The Wolf Of All Streets - Banking the Unbanked with Richard Ells, CEO of Electroneum

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

Richard Ells is the CEO of Electroneum, who we can proudly say are the newest sponsors of the show. Richard has years of experience building products and businesses in the tech industry, which has translated into success in crypto, where he is the leader in providing solutions for the unbanked worldwide. Richard has focused on developing a more inclusive financial system through Electroneum, including their own proprietary affordable smartphone and their most recent launch, Anytask.com. Scott Melker and Richard Ells further discuss the massive unbanked and underbanked population, trying to pay a Ugandan villager, skipping a layer of technology with crypto, the ICO boom, Amazon, how most cryptocurrencies lack a real-world use case, Anytask.com, longing Gold, Silver and Bitcoin, proof of responsibility, ETN in Brazil, Uganda, India and more. --- ROUNDLYX RoundlyX allows you to dollar-cost-average into crypto with our spare change "Roundup" investing tool, manage multiple crypto exchange accounts in one dashboard and access curated digital asset content and services. Visit RoundlyX and use promo code "WOLF" to learn more about accumulating your favorite digital assets when making everyday purchases and earn $4 in free Bitcoin. --- EQUOS Diginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using equos.com/wolf. --- CELSIUS With the Celsius app you can earn up to 15% APY rewards on over 30 cryptocurrencies. Have crypto but want cash? Celsius also offers the lowest cost loans against your crypto with interest rates starting at just 1% APR. Enter promo code WOLF when you sign up and get $20 in BTC! Users must transfer and hold at least $200 of any coin for 30 days to be eligible for the reward. --- 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

I'd like to thank my sponsors, Celsius, Equus, and Round the X for making this episode possible. Stay tuned later in the episode for more info. What is up, everybody? This is Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities in the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, art, politics, sports, music, basically anyone with a good story to tell. The show is powered by Blockworks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworksgroup.io. Now, if you like the podcast, you follow me on Twitter. You need to check out my website and join my newsletter,

both of which you can do at thewolfofallstreets.io. And now on to what is important. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of Electroneum, who I am very proud to say is the newest sponsor of the podcast and one that I'm more than excited to stand behind and partner with. With 28 years of from-the-ground-up experience, Richard has now positioned his own unique cryptocurrency to be a real contender in the world market with a use case impacting millions of people around the globe. Richard Ellis, I can't wait to learn more about you and your venture. It's really a pleasure and an honor to have you on the show today. Thank you for being here.

Thank you very much. Very kind of you. Great introduction. I mean, it's hard to be humble with such a wonderful introduction. But I should try to remain small-headed. Okay. Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem with that. I've spoken to you before, and you've always remained very humble to me in the face of

all these incredible accomplishments, which we can discuss now, because I'd like to hear more about your background, how you ended up where you are today. I think Electroneum is a very popular name on the market. Most people have heard of it, or at least know what it is, but they probably have no idea how it came to fruition or where you came from. So I'd love to hear that story. Okay, well, I'll try and put it in a nutshell so it's not too dull. But I'm in the IT industry, which couldn't be much more dull, could it?

But I've been in the IT game for many, many years, had a big team of people. I've got a digital agency and I've got a social media management platform for brands like Herbalife and Avon. It helps their sort of agents out with their marketing. So I had a team of people, had software engineers. I'm just a big nerd. I love a bit of software. I'm a software developer myself. So I was obviously into crypto, right?

Not super, super early, probably about 2014. I saw Ethereum's ICO and that was kind of the same sort of time I was getting into Bitcoin as well. And so I had mining rigs floating around all over the house, hooked together with these GPU cards. So there were these little hot things that guests would come around and my wife would occasionally whack me with a stick and say, do we have to have that noisy, hideous thing laying around there? And so I would move them from place to place wherever I wanted somewhere hot. That would be a good place to put one. So, yeah, mining different things.

And people would come around and they'd see this thing about cryptocurrency. They'd say, how can cryptocurrency, you know, so complicated and it's rocket science. And it's really only for these propeller heads, you know, that can get their mind around it. And really largely at that time, that was probably true. You know, there wasn't, at the time, probably, I'm not even sure if there were Windows wallets for these things. Everybody was using Linux, and that was just the way it was, and mining was not in any way, shape, or form a simplistic thing to do. So it was a bit complicated. And I thought, wouldn't it be awesome if everybody could use cryptocurrency just really, really easily, even more easily than they can right now?

And there have been some great advances in wallets and things for Bitcoin and many, many others. But we started building an app, playing around with it, and we did all sorts of things. We melted lots of phones. We were trying to do proof of work on a phone, which they're a little… Did not go too well, I guess. Yeah, they'll see that your brains really aren't man enough for it.

And so we didn't get very far there. But we did lots and lots of things. And then ended up saying, you know what, we know what people need, which is instant ability to pay. The instantness was super important. So we needed to get that. All cryptos, even now, nearly every crypto you see has got eight decimal places and trades to eight or 10 decimal places.

And I was talking to real people and real people could not get their head around it. So I said, you know what, we're going to make it, we're going to push the decimal place along just to have a larger supply, but have two decimal places, which kind of everyone in the world is familiar with. And we just, we made it a bit more of a user-friendly crypto, easier to use, easier to spend, and easier to transfer between each other. And then built a system around that to enable people to earn it.

So you don't have to go and buy it. You haven't got to have any KYC details on the lower levels, which means if you're unbanked, this is why we've become popular with these guys with this sector of the market, you can go out and earn some ETN and then you can use it. We've got 140 countries where you can cash it out to airtime or data for your phone

and lots of other things coming along as well. So that is really it in a nutshell. You can imagine there's been years of work. So, but I felt one or two of your listeners dropping off to sleep and two of them actually may have passed away. God rest their souls. That was actually like 10 minutes shorter than the introductions that some people have

given about every job they've ever had in their lives. So I think you did a great job. But I want to dig more into sort of when you came up with Electroneum and why it was important. You touched on it, but the unbanked aspect to me is the part that gets me very excited and that I'm very passionate about. I'd like for you, I guess, to talk about it as a general concept. Why are so many people unbanked?

How big of a problem is this and how is this a solution? Okay, cool. Well, I mean, I've always seen all of crypto as a potential solution for the unbanked. So, you know, I've jumped in. of crypto as a potential solution for the unbanked. So, you know, I've jumped in. Will I say I've jumped on the bandwagon? Well, maybe a little bit, but mostly I wanted to solve a problem that certainly when we launched and even now, people haven't really got their heads around, which is for you to get involved in crypto, largely you have to get access to an exchange. Not 100% true,

but largely, that is the case. And then once you have got some, you need some form of wallet to manage it. And then you need places to spend it that give it some value, etc. So building that ecosystem, which we built, is why it appealed to the unbanked. And in terms of the numbers of those people, I mean, I think a third of the world's population are what would be considered unbanked or underbanked. It's crazy. What's shocking for you and I, who are sitting here with a dozen different ways to pay, we've got every digital way to pay you can shake a stick at. So we're not short of solutions for digital payments. So actually, I think the reason cryptocurrency hasn't taken off

in quite the same adoption place that us crypto purists want it to be adopted is because it's so easy to pay with Apple Pay, so easy to pay with PayPal or with... Venmo and cash, right, of course. So as such, it's much harder to convince someone to give up their preferred way to pay, to take something on that may even be slightly more onerous to use than what you had before. It's just not going to happen. So when we looked at the unbanked market, these are people that really are underserved in the financial world. And largely the explanation for that is because a lot of them just don't have

the facility to become banked, i.e. their address is, you know, shack next or behind a petrol station on the main road. Right. You know, they're not necessarily people that sit well with the banking systems, you know, very detailed red tape system. So as such, there's this huge population of people in the world that would love a digital way to pay, but even if they could get a bank account, and there are lots and lots of people in the world that would be called underbanked, so they can get a bank account, but most places in the world, the bank account costs them money.

