the intention of doing it so i think for me personally i didn't

really care as much about the money so i didn't focus on a profit so for me it was about exposure and getting to know the people who are working on it it's kind of a game right like can we get in yeah exactly sounds like pretty much yeah okay so you get into the bank and what do you remember what the security vulnerability was yeah that was so they were using my sql at the moment so i found vulnerability where you can find sql injection and then find information about different tables so we weren't able to like do any transfers but we're able to read information from the private tables that wasn't exposed yeah okay and you hit them up and you're like hey by the way i just broke in like you probably should fix this are they mad or they're just literally

like hey come work here and fix it for us yeah so because they didn't have that much you know security team in the company they told me just to come over and that was the biggest bank in ukraine so population of ukraine was 47 million and they had 41 million users wow so that's pretty big bang yeah that's a lot of money at stake yeah totally all right so you take the job yeah so i took the job i was in university at the moment so that was my third year and so this is the year uh when i basically left ukraine so the reason why i left i got in trouble with the government so because i had access to the hackers and security people so they wanted to get access to them and so i tell them no and i just had to leave so the government basically came to you and said

we know that you know all these people we're going to use you to get to all of them turn over the names or so they want because you cannot get names because it was a private forum but we had around 10 000 people where we would kind of share knowledge between other people and we would have different kind of levels of how much information can you share so and this is what they wanted they wanted to have access to their emails their accounts and then ip addresses that they used to access it and then once you have that you can kind of start tracking them down but at the same time uh they're usually pretty protected they use you know double vpns and then it's just you know a different level of security for sure and so uh when they approach

you they ask you to do this you say no way uh how did you get out yeah so ukraine strikes me as a place my girlfriend's from bulgaria it strikes me as a place if you're trying to get out of there they know you're trying to get out, you're not getting out. Exactly. So I think I was lucky at the same time. So I was applying for one of the programs to go to US for work and travel. So I think that was like around the same time when I basically decided just to leave the country and never come back. And so initially I went to Alaska and I worked there for like three months on the fisherman factory. So we would like clean and, you know, cut the fish for like 16 hours a day, literally. So, uh, did you have to go to Alaska or you wanted to go to Alaska?

No, initially I was planning to go there just for the program for summer, but it turns out that I had, I started to have this issue. So that was like the best way for me to leave the country. Okay. And you get there and you go from hacking the bank website and the president's website to cleaning fish. Exactly. What are you thinking?

Wow, that's going on. That's pretty crazy. I think like when I tell this story, like people don't really believe, but yeah, that was something that happened and it's kind of hard to explain. And then like once I got to Alaska, I basically spent four months and thought like, okay, i cannot really go back like what are my options and then the only people i knew in u.s was my neighbors from ukraine so they came here as a religious people back in 2004 or so okay so i thought like oh that's the only people i know i'll just go there and we'll see what we can do

so i flew over to sacramento and then i just sound like can i just stay at your place because i don't really want to go back to my country it's not secure to me and so that they're like said Yeah, definitely. So you can just stay here. And they were pretty religious. So they were part of a Pentecostal religion. So I kind of stay there. I mean, they told me to go to church. So I kind of spend my time learning. Did they indoctrinate you? Oh, totally. Like, yeah, I had to like kind of follow some rules that they told me. So I would go to church every Sunday and because they told me to, I was fine. I learned a lot about religion and like thinking behind these people and like what's their like motivation in life. How do they think and how do they perceive other people that not religious? So you go from cleaning the fish in Alaska, you're in Sacramento now. What are you doing for work? yeah so I was illegal and basically for about eight months in the country so this is the time when I also applied for asylum so the way you apply for asylum you just write your story like

