The Wolf Of All Streets - Bringing Bitcoin and Ethereum Together with Chris Spadafora, Founder of Badger DAO

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Chris Spadafora happened to work a sales job right above the original Bitcoin Center in NYC, long before Bitcoin hit the mainstream. A combination of luck, motivation and destiny landed Chris deep in the Bitcoin community, eventually leading to him to develop his own project in the DeFi space. With a passion for both Ethereum and Bitcoin, Chris extricated himself from the tribal crypto war and designed Badger DAO to connect the two largest cryptos in a cooperative manner. Scott Melker and Chris Spadafora further discussed working above the OG Bitcoin Center, professional bodybuilding, the life of a salesman, breaking a regimented routine, discovering true happiness on vacation, the 4-hour work week, building on Ethereum, designing a DAO, PayPal in the crypto space, food coins, charity poker, wrapped Bitcoin, a new financial system and more. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- ELECTRONEUM Electroneum, has gained widespread adoption providing a mobile-first payment solution to the world's unbanked, attracting more than 4M users worldwide in less than three years. They have since launched a new freelance marketplace, AnyTask.com, which is providing thousands of freelancers the opportunity to sell their services to buyers globally, without the need of a bank account. Learn more at Electroneum.com. --- 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, Voyager and Electroneum, for making this episode possible. Stay tuned for more info on them later. What is up, everybody? I am Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. I'm really excited for today's guest because he's a friend of mine, and we've battled it out on the poker table at the charity tournaments that he's graciously put together over the past few months. Now, Chris is an OG in crypto by any sense of the word, and he continues to build and innovate the space, mostly recently with his new projects, AngelRock, and specifically Badger, which we're going to discuss at length. He's also passionate

about both Bitcoin and Ethereum, separating himself from the tribal battles that have long been seen in this space. I believe this gives him a unique perspective on DeFi and the future of crypto, which is what I really want to dig into today. I also look forward to learning more about some of the things he's interested in, including bodybuilding, writing, and charity. So Chris Spadafore, man, it's nice to hear from you again. You too, buddy. So before we get into the questions, once again, you're listening to the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics. This show is powered by BlockWorks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in

their network. Check them out at blockworksgroup.io. If you listen to the podcast, you follow me on Twitter, then you definitely need to check out my website and join my newsletter. You can do both of those things at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now back to what is important. So Chris, as they say in the old country, you are pretty small. You're a bodybuilder. So what do you have to say for someone who really hates exercising their legs? Ask me for a friend. So they ask you for a friend.

I was going to say, I saw you get up before we talked and you were in shorts. So I got a glimpse of what you're talking about there. No, but honestly, honestly, Matt, like when it comes to say, I saw you get up before we talked and you were in shorts. So I got a glimpse of what you're talking about there. No, but honestly, honestly, man, like when it comes to fitness, a lot of people will be like, Hey dude, like how do I, you know, get in shape and all this type of stuff. And my answer is always the same. Like you just got to find something you really like doing and it just needs to be physical and just do it, you know, as much as you can.

Like I tend to love like lifting heavy shit over my head and that's like what I like doing, you know? And I like playing basketball too and stuff, you know, as much as you can. Like, I tend to love, like, lifting heavy shit over my head, and that's, like, what I like doing, you know, and I like playing basketball, too, and stuff. You know, if you don't genuinely find passion in it, it's, like, impossible to do it. It's a job. For an extended period of time, you know what I mean? And, like, I haven't competed in bodybuilding shows

almost, like, eight years now. But, like, you know, hitting the gym and, like, you know, just being active has been, like, the result of, you know, you know, hitting the gym and like, you know, just being active has been like the result of getting a little intense in the early days, you know? So. Yeah. COVID has been challenging definitely, but it switched me to one of those like cardio weirdos who likes to go for runs and stuff, which is something that I despised before we got here. Cause I was always into, I always did CrossFit. Um,

not because I believed in the ethos of it or anything but just because like as you said I enjoyed it because it served my ADHD and I could like do something different every single day lift some heavy things do some cardio and it's that's been a struggle but I don't know that's that's not what people are here to to learn about so as I touched on in the intro you have a new platform DAO called called Badger. But more importantly, it sort of integrates the Bitcoin mentality with the Ethereum mentality. And I've touched on that tribalism. So I want to talk, I want you to talk first about like, where you got your passion for Bitcoin, and then how it sort of evolved into also an acceptance of Ethereum and building on Ethereum? Yeah, like, you know, it started like many with Bitcoin, right? Like back almost eight years ago, when I was in New York at the time, and I was kind of lucky where my office was on top of the original Bitcoin center that was on Wall Street next to the stock exchange. And a buddy of mine from college moved to New York and he's like, dude, you got to come like, it's pretty funky.

There's this thing Bitcoin, like I've been researching it online. I really dig it. So I go down there on Tuesdays and, you know, they'd have some dude wearing a bow tie doing a live auction for Bitcoin with an Excel spreadsheet as the order book projected on, you know, behind it. It was wild. People were selling miners that they were rigging up themselves. Like it was pretty cool. And that was just kind of the start. And then you were digging into Bitcoin Talk. And I just believed in a new financial system, right? I just wasn't the person that believed in the financial system that we had and knew there was going to be an alternative. It was going to be online. So I got into that and started investing and hanging around in the groups. And then over the years, I moved back to Toronto and Ethereum started here, of course.