So if you've got a bank account and it's costing you money every month and you're a subsistence farmer, why would you take the money and put it in the bank, which is a drive away or a horse and cart ride away or a motorcycle right away whatever but you've got to go to the bank put the money in whereby it costs you money to store it and then when you want to use it you have to go and get it back out again being banked isn't like it is for you and i where your your salary is getting paid into it and and it's useful for digital payments because largely they haven't their network doesn't enable the street vendor

that they're buying food from doesn't take Visa. Of course. So actually cryptocurrency does what these countries are doing really well. And that is you can skip out a whole layer of technology. So in the United States, you have copper network run all over. The place in the United States, in Great Britain, we had an amazing, in Europe, we've got this amazing network of copper. So that was laid down because telephony was the advanced tech of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. In the 1950s, the amount of copper that went down in the UK was outrageous.

So that network existed, but there's absolutely no point in putting that network down in Cambodia or in Uganda, because it's a complete waste of time. The technology has surpassed it. It's jumped forwards. And you see this now with mobile phones. Nobody's laying copper networks. Everyone's got a mobile phone to their end because it's much easier, much cheaper. Well, that's what's going to happen with crypto in these unbanked regions, because why would you go and saddle yourself with a banking system that's got charges and doesn't benefit you when you can go to crypto that costs you nothing affords you more empowerment gives you power to earn from around the world but it doesn't but it so there's none of the negatives at all of the positives as long as

there are places to spend it so it's about building this ecosystem out, really. Oh, so just quickly to slag off the banks one more bit, because I can't help it. Even if you were banked, so if you're fully banked, you're sitting there as a fully banked person, you've got all the ID that you can get, and you're in Cambodia, and I'm in the United Kingdom, and I want to buy a logo from you because you are an amazing digital designer.

And you've said, I will design you an amazing vector-based logo. You're going to love it. And I'm going to charge you five bucks. I'm going to charge you 10 bucks. Imagine now you go to your bank, whether it be in the US or the UK, anywhere in the developed world, shall we call it, and you said, I want to send $5 to Cambodia. One, they'd probably laugh you out of the place. But if they did do it for you, it would cost you at least $30 to do it.

And then if it actually arrives, which is debatable, I might add, because I've done it myself, but if it arrives at the other end, it'll have some charges on the run expected and they won't get their $5. And they'll have to have on their unexpected. They won't get their five bucks. And they'll have an account. That's right. And then they'll have a hole in the wall charge if they actually take it out, which you probably have a minimum of $1 or $2.

So what they end up with is nothing like it, and it's impossible to really, really achieve it with the system that exists. But it's cool to actually know. Crypto, someone's around the other side of the world. We want to transfer them $5 worth of value, bump, it's done. And with ours, literally instant payment. So you've got an instant payment notification and that $2 of value or small micro payment values are being transferred around the world really, really fast and hundreds of thousands of them, which is nice to see. Right. And that's actually what you just described as a very nice segue into one of the biggest aspects of what you guys are doing now, which is AnyTask, which is just really awesome and incredible.

I would love for you to talk about that now that you kind of have already touched on it. Yeah. So we built the underlying payment mechanism of Electroneum first. And like I said at the beginning, we always had this vision of making a usable cryptocurrency. And that's not to say that Bitcoin isn't usable. I use it all the time. But you tend to use Bitcoin for paying larger bills, for more substantial things, rather than for micropayments. That's not to say that you can't use it for micropayments. That's not to say that you can't use it for micropayments, but the nature of the long wait, the sort of 40-minute consensus time,

is problematic for real-world use. If you go to a street vendor and you want to top something up, it's problematic. And so we built this system. The Electroneum system is built to be simple for people to integrate. So if you wanted to integrate it into e-commerce, it's really easy. We've built an API system that hooks into our blockchain. So anybody who knows how to implement PayPal or implement Stripe, which is, of course, most of the coders in the world, can easily follow how to implement electronic. So we

made it really easy. But then we had this massive distribution of ETN users around the world, and we managed to get lots of places where they could spend it. We were the first crypto, in fact, I think we're still the only cryptocurrency that's partnered with a full-blown mobile network operator. And we've got 140 countries now, 500 mobile network operators. But huge, huge, easy, easy places to spend was critical. So we built all of that. But there was still a bit of an issue, which is how do people get that ETN? It was taking too long to disseminate. So you'd have, you'd have one person, we can find one person in the village that we could get some ETN to, and then they could start convincing people, shop owners and things to, to take some ETN. And then they'd have some, or we did start getting a little bit of velocity of the ETN moving around.

But the time we sort of calculated that out. So quite a bit of time, this is going to take is outrageous. Yeah. I mean, that's like boots on the ground, literally walking into a village and finding someone to talk to. That can't be the most efficient way to,

uh, unfortunately. That's exactly right. And we, and don't get me wrong. We have got a bit of that actually. And we've also got quite a lot of advocates who love what we're doing. One, one chap in Uganda has signed up 70 shops to take ETN.

So there are some quite big advocates of the project out there, and that's lovely, and we very much appreciate all the work that they do. But we knew that what we had to do was we had to really make it attractive so that people at all levels in that country could understand, okay, I can see why people will have ETN in their pockets, which then makes it more attractive for them to accept ETN because they can see how it's working. And we went off to all of the big freelancer sites.

So we went to Fiverr, we went to Upwork and freelancer.com, reached out to all of them. None of them came back to us. At the end of the day, I don't blame them. I've been doing this for a few years now, and I know that the lawyers are terrified of crypto. So you could jeopardize your whole banking relationship by potentially managing to get another 2% or 3% or 4% or 5% in crypto.

So from their point of view, the risk would be reward, slightly dangerous. They're billion-dollar businesses. Why would they do it? Which was frustrating. So then we sat down as a team and went, hang on a minute, it's a freelancer platform, we've got millions of users that are going to want to sell stuff. And that's one of the hardest things to do is to find these skilled people. So why don't we just build it? And so just wasn't the easiest thing in the world. A couple of years of coding, in fact, went into it. But we built the first, the MVP, the minimum viable product.

We built that, rolled it out in February. It's very Fiverr-esque in terms of its simplicity. Some of them are more complicated where you have to bid on tasks. But we've gone down this route of being fairly simplistic. You offer a task for a set fee in dollars, which you get paid in ETN. We accept dollars at the front end with credit cards. And that has been the key. And it's just gone mad, which is brilliant.

So if anybody out there ever wants to go and buy anything freelance, please go and have a look at anytask.com because we've got cheaper tasks than anybody else. Tasks starting from a dollar. And not only are we cheaper than anybody else, nearly across the board, there's now just under 15,000 tasks listed. So you can find everything you can imagine. And you can buy it with a credit card, just like you can on the other You don't need to know how to go get Electroneum to participate in the market if you're a buyer. If you're a buyer, you barely see Electroneum. It's kind of in the background. You can sort of see, I could sign in with Electroneum, but I don't know what it is. So I can just create an account and check out. And yet we've had

literally tens of thousands of people have added things into their carts and zoomed off through. We've got 530,000 users on there now, registered users. Like I say, 14 and a half, just over 14 and a half thousand tasks are now live on the site. So it's gone really crazy, really fast. And that, I think, has just been because what's happening is we've got people at the back end who it's empowering. And this is what crypto is for at the back end who it's empowering. And this is what crypto is for at the crux of it. And I know that a lot of your listeners will think, no, no, no, crypto is a speculative asset. And it's like a stocks or shares thing. It's an equity thing.