what happened to you why do you think it's scary to go back to your country then you just apply and then you have interview after like six weeks or so and I'm assuming it's a pretty good case if you're like ah the government's after me they're like you can probably stay here yeah pretty much like if you really have fears or you have someone who will like catch you in your country I mean there is, you know, they'll help you out. What is the process? Is it difficult to go through the asylum process? Like the immigration process we know is super screwed up in the US and it's just really difficult for people to kind of navigate on their own. Is the asylum process similar in the complexity? Yeah, I don't think it's too hard. Like for me personally, it was

pretty easy. The way it worked, I was writing my story. It's about four pages long. So I would just like write how everything happened. Then I hired the translator who did like translation from Russian to English and they just submitted my application. So I didn't require any lawyers or anyone. I just did it everything myself. So it's pretty straightforward. There is lots of tutorials on their websites, but most people just get a lawyer who will like help them. But I don't like that. They're like talking to lawyers usually. So yeah, they're usually pretty useless in a way because like if you talk to three of them, like they will have different vision on how things should work and they'll kind of scare you off. So you don't, you know, you don't go to someone else

and well and if you're telling them hey i think that the ukrainian government's after me they might even be a little bit more scared to help you maybe that's true too but there is things that you can do yourself as long as you follow guidelines because if you go to the immigration website in u.s you will see all the guidelines on how things work and they're like pretty detailed like oh here's a form here's the field and here's explanation to it so you can just follow that if you have time but if you're broke and you sleep on a mattress you would you want to hire a lawyer Yeah. I don't know why, but I think your life could be a movie. I'm imagining the Ukrainian government chasing you while you're doing parkour and running from house to house.

All right. So you're in Sacramento, you get the asylum, right? And then what do you do for work or what's kind of your next step? So before I got asylum, I went to hackathon and because I knew how to write scripts, but I didn't know back then how to program. And it's actually two different things, right? Explain the difference. so the scripts are based on like you just write a commands but programming is a little bit different it requires you to think how to build architecture not just to tell commands like here's one two three but with uh writing code you need to follow like different design patterns you need to write code that will scale easy to test and you wouldn't do that with just scripts so and we use also

different languages we would usually use like pearl which is not used anymore so and a little different i would say and so i went to this hackathon and i was illegal back then and then i joined the team and they were doing a game where you would just um build an app and you will take the hamburger and you will throw it in the person so the whole idea was like to take the hamburger like kind of swipe it and throw it in the person this is uh post smartphones right so literally on the screen you're just swiping with your finger 2011 yeah okay and what do you think are you just like americans are crazy they're building these dumb games are you excited about this like that was pretty exciting at that moment i didn't really know how much like to program how to program i

didn't know like some basics and so without like oh let's just join together and build this so someone designed it we like wrote some code and you know build an app and just kind of submitted for the hackathon and we won the first place and they just offered to help me with the jobs they said like oh here's a job for you if you can tackle it like feel free to do it and we'll teach you how to do it so this is how i started my career like actually doing programming so this is when i switched from doing you know breaking things into actually building building them and how much of the experience in breaking things did you see as an advantage in building right because now you knew how to think about the vulnerabilities and the architecture or did you not really realize

that at first and you were just kind of following whatever you're passionate about yeah i think i just followed the passion but at the same time it helped me to understand how security works on the side of the hacker so i really know how they think about like what they need and how they use the data afterwards so i think this is kind of the key when you think about security got it okay and so now you're like all right i'm a programmer i'm not gonna write scripts i'm gonna build things not break them what's the first thing you build so first thing um so for that company i remember we started to build apps for dealerships so it was a simple app and the guys who were selling the app were like super amazing they would sell this dealership app which would show like here's

the address of the dealership here is the cars that we sell and that's it and they would sell it for about like ten thousand dollars plus like membership fee of like five thousand a month something really crazy so they did really good upsell have you ever seen a used car dealership commercials in the u.s have you seen these on tv i don't think they're really bad production quality but they're pretty funny and so walking in and talking to a lot of these people to get them to buy a mobile app was probably an interesting experience yeah totally yeah did you ever go on the sales pitches no no really no you just built the app exactly okay and so this is the time when i started learning about trucking so i think this is my first exposure to being you know