And a lot of the people that I knew in my network were part of that. And I was an Ethereum fan, right? I dug it, I believe. And I am an Ethereum fan, but, you know, a smart contract platform and being able to build on top of it, I thought that was great. So I got involved just from an investment perspective, but never really dug into the community, never was an active participant in the community and things along those lines. Spent more of my time on the Bitcoin side. Then the last year and a half in looking at

building something and evaluating building on Bitcoin, other chains, and then eventually realizing the best place to build today, at least I believe, is Ethereum, I started to get a feel for just the tribalism between the crews. And actually, I host a poker game every Thursday, which I sent an invite to you over a few times. And we're doing it soon. Yeah. We have a lot of people on there that are, quote unquote, like Bitcoin maximalists and DeFi people and Ethereum people. And the debates are pretty interesting, but there are debates and it's always like this Bitcoin versus Ethereum, which I genuinely think is bullshit, right? Like it's not

Bitcoin versus. Number one, it's one industry. So we're trying to move the whole thing forward. It's not one or the other, first and foremost, especially two that have obviously Bitcoin spearheaded everything. But Ethereum has been a big driver as part of the last five or six years. But, you know, it's about differentiating the two. Like Bitcoin is better money and Ethereum is the best permissionless smart contract platform in the world. Like that's what it is. And they're very different things with very different purposes. And when you understand those, it makes it that much easier to realize like, why the hell should they be fighting?

And it's not about fighting. It's really about being a joint community and pushing the overall message forward. So anyways, that's kind of where I've landed in my perspective on the whole thing. And I think a lot of the Ethereum maximalism and the Bitcoin maximalism, I think it's dumb. It's really a waste of time and a waste of breath. Well, I agree.

I mean, a rising tide lifts all boats, first of all. Like as you touched on, I think the crypto community as a whole is too small to then separate into tribes. You know, if everybody would just kind of work together and be passionate about each other's projects, we'd probably get a lot further, a lot faster. But talk about Badger more specifically. I know you just talked about the fact that you decided to build something on Ethereum. Let's talk about what that something is. Well, a lot of that's been driven by the explosion of Bitcoin on ETH. I don't know how familiar the audience is with the different ways that Bitcoin has either been tokenized on ETH.

I think it would be valuable, actually, for you to give the brief background on that. That'd be great. Yeah. So over the last year, I'd say actually really since January, it's exploded. It's gone from a thousand Bitcoin being tokenized on ETH, which I'll explain in a second, to over a hundred thousand and over, I think it's like $1.3 billion or something along those lines. And the main driver of all that has been DeFi, right? Like we want to be able to use our Bitcoin to get a yield, to participate in some of these, you know, food coin explosions and explosions and all that nonsense that's been happening over the summer. But the genuine thought was, I have Bitcoin, I want to do more with it. And at the same time, those people are comfortable with some of the inherent risks

that come with tokenizing your Bitcoin. So the process of tokenizing your Bitcoin, there's really, you know, I'd say two major players right now that make up 90% of the market, and that's WBTC and RenBTC. So with WBTC, what they say is send your Bitcoin here, and here meaning to BitGo, which is a centralized custodian and one of the largest in the world. They'll hold it there and will mint the equivalent Bitcoin on the Ethereum chain. Okay. So if you put one Bitcoin into WBTC, you'll get one WBTC out, which mimics the price of Bitcoin and it's on the Ethereum chain. So you can use it in the Ethereum wallets, you can use it in Ethereum applications, things along those lines. RenBTC, and they make up, I think over 70% of the market at this point. And a lot of the larger institutions, like the largest merchants that are actually using WBTC are Coinlist, Three Arrows Capital, Almeda, and FTX. They're probably the three of the largest minters of WBTC.

REN BTC, on the other hand, comes from REN Protocol and REN Project. And they take a different approach where they tend to have an infrastructure of nodes built on and with the REN platform and network where those nodes actually custody the, the Bitcoin. So it's not about giving it to a centralized custodian. You give it to the REM nodes. Now, to be fair, there's been a lot of scrutiny around REM because they found, or in looking into how those Bitcoin are managed, they're managed by the REM team.

And there's quite a bit of Bitcoin that's in those wallets. And that's part of their journey towards decentralization. So they haven't gotten to a full decentralized custody, but they're making their way there. But today that's really their kind of position in the market. And that's been a big lift in DeFi because REN is installed or REN's integrated in Curve. And Curve is one of the largest places where people have placed their tokenized Bitcoin to earn a yield, right? By providing liquidity to those pools. Why does Curve look like a website from 1987? I think it's on purpose, dude. does Curve look like a website from 1987? If there were websites in 1987. I know, it is amazing.

I think that like, I love the like throwback Atari vibe of a lot of these DeFi things, but like it definitely gave me pause the first time that I looked at it and I was like, I'm supposed to deposit what, where, in this thing really.

But, and yeah, I guess so people, anyone who's heard the term wrapped Bitcoin, that's what we're talking about here with WBTC. OK, so where does Badger step in? Where do you fit in the equation? So really, you know, tokenized Bitcoin has been this explosion. And but at the same time, you know, we need more bridges to get Bitcoin from Bitcoin to ETH and other chains, not just Ethereum, right? All the other chains. And we need more applications once we're on those chains to accelerate decentralized finance, right? The ability to put it to work and do different things while being outside of your

traditional financial systems. You don't have to go to the bank to earn 1%. You can do peer-to-peer lending and take that tokenized Bitcoin and earn 10%. Or you can provide liquidity so people can trade between similar tokenized Bitcoins without getting massive dips in prices or whatever it may be, like what Curve does. You know, yeah. So with that whole market, you know, what we decided to do was to build a DAO and to build, to bring all the best builders together under one roof to collaborate on building these bridges and these products specifically for bringing what I would consider the best collateral ever invented Bitcoin to smart contract platforms. So it can be used in decentralized finance. So that's So that's what Badger is all about. And of course, being a Bitcoin guy, there's a lot of Bitcoin memes inside of Badger,

even though it's on Ethereum, the honey badger in itself, the 21 million fixed supply. There's a lot of other things. But overall, Scott, that's what Badger is all about. So why do you believe that Bitcoin is the best form of collateral ever invented? Well, it goes back to, it goes back to why Bitcoin's Bitcoin, right? Like Bitcoin is a collateral that you can use, obviously being a digital asset, you have the ability to take that collateral and And I should just use a comparison, right? To get a line of credit, you can use your home equity, right? So you can take your house and you can take the equity that you have on your house and you can use it as collateral to get a line of credit from the bank, right?