I hope they don't feel that anymore. No. And don't get me wrong, that side exists. But what we really wanted to do was we wanted to actually show that this can change the world. And as well as Bitcoin is changing the world, we wanted to do it in a really clear cut way. That person can now earn a living and change their life. But we're not a charity. We are doing this as a business. So we make margins on things and we make the thing a sustainable thing for the

future. I'm a businessman. I want to make a profit, even though it's a dirty work. But so we've got a long-term goal of profitability and electronic just powers the whole thing. So we've just got this real world ecosystem that's been built out now that is genuinely working. So it's sometimes a bit frustrating when we look at the other side, the speculative side, and we're sitting outside the top 100 cryptocurrencies, but all cryptocurrencies are just defined by market capitalization. Yeah, that has nothing to do with usage. No, one thing I can absolutely attest to is that the market has no interest in real world use.

It's bizarre, but true. I don't think the market has a very long view. So, you know, I'm really, really confident that the Electroneum brand will be here in five years, will be here in a decade. And the same with any task and what we're doing is brand building. We're building something for the long term that's going to be an Amazon.

It's going to be an eBay. It's going to be one of those monsters. And I'm really sure because if we've dropped 4 million users in this early and we've got half a million users of our freelancer platform this early, the long-term goals are absolutely massive. So I'm really, really confident of the long-term future. But other people are not equating our numbers to that for some reason. I don't know why, but we'll just keep doing what we do, which is deliver things and make the product better and better and just keep on getting

those partnerships for more real-world use. How much of a challenge you talk about market cap, obviously, and your listing being in the top 100 or not, and that obviously leads to exchange listings and the coin being traded as a speculative asset, even though it has a real world use case. How much effect does the volatility have on your use case or your selling point? Because obviously someone can get paid in any cryptocurrency and then see it be up or down 50% a day later in value well what's been really interesting about that as well is we're probably one of the only cryptos that genuinely knows uh how much difference that volatility makes to the real world users

so what's been fascinating is we we've got um hundreds of thousands of airtime top-ups have taken place through ETN. And when we see the huge spike in those happen, it's when the price is fluctuating upwards. So if the price of ETN goes up, and we had one part earlier in the year when ETN went up by maybe 30, 40 percent. Most of the time, it's sort of in a range of maybe 10, 20 percent. It goes up and down a little bit here and there, like all cryptos, I guess. But at one point we were up 40% and suddenly we saw this massive deluge. I think it was 100,000 transactions or something within a space of four or five days. Everyone suddenly realized, hang on, I earned $2, but I can top up $4 worth, for instance, or whatever it was at the time,

$4 worth of airtime. So we had this huge, huge buyer response. So even though that person didn't have access to an exchange directly, they had access to an asset that was fluctuating. So they're very aware of it. They're very aware of the real world value. So I think that's quite an interesting thing in itself. And there's also this weird symbiosis between the people that are using it who don't have access to exchanges and the sort of speculative market as it were. And then the people that are in the speculative market don't really make a use of it. And yet they're the ones that are setting the price of it globally. Right, I was just going to say that.

This is a really weird symbiotic relationship, which my lawyers don't like me talking about in any way, shape or form, because, you know, like all of us in this industry, we have to steer away from giving financial advice. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's so interesting. And I was going to ask you about that next, because the price of it on an exchange and what people are buying and selling it for is what sets its value, or price, I should say, but has literally nothing to do with the value of the token on the ground. And you can't say that for 99.9% of the products in this market because they don't even have a real life use case or it's not there yet. And you have literally millions of people that are using this as money. Right. So I guess it comes down to what is money to a person who lives in a place that's not ruled

by the dollar or doesn't have a bank? And why is it so important to have access to a way to transact that's outside of that system? Yeah, well, I think we probably covered the fact that if you've got access to this, we've got people with some great stories. And if people have got the time, go and have a look. Go to electronium.com and click on news and you'll be able to see some of these great stories. We're interviewing people all the time that are some of our sellers on any task. And some of the stories are absolutely amazing. There's one that just came out last week. A chap has been saving all of his ETN and he's cashed it in and bought a 3D printer. So now he's building things.

He's a teenager. He's a kid. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So many of our people, we actually moved up our age range down. Again, the lawyers wanted 18 on any task, but were working in cambodia and 18 is an old man of work in cambodia you know 14 is very very common so uh we went back and said look whilst i understand what you're trying to do which is protect people from being exploited this is not really an exploited this is not something about exploitation this is about empowerment you're actually empowering these kids because at 14 years old, they are desperate to use their technical.

They know the world and they are very technical people, but there's no outlet for it. So we're giving people an outlet for their digital skills. And you'd just be amazed at the price you can buy things for. The example I always keep giving because people get it straight away is cutouts, image cutouts. So every e-commerce site in the world, of course, tens of millions, hundreds of millions probably, you have product images and those product images would need more, would look better if they were cut out to have a nice flat color background or

a transparent background. And so that is a sort of tedious work that you could give to someone on 25 an hour in the us or in the uk but any task there's a number of people out there that will do you a cut out of a product for 75 cents so that probably equates to around a dollar a dollar 50 an hour for their work you couldn't possibly achieve it where we live, but the results are exactly the same. There's no difference between the quality of the work and it's something that can be done just with a smartphone. So if they've got an Android smartphone, they don't even need to have a laptop. They can sit there with a free app and cut things out and fire the PNGs back. So that sort of stuff is the stuff that literally anyone could learn to do. It's very

easy to learn. But the skill sets progress up to unbelievable levels. There are coders, and there are great graphic designers and amazing. Some of the people obviously have laptops and things because they're using Photoshop and they're doing some really clever stuff. So it's amazing what we're finding. I'm amazed every day when I'm looking for and seeing what people are doing. It's really good. So largely this ecosystem is based on the fact that all this technology missed these places until phones and everybody has a phone. Is that true? Well, the ubiquity of phones is increasing all the time. It's not quite there. I mean, you go, we've got boots on the ground in loads of countries. In Africa, we've been there with projects, and we're working with a number of NGOs on the ground

in all sorts of places around the world, actually. And so there are still a lot of feature phones around. So they are not capable. They're not smartphones. They're feature phones. You can do a few things on them, but you can't really browse the internet. Right. And alas, Electronium does not work on those phones.

We've had quite a lot of call for it to work on there. We did spend quite a bit of time on it. We spent some time working out whether we could get into the SMS arena so we could enable people to send SMSs to get involved in it. But then we see the spread and the speed with which a smartphone adoption is taking place. And we just thought, you know, by the time we finish writing the software, exactly. Because what do we do with all of our old kit? All of our old kit disappears back overseas.

And you find that 99 percent of the hardware that they're using is secondhand model that's come back out of. I didn't know that. That makes sense. I had no idea that that was the case. Yeah. And lots of them have been repaired. So if you drop them, they quite often go wrong. And there's quite a lot of demand for new smartphones. We built a smartphone ourselves called the M1 as a sort of a push. When we were going in South Africa, people had never heard of electronic and still haven't in loads and loads of places, of course. So we wanted something that enabled them to trust the brand. So we built a smartphone and distributed numbers of them

to different MNOs, mobile network operators, to show people they sold really well in Cambodia, which was excellent. COVID has pretty much stuffed us in terms of transportation and moving those deals forward. But I'm sure more will come of that as well with the next one. But, yeah, so we understand the smartphone market relatively well as well. But, yeah, you're looking at a 40 price point is is is the is the sort of entry level for for smartphones so that will give them a choice of buying a second hand samsung or something that's a few models old or uh or perhaps a brand

new phone that is lower featured but is maybe less likely to self-destruct when you drop it gently. I find it astounding how many things you guys have your fingers in. You realize that the Fiverr stuff, that wasn't ideal. So, hey, let's just build that platform. And then some of these people don't have phones, let's build our own phone. I mean, what gives you that sort of drive to solve each and every problem on your own, as to, you know, wait for the market to catch up or you don't find many companies that'd be like, yeah, you know, not enough people have phones.