like entrepreneur in us and so my friend was a truck driver and so he told me about um you know trucking what they do how they do it and this is the time when he told me like oh here's a problem that i have can you solve it for me and he told me that it's hard to find truck stops where to sleep at night. The Google Maps didn't have a really good understanding what a truck stop is. And so finding that specific spot was a hard problem. So what I thought would be really cool to build an app on mobile that will just show you all the truck stops, wait stations, all the places that the truck drivers could sleep at night. And that was a big deal. So I'm actually weirdly very familiar with this problem because I invested in a company that does something similar. What was

the name of the company? So the company I started is called Trucker Path. Truck Path? Trucker Path. Okay. And my understanding is you probably were part of the solution of now people know where the truck stops are. But another issue is when the trucks get there, they don't know which loading docks they're supposed to use. They don't know where to park. They don't know which is the entrance versus the exit and kind of the last mile issues. And so now there's a bunch of companies that are trying to solve that with the mapping. What did you do with the company? Were you selling it to the truckers? Were you selling it to the actual truck stations? What was the point of building this? yeah so the point was to build only for the truck drivers that needed this stop and the way so the database was missing as well like there's a few apps that were like okay but at the same time there was not a single database that had location plus reviews and ratings so what i thought would be cool to just kind of get all the info so i had to actually get into some private databases of different websites so i used my skills from the previous yeah so i got all the database i got like four good databases i put them all together i filter out all the like uh bullshit and just like

had a good database for people to use it and then build the ui which will just show you like all these places and i made it social so people can leave reviews and think about you know just the social features okay and as you're building that company what what did you end up doing uh with the company and kind of then what'd you do next yeah so i started just you know as a fun project just to help my friends but it turns out to be a good problem and then after some time we started to get more users and then realize that we have like over 10,000 people now and you know what do we do then and so maybe like year after we had about 50,000 users and we the people started to pay subscription for using premium services which will tell like how to get from New York to Los Angeles so part

of the being a truck driver that you have limit hours you have at most 14 hours a day and then you can physically drive only 11 so this means that if you have only 30 minutes to drive you need to find spot right away if not you'll get a ticket for a couple of thousand dollars so this is where it was really handy to have an app that will show like here's the place here's how many truck stops they currently have that they're available got it and then how did you get to uh building trust wallet oh yeah so uh that's why we're supposed we're supposed to talk about that at some point okay cool yeah totally let's do that so and then i raised like uh with my co-founder like 20 million dollars and then we raised even more after that but you raised 20 million dollars

for trucker path yes what the hell all right yeah wait hold on back up who gave you 20 million dollars so we found investors in china who were able to invest okay yeah that was a company called renren that's a big company yeah and so they invested 20 million and then we raised 20 more to build the factoring for the product so we went from being just assistant for the truck drivers to being a load board for the truck loads so this is how we kind of transitioned and because we already had the user base it was easy for us to build this kind of second product altogether yeah and then at some point we just sold the company to back to the run run got it so they just ended up buying it yeah okay and then now you're rich so what do you do okay so um i don't think it

mattered about that that much i think it's i'm all about technology just building but the cool part was that back in 2017 um i think let's talk about crypto now right so this is the time when i started learning about crypto i did i got my first bitcoin back in 2013 because people told me like my friends they said like oh we need to get this and i was like i don't know what it is let's just buy it on coinbase and this is when i got exposure but then two three years they didn't do anything and then 2017 icos i realized that it's a cool market um interesting to see what's going on so i got my first ether i went to buy some coins um i think it was like polkadot or some other ico and so i just couldn't find a good wallet where i can store my tokens so i think this

the problem hits me again like that happened with a truck driver which told me like here's the problem so it was like what do you do there's only my ether wallet that's the only wallet i can store my tokens so i'm a mobile um ios developer so let's just build a mobile app um for people and make it open source so this is where it's all started and when you see my ether wallet but you say it wasn't good enough or you just wanted your own or what was the impetus for starting another one so i think the emphasis was to build a mobile app and then when you think about the mobile app you think about you know like good user experience because it's on your phone it's fast and performant but then you also think about like oh this could be a much better deal than anything