There's very little liquidity in that, very little ability to transfer that. Now, all of a sudden with Bitcoin, it's something that you can send for cents all around the world, right? And you can use it to then go and get a loan against that specific dollar asset, while at the same time, because it's a digital asset, be able to move in and out of that loan, send that loan or that asset that you're using to another person that wants to potentially use it. The opportunities are endless, but the transferability of it and the liquidity of it, in my opinion,

are the reasons why it's the best collateral ever invented. And you also have the opportunity to see your collateral rise in value tremendously. Of course. Never a bad thing, which doesn't generally happen with a home equity loan as you were touching on. And it comes with its inherent risks too, right? Of course. Go the other way. The other way, exactly. We saw that plenty of times. In 2018, we saw that. That's when a lot of the big lending platforms started picking up steam and you could start borrowing stable coin against your Bitcoin, the amount of

people that got crushed when Bitcoin dipped and you had to continue to top up to keep your loan alive, that was really rough. But then the other side, like people that opened some of those positions in March of this year when we had the big dip, you know, are laughing right now. They've been able to pay back that loan and they were able to do whatever they wanted with that liquid fiat or stablecoin, rather. Yeah. And now I think just the platforms learned probably a lot from building in 2017 and 2018. We have huge platforms, Celsius and Voyager and BlockFi, where you can, I think, pretty confidently go park your money and get a yield and even take a loan. And they all survived the March 12th drop without liquidating anyone. If you can survive a drop from 9,000 to sub 4K

in 24 hours, I would say that we've matured in this space and that's somewhat proved that you're safe. Yeah, there's a lot of maturity in this space. Look what's happened in the last three weeks. With BitMax, even with OKEx as of recently, with KuCoin, these types of things would have destroyed the market a few years ago, literally slaughtered the market. We're not even a blip. We crossed we're like 12,500 today. It's like nuts. You know what I mean? Like totally crazy. Yeah, I know CoinShares recently reported this week that they were basically were like 12,500 today. It's like nuts. You know what I mean? Like totally crazy. Yeah. I know CoinShares recently reported this week that they were basically said that the same effect was that, you know, Bitcoin has remained stable through a blitz of negative news. And I think the biggest sign of maturity of any asset is when, you know, it laughs off news, both good and bad. Right. I mean, talking, speaking to what you're saying, it used to be

that if there was a mention of Bitcoin in an article in 2016 or 17, it was huge and price would swing like a thousand. And now it's, it's mainstream. You see it every single day in the biggest publications. It doesn't affect anything. And still like being fair, we still got an enormous way to go. You know what I mean? Like so much in front of us, tons and tons of years. But nonetheless, the progress in the last few years has been amazing. And you're starting to see it now with a lot of these public companies placing big bets. And if you were to ask me a few years ago, like what would be one of the bullish signs that to help push Bitcoin forward in the coming years, I wouldn't have thought that was it.

You know, maybe saying like a PayPal turning it on, I could see that happening a few years ago. That would make sense. And we started to see with Robinhood and some of these other platforms. But I didn't think that to accelerate that fast and the trends just going on and on and on, you know, so it's exciting times for sure. I agree with you. And we've seen the news actually came out today, not to date this interview, but that, um, obviously PayPal has further committed to, you know, they've, they've basically, it was a rumor that we all knew was fact, but have established it as fact that they will be allowing buying, selling and purchasing with Bitcoin. It's just huge.

It's huge. I mean, you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions of people now be able, being able to expose themselves to Bitcoin on a platform that they're comfortable with, which I think is the most key part, because I think the biggest barrier to adoption is that people just don't want to go somewhere else to figure it out. And don't overlook Scott,

the merchants too, like merchants can now accept it as well. And we're talking like Matt, like that's massive too, man merchants can now accept it as well. And we're talking like Matt, like that's massive too, man. Like it is big time stuff. And I was excited to see Paxos behind it as well. So Paxos and PayPal, because Paxos has done nothing but, you know, showcase the level of professionalism and, and being really forward in ensuring, you know, they, they met all regulations and they followed the script and the book the right way. You know what I mean?

Because, as we know, there's a lot of people that tend to skip over certain things just to get to market fast in our industry. But, you know, they did everything the right way, at least from an outside view looking in, at least. So I think we have like a well-established use case for DeFi. I think that most people can agree that decentralized finance at its core is somewhat the future of banking even to a degree. But what do you make of sort of the bubble popping and these smaller FOMO-based food coins and projects that we've been seeing over the past few months? Yeah, I think it's exactly that, right? I think it was, call it a bubble, call it whatever. It was a bunch of people playing around with money they've been sitting on for years,

just waiting for an opportunity to make that 5 or 10x or whatever that type of crap is. But DeFi is 100% here to stay. If anyone actually used the applications and some of the bigger applications in the space today, like Compound, like Maker, like Synthetix, like Curve, some of these players, you'll get a glimpse into what it's like to actually participate in these types of financial services without walking into a bank and without having to bring three pieces of ID and without having to have all these paperwork and all this type of nonsense. You literally log into an application with your wallet, which is just an app on your computer in your browser. And you're able immediately to see all the assets that you

have in that wallet in the application. Click a couple buttons based on the assets that you actually have. You're pre-qualified. If you want to use some more layman terms, you're pre-qualified for really loans and borrowing and doing all this type of stuff like instantly just by looking at your assets versus like, I'll give you an example. When I moved back from New York and I lived in New York for three years and I came back to Canada, I was there on a, you know, a one or L2 visa. I can't remember the name and the money I made there and the taxes that I paid there. I did it all there as part of what I needed to do. When I came back to Canada, they wouldn't even give me a, a line of credit, a bigger credit card or whatever, because they wouldn't recognize any of the money that I made in the U, right? Which is totally, totally ridiculous.