Let's go build them and distribute them. Yeah, that's a good question. You can see how much gray hair I've got. I've cut mine down a little bit. This is what we do. So I think from my point of view, I've got a couple of other digital businesses that are still going. I have

a business partner that runs them very, very well, and I spend less and less time there. So my apologies to anyone from those businesses that's listening. Sorry, I don't turn up very much. But this business is just the passion that we all have in this business is so, so

palpable because my other businesses have been great at making money, and everyone likes money, but they didn't make the world a better place. You know, I mean, sure, they make the world a little bit of a better place for some people, but you know what I mean? This is just tangible. We can actually feel that we're empowering. We get these great stories come back and that's what gets us all out of bed in the morning. And we go, right, how do we make this happen? How do we make this go forward? And so we've got a lot of really good people, we get these great stories come back. And that's what gets us all out of bed in the morning. And we go, right, how do we make this happen? How do we make this go forward? And so we've got a lot of really good people just passionately pursuing making this happen. So that's pretty much what drives us, I think, is the fact that we are empowering people. And at the same time, we're

building this crypto brand that, because we're going down that regulatory route as well with this brand, so many other cryptos are absolute purists and decentralized. No one's got any central. There's no one you can phone. You can't phone someone with Bitcoin and get support. You can't. You know, they are. That's the beauty of it.

That's the wonder of Bitcoin. Don't get me wrong. I'm not slagging Bitcoin off. I love Bitcoin, love the project. So, but we wanted to be something different. So we've got a support desk. And so we take a lot of the fear of crypto away. We've got an FCA, we're dealing with the FCA right as we speak in the UK. That's the sort of UK equivalent of the SEC. And hopefully touch wood, we should have an FCA number by Christmas time. And, you know, so we're going down this sort of regulatory path, which then makes it easier for people to partner with us. Because if you're going to choose a cryptocurrency to install, and you know, there's 3000, if you count all the ERC20 tokens, there's thousands of different token choices. So who do you partner with? Well, it makes sense to partner with one that understands AML,

understands KYC, understands regulatory, what the red tape and the slightly nightmarish scene of that. But I'm still a purist at heart. I'm still a crypto purist. So once people have got some ETN, it's really easy to hop into anything else. So you can earn some ETN, but sure, you want to have some Bitcoin,

hop into Bitcoin. There's some atomic swaps out there. I'm not sanctioning it, but you can. It's there. That's interesting. So you talk about regulation. I have to imagine that a lot of the markets

where you're the most popular or the most useful probably have minimal regulation or it's kind of easy to navigate. But then you come up against monsters like the UK, which you talked about, and the biggest monster of all, the United States, of course. So I want to talk a bit about the difficulties of dealing with regulation in these bigger markets, and I guess particularly the United States? Yeah, well, we've been pursuing some sort of a legal memo to get us back onto exchanges in the US because we are probably more obviously than most a utility token. In the UK, we actually have another distinction, which is called payment token, which is how we would see ourselves under UK and European legislation and regulation. But

in the United States, we only have this very straight security or utility. We would pretty obviously, I think, fall into utility simply because we have more real world utility use than nearly everything else out there. And we are a whisker away, touch wood, from getting that fairly strong opinion, I might add, at what I've seen of it at the moment. So I think we're maybe two weeks away from completion of that. And I'm hoping that that then drops us back in to being able to talk to the US exchanges again with a really obvious utility token use case. And the same is true of any task. At the moment, any task is powered almost entirely by fiat. But we've also got it ready to go.

It's not quite ready to pull the lever yet. There's still more lawyer stuff going on. And we've got lots and lots of legal entities that are set up to do things because crypto makes things complicated. So, yeah, we've got some more machinations to do there. But we're very close to being able to have etn payments coming in as well for any task and that might sound a bit odd but what it means is that the people who are the taskers they can actually suddenly do more complicated things so let's say they were

doing an animation so that one person might be fantastically good at doing an animation but he can't do the squeaky animation voice that he wants. So he buys the squeaky animation voice from someone else, someone around the rest of the world on any task using some of his ETN and he charges $30 for something. He makes his $15, charges out a $10 voiceover and now he's made an extra $5. So, you know, there are opportunities for other people to use ETN, But at the same time, it shows even more utility. It's just so obviously this is a utility token. And as such, that's great. And what we're also doing is we're discounting the use of ETM.

So we only charge buyers. We don't charge the sellers. Nearly all the platforms, in fact, I think all the platforms, only charge the sellers. So all the commission comes from the person who sold something. But because of the end of the market we were working at, we thought it would be quite grossly unfair. They get pretty hammered on these other platforms. Yeah. And they're underpaid enough.

Exactly that. So we've said, no, no, no, no. We'll take it off the buyers. The buyers are the richer ones here and they can stand it. And we don't charge such outrageous fees as some of the others either. Remember some of the other people have developed their platforms without having such a massive user base to reach out to in the first place. So their upfront costs were much, much higher. So they've had to have huge percentages to recoup that cost. Whereas we're running out, we're going to have a 6% fee to the buyer for fiat, but only a 1% fee if you pay an ETN. So once again, good reason to go to a U S exchange, buy some ETN to get your 5% saving on any toss. So, uh, uh, yeah, I think it's going to be, well, we'll wait and see over the next few weeks,

but we've been working on it for, uh, well, it must be 18 months we've been working, uh, with, with U S lawyers on this so that the document is large, comprehensive, and well thought out, which is always a good place to be with lawyers. Sounds expensive and annoying, which is probably the description of anything that involves American lawyers historically ever. So I guess you don't get to dodge that, unfortunately. My lawyers won't like this part, but I've got a friend of mine who gave me the best analogy for lawyers I've ever heard. It's just fantastic. Imagine two farmers.

He said, there's a cow standing over the hedge between the fields. And one farmer's got its tail and he's pulling on it, going, this is my cow. And the other one's got its nose and he's pulling another one, going, no, that's my cow. And to and fro, to and fro they go. But underneath are the lawyers milking away. That is perfect. Absolutely amazing. Roundthex.com is one of my favorite companies in the entire crypto space. What they do is take all your small purchases and round them up to the nearest dollar and invest that spare change into any of over 30 crypto assets of your choice. They integrate with your favorite exchanges so that you can view various exchange balances all in one dashboard and round up into different assets all at the same time.

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Electroneum because we talk about these things all the time, but what is that experience? So if I'm a Cambodian villager and I've heard about this for the first time and I want to get my hands on it and then I want to go to the local vendor and I want to use it, or maybe he does or doesn't accept it. What is that process like for these unbanked people? Well, installing the app is relatively simple. Like I said, we've got – there's a thing called the European Fifth AML Directive. I told you it would be a bit dry when we start getting into regulations,

but this is a fairly large piece of legislation that the UK has adopted. And in that there are there are limits, one of those limits is 150 euros in three months, which is the lowest tier of anti money laundering. So where we get to with our KYC processes, if you're doing less than 50 euros worth of transactions a month, really, you're not of any interest to the authorities. And as such, our KYC is super simple. It is, what is your name? No identification required in terms of documentation. Now, we do have lots of backend AML systems that check IP addresses and geomocation and all sorts of other stuff, because we don't want a robot to come out and make 10 000 accounts you know and we we are not we are built the to not allow money launderers to use our system you know but at the same time what we're trying to do is make a system that does enable that cambodian or

the ugandan or the nigerian or the indian to use it without any identification on lower amounts of money these small amounts of value and make a big difference to their life. So we built this system. You download the app. You put in a few details. You need an email address. So if you haven't got an email address, you can go to Gmail. You can get one for free.