else because it has secure enclave which makes like really secure for you to use the apps and then you can just store information securely so i think you kind of utilize the power of the mobile phones that gives you to actually build really good mobile wallet okay uh you built it yourself or you build out a team raised money what was kind of first steps to build so um it was doing myself so it was me for about five months i was doing the ios myself um maybe for about four months i did it and then few folks on github just joined me to help i think we got to the point where we have like 15 000 users and this is the time when i was working full-time and the other company i was just like doing mobile for fun and my friend from the previous company trucker path

he was doing android so he's the guy who i found just on the internet um and told him like oh can you build me help the tracker path for android so i know him for like five years so this is only two of us who was doing like hardcore development for the trust wallet okay and as you're building this uh icos are going nuts right 2017 the big bull market uh when you launch how did you distribute the product so i think first thing you would do well is optimize for the app store so as long as you find the right keywords you can target users easily because you need to think about the logic like where are going to users going to come from first they will come from app store and searching the words they want like they would find like your c20 wallet right and the second question

would they download or not it's based on their reviews so um you know you need to have some basic traction where people come in and say like a good review is all downloaded it has like some good stars so this is where you start and then it's so much easier to sell with a product once they once they're in yeah and as you're doing this um how much of the app store optimization right what you're describing in terms of being able to be searchable and and establishing that trust for people to download how much is that data driven versus its intuition you're saying i think people will search erc20 or do you have actual data that that's informing this decision i think intuition uh basically thing like if i were the user like how would they do that

and it's one of the most most logical things to do at first but then you also need to optimize how other people will find it so there's people who will find through google and then how you would optimize so google will know like this is the app that it needs to show so it's all about like just optimizing the right keywords make sure you link properly and people understand because google is not smart enough to understand like what is the good content so you kind of need to guide google and other services say like this is a good one well and i think a lot of uh this is a much bigger topic but algorithms in general they are built to do the things that we tell them to do right and a lot of that is predicated on the quality of the information we feed into the

algorithm right yeah totally and so i think google is a perfect example where if you give it really bad data or information it's going to spit out bad results if you give it good information it'll spit out good results right yeah exactly okay so you have the app store you launch how quickly do you gain traction is it right out of the gate or is it kind of a slow uh slow um momentum building Yeah, I think it's a slow momentum. I think the first 50 users were my friends in the first couple of days. Are these the anonymous hackers or are these like friends in the US? No, these are the friends in the US. So they're all good. Yeah. So, you know, everyone who was around me also were in crypto. So I told them about the wallet. They're like, oh, this is really

cool. And so one of the features we built that was like super exciting for anyone, like, I don't think at that point MyEtherWallet had this feature. It's called Automagically. Like this is the best future currently out there in the market, I guess, which is you import your wallets and it just shows all the ERC20 tokens that you ever owned or have. Automagically is a big joke at tech companies that just somehow it works, right? Just automagically that happens. Yeah, exactly. And all the people that would come in and message support and they say like, oh, you misspelled this word over here. It's like, no, we didn't misspell it. All right. So as you're going and you're scaling, right, you go from 50 users to what did you end up uh having as a user base when binance acquired the

company so i think when the company got acquired there was about a hundred thousand or so monthly active but before like four months after like i switched doing full-time once we had like 15,000 users okay so i think that was a good time where it's like oh yeah it makes sense we need to so you have 50 users by the time you get to 15,000 monthly active then you're like oh this is real i need to go spend 100 of my time here exactly right uh it continues to be built how did you think about designing the mobile app from a privacy and security standpoint, right? Because the security, you have a ton of experience there. But another component of this is the privacy of are you KYC AMLing people? Are you allowing them to sign up anonymously? What was the approach?