And all of a sudden now I can log in with an app and be qualified for as much if not more money just because the capital is there and the application proves it. Like that's what's going to happen. No ifs, ands, or buts. And if you have this in between, like a couple random devs that are like,

hey, I'm going to try and make a quick buck and launch something cool, and other people can make money, yeah, of course it's going to go up and go down, and it's a total joke. But at the same time, it's starting to show life for what's going to come. And as you said, with Curve, it being a unique UI, you know, that's another step forward, right? Like making UI, UX that much simpler and easier to use for normal people to play around with. But, you know, that's where it's going. You just touched on something so important. I mean, I was a DJ for 20 years, so I never had an employer, a W-2. I was always

an independent contractor. So none of my income ever counted for a loan, even in the United States. So getting a loan was always really difficult until the past couple of years. But to be able to just show exactly how much Bitcoin you have and get a loan without a credit check and without sending bank statements and tax returns for the past years. I mean, getting a loan takes months in this country. This takes seconds. Yeah. And so, I mean, if for people who don't know why we think this is the future, I mean, you're talking about the ability to literally get the loans that you've waited months for within minutes without a centralized authority telling you that it is or is not okay. Right.

So, which once again, and this is where people quickly overlook with a lot more risk associated with it. Right. Like you're talking about trusting smart contracts and software to, to manage your money and get loans and do all these types of things where there could easily be problems. And especially at this very early stage, there's going to be problems.

And with that comes the risk of losing funds with security risks and all those types of things. So that's what a lot of people tend to overlook. And we'll take it for granted, right? We've been monkeying around with this stuff for years. So like, you know, we're much more comfortable than normal Joes, but like a normal Joe, their, their mind would explode if, if all of a sudden, you know, they put 10 grand and to get a loan or to lend it out, to make seven or 10% interest or 15% or whatever it is. And then all of a sudden that 10 grand goes nowhere and there's no one to contact, no way for them to really get their money back or to take any legal action, whatever it may be. And that's part of it as well, you know, and that's something that's going to evolve. But for the most part, like those are

inherent risks today. And those are also quite a few of the inherent risks that make people skeptical to go back to tokenize Bitcoin as well. right? Like a lot of the Bitcoin faction would be like, dude, you're crazy. You think I'm going to take Bitcoin that I custody, that I manage, that I know is safe. And I'm going to use like four or five different hoops to get into a network and lend and provide liquidity here and take that liquidity and provide it to lend it over here and board. And now I have like seven or eight layers of risk associated with those smart contracts. No way. Right. Which is totally fair. Yeah, I get that. Which is totally fair. And like, you know, Peter McCormack's a friend of mine and he always says it. He's like, you know, honestly, man, I trust BlockFi over smart

contracts. I trust Voyager over smart contract. Like, you know, a lot of people will say that and that's fine. You know what I mean? And that's cool. But once again, it's about understanding those risks. And if you have a level of comfortability with it, you'll start to realize that, well, unless there's applications built on these other networks that people are actually using, billions and billions and billions of dollars are going to go from Bitcoin to Ethereum and other chains where they can actually put that asset to work and do it in a way where they can get oversized returns and risk. Yeah, I think you can spread that risk around. It doesn't have to be one or the other. I think it'd be insane to go all in on wrapped Bitcoin. You know what I mean?

So have some in your multi-sig that's your savings account forever. Have some on each of those, you know, Voyager and Celsius that you're gaining yield on and then take a little and go test this out and see if it's the future and if it's right for you. I think that's probably the more sensible approach for most people, even the people who are passionate about it. Right. I mean, it's just crazy to be all in on food coins and like, you know, liquidity pools and stuff, but Hey man, people, there are people who cashed out huge. So I want to talk a little bit more about, um, I know that you had sort of like a life awakening of sorts on a vacation

once upon a time that sort of, I think changed your perspective. Um, that I find really interesting. I'd love you to talk about that. Yeah. I love that time in my life. It's pretty amazing. So, you know, I spent my life like many people. You know, I grew up in Toronto, was taught to go to school and do all that type of stuff, go to college, get a job, you know, save money for a house, start a family, do all those things. And I kind of followed along the path I had a few bumps people that know me in my teens know I you know I wasn't the um the best the best kid but nonetheless I eventually made my way to college and graduated and went and got a job selling software and hardware and um at the same time I was doing bodybuilding so I became very like regimented

and goal-oriented and like in sales it really worked for me because it was like, okay, set this goal, put this plan together, crush it, and you'll be successful. So I found some success in my job, moved to New York, and during that time, continued to you'd find me, you know, in a suit and tie every day and dealing with people that I didn't want to deal with. And yeah, making decent money. But at the same time, like I genuinely wasn't happy and didn't have passion for what I was doing. And at that time as well as when I found Bitcoin. So that was a big part of this, this whole conversation. But really, Bitcoin wasn't the catalyst for me at that time. At the time it was, you know what, I want to, um, control my life. And, you know, this is a, uh, a product of like the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss. Right. So like, you know, I want to have a lifestyle design where I do what I want when I want and make the money, you know, when I'm sleeping, like that whole, that whole stuff. So, um, on a whim to an extent, I, I left my job after having the most successful sales month of my career.