Fairly easy to do. So there's no cost to getting access to that. Then one click from the app will take you into any task, explains what that is, and you could create a simple task on there fairly easily. So you could say what you do, what your skills are. There are one or two documents floating around now showing people some simple skills. So for instance, that cutout skill. So there are skills you can learn even if you don't have them yet. So it's fairly easy to get into that. You then have to be relatively lucky at the moment to

start being one of the people that's selling because we've had so many people coming in at the back end listing tasks like i said there's forty and a half thousand live now only three weeks ago there were ten thousand so it's it's it's really going crazy so we've got a front end push going on we've taken on three agencies to pile front-end sales on. So that's happening as we speak. So we've got many more sales coming in, which we then hope will catch up so that everybody's got an opportunity to sell. But it's actually fairly simplistic.

You don't really need too many skills. It isn't rocket science. So harking back to the beginning of this call where I was talking about these GPU rigs and, you know, that really was, it wasn't, it wasn't rocket science, but it certainly wasn't. Very complex. Yeah, very complex. Wouldn't have got stuck into it, I'm sure. Whereas this is very simple and using it to pay the street vendor. Once the street vendor realizes, oh oh actually etn is something i can use then it's really easy you just scan a qr code between the two apps and it goes bleep and the vendor sees immediately yeah i've got two dollars worth or whatever even converts it to the local

currency so it's got i don't know 100 different global currencies or something built into the app so you can see exactly what that etn is worth in your currency. So if you were traveling somewhere and they had their local currency and the ETN value and you scanned an egg on a stick at the side of the road of a street vendor and you scanned their phone and you were a US citizen and you saw it on yours, it might say, well, that's $9. You go, oh, you're trying to rob me here. You can't charge me $9 for that on a stick because it can handle whatever your local currency is. So it's quite convenient that it makes everything really simple. So that's really what's been the key to the whole thing, keeping

it as simple as you possibly can, which is why we've got that adoption, which long may it continue and may there be much more. So if I'm traveling as an American, which I guess is not a thing right now, so it's a total theoretical, but I look forward to being able to do that again one day. If I'm traveling and I'm in one of these countries, how do I know that someone will accept it? Do I have to ask them, hey, do you take electronic? I mean, the answer is, you know, we're still,

I talk about we've got 70 shops in Uganda and there probably are maybe a few more, but you bear in mind the size of Uganda. Yeah, of course. We're just doing a deal right now with a chain of 700 shops across the continent of Africa. But again, 700 across the continent of Africa is few and far between. So we've got these little hotspots of use and we're seeing them more and more. So we've got a couple of places in Brazil where we're seeing some real hotspots of this use. And the same in Nigeria, same in Uganda, same in India. So we're progressing

those as much as we can. And one of the things that we have seen, which has been fascinating as well, is that the people are very entrepreneurial, probably more entrepreneurial than anyone else, actually, because every penny counts and every way to earn money is a good way. And what we have been seeing is that people will start accepting the ETN for other things because they know that they can buy bulk airtime with it when the rates are at the right place. And then they can resell that airtime to other people that come in that don't know anything about ETN. So when someone comes into the shop and says, I'd like to buy a dollar of airtime,

and they've just bought $10 of airtime with ETN because they've been taking ETN for bottles of water and some fruit or whatever it may be, suddenly they've now got a new way to cash that in and they can monetize all of that. So if they want to add 10%, 20%, of course, that's up to them. People are doing that all the time. So giving the airtime has really been an interesting thing because it's enabled real world value to exist in places that you would

never find a cryptocurrency exchange. I had Ray Youssef, CEO of Paxful on the show a while back, and obviously they're doing, you know,to-peer Bitcoin exchanges around the world. But he said sort of the same thing you just touched on, which is that when he travels Africa, Nigeria in particular, he finds that they're the most brilliant, entrepreneurial, savvy people and that you wouldn't necessarily expect it, but that they find these incredible ways to make money. They're just so resourceful. And he thinks that if you get these things, these tools into their hands and you give them even an inkling of the same sort of opportunity that we take for granted here, that it's just going to explode with innovation. Yeah, totally agree. I love that project. It's a great project. Any projects, I love all the projects that are out there

trying to make crypto really genuinely useful for people. As much as I have had my fair share of sitting on projects, I've never used any Tron, but I own some Tron. I've never used, in fact, now I think about it, I was one of the first people that was mining a SIA coin. Not too sure I've ever used a SIA coin. I'm not entirely too sure what they do anymore. I can't remember. But, you know, we all end up with them, I think, especially people that were mining things.

We get a bit excited about something, jump on it, mine it, and you have a little wallet of this stuff floating around. But seeing things, a brave, you know, basic attention token, love that project, lots of users again, you know, big adoption and a great concept for something. And some of these other projects out there where they've got just genuine real-world use for things is absolutely fantastic. I think Sia is a storage thing, actually.

I think it is actually a good project. And it is one of the ones that's got real world adoption. So I didn't mean to speak badly of SERE, it's just I haven't visited it in so very long. But you get the idea that people that are out there, they are making the crypto landscape happen by getting it really genuinely being used. If all it was was speculative, then it would all just disappear. It'd be a puff of bubble. It'd be gone. So it has to have that real world use. But like I said, there's this disparity at the moment between the two. But they will join up again at some point. I think they've gone outwards. I'm not too sure if they're

still traveling outwards, they're traveling parallel, but they are going to start to converge. And at some point, that real-world usage will be important. We're sort of – because if you look at the greats, if you look at the Ebays and the PayPals and the Amazons of the world, a lot of those brands were really – people took the mickey out of them. I remember people laughing at eBay's base sale. world a lot of those brands were were really um uh people took the mickey out of people you know i remember people laughing at ebay's basic i remember people laughing at google's basic interface and amazon's basic interface amazon had that times roman font it was all sort of old

and everyone just laughed and went oh they're gonna be it's just a bookshop online it's gonna be gone in a few years and now you look at it and it's it's a levithal it's just a bookshop online. It's going to be gone in a few years. And now you look at it and it's a levithal. It's just enormous and incredible. And it's all done off Clever Tech. Simple as that. Simple as. Yeah, Clever Tech is certainly the future and nothing's going to ever compete with it,

which is a whole other conversation. I'm curious, though, we talk about you seeing these hot spots all over the world. And obviously, we see places where cryptocurrency is seeing massive mainstream adoption. There was a survey in Argentina recently that said people view cryptocurrencies as a better store of value than anything else. Basically, obviously, you have Lebanon and Venezuela, these obviously places where we've seen hyperinflation. Do you see any correlation between where Electroneum starts to see traction and the basic state of their economy in general? Some and some. I mean, because we've got the same thing in Venezuela and Argentina and Brazil, to a greater or lesser extent, and Turkey, we're seeing possibly based on fluctuation of their fiat currencies.

Because I think that's one of the things that your viewers or listeners are smart people. So they'll be aware of this. But quite often I talk to people and they go, oh, crypto, you know, it's so volatile. And you say, yeah, but the countries that we're being adopted in, their fiat currency is that volatile. You know, they see a 20% shift in their fiat currency regularly on a day-by-day or weekly basis. So actually, crypto doesn't look anywhere near as scary to people whose fiat currency is going like that.

But one of the things that they've got is, of course, you know, sure, it's easy to say, oh, grab some store of value in silver or gold, but they're not the easiest things to buy or store and how fungible are they or whatever, you know, so you're absolutely right. And it's fairly easy for the government to come and knock on your door and say, we would like to confiscate this. So crypto is a slightly more secure thing. And of course, the more you require that, the more there are tools for the job. So if you are really terrified of someone knowing that you've got crypto, once again, there's a crypto for that. Monero, it's the perfect tool for people that are repressed and need to store something in a way where nobody can tell how much it is.

So there's tools in crypto for every eventuality. So it is the perfect thing. As far as I'm concerned, it's a replacement for silver and gold. I'm still long gold and long silver. I've loved them both for a very long time. I've been a silver bug for many a year. So I still love my precious metals. But like anything, if you're doing it speculatively, the critical part is good money management. You know, don't jump with everything you've got into any crypto. It doesn't matter what it is, don't jump like that. And the same thing for any equity position or any precious metals or anything else. You know, good money management, take a fraction of your,

a fraction of the money that you can afford to lose and divide it up amongst projects. It's very important that people understand that, I think, because crypto has got a bad reputation for these charlatans that come along, you know, there was one coin and, you know, these types of scam come along, you know, there was one coin and, you know, these types of scam come along, unfortunately, and ruin it for all the good people in crypto. They do, but scams have existed long before cryptocurrency and usually are, you know,

perpetrated in dollars. So it's kind of just, it's such a funny stigma, I think, because it's so unfair in my mind because a scammer is a scammer the tool that they use to do it is is uh somewhat irrelevant in my mind so you just touched on as an investor yourself that you are silver bug and you believe in precious metals so clearly you believe in having um you know different things in your portfolio as hedges and to make sure where do you think that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency fit into the portfolio of, I know this is not financial advice, but of your average investor or person,

how much should they be exposed to this? Well, I mean, that is, we will say this is not investment advice. I talk about it all the time with the same qualifier. From my personal perspective, I've been saying to people for absolutely for

years if you have a portfolio of things right and you haven't got five percent in bitcoin you'd be mad and and i've been saying that since bitcoin was 400 bucks so uh you know this is um this is definitely something that people people should be doing if but with a very small amount right because ultimately it is still early days for crypto. And there'll be a lot of people in crypto going, there's no way it can ever go down. But let's also look at the correlation between the markets at the moment.

I'm not keen on that correlation. So we saw at the beginning of this COVID crisis where there was a huge dip across the world. You know, we saw it in the FTSE and the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones. Everything dived south. And as it did so, Bitcoin followed suit. So I'm not keen on that correlation.

I would prefer to see that it didn't exist rather than it did. Of course. And I think we need to see it break that correlation before I would be confident to say, yeah, Bitcoin's on its own trajectory. I can't say that outside of Bitcoin's on its own trajectory. Can't say that. Outside of what the stock markets are doing. But the stock markets are going to be pumped and pumped and pumped and pumped, aren't they? They have been for the last decade and a bit since the last crisis, when everybody suddenly

realized there's this magic spigot you can turn and money comes out. Fantastic. Let's turn that spigot. And it's really hard to turn it back off. It's pumping out and turning it off doesn't feel very good. So I don't think they'll ever turn it off. I think if anything, they'll just turn it on harder and harder and faster and faster. So I see those positions. I do think there's a good chance that we're still going to see the

traditional markets just keep inflating away. You know, the numbers going up and up. So my personal belief in Bitcoin is still a very long position. I think, you know, it's mathematically scarce, which is not true of very many things. So I'm personally a very long Bitcoin. And therefore, you know, I won't ever make a speculative argument for ourselves because I'm already dicing with it by talking about Bitcoin. But there are a handful of cryptocurrencies that I believe in, and they're all the ones that are going to be around long term. I look at some of the projects that are buzzy, you know, and sure, there's money to be made,

but be very, very careful about these buzzy projects, because you jump in them, and you might be 5,000% up in a day, and that's great. So take it off the table, because by the next day, you could be, you know, 50% down and then 90% down. So false. Well, I think it's fair to assume that like any sort of technologically innovative phase in time, which is what we're seeing with blockchain, is that everyone has great ideas and most won't come to fruition. And we'll see most of them. And that's not even a knock on the technology.

It's not a knock on those teams. It's actually almost a compliment. They're trying and they have, you know, they're putting everything on the line to make it happen. They're not scammers. It's just a lot of people in any industry will try and fail. So I think maybe we'll see like a sort of late 90s culling, like the tech, you know, sort of boom and bust. And also the ICO boom, I mean, there was, obviously there were some scams there, which was tragic to see. But at the same time, what there was is a generation of entrepreneurial young technical people

that had never been exposed to that. So they'd done an ICO and they raised $2 million and the money went to their head, you know. Or $200. Yeah, or $200 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But some of them crazy numbers, but there were literally thousands of projects that were raising a couple of million dollars. If you'd have gone off to VCs and said, well, I need a couple of million dollars for this project, they would've just shake their heads and gone, I couldn't justify it. I couldn't justify $20,000.

And these guys were like, no, no, no, I need 2 million. But then they burned through it too fast. They didn't use good money management. Come back to that. You know, they needed to keep their heads and try and eke it out a little bit better than perhaps they did. But you're right, they weren't necessarily crooks. I knew a few people that I felt quite sorry for them because they weren't crooks. And some of the people actually were building things that we've gone off. So there was one project called Blocklancer, I think, that was quite a good idea. But they ran out of funds. But the concept was good, but it just didn't have enough impetus. So the concept was a freelancer platform powered by Ethereum. But the last time

I looked at it, it was completely devoid of any users at all. I think it had 80 things listed or something. And I wish them well with it. So I'm, you know, I will always, this market is too small for there to be any competitors. So people say to me, oh, you guys are competing with Dash. I'm like, no, no, we're not. I love Dash. You know, I'm a big fan of what Dash guys are doing. So, you know, I think this market, we all just need to keep that rising tide and a rising tide, boats or boats. Yeah, I agree. So you touch on the ICO craze of 2017. You guys did an ICO in 2017, right? Can you talk about what that experience is like, why you chose to raise money in that manner? And, you know, I guess what the ripple effects have been of that now in 2020? Yeah, well, we, I mean, like I said, probably at the beginning, I watched the Ethereum ICO

and that was the first time I'd ever seen that concept. So I knew it was feasible to do it. And I also knew that to build what we wanted to build, we'd built the blockchain already. To be honest, we hadn't made that many changes. We took the Monero blockchain, bought the Monero blockchain, because there were two things in it that we really wanted. All of their stealth technology we didn't really want, except for one thing that we really, really did want,

which was they have a way of obfuscating the address at each time an address gets used. And the reason we wanted that is so that you can't look inside someone's wallet and see how much they've got. So if you look at Bitcoin, you can look at a wallet address and see how much they've got. Now, in the world of the unbanked and in the world of the developing world, knowing how much wealth someone has

is a dangerous thing for them. So if I can look in and see that someone has $400, then it's worth me going around and sticking a gun up their nose and saying, or whatever, a knife to their child's throat or something absolutely horrific and forcing them to hand it over. If it's anonymous,

then there is safety in that anonymity. So that was critical to us. They also had a wonderful thing, dynamic block sizing. We know that Bitcoin has a slight problem with its static block sizes. They've written this amazing piece of technology for that. So we fought from an era. So we had it working, still done all the other changes, the two decimal places and lots of other things. And we've changed it quite radically now. From back then, we've had a good few talks since then. But so the blockchain was all up and running in our office and we knew what we were doing with it in terms of where we were trying to take it. But we knew that we needed to develop our apps further.

We knew that we needed to build this ecosystem. So we thought, you know, we're going to have to raise some money. So it was either the traditional markets or run an ICO. And the ICO, we were preparing for this, of course, long before there was an ICO craze. We just got very lucky with the timing. We raised just over $40 million worth of ETH and Bitcoin. I can't say raised, actually. We sold $40 million plus worth of ETN tokens for Bitcoin and Ethereum. And again, I'd like to think that we've been very prudent in the way that we've built a lot. We have built a lot of software and we've done a lot of things. And because Ethereum and Bitcoin are what the price that they were when we when we did that

ico we're still in an almost identical financial position to where we were in 2017 so uh that's that's something that you wouldn't get from the bc 2018 must have been scary when that wasn't the case yeah yeah it was and we tightened our belts you know and that was what everybody else in crypto had to do as well uh And that's a little bit about that experience, I suppose. I am an old, old man. And so I've done it all before in business. And you see lean times and you see good times. And you have to make pay while the sun shines. But if the rains come, then you hunker down. So there were so many analogies and metaphors, and I don't even know where to start.

But you get the idea that actually, if you're an inexperienced businessman, like we were talking about before, you have to feel a little bit sorry for them. But they'll pick themselves up and they're technologists, they'll go on and do other great things. But yeah, my experience, I think, was useful in that. I heard you use the term proof of responsibility, I believe it was before. Can

you tell me what that term means to you? Yeah, well, we had, I mean, obviously, everybody knows proof of work, and we were a proof of work blockchain. But there wasn't the distribution. The whole concept of proof of work originally, if you look at the original Bitcoin white paper, is brilliant brilliant and it's genius. What that's now transpired to be is not as pure as people think that it is. Nearly every block, 90% plus of Bitcoin's blocks are added to the Bitcoin blockchain by one of a handful of entities. They are large pools and the people's hashing power is going into a pool that is then mining Bitcoin. So they're the ones filling out the block template, if I may be

technical and dull. But the scary thing from my point of view is that's not what mining was all around in the beginning. And the concept was the distribution would have actually had Bitcoin miners all over the world. People talk about Bitcoin miners being all over the world, but they are not really what Bitcoin mining was when it was first developed. What they are is people providing hashing power to a network. And there are a handful, five probably, Bitcoin miners, people who are actually completing the block template and submitting the blocks. And that doesn't sit very well with me. People argue with me quite strenuously about this, because they are right in that when one of those entities starts to get towards a larger percentage, you do tend to see the miners move their hashing power around. So I do understand that it's a

self-policing network. I know I understand it relatively well, but there's also that fear that someone could obtain a large percentage of the network by obtaining an entity. No one knows necessarily who owns F2Pools and these things. And sorry, I've picked one out specifically, which I shouldn't. I do know the guys at F2Pools. They're very ethical people. They're not going to cause a problem. But you get the idea that actually if somebody came along and said to the guys at F2Pools. They're very ethical people. They're not going to cause a problem. But you get the idea that actually if somebody came along

and said to the guys at F2Pools, I'm going to give you a billion dollars. Well, they might well go, yeah, I'd like that billion dollars. So now somebody now has 30% of the Bitcoin network and suddenly they can buy this up. So I worry a little bit because actually if you run two, if you had two or three pools uh that you'd bought up uh nobody would know necessarily they're all owned by the same people and if you own the network the hashing power can all be taken easily and and funneled into to nefarious means and once again

i'm sure that they just wouldn't do it but where we were at and i finally get to my point where we were at is we had one pool with 70% of our hashing power constantly. They were paying out the best rate and nobody would migrate from it. And so, it made a mockery of proof of work, in fact. Even though we had a massive hashing rate, absolutely enormous, we didn't actually, it wasn't really doing what it's supposed to do, which is give us distribution. And it was burning a massive amount of electricity. Of course. We did some calculations. It was all ASIC mining. And we did a little calculation. And if they were the most rubbish ASICs running, there was at least 300,000 of them. So realistically, there's probably half a

million computers mining electronic. Now that is a terrible waste of electricity to add a block to a blockchain that can be done by probably by your wristwatch nowadays but with a very low amount of CPU pads. It doesn't need CPU pad around blockchain. That's what people are confused by I think

in the market. So people have come up with other things like proof of stake conceptually an interesting idea and Byzantine fault tolerance in the case of Red Bull, you know, so we looked at all these other things and nothing was exactly what we were after. So we came up with this concept of proof of responsibility. We're already in the KYC, in the regulatory kind of environment. So we said, why don't we find people that are going to be trustworthy, which we use NGOs, so non-government organizations, that are on the ground in the same place that we are,

and we can convince them that electronic is doing something good. And then these guys are battling for us on the ground, and they're getting the block reward. So we got a handful of these people. There's only a dozen of them. But we got a handful of these people and let them have the software. And then we put something in that's again, slightly contentious sometimes, but we've got a moderator layer because the whole thing runs off keys. And we've got a moderator layer that says, right, if somebody, if that key appears twice, they're doing something nefarious, they've been hacked.

We cut that key out of the network. And by doing that, even though we've got a layer of decentralization where we've got these guys around the world doing the work, so that the network works even if we've been struck by a meteorite, we also have this centralized layer that can protect us.

So we can't be 51% attacked. We've written that out of the network, but at the cost of some of the decentralized things. But at the end of the day, we took the idea that, hang on a minute, someone has to trust here. We're an app-based cryptocurrency. We're building an ecosystem that's got KYC and everything else. So if they're trusting us for this, trust us for that decentralized aspect of trust as well. And so we coined this term proof of responsibility. Very, very long answer to a very short question. So my apologies. But

proof of responsibility enables people to have this big distribution of ETN. Proof of stake tends to focus the ownership, which we didn't want. So we've got, I think there's something like 3.7 million. Last time I looked, there was 3.7 million electronic wallets in our custodial wallet system that had ETN in them. And so it's fast distribution. Whereas if you put proof of stake in place, then suddenly, you know, you set it relatively high. The rich people will be able to benefit from the, from the reward. But, but it means that they have to, you know, grab all of this, all of these, the, the, the tokens together.

And of course the token projects are doing that because they want, where are they going to get those tokens? They're going to get them off the exchange. The owner's going to empty their pockets of the token. We've seen it all before with these schemes. And so as much as there are some great legitimate proof of stake projects, I wasn't keen on the concentration part of it. So that's where we ended up with proof of responsibility. And yeah, the system's working exceedingly well. We've had it sort of peer reviewed and yeah, people like what what we do. Thank goodness.

But it's funny because one of the core tenets that people love so much about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency proof of work is the decentralization. But I think in their mind, they don't realize that's maybe decentralization from governments or a central bank or something like that. But that doesn't mean that somebody can't centralize proof of work, which you just touched on. You guys basically did it yourself inadvertently. And Bitcoin, if somebody bought it all up, could be a very centralized network just by a private organization. So it gives you a lot to think about in that model because people are so passionate about it. But in the end, they may actually be controlled by a central or a couple players in the market. It's really interesting. I think that isn't the case because like I said,

I'm a big fan of Bitcoin and it has the brand in the marketplace. I always think everybody should hold a bit of Bitcoin. And one of the things, I'm a libertarian at heart. I want people to have freedom of their finance. If you can get some ETN and maybe there's one part of it you dislike, or I'm not sure I like that part where you can control the miners. If you don't like that part, great. Earn some ETN and then go buy some Bitcoin. You know, we give people that freedom. So we're all about empowering people.

And, yeah, it hasn't caused us any problems. In fact, probably solved a good few problems, actually. So I talk about that layer. But whilst there were a few moaners in the market, I find that in crypto, it doesn't matter what you do, you can't please all the people all the time. If you don't have moaners, then you're not doing anything of significance. I think that's pretty clear.