Yeah, because it's a decentralized wallet, which only generates like 12 words for you. And that's that's it. And you know, you keep them secure. And we don't collect any information from the users, like nothing at all. Neither we even collect their public addresses. We don't want to collect any information for, for their own like security. Yeah. And, uh, when did you first meet CZ? So I think that was back in, um, July or June or July, 2018. Okay. Yeah. And does he just call you up or how does that happen? Yeah. So I think, um, it's kind of interesting story. I was raising money at the same time. Okay. So this one was really funny. I hate dealing with investors myself. Um, it's just annoying, you know, you know, some lawyers and investors are not on your

high okay got it they're really hard there's a good room to tell that too yeah especially yeah especially with crypto and you don't know like i'm technical person so you know how you deal with business people they have like different perspective you know they want to get returns like a couple years later for me it's like let's just build technology and we'll see how we can monetize later and so i thought that you know i have to to waste raising money token sellers are big so i can just raise uh money into token sale so i decided to do it this way and i raised like five million private. And I wanted to close another fight on the public sale. Okay, hold on. So you started talking to investors and you realize there's two paths. There's the traditional venture capital

approach where you're going to go pitch Silicon Valley firms. They're going to give you whatever valuation and terms and you either take it or you don't. Or you realize that there's this new funding mechanism, which is an ICO and there's a private sale. So you're selling tokens privately to certain investors and then you can eventually do the public sale. Why did you choose the ICO over the traditional fundraising yeah so you have always options right it's like the downside with venture fund because they control your company they have lots of leverage on what you can do whatnot and you know their incentives you know like get returns and they will push you into like different directions to raise even more money to like raise valuation so with token sale um i

thought that because of a crypto or decentralized wallet there's so many ideas you can explore to build token like token utility um so which will utilize your user base to build um utility token to you know kind of incentivize people to do certain things right so there's ideas about like ctr decentralized exchanges and many others that you can just start from having the user base in the wallet okay and as you go through the token sale uh the company's based in the u.s so this is a tricky part right so you cannot legally raise money in u.s especially because i'm u.s citizen now it's even more trickier um so the part of what was thinking is that like let's just you do offshore pretty typical okay and just raise money from people who is not us based and then

like so base the company offshore and then not allow us investors to participate in the fundraise exactly right and and you brought up the point that if you were actually just a ukrainian citizen you weren't in the us this would be much easier to do right the u.s regulation makes it difficult and so you've got to be offshore you can't offer to u.s investors the five million you raised in private that came from retail type investors or like funds like what's the makeup of those investors so there was 12 investors they all had equal shares we didn't have any bonuses neither any any of that bullshit that people did in token sales so i thought like i'm gonna make it fair to everyone no one is gonna get more than like this amount that is fair for everyone so that

was my structure because i didn't want to have people who would like flip tokens i wanted to make sure they still stay long enough yeah so that was my structure okay and then uh as you're going getting ready for the public sale that's when you meet cz yes so i was talking to the binance lab at the same time so there were like the venture fund for the binance so this is the time when they told me about like different possibilities and we're just talking about ideas to invest money they weren't really interested into getting the token that like we don't see any value into it so we either invest or we, and then like a couple of months after they told me like, okay, we will consider actually just acquiring you, but we would need to talk to you. And so I just go to.

Wait, hold on. Talk to you. Were they not talking to you before? Yeah. But you know, I was talking to their team mostly like to the Binance labs. Oh, you're talking to the labs team and now the actual Binance executive team want to talk to you. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And yeah, that's pretty much. And so do you do a phone call? Do you fly to go see them? Does CZ sneak into the US and come hang out? How's that work? Yeah. So I basically have a video call with him, uh, talk for a bit. And then, you know, like he told me like, let's just meet. And then I'm just flying to, you know, someplace yet to meet him. And then maybe like three days after I realized that that's the only way to go