And me and my wife decided to move back to Toronto. So we did that a few months in, we're like, you know what, let's go for a trip. You know, let's go to Thailand and Bali. This would be really fun. We'll go for a month. We'll go with a few friends and we'll have a blast. So we go out there. And by that time, I started an online business and I was selling, it was called My Bumper and we were selling battery cases. So cases that had a battery attached to them in case your phone died. So I was learning the ropes and I was going decently well. So we go on this trip and we're all on this trip, me and my wife from Bali. and we're just like you know hanging out on the beach and we look at each other and we're like it was like a week or two before we're supposed to go home like do

you want to go home and we're like no we don't I don't like fuck this let's just stay and that turned into like like six and a half months of just hanging out over there we eventually made our way to Italy where my both my wife and I's families were from our parents we're first generation Canadians and we were able to really you know get in touch with our roots better learn the language and spend time in Italy doing a lot of amazing stuff but it was on that journey that I that I learned and I not that I just thought about it, but I genuinely felt that Scott was like, shit, like, you can do what you want when you want and be happy. But happiness is not necessarily tied to, you know, also being strict and regimented

and like, super, super intense, right? Because like, I went from being super intense in my job to being super intense, like trying to build, you know, business and being an entrepreneur in a short period of time, even though I was, you know, not working for someone and working at home and everything was online, it was still the same mentality. So that was a big shift for me. It was like, you know what, it doesn't have to be like that. You can kind of have like these focus zones and these chunks of time where you grind and put your head down and do certain things, maybe in a regimented manner. And then you have this the equal amount of kind of, okay, let's remove the schedule, let's be more loosey goosey. And let's plan that out accordingly with the capital that you can make before that little bit of a lull and stuff. And then as that progressed and having kids and whatever, that always forces you to like take the pedal off the metal, especially in that first six to nine months. So that was like the evolution of it.

And then now it's like, you know, I'm very comfortable in managing my lifestyle and taking breaks and being on and off and finding a level of happiness and things along those lines. So that's the story. Sick of paying ridiculous fees to trade crypto? It's time you try Voyager. It's hands down my favorite place to buy and trade crypto and it's 100% commission free. Voyager gives you easy access to more than 40 top crypto assets and you can instantly transfer cash from your bank account so you never miss a trading opportunity. Even better, you can now automatically earn interest on your crypto holdings. Currently, they're offering 6.5% interest on Bitcoin and 9.5% on USDC. Yes, you heard that correctly, 9.5% interest. And there's no limits or

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walk. They're banking the unbanked worldwide and offering opportunity to those who lack access to the resources that many of us take for granted. In the next few months, they're also adding more in-app purchases, including local food and supplies, paid TV, gaming, gift cards, and much more. If you'd like to learn more, head on over to electronium.com. That's E-L-E-C-T-R-O-N-E-U-M.com. Which jives very well with having your own business and kind of, you know, being passionate with crypto, of course. So I guess the question is, because I've experienced it myself,

just as a friend, how does kids change that? Because you can't just dick off to Bali for six months at a time generally. Well, I guess if your kids are really young, you theoretically can, but then once you hit the school thing, you know, and sort of kids having their activities, it's hard to stay in the mentality, I guess, without the ability to go on the vacation that resets you. Yeah. And I think honestly, it's about, you know, my daughter going to school, my son hanging out with us, you know, having our routine on a day to day, me doing everything online as I was, you know, prior to COVID. But, you know, everything being done online, managing my own schedule, managing my own capital, right, majority of it being in cryptocurrency and stuff. So, you know, and I can genuinely say like my lifestyle design that I put

together is something that makes me extremely happy. And that's changed from a few years ago before we had kids. But along that journey, you figure out the different ways to kind of align that lifestyle with the things that make you happy. And I genuinely love being a dad and husband. So I'm cool with that. I think nine out of 10 people never even reached that point in their lifetimes though. I think most people are probably unhappy with their day-to-day life, whether they admit it or not. I mean, do you agree? And I do, of course, like, Oh my God, of course.

How many people actually Scott spend the time to even think about or write down the things that make them happy? What would be an ideal lifestyle? How to actually plan towards accomplishing that, taking that longer term mentality versus the short term stuff? 99% of people don't. They just sit there and complain. They'll go to work, come home, have a couple of drinks, smoke a joint, forget about it, go on. Like, it's just as fucking sick. It's just crazy, you know? And it starts with taking the time.

And for me, a lot of books in the early days were really what helped me change my mindset, right? The Think and Grow Riches, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Like, these types of books really help shape your mind to start to learn, like, shit, there another path. Let me attempt some her old job. And she gave it to me. I changed my perspective on everything. I actually feel like I need to read it again and implement some of the things because there was a time when I really, just like that book said, I would only check my email one hour a day. Or like you could only call me one hour a day and it was life changing. I'm not like that anymore. Unfortunately, I'm always accessible and I'm

always connected. But I think that that ability to disconnect was something I learned from that book, kind of like you're saying as well, that maybe is worth revisiting. Yeah, I agree. It's funny that you even say that because literally a few days ago, me and my wife were talking and it became clear in the last two or three months in particular. And it also aligns with just being busier with Badger picking up steam and stuff. But, you know, I'm on my phone a lot, like a lot. I get it. And like, it was like, you know, even like when I'm working out, I'll like check my phone in between set, like all this type of shit.

And I know I'm like, fuck, that work goes crap. Or like, I'm with my kids. I shouldn't be monkeying around on my phone or it's their time like but now especially after the conversation we had a few days ago i'm like genuinely scott saying okay during these times i'm not even i'm leaving my phone upstairs i'm not touching it and even this this week it's only been a few days of really attempting it and you know, it feels great. Honestly, like I feel It's like that ghost you reach for it in your pocket and it's not there and it's super I We do the exact same thing my wife and I it like comes in phases But there was a long time where we had a rule that was like no phones in the bedroom period

You know, like we're gonna have her a little time and I don't do that anymore Unfortunately, but definitely with the kids, man, I should not be like checking the price of Bitcoin when my daughter's asking me to play a game with her, but it's inevitable, you know, to some degree. I try. It gets even worse when you're checking the price of the shit coin and then you're trying to sell that shit coin because it's just like 10x. 99% an hour. It's happening. In 10 minutes it went up. Or up. Yeah. So talk to me about, uh, your, your other business, Angel Rock.

Angel Rock is primarily an investment advisory business that I've been running for quite a few years. And it's really just a way for me to participate in cool projects and then help them, um, accelerate. And then as part of that, you know, I was, I got involved early, like in eight, early 18 with like lending and borrowing, which opened up my mind to like the potential of digital assets as collateral and then in turn, helped me better understand DeFi. But for the most part, you know, Badger is where I spend most of my time now. And I'm really just excited what the next month has in store because we're going to be launching the Badger token in the middle of November. And we're going to be launching the first two products. So just to give you a background,

like how badger came to be. So the Corvette like badger creates products that help accelerate Bitcoin on ETH and other chains, but primarily for decentralized finance. So the bridges and the apps, but we did, we're doing it in a way where it's truly community owned. And that's like a little bit of a meme now, right?