I mean, if you can't gather people who are criticizing you, then there's nothing. You're not doing anything worth complimenting either, probably. I've found. I have to agree. new projects that are really on the ground and doing this and working towards that. What are the future steps that make this explode where cryptocurrency is just adopted, even if it's just everywhere in the third world, using somewhere like that? Maybe not sitting here in Florida, do I need to go buy my food with cryptocurrency? But how do we see this level of mainstream adoption where it can't be ignored and it's a force in the market? I'll probably have a fairly controversial answer to that, I think, because I actually think one of the things that we're doing is we're reaching out to, we've got quite a few governments that we've been talking to for quite a long time. Governments are terrified of crypto. Most of them are terrified

of it for capital outflow reasons. They're terrified that the money will flood out of their country. When they see us and with any task, they understand that this is about bringing money into the country or value into the country, crypto into the country. I personally think that if this can become something that governments can see a tax revenue from, you will find it gets adopted faster and harder than anything else. Because if you've got a huge populace that have access to the internet, they have access to technology, but they're not doing anything with it to be productive economically for the country, a government will suddenly realise they'll rub their greedy little hands together

and realise that there's money to be made out of the populace. And that's a terribly cynical be made out of the populace. And that's a terribly cynical way of looking at the world. But alas, I fear that that is probably what would spur any adoption. And of course, there are loads of these government attempts at crypto, should we call them? Petro. Yeah, these types of thing. government attempt at crypto, should we call them? Yeah. These types of thing,

they have not had the trust that is required for adoption because if it is going to happen, I still think it would have to happen with one of the players that's in the market and not a specific tie to any country because people are fearful of things that are tied to one country and too much control in that country if it's a global phenomenon and one country adopts it that's fine because you still know okay i can send it to somewhere else and you've got that stability of value or increase of value or whatever it may be but you get the idea that that a country going, you know what, this crypto stuff is okay. And we're starting to see it. We're starting to see it now where

we're starting to see a little bit more embracing of regulations. People are realizing, we've seen it in the UK, seen it in the States. People are realizing, guys, you do need to pay some tax on this. And there's obviously going to be the few people that throw their hands in the air and say, I can't believe it. But at the same time they were playing people go okay well fair enough it's a capital gain i'm going to pay my tax once that revenue is realized the governments then suddenly go yeah you know what we need more of this not less of it and and i think that will that will help spur it on so regulation i suppose it's better for all of us to be taxed than to be banned. Yeah, I totally agree. And we've seen this with some of the jurisdictions that we're operating.

And so for instance, we've got somebody in Pakistan right now, a very technical young lad has got in touch. He said that I really, really, really, really want to use you guys because I'm paying 20% to Fiverr plus I'm paying a fee. They've got a way of paying out to a mobile money project thing, which costs him some more percent. He ends up with about 30% of charges to get his money from Fiverr. He said, I really want to use you guys, but crypto is illegal in Pakistan. What do I do? And the only answer I have at the moment is you just have to wait for Pakistan to catch up and say, you know what? Crypto isn't the devil. Crypto is an empowering tool. And like any tool, it can be in the wrong hands, it can be a bad thing, but in the right hands, it can be an incredible thing.

So as the world catches up and the empowerment flows out and more and more people are using crypto for good, then it'll just get better and better. And we're right at the start of this. You know, we're still, this is 1985 in the smartphone market. Well, maybe not smartphone market, but the mobile phone market with these giant bricks to our heads and everyone, that's never going to catch on. With the backpack. Yeah. It's interesting to hear that. I think people just don't realize they want everything now.

It's such a now society and, you know, Warren Buffett, you know, markets are passing wealth from the impatient to the patient, right? So I think that's the case here. We just have to wait. But I love hearing that we're so early because it feels huge already, but it can be so much bigger. But it feels huge to us because it can be so much bigger. Because we're sitting in it, right? So every day, this is what we're doing. But equally,

at the same time, I'll go to a pub and I'll sit down with people and they'll say, what do you do? And I'll have a little chit chat. And they laugh. I've heard of that, but what is it? So actually, I still think your average person, your average person probably still doesn't get it actually. I agree. You know, I think we've still got a long way to go and i think it's really really early uh and and i remember very very clearly being offered an opportunity to get into a a mobile phone shop a chain of shops i was offered an opportunity to invest in this chain of shops and it must have been about i think it it was about 1989, 1990, perhaps,

maybe 91 at the outside. But whenever it was, I just said, no way. Mobile phone market is saturated. I could not have been more wrong. And as I watched it grow and grow and grow, I just thought, how wrong could I possibly have been? So that was a really bad call by me. But at the same time- But a good teaching moment. It absolutely was. That is literally the thing that was in my head as I was seeing Bitcoin. I first saw Bitcoin at $40 on a blog called Zero Hedge. And I thought, do you know what? I should buy some of that, but I didn't. And then I saw it creeping up and up and up. Eventually, I think I

bought my first at about 400 bucks. And I thought, do you know what? I bought i bought at the top haven't i i could have made 10 times my money if i just got into the beginning yeah so uh but it made me think you know what now i'm going to jump into crypto because i i think this is going to be like the mobile phones um of yesteryear so and i still think we we're still in that i think we we got in really really early you know where maybe it was the backpack uh but um but now now it's the uh it's the flip phone i was gonna say we got the motorola star tack now which was uh which i thought was going to be the greatest invention of all time when it came out you could never could never ever come out with a better phone than that because it looked like it was from star trek it was awesome i love that so so where uh where should people follow you where can people sign up why you know keep up with what you guys are

doing after this because i know we're gonna have a lot of interest i want to make sure we drive them to the right place uh well electronium.com it takes you to our crypto website where you can sort of learn more about the project and uh if you there were links for the app on the Android store or the iPhone store, Apple store. And if anybody's listening, please go and take a look at anytask.com. It's a cool name because it is pretty much any task you can think of digitally.

You can buy it on there for peanuts, not literal peanuts. I'm afraid you will have to spend dollars. But one day we hope to accept many types of nuts walnuts peanuts also i was gonna say if you can somehow convert nuts to electronium i think we're on to something here we're gonna have to talk afterwards we just need an infinite amount of monkeys this is just not really weird towards the end hasn't it i'm sorry about that everybody oh yeah so go and buy, please. We've got, the great thing is you're buying something from somebody who's a very

skilled person, money back guarantee. So you've got nothing to lose. If you don't like it, we'll refund the money. It's both sides are protected. So if somebody delivers something that's amazing, you go, yeah, that's amazing. And as soon as you sign it off, they get paid. But equally, if you said, look, you haven't delivered anything like what you promised, we've got an arbitrage system that just goes, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. We've got 24-7 support. So it's a great platform. Go and have a look at that and buy a task and you're making somebody's life better. And at the same time, lowering your outsourcing costs. So crazy not to do it. Yeah, well, I'm going to go do it. So I've actually checked it out myself already. So I can't lie, but it's an incredible platform. And I think that what you guys are doing

is just really incredible. I'm very, like I said, honored to be a part of it and to use it myself and to be a part of this ecosystem. So I'm looking forward to seeing the growth and seeing that continue to be exponential as it has thus far. So congratulations on everything. But I hope we are in 1985 with the brick phones because that means the future is infinitely bright. It certainly is. I'm very confident that is the case. It's very easy to think, oh, yeah, yeah, this is it. And not realize how big it can get. And I've kept

using the same analogies, but look at the Amazons and the Ebays and things. Just when you think, no, nothing can get any bigger, they do. It's an extraordinary thing to watch. So the future is super bright for crypto. I have no doubt. Well, here's to being the next Amazon then. I'll take that. So will I. Well, thank you so much once again for taking the time. And I know we ran over it a bit,

but I do appreciate the conversation. It was great. So hopefully we'll catch up soon. All the best to you. Thanks for inviting me on. Very kind of you. All the best. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me on. Very kind of you. All the best. Thank you.