now. Okay. Yeah. Once you meet CZ, you know, like this is the right guy to work with. So I am very impressed with him. I've gotten to know him and I think that he is an incredible operator. But before you go meet him in person, what was your impression of him in Binance? After you used to do the video call, what was your impression between that and going to meet him? Okay. So I didn't know much about Binance before I basically talked to CZ. Like I did some research and I kind of realized like this is a crazy company. I don't even know how they got from like zero to one in like such a short time. Like that was pretty impressive to me. And so I just learned a lot about how they did it and like what they actually did behind is like really hardworking. Nothing else. Like, you know, there is luck definitely, but you know, they really work hard. For sure. And so you go fly to an undisclosed location. I probably know where it is, but let's just say an undisclosed location. And when you meet with CZ, does he hard pitch you on coming and joining the company? Do you guys just talk about, hey, here's what we could do together? Like, what is that conversation like? Yeah, I think, you know, my challenge was, is that how do I make it so I, you know, make the product open source, you know, we'll build tools for the decentralized world. At the same time, we don't have anything that will push us into being kind of sustainable because we need to be sustainable, but at the same time, not to be really attached to investors who will tell us like, oh, you cannot open source this because you're going to lose value as a company. And so I think I wanted to keep that, you know, straightforward. And I just told him, like, here's things I want to build.

Here's my vision for the next, like, couple of years. And then, you know, my goal just to get resources. All I need is resources, be sustainable, and not to worry about, like, finances, marketing, you know, HR, any of that. Like, I just want to focus on a product. And this is something that I love to do the most. I mean, even that we have a small team now of, like, eight people, I still spend most of my time doing coding every day. And how did you negotiate in terms of the terms of the deal? Do they just offer and you either accept or don't?

Or do you have a back and forth negotiation? Yeah. So that was another challenge because I raised money. So I had that leverage. And then, you know, the challenge was like, OK, so if we do acquisition, then I need to return money from the investors because that was raising for the token sale. And then we have the company that we need to sell, which is basically two and a half people.

So it's my friend that did Android. Then there was somebody who was helping kind of like part time. and so that was basically the challenge so and what i realized that would be the best return money to token investors and then just do with a you know selling the assets as a company uh have you publicly said how much the company sold for do you want to say it right now no no okay um all right so you sell the company and uh obviously it gets announced publicly what is the reaction from your perspective when the acquisition was made you guys get a bunch of a rush of users Is it kind of just what you were already doing just now you're part of Binance?

What was that initial change? Yeah, the change was I think, yeah, we got some exposure. We got more kind of brain behind us. So we got more users using the product, which is I think for me personally, I think this is how I see value like that we're bringing. How many people actually find it useful? This is how you can tell you actually make the difference. And so I think for me personally that how many people can we help secure their funds? This is what I can measure as a success of the product itself.

And this is one of the things. and then the second one is like how can you help the whole ecosystem not to just grow your own product but how can you help other companies to build products on top of it and as you've been doing this where are you today how many users do you have how many tokens do you support just give us kind of an update of where you are today tough to say number of users because we don't do any analytics in dab so there's no way to tell like oh this is number of users who visit like monthly or daily we just like ditched everything that will like track down any analytics any stats And so I would say that approximately we have around like 150,000 monthly active users, even at this like downturn time.

Okay. And what is your feeling about the acquisition? Would you do it again? What's it been like to work with CZ and the Binance team? I think I wouldn't do company again. It's just too hard. You wouldn't do another company? It's too hard. Yeah, it's too hard. And I think it's a good time just to like focus on this for the next like five years. I think this is a perfect time. Would you go back and sell the company to Binance again if you had to do it over? Um, I'm not sure. I don't think I would do it again, but in terms of like... You wouldn't do the acquisition again? Oh, no, no. Um, I wouldn't do the company, but acquisition wise, I think, I think this is the