Especially because of all this bullshit food coin stuff. But like me and a few friends that are also long-term crypto guys, you know, we spent the last five, six months building this up, right? Investing our own capital, not raising money, but like building products, building the brand, building the strategy for launch, building the decentralized government governance framework. And then upon launch, we're literally just going to give up control of it, right? Like, not like, oh, it's in a multi-sig or, oh no, we're going to hold it for a while. No, like genuinely, we're not going to have the ability to make changes. Only smart contracts can make those changes and only people that vote with tokens can enable those smart contracts to make those changes. So the reason why we're doing that is because we genuinely want this to be ecosystem, like an umbrella for all the best builders to come together. everyone coming together, having genuine shared ownership because they own the entity that's

creating these products and they collaborate on how these products are built, what products should be built. They can leverage the digital treasury. They can leverage the token to incentivize people to actually use the products, all focused on Bitcoin and DeFi. So with that being said, you know, we're trying to do it the right way. We're launching with two products. The first product and kind of the anchor product is similar to Wi-Fi vaults, where you would deposit a tokenized Bitcoin like REMBTC or WBTC. We'll then take it and execute different automated strategies across DeFi protocols and give you a certain yield. And then on top of that, for anyone that uses that product, we'll also give you Badger

so you can govern and control the product that you're actually using yourself. And then the second product, which is really cool, is called Dig. And that's an elastic supply cryptocurrency, similar to Ampleforth, if you're familiar, but it's pegged to the price of Bitcoin. So instead of being pegged to the US dollar, it moves with the price of Bitcoin. So it's another opportunity to go long Bitcoin or hedge, but it uses elasticity in the supply to drive buy and sell pressure. So we built both of those products, we got them audited, we're launching once the market's ready, but also the products are further tested and things along those lines. And then at launch,

we're going to have an eight week distribution where if you use this, the, the vault or set product, as we call it, your earned Badger, and then we'll launch dig as well as part of that. So you're in Badger by, by participating by using. By using a product. Yeah. Yeah. And I know you touched on community, you know, governments or being community driven is sort of a meme. But I don't think that's true when someone actually puts their face on it. I mean, you can go to your website and see exactly who's doing it. It's kind of a meme when it's everyone's anonymous, in my opinion.

And it's also a meme when it's not truly community owned, right? Like, like, you know, and a lot of people pretend to be community owned when it, when it really isn't. And, you know, I believe at least that, you know, this call them DAOs, whatever you want to call them, right. This idea of decentralized governance and, you know, just, I almost call it a democratic governance, right? But in a digital form, because everything's being decided through votes and things along those lines, you know, that, in my opinion, is the future of business, right? That's really the future of shareholders and so forth. But, you know, there needs to be genuine shared ownership.

Just because you own a token and you can make a couple fucking feature changes oh we're gonna add this pool to the farm oh we're gonna change the fee to x that doesn't bring that sense of like this is my thing you know like i own this thing and that's why at least for us, actually day zero, because for the next three weeks, we're going to be running a program to get feedback and insight around all the things that we put together for how long is the Badger distribution? What should the fees be on the set product? All the specifics, the supply, the emissions of Badger, all these specifics, we're actually getting feedback from the community over the next three weeks. So they're there day zero, and they're going to be part of like our early contributor program and reward them with some Badger as part of that and things along those lines. But it's really about like getting them involved to make the important decisions, them having the actual control of how the products and the business

move forward. And then we're taking that step further as well and saying, we're not just going to build products as the operations team and then give them to you guys and you control them. We actually want you to participate in what products are built. So you want to come up with an idea, hey, this cool cool bitcoin product this bitcoin insurance product should be built propose it have the community come together ideate around it then pitch it you know pitch it to the community gets approved the treasury will fund it the operations team will help you build it and most importantly then you and whoever was involved in building it own a piece of it as well not like just just because you own the token, but like say there's revenue, you get a percentage

of that revenue in perpetuity. And that's built into the smart contracts on how the actual revenue or fees distributed. And that's like the next level of it too. You know what I mean? I've heard you use the term fair token launch. Is that kind of what you're talking about here as you guys approach actually launching the token? What is a fair token launch in your mind? Once again, another meme, which is kind of crazy. But I do think that fair token launches, and many would argue Satoshi and Bitcoin is the fairest of them all. And I would totally agree

with that. And there's a lot of things that make it the fairest token launch ever. But for the most part, that's what we're going to be moving towards, right? It's not going to be like it was with ICOs, where people would just throw a bunch of money at random white papers. And it's not going to be like, you know, Silicon Valley VCs investing money. Instead, it's going to be this idea where here's a product, we're going to use the product, you're going to be rewarded almost like a proof of use for using that product. And the people that use it are going to be the ones that can actually control and manage it moving forward. But you need to eliminate all the other kind of bullshit things that have come up now, right? So as an example, front running, where people will front run projects, because they know when they're

launching, or they'll have bots monitoring flow of capital into new smart contracts. And they'll, you know, their bots will start putting money into it by a bunch of the supply, or you'll launch and you only tell a few buddies, and you say, okay, for the first day, you make so much rewards, you know, for staking in that pool and you and your buddies make those rewards. And then you publicly go out and say, this is a new project. And then everyone else rushes in and then they just sell their coins. And so I'm like, a lot of that bullshit is not really a fair launch. But there's, there's quite a few things that we're doing as part of our launch. Like as an example, by using the vault of the set product, for the longer that you actually

stake your assets in the set or in the vault, you're going to get a higher reward of badger, a multiplier of a reward. So for example, after two and a half, you know, literally, so after two and a half weeks, you would have worked your way up to like, one x times the amount of rewards as someone that just put their capital in. After a month, it'll be two x after, you know, two months will be three x. So there, what it does is it's rewarding people for staying longer. And it's given the advantage to people that aren't these massive whales that are going to drop like 20 million for a day, farm, and then leave. Someone can put in, you know, 50 grand, keep it in for those few months. And then all of a sudden it's like, they've earned as much badger, rightfully so, as someone that came in for a few days and just dipped, you know?

Where does the supply come from to pay those exceeding rewards? As the rewards grow, where's the supply of Badger coming from to compensate? So that's all just been programmed into the smart contracts. So as part of the distribution or what we'll call the emissions of Badger, we've allocated a certain amount and then per block it's mined. And then it takes the data of how long those assets were staked and it will give that specific wallet more badger as it as it's longer so it's you know it's just all once again it's just all baked into the uh the smart contract is there any point at where there's so many people participating that that

can't happen or is it all just relative to it's all relative to the pool size yeah so it's all about a percentage of the pool so if the pool is a hundred dollars and you have ten dollars you get ten percent if you know if the pool is a hundred dollars and you have $10, you get 10%. If, you know, if the pool is a million dollars and you have a hundred thousand, you get 10%, right? It's, it's kind of the same thing. Uh, but what we're doing is we're going to be doing kind of the way we're distributing the token. We're going to be giving almost 15% of the total supply, which is 21 million fixed can never be increased. We're giving that a beautiful number, isn't it? We're going to be giving that retroactively to anyone that's kind of that aligns with our ethos and that's, you know, taking actions in the past, right? Not actions in the future.

So what I mean by that is one thing that we announced this week is anyone that's ever donated on Gitcoin will be rewarded proportionate to their donations with Badger Awards. And that's been around since about January of 19, for example. And, you know, another good example is what we're going to announce, you know, over the next couple of weeks is people that have participated in certain DeFi protocols. And we can, all that information is open source, right? So we're going to be able to gather all that information from the last two or three years and say, based on how much you've participated, we're going to reward those specific people

with badge rewards, right? And we want those people to join the community and participate in things along those lines. So we're going to have that go to the airdrop. We're going to have 40% of the supply go actually to the Dow, and it's going to go right to the Treasury, and the community can decide what they want to do with it. They can burn it all. They can do additional incentive programs. They can carve some out for operational expenses,

whatever they end up deciding. And then finally, the rest is going to be distributed through the liquidity mining, as I mentioned, where you use the products, you earn badger. It's a lot of responsibility for a community. How do you make sure that you don't have a bunch of trolls in there who are making bad decisions just because they want to? That's the scary thing, Scott. You know, that's one of the hard things about this whole, you know, situation is, it is an experiment in a certain instance because, you know, much of this hasn't been done before. I personally haven't done, you know, something like this before. And I know this

is very young and immature and we're going to run into some of those bumps. But, you know, the way that we're trying to accomplish that and build the right community is by trying to get people that have taken actions and provably so get them involved. So a good example is people that already believe in tokenized Bitcoin and have used tokenized Bitcoin. Guess what? That's like the bullseye for us. Like they get our vision, they get our mission, they use DeFi, they understand it. Like those are the exact people that we think would be, you know, equipped to make the right decisions, to collaborate with other people in the same mindset, and to really focus on like, how do you build this thing? Because there's opportunities, not just necessarily with

Badger, but you can see like a few others, like look at, you know, Wi-Fi and how that's exploded over the last three or four months to manage thousands of dollars in treasury, millions in treasury and hundreds of millions in assets. And another example is, which I'm a big fan of is, is harvest off finance. Like a lot of people kind of wrote them off to be part of the farm craze, but they just crossed a billion dollars in total value lock today. They've done nothing but, you know, deliver, you know, they've, they've gotten their stuff audited. They've, their community is insane. You go in their discord and the amount of volunteers that are like working actively as moderators and developers and all these types

of things. It's amazing, you know, and it's pretty, it's pretty awesome to see communities grow like that. So that's what makes me excited about if you find the right people this is this is real and these people their names might be totally ridiculous online like poopster and crap head and like total nonsense you don't even need to know them you never have to have a call with them you never have to shake their hand but you get you can work together and you can be in different parts of the world with totally different upbringings. Doesn't matter what color your skin is. None of that shit matters. You know, it's just about, you know, actions. You just touched on something that's like, I think about all the time. I feel like now some of my best friends in the world

are people I've never met who like I've worked with in this community, never met some of them. I've never even seen their faces, you know, know and but there are people that i send tens of thousands of dollars to that i've never met in my life and are only like my friends on telegram yeah i know dude it's crazy time try to explain this to like people not in this space even my wife just like rolls her eyes so much that like some of the nonsense so hear me on a call and she'd be like, dude, you're talking like a different language. It's like, so. My friend, Dan Gunsberg, the C I don't know if you know him, the CEO of hero.

He was, he was playing. So we were talking recently and he was like, my best friend from childhood could come pitch me like a brilliant business idea and say like, dude, just, you know, throw me 20 grand to invest in my business i'd be like forget it i'm not giving you 20 grand while literally like on your phone sending 50 grand into a food coin without even a second thought it's just i don't know where that mentality comes from but people who are in this space have a

certain like the value of money that gunny is the best person to share that because, you know, Hero has such a fanatic community and like their Telegram channel, which I highly recommend anyone check out. It's the funniest. I go in there and just get abused. It's a totally abused channel you could ever imagine. And like, it's so ravenous. Like you'll check it and you won't check it for a few hours.

It'd be like 25,000 messages, like crazy stuff, man. Like it's unbelievable. Yeah. It's, it's a go, go in there at your own, uh, at your, at your own risk, but, uh, it's a lot of fun. And, and honestly, I mean, people have made a lot of money there. I love what they're doing. Um, they're awesome. But he said that to me and it really like was a light bulb moment because it is so true. It's incredible what kind of people that you can meet from all over the world here and that you get a feel for, you know, your level of trust. You just talked about obviously poker and something I mentioned at the beginning. So you have obviously a passion

for both poker and charity. And so I've played in a couple of tournaments you've put together, you've raised a ton of money. Where does that passion come from for charity specifically? Well, you know, I felt really compelled when COVID hit this year, to be totally frank with you, you know, I haven't been super active from a philanthropic perspective in my life. But in this year in particular, I don't know what it was. I just felt very compelled when COVID started picking up steam in February. And I hadn't played poker for a while, but, you know, obviously I love poker. I played a lot when I was younger. And I thought, you know what, this is an opportunity to show the

world as well that crypto is not just a bunch of crazy maniacs and drug dealers and money launderers, right? Like, you know, crypto could be used for good. And the people behind it have genuinely good intentions as well. So I thought, let me call up some friends and people that I've known in the space for a while, let's put a tournament together. And let's try and raise some money. And, you know, we did that. And the first tournament raised like 20,000. And then we just kind of kept doing it. And after five tournaments, you know, we did that in the first tournament, we raised like 20,000. And then we just kind of kept doing it. And after five tournaments, you know, we ended up raising almost half a million dollars, all in crypto. So everything we raised was in crypto, we donated it

in crypto, through the giving block, which is amazing, which is an amazing initiative in itself, everyone should check them out. And what they do is they'll onboard 5013Cs and they'll handle like the crypto side of things for them. So like they'll open up an account with them. They'll deposit it. The crypto will come in. It will automatically be converted if it's over $200 to fiat and sent to the bank account that they've connected with. So they technically can accept crypto without touching the crypto and needing to know how to manage it. So that's how it all started this year. And then what ended up happening was just a few buddies, you know, we're like, Hey, let's, you know, let's just play a game on Thursdays because

we're all stuck in lockdown. And now we're on like week 25 of playing every Thursday. I gotta get in there, man. I know, I know. You asked me. It's fun. It's fun, man. Like there's a lot of fun. Yeah. I've watched you guys play. It's fun, man. Like usually it's, you know, me, Peter McCormack, Luke Martin, Bobby Lee, Charlie Lee, Ari Paul, a few folks like that.

So people have been around a little bit and know what they're talking about. So we'll live stream it on Twitter and it's on their BTC poker game. And we buy in 0.1 Bitcoin and there's a lot of bad beats and there's a lot of debates and you know there's a lot of fun so we'll stream the video session of it and uh and people really dig it so you definitely gotta come scott 100 i'm definitely in for one of the next two weeks i gotta just uh make it happen it's always as long as you don't take my money You're allowed to come as long as you don't take my money, okay? I heard that you were a fish. You're the free money.

You know what, dude? I'll tell you. A lot of people at the table, especially Peter McCormack, will agree with that statement because I get the worst beats on the river out of everybody. It's the worst, man. If you're in with me at the turn and we're all in and

I'm up, you should be okay with that because you're going to catch something on the river and you're going to devastate me. That's just how it goes. Are there people in that game that consistently win or consistently lose? Or is the money just being passed around? It's a mixed bag,

but I'll give kudos where kudos is due. Peter McCormack's by far the biggest winner over the 25 weeks. He's the standout winner. There isn't really any standout losers because we've had over 30 or 40 people come play. So some people come and they'll lose a bunch one time and they won't come back. Just like trading crypto. Pretty much, much. Yeah. Charlie Lee won one of your tournaments though, that I was playing. I think he did. Yeah. So it was funny. So the first tournament that I put on, I won, which was funky. And of course I donated the winnings, but in second place in that tournament

was Luke Martin. So me and him went heads to head in that one. And then the second tournament, Charlie actually won. And then the subsequent tournaments, none of the people that would be recognized. I think actually Brock in the third tournament came fifth and Crystal's wife came eighth or ninth. Brock's a really good poker player. Yeah, he plays with us on, well, he was before, you know, he started running for president.

But yeah, he was playing with us. Crystal's wife actually plays with us on, well, he was before, you know, he started running for president. But yeah, he was playing with us. Crystal's wife actually plays with us a lot. She's coming to play tomorrow night, actually. That's awesome. So I know we're up against it with time. So where can everybody follow you and follow Badger and what you guys are doing? I know you're coming right into the launch soon.

Yeah, like honestly, the call to action for me would be badger.finance is the website. Once again, the dot finance is not meant to be a meme, but nonetheless, it's badger.finance. And I highly, highly encourage anyone that has a passion for DeFi, a passion for Bitcoin, that wants to collaborate and build some really cool stuff and actually own what they're building and be part of another community or a community of people that actually are passionate about doing the same to just join our Discord and have some conversations in the Discord.

It's really starting to ramp up steam. Myself, you can find me on Twitter. Spatafora Chris is my handle. I'm not super active, but nonetheless, Badger.Finance is the website. Join the Discord discord i think people would really dig our content so all of our content's like old um 8-bit and 16-bit video games so like we'll take like the super nintendo games that we all love yeah and like you know like you know we just did one yesterday with super mario we're doing another one today. We're launching with Double

Dragon, which was like my game. Man, that was the best game. The first one we did, which we announced with the Ren actually was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Turtles in Time. And like I do when I made that video, I sent it to a few friends because we used to play that game like crazy. But anyways, it's nostalgic, some of the content, but yeah, come join the community. Any questions you can hit me up. Like, of course I'm in the discord. And honestly, Scott, I appreciate, you know, one, this conversation was a blast. So I really appreciate you having me on here and just chatting with me and,

and, you know, getting my perspective, but also hearing yours. It was a lot of fun. Same man. I appreciate it. I'm definitely going to come play poker and you can just flip your cards up and let me know when you have a, when you, uh you uh you know get uh pocket aces so I can go all in against you well you have pocket kings and you'll beat me I'm saying if you get aces I know you have a winner then I've got your money yeah exactly all right brother thank you all right brother Bye.