best that I could possibly imagine. Like we have all the resources. Our team is like full autonomous. Like we don't interact with anyone. Like here's like 10 people, like don't touch us. That's it. Like I'm the only shield from everyone, like if we need something. And so it's cool because we're really focused on like open sourcing and also working on a mobile app. So we really stay focused on, you know, the product itself. Got it. Okay. And how do you look at the wallet landscape today, right? There's obviously centralized wallets, there's decentralized wallets, there's some that are highly privacy and security focused, some that are more user experience focused. Where do you see that ecosystem or that landscape evolving to over the next, let's say,

five years? Yeah, I do think that decentralized wallets still, you know, far behind of anything. I think it's just because of dedication and technology itself. I don't think it's a good intuitive interface to have this like 12 words as a backup phrase. It's just not intuitive and people just forget about it. Even though you can write it down as a secure way to store your backup phrase, but you could lose it easily if you don't have a few backups. So regarding wallets, I think there is still need for good centralized wallets that will store your backup phrase, but it will have a way to authenticate and then make it kind of secure. Because decentralized wallets are kind of limited on how much you can have control over it because you don't control funds. You only

rely on the user to remember their backup phrase so i think it's going to take a while and i think the main focus right now is about like how do you make it secure in terms of um regular users and then the second is like how do you make a wallet that will support any type of digital asset right in decentralized manner and this is tough like it's not as easy as many imagine it's okay just when you have a back end which could connect any blockchain easily but then when you have a mobile app that won't should be owned like lightweighted it's much harder how do you think about uh cryptocurrencies utility tokens and what now people are calling these like uh security tokens or tokenized securities right is this something that you guys will eventually support

every digital asset do you have a uh focus on just cryptocurrencies utility tokens where do you come out on that yeah so i think the way we approach this problem myself so we did like ethereum wallet initial rights and then i realized that it's really hard to build a wallet and support assets and i started thinking from a different perspective what if you create a library that will be well designed and will allow anyone to support any any coin or token and we'll just make it open source here's how i looked at it like let's just build a tool that will allow anyone to add support and support any asset and so now like for me i don't think i see big difference between like utility or security token because it's still digital asset maybe there is a kyc for

the security token that needs to be implemented but in reality this is just a piece of bytes on the blockchain. So for me, like I don't see any difference as long as it's, you know, somewhere in the blockchain, we can connect to it and you can use it as long as you have the right permissions and all of that. Got it. Um, on the acquisition, last question about it. Did you guys take Fiat or BNB? Fiat. Fiat. All right. Uh, CZ likes to say that a lot of people are getting paid in BNB. So just checking. No, it was, um, I think it was public actually. There was a Fiat and also like stock of the company got it okay um before i wrap up i always do some rapid fire questions uh other than binance what's the most important company in crypto who can't say binance can't say

trust wallet i personally like uh blockchain wise or like as a company either yeah um it's a hard question just one i know i would say github i think this is what will connect everyone very interesting no one's ever said that before yeah i think personally that it's kind of missed it i think github is the biggest company in crypto that will help everyone to connect just because of the collaboration and the way that how integrated it is into the software development exactly yeah that's actually a really good answer um if you could change one regulation or improve it what would you select uh i wouldn't change any regulations you just like they're fine yeah okay not even

let's just keep working not the immigration not asylum not anything oh man immigration i think it's good as is i think there's ways around it yeah find a good lawyer yeah breaking things i get it yeah um all right what uh what's your most controversial thought in crypto what's the one thing that you believe that the vast majority of other people would disagree with you on? I think most people disagree with me that they always think that there is only one black chain and one community that is the best. And I actually disagree with that. I think there's lots of different communities on different levels and different people have different understanding of crypto itself. So we just recently added like support for XRP. And then I just met

some of the people who are like part of that community. They realized that this is totally different community. Like there's tons of people that have different knowledge and different understanding of the world itself and then there's so many of them on the internet well and taking a step further it's not only just different knowledge and experiences also people have different needs right people have different desires or they want different things they want to use different types of technology and so um the experiences and knowledge help serve some of those different needs exactly yeah yeah what's the most important book you've ever read um from top of my head i think it would be alchemist why i think i like the journey that the person had um around the book and

i think it's something that everyone should strive for is just to have a journey on things that they want to achieve in life i think that's kind of missing from many people they don't have like motivation because they don't have you know a goal which they will want to go to got it um before i wrap up i will let you ask me a question but we have to talk about aliens aliens i actually know that you asked this question so i'm listening did you come prepared yeah all right are they real or not um potentially i think it depends how you consider aliens right okay all right maybe they exist we just didn't see them i think that's my okay so explain that i think the universe is big enough to have some type of human life somewhere else oh like human like life um yeah it doesn't

have to be like it's like intelligent life intelligent life i would say yeah okay because universe is expanding and there's different types of things that might be leaving somewhere else okay um i've also started to ask people now about the depths of the ocean right so we always talk about space and aliens but we actually know more about space than we do about our own ocean would you rather go to space or to the depths of the ocean space why i think there's more to explore i think there's more to explore in space size wise yeah i think there is more um i think i'm personally interested in like exploring the whole space just because it's so big and then you know how big is it maybe like uh 200 billion years right there so because it's expanding um in both

ways so i think there is way more to explore than just the ocean itself yeah it's pretty crazy how large and how long space has existed right yeah we feel pretty small now that's all right what one question do you have for me okay i was coming prepared again yeah i knew you asked so um last night the uh some people from binance were messaging me that you were prepared and i got scared no i actually listened to your podcast it's the best and um i have a question for you though okay so if you had a superpower what would it be and how would you use it uh i would want to be able to speak and understand every language in the world it's good because uh and i think that we'll all have like by the time that we all die in this room

will be able to understand everyone and speak to anyone regardless of what language, right? So I think people have seen like Google has this thing that you can put in your ear and it like auto translates or whatever. I don't know how good it is. But this idea that in 2019, let's say that you were back in Ukraine, you didn't know English, you and I couldn't have a conversation just because you make different noises out of your mouth than I do. Like that's pretty ridiculous to me. And so the ability for everyone to communicate and understand each other regardless of if it's on one language or just there's some kind of technology that allows us to understand other languages um i think would be uh would be the superpower yeah that would be

super like what if you wanted to just learn a few languages which one would it be i'd do something super weird like uh well not maybe i do a super weird one and like one that would be helpful so like chinese seems just like a really hard task yeah so like that'd be pretty cool uh and then um I had somebody come on and I'm going to forget who it is, so I feel bad. But Afrikaans is a language that's pretty fascinating to me. I don't know if it would be useful to know it, but I think that it'd be cool to figure that one out. Yeah, totally. So, yeah, like I personally only three languages, but I would love to learn.

You know three? Yeah, so it's Ukrainian, Russian and then English now. Isn't Ukrainian and Russian pretty similar? No, very different. So the thing is, so Russians wouldn't understand Ukrainian, but Ukrainians would understand Russian. I think that's how Bulgarians are, too. Like they understand Russian, but Russians don't understand them. That's so good, actually.

The Russians are just confused. It's kind of like Spanish and Portuguese. Got it. All right. Actually, last question, because I'm curious. What is the general take on crypto in Ukraine? Do you have any insight into that? I think I would say for both Ukraine and Russia since they're like similar culture So I think everyone thinks about Russia's scammers and they did lots of scams actually back in 2017 Yeah, I think there is a good developers. I don't think many people have really good vision on what they want to build I think that's what's missing

So they have lots of talents, but they don't see they don't have that feeling like what's needed because I'm based in Bay Area So understand like the need of the products, but for them, it's a little bit hard to understand more different So that's why it might not happen in different countries just because they're kind of lack of understanding of the products itself. Awesome. All right, well, congratulations on the acquisitions. At some point, you're going to have to tell us details.

I appreciate you coming and we'll do it again in a few months to catch up. Sounds good. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts,

please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain