The Wolf Of All Streets - Durov Faces Charges in France, Investigation in India | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

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Good morning, everyone. We were obviously live yesterday at this time speculating as to what the charges might be for Durov. We had Macron's tweet during that time basically saying that he had been arrested and it would be left to the judicial system. I think, you know, as we let people come in and get everybody up on stage, worth mentioning that now we have a lot more clarity as to what those charges are. In my opinion, basically the worst case scenario from what we were speculating, which is that effectively, it's all of the charges are complicity with crimes committed using the platform. So basically, we speculated that it was likely he was being arrested because he would not allow the government to have a backdoor.

That's literally mentioned that he wouldn't cooperate. And that that made him, quote unquote, complicit with all the activity that's done illegally on the platform. Really, really scary dystopian stuff comes at a time when Mark Zuckerberg effectively apologized or said he regretted in a letter that he had allowed the United States government, specifically the Biden-Harris administration, to pressure them into removing COVID-related posts. So I guess the story of today is censorship. Mark Zuckerberg played ball. And I would imagine that every American-based social media platform has those

backdoors, probably even the one we're using right now. And so Zuckerberg's living his best life. Pavel Durov, not playing ball and arrested when he gets off his private jet. Dave, go ahead. Yeah, I think that you said it well. I mean, it's literally the worst case scenario. And let me explain. I tried posting this morning and at least one responder understood what I was saying. By bundling the, you know, a couple of, there are 12 charges, right? There are four that really are incredibly important. One, there are two that are totally dystopian, essentially saying it's a criminal to offer an open network without moderation. Another one said, basically, it's criminal to offer encryption, you know, without moderation or care to who has access to it. Those are incredibly dystopian because basically, effectively, what you're saying is it would have made the printing press or the producers of printing presses illegal back in the day. And that is a very, very big deal. And if that were the

only two charges, people would be outraged. You would see enormous public pressure. You would see politicians weighing in. It would be, you know, even our mainstream media would say, okay, wait a minute, this is just a bridge too far. Here's a huge but. But they included three other things. They included complicity and the intent, and you don't know by what they mean by this, in child pornography, drug trafficking, and money laundering. And complicity in that could be that it was happening and he didn't help the people, or it could be that he knew about it. And until people know the answer to that, those are such third rail items. Nobody is, the mainstream is not. Yeah, but even if he knows about it as the platform's owner, knows that it's happening here, I think, listen, those things are horrible.

So don't nobody get me wrong. But he knows that literally, rationally, we all know that on a platform that big with that many people that's encrypted, those things have to be going on. Right. But the problem is, at this point, we don't know if they have evidence that he knew-knew as opposed to, eh, he could have found out. There's a difference, right? Right. But even if he knew-knew, it still begs the question of what the line is for moderation. And like I said, I'm not making a judgment. Right. I am as close to a free speech absolutist as one can get. And even I think that, that the platform, if they know about and can take down people who post child pornography should use a curse word, should take it down. Right. There's no question about it. So the problem, what I'm

trying to say politically is by bundling those things together. Now, the funny part is I included money laundering and is Andrew on here? No, there have been a few people. There are a few people who have made very strong, I think Preston's one of them, have made very strong arguments, accurate ones, that our anti-money laundering regime does no good. If anything, it's the opposite. But I don't think anybody argues with the fact that criminals laundering money collected from human trafficking, you know, shouldn't be allowed to launder their money. The issue in terms of crypto is efficacy. But the point is, if what I'm trying to say is this, the important point that needs to come out and what needs to be understood is, did he have personal involvement with any of those quote bad things or is it just a general thing because if it's a general thing then it's a very different story but right because you know tim tim cook could probably read your yeah i mean

apple could probably read your texts right like are they complicit in any crime that's committed via text message on an iPhone? Well, let's put it this way. If Apple didn't, if they could, if they read your text, and they didn't give a backdoor to law enforcement, even at least when they had a warrant, then there'd be a problem. I mean, when the phone companies were established, they had, you know, look, there's entire regimes of wiretaps. And there's a huge problem in the U.S. because the FISA courts go in crazy on wiretaps, which is kind of cute because who uses telephones anymore, right? It's all in the cell phones.

But the point is that you get into gray areas that every country does differently, where what I'm basically saying is sweeping a platform for speech into that and potentially criminalizing an unmoderated platform. Unmoderated meaning not I know it and I will let the Justice Department or the Interpol get access to it, but I will take decisive action myself. That is a huge difference. And that's why, and that's the distinction that needs to be drawn here. Because effectively, if you read what Elon has been saying, that's basically what he's been saying. What he's basically saying is, listen, people could talk about whatever they want to talk about, right? And that's fine. That's different than, oh, I see these children are being transported and I find out about it and I don't tell the government about it. Those are very different things.

Anyway, I'm ranting. Dave, I'm hearing a connection issue with you. I don't know if anyone else says. I would love Preston to weigh in. Yeah, Dave, you were just glitching in and out for me at least. Could be mine. Preston, go ahead. Can you hear me all right?

Yeah. Yeah. So I actually have my minor, if it's possible for lawyers to have majors and minors, my major is crypto and my minor is web applications and social media. The thing that makes this really extraordinary with what happened with Duroff is that illegal conduct on social media applications, particularly those which are encrypted like WhatsApp, is something which is known to happen and is known to happen by the platform operators and has been known to happen for years. So WhatsApp in particular was used by the Taliban as their official means of communication for basically the entirety of the Afghan war and is still used by the Taliban to operate their government, right, at all levels of government, at all levels of the state, despite the fact that it's been sanctioned by the

United States. And despite the fact that that was a belligerent against the United States and France and other NATO countries during the Afghan war, At no point did Facebook decide, or at no point were they ordered by anyone in the US government or anywhere else, to turn off and disable access to WhatsApp in Afghanistan and say, listen, we're going to ban all Afghan IPs and we're going to ban all Afghan numbers. So instead, what they've done is whack a mole content moderation as things come up, and they become aware of them, they enforce their terms of service. Now in the United States, which is where most social media companies that aren't chinese are based right or most social media companies of consequence that aren't chinese are based or

messaging apps of consequence that aren't chinese are based the default position is that you have to for civil liability to attach for your users crimes and torts, you have to do something called materially contribute, right? It's called the material contribution test comes from a case called roommates, which is about housing discrimination. And there are other cases, like so the one of the leading cases on material contribution is about Facebook. Not coincidentally, it has to do with Facebook and terrorism. So the so Facebook was used by Hamas, a group of Jewish victims of Hamas sued under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act for a civil, civil tort, which I think was like, you know, it's treble damages,

various other things. They sued Facebook saying you're aiding and abetting terrorists. And that's what contributed to our relatives death. and in the us we have a law it's called section 230 of the communications decency act section for uh 47 us code 230 c 1 and 2 which says that platforms like twitter and facebook aren't treated as the publishers or speakers of the content that their users post right And they're not liable for any content moderation activity they undertake in order to remove that, you know, remove access to that activity, right? So basically section 230 C1 says,

your users can say what you want and you're not gonna get penalized for it. Section 230 C2 says you can remove that content and you can do so more or less in unlimited way without your users suing you for it. And generally speaking, the terms of service reflect that underlying legal reality. There are a number of exceptions to that rule, right? The most significant one is child pornography.

That will get your website or your application in very big trouble. And in the United States, there's a notice and reporting regime. So if you discover it on your website, as soon as it's found, you have an obligation to remove the content, back it up for 90 days, send it to NCMEC, which is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and hold the data, the user data pending receipt of a subpoena or a search warrant or some other process from the FBI. So there's a regime for that. That content't stay up similarly there's a pressing can you give us the layman's term version so the layman's term layman's term is it possible oh the layman's term version is basically that so summarizing in one line um companies aren't generally speaking liable

for criminal conduct that their users perform unless they participate in the criminal conduct themselves. So they have to aid a bet and they have to have a specific intent to bring about a specific criminal result. Merely hosting the content doesn't create that vulnerability. Yeah. Somebody yesterday, now I'm blanking, but I made the sort of iphone i guess uh or the zuckerberg or musk association they said it's more like a cz or a charlie shrem situation and what you just described sort of reminds me of how charlie is who's a friend and you know has admitted admitted guilt at the time i think it was kind of big but because he had seen the emails and responded to them about what was going on in the platform roughly speaking that's why he was in trouble

right there was proof that he was aware or correct so exactly so if someone had written to Pavel durov and said hey Pavel how you doing I'd like to deal drugs on your platform can you tell me how to do it and he responded and he said sure no problem no problem. Let me show you how to run a drug marketplace. Then he's in trouble. If he simply deleted the email and said, I'm just going to ignore this and not be involved in it. And there's no tacit understanding between him and the user. And there's no wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And it's just like, listen, I'm running a platform. I think they've got like 100 employees and 15 engineers. It's a skeleton crew. And he's just saying, listen, I can't, my business has to operate. And I can't be worried about this stuff. Because it's a distraction. And you know, I'll

moderate it as and when it comes up. That's not enough in the United States to impose criminal liability. Right. But in France, it might be. And that would be the Lutte contre la Haine sur l'internet, which is law against hate speech on the Internet. Or Germany could have come after him under the Netzwerk der Setzungsgesetz, which is their Network Enforcement Act. So a nice compound down there, as the Germans do. But they didn't do that. These are not fine proceedings. These are criminal proceedings suggesting that he actively aided and abetted criminal conduct. We'll have to wait to see what comes out. But as a general, my hunch is that he's not so stupid as to say, oh, I'm going to actively promote terrorism and drug dealing on the platform because that's illegal everywhere, including in the United States.

And the U.S. is really good at extraditing people. So I strongly suspect that what's happened is the French have said our aiding and abetting statute, similar to be blunt, to the English encouragement statute, doesn't require specific intent. And so we're going to basically use his willful blindness as the necessary intent to bring criminal charges. Yeah. And some of these, listen, I mean, there's all these lines of complicity and maybe I should, I'll pin the tweet above so people can read it, at least showing the charges in a minute. But a few of these actually went pretty clearly into crypto territory, at least cryptological, right? So these are the three at the bottom. Provision of cryptology services to ensure confidentiality functions without a declaration

of conformity. Provision of a cryptological means not exclusively ensuring authentication or integrity control functions without prior declaration. Import of a cryptology means it does not exclusively perform authentication or integrity control functions without prior declaration. Yeah, so that's an import. So basically, France has an import control law over crypto. Telegram is as a general rule is not an encrypted application. Most of the messages. I mean, the connection is encrypted, right over HTTPS. But the messages are stored server side with

Telegram, all groups, for example, and most bilateral messaging is communicated in the clear, right? So it's held on Telegram servers. I assume Telegram, right? I assume their data is encrypted, but I assume they also have the key. So it's not end-to-end encrypted. So Telegram can't see it for most messages. They also have an encrypted messenger function where you can have one-on-one end-to-end encrypted messages where both people have to be online in order to make the encrypted connection. So they would have to have gotten import control authorization from France for that function. And it seems that they didn't do that. So France wants to be able to review any crypto that that comes in i think

of broader relevance or to the social media ecosystem as a whole are the accusations that he's facilitated gang crime and theft and fraud and and uh and things like and narcotics dealing and that sort of stuff right because that but we all know those things are happening and they're happening you know they're happening on Signal and WhatsApp too. They're happening on Facebook. They're probably also happening on Twitter. So, you know, people use different means to communicate. And, you know, I mean, I think we can say as a matter of certainty that it happens on Signal and that it happens on WhatsApp. We know this for a fact. So when we're looking at this, if indeed, right, Durov didn't specifically intend to facilitate drug use, and it was just incidental, there's really

no reason why similar charges couldn't be brought against any other CEO of any other social media company, which provides any encrypted functions whatsoever. Carlo. Preston, you're a tough act to follow, but I'm going to try. I can't disagree with anything he's saying. First off, I think everyone should presume that all of these, quote unquote, encrypted end-to-end apps are not private and there are back doors you should presume that and to presume otherwise you you proceed at your own peril but you can expand this to any delivery system i have been in countless money laundering cases involving currency being sent via fedex drugs being sent

this is tantamount to holding the ceo of fedex liable because they did not implement sufficient uh protections to avoid people sending illicit materials now it is a different analogy if you if you follow preston's logic that if the ceo is complicit in knowing that there are packages that have been intercepted, unsealed, found contraband, sealed them up and let them go on their way. That's a different standard. But this crosses a dangerous line because it can have a potentially chilling effect on founders. And granting unfettered access to technology based on this premise in order to thwart criminal activity is an alarming trend because these platforms have made representations to the public that they can communicate privately, which obviously involves free speech rights, freedom to transact if we want to talk about this spilling over to crypto and you know i mentioned on mario show that this arrest came basically a year to the day of the uh storm arrest in the tornado cash case and while there are some distinctions there are

many concerning similarities i see here and a pattern that i frankly find troubling jonathan yeah the uh the kind of like echo what carlo was was talking about i mean it's uh you know wells fargo has atms all over the place i mean uh what is it like 90 of the bills uh have some type of drug residue on them, like methamphetamines, cocaine. You can't deny that some people going to the cash machine aren't using it for some illicit purposes. The thing that pisses me off about this, the telegram thing, and I'm operating on my opinion that this is all political motivated, is they insert the bit with the child pornography.

And I'm sick of seeing this shit that they do. It's like comparing Trump to Hitler. It doesn't make Trump seem more evil. It means it makes Hitler seem not that bad. OK, when they do this stuff because they want to target him, because the government wants to target him. It doesn't make him seem horrible. It makes it seem like child pornography is not that bad because they're using these cases and inserting that in there to make to make it difficult for allies to support him because, oh, oh, well, he well, well, he's alleged to be involved in child pornography. Is that somebody that you can support? That's the entire purpose behind it is to blacken the name with an allegation whether or not it's founded. Alex and Matthew.

Yeah, so I think the, I want to hit on what Carlo was saying about kind of the opsec of like whether you can trust these platforms or not. I think for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people, one, I do think there are secure platforms out there. I don't think that everything has been backdoored if you actually, you know, depending on what the architecture of it is. The biggest risk you're always going to have, though, is the person on the other end of the conversation, right? Normally, and Carla, I'm guessing you've seen this a billion times in every prosecution you have,

it is not that the FBI spends millions of dollars and get advanced wiretaps. It's that your fucking co-conspirator takes a screenshot of the text you sent them confessing to the crime and then trades it for a lighter sentence. Or they take your phone. Or they confiscate your phone and you haven't deleted everything. Exactly.

Or they take your phone and you had a password of 1234 and they can just – or your birth date or whatever and they can open it up. So what I'd say is if you're going to commit crimes, like, oh, God, read up on OPSEC and don't be stupid about it and don't trust other, you know, or what's the old thing? Two people can keep a secret if one of them's dead. But if you are just trying to, as like an individual, just protect your privacy, which you should be doing. It's a human right. We should all be doing it. I think, again, Signal is my choice, and I think you can roughly trust it in that it's not backdoored, given the number of eyes and open source nature of it. I think the other thing is, and, you know, we keep coming back to this idea of, hey, if this can happen to the founder of Telegram, why isn't it happening to Meta or Twitter or wherever else?

Are they at risk to? And I think it all comes down to the combination of perceptions of legitimacy and how much those platforms are willing to help the authorities. And I think the issue with Telegram, the reason they're so focused on it, yes, there's probably a little bit of like the free speech element. I don't think it's this element of like, oh my God, it's leaking information they don't want or creating perception about the war that we don't want. And so we've got to shut it down. There's a degree of control and power there, but I think the bigger thing for them is they do look at it and they're like, look, these guys aren't playing by our rules at all. Yes, there's a huge amount of illicit material on WhatsApp and probably even in Twitter

DMs and whatnot. But again, when those platforms get requests from law enforcement to cooperate, they do. They have lawful intercept programs set up. They have law enforcement portals where if you're a cop and you have a subpoena or a warrant, depending on what you're looking for, you go to an online website, you type in the subpoena information and they spit back the records to you for your investigation. But there's also on the legal legally there, like there's an interesting point here, which not a lot of people have mentioned. Sorry to cut you off, Alex, which is that let's say you're an American company and the

French come along and they say, here's an order, right? Principles of international comedy mean that, and that's C-O-M-I-T-Y, not E-D-Y, mean that an American company is under no obligation to turn around and obey a French order when it's not subject to French jurisdiction. So normally, if you get an order and you don't like it, you say, you know what, we have a mutual legal assistance treaty, go get an American court to domesticate this order, and then we'll comply. So for France to just turn around and say, well, he's not responding to our document requests. Okay, maybe, but like, where are they serving those requests? Were they seeking to get them domesticated in the UAE, or against some other entity? I know that I think there's an Inc, which is based in the BVI. So there are a lot of open questions about the nature of telegrams refusals and whether France had gone through all of the steps to domesticate those orders in their home countries. It doesn't necessarily follow that just because there's a country that sent you an order, you need to follow it, right? So anyway, apologies for jumping in there. I think that is a great point from a strictly legal and whether you should actually be held criminally liable under the law's point of view. But I think it's a little bit irrelevant to the perceptive issue that I'm also talking about in it, right?

There are frameworks and kind of procedures set up in this place, and like a lot of these other platforms, they play by those rules, at least to a mostly extent, and that's what kind of keeps them in the green and without, you know, to a degree, obviously regulators crack the issue for Telegram is that it's not playing the game. And to be clear, I'm not saying like, and therefore they deserve it. Fuck them. I'm not saying that at all. But I am saying I think that's what makes them a target. Yeah, but I could edit it to make it sound like that's what you said. I know. That's why I had to put it. Everyone here heard it.

They know that I'm not saying that. Again, big believer in cryptocurrency. I could just take out the little part, I'm not saying, and then you very passionately said the thing you weren't saying so you got to be careful on these you know these platforms matthew go ahead yeah hi there um i think that the you know when we talk about moderation here i'm not sure whether we're this is just superficially um recognizing that there's criminal activity going on i mean i know I know of instances, for example, I know Twitter are a lot tighter on moderation, and they're able, and don't forget how much money these platforms generate. Surely they have a moral responsibility, of course, to moderate. But also,

as I say, it's not just superficial recognition that there's criminal activity going on that they need to monitor, or may or may not need to monitor. But often I know with Telegram, I know of many instances where there's criminal activity going on and they report to Telegram. Many, many people report, block and report particular sites to Telegram and nothing is done about persistent criminal activity. And this is particularly to do with cryptocurrency, scamming people effectively. There are many, many Telegram sites that persistently scam people. They're reported persistently and consistently to Telegram, and nothing is ever done about it. So it's not just

superficially things going on. This is when the specific reports. So surely moderation is very possible and very easy to implement in those cases. I know it happens on Twitter. It should be happening on Telegram and maybe some other social media platforms, and it's not happening. So I think there is definitely a case to be answered, whoever needs to answer it. Surely there's a responsibility when you're making all of this money to provide some level of protection for people you know engaged with your site with your media sites yeah i i i think your point is well taken but i think it's also uh there's gray area so first of all i've had friends i had a friend in the last cycle who was scammed on telegram. Basically,

someone had created a group that looked exactly like the actual moderators of a community that he was in, had bots to fill it with 20,000 people. So it looked exactly like the real one and was scammed. Sad that that can't be stopped. But the point about the other platforms, I can tell you myself, I used to have an Instagram account. I had 1000 fake versions of me who are actively following everyone that followed me and scamming them. And then I got kicked off as an imposter account of myself and I've never been able to get my account back in 2 years. And they're actively scamming with my old account, somebody who's taken it over. And I've never been able to do anything about that.

And anyone who obviously uses the platform we're on right now knows that probably for everyone on stage, there's 100 fakes that are in people's DMs and are almost impossible to get removed. So it's a game of whack-a-mole, even if I think you're trying, giving your best effort. And I would argue that none of these platforms are giving what you know, we would consider their best effort. Carlo, go ahead. Yeah, to build on what Matt is saying, that is the that is the opposite side of the argument, because I know firsthand as well, again, dealing with crypto fraud cases, many times law enforcement is very frustrated in their ability to get to the overseas actors in these cases, because they use these encrypted end to end applications because they don't have compliance and agreements with these end to end encrypted applications to release the information.

So what ends up happening in a lot of these crypto fraud cases is you have us individuals who get suckered into pig butchering, they then get escalated into becoming participants in the scheme, and they get indicted. And then you have an indictment, which has one US individual, and then maybe five or six blacked out names of unidentified Nigerians and so forth. And they can never be brought to justice because they can't get access to the data. So there is absolutely two sides to the debate. In the end, Scott, we're going to have to wait and see what the evidence is in this case, and hold judgment on whether this is legitimate, complicit activity in a criminal scheme, or whether this is an overreach.

And Carlo, then there's so there's that aspect. And then there's the separate issue of whether the CEO himself is the one who is liable for all that. What happens to all the other employees at Telegram, right? And it's country to country. So it just seems like if you start a platform of this sort, you should do it in one country and never leave that country and set foot elsewhere. I mean, it's, you know, the guy, given he's a French citizen, but if he doesn't land in France, it's probably fine, right? Well, it depends on treaty arrangements. And it depends on whether the United States or whatever prosecuting authority can reach overseas

and apprehend these people on MLATs, which are mutual assistance warrants, hold them and extradite them back to the US for prosecution. But yeah, you bring up a good point, you have all the low hanging fruit in telegram, they're either going to have to make decisions to cooperate, avoid criminal prosecution for their own potential criminal conduct. And it always goes up the food chain. And the CEO ultimately is the biggest target. And you know, this is a guy who by all everything I've seen recently about him seems to be a very strong willed individual, you know, ice baths and his, you know, his philosophy with respect to privacy. I don't think this is a guy that's going to roll over easily. No, I think he's going to roll over easily.

No, I think he's standing on principle for sure. Alex, I want you to speak. And then actually, the one conversation that we haven't had at all about this is the token side and the crypto side and what it actually means moving forward there. So I would love people's perspective on that. Alex, go ahead. Yeah, I would say if you are going to start a social media company, I would highly recommend hiring my good friend Preston up on the stage here to tell you how to not go to jail. We have double Alexes, so Miller then Thorne, sorry. But yeah, I think actually this is one thing. There was obviously a lot of blow up yesterday when the charges, the list of the charges were rolled out. And I think if we ignore the last three about the use of encryption,

which are so fucking absurd and offensive that like, I want to destroy the French state over it, but let's just ignore that for a second. The word complicit in the rest of them is a really interesting one. And, you know, there's obviously actively participating. I think Preston brought up a good example of like, you know, someone emails you, how can I use your platform to do drug deals? And you tell them how to do it. Like, yeah, you're a co-conspirator.

You're definitely guilty there. You've then got the American view sort of it's like, yeah, but like, you know, as long as you don't tell them what to do, you're in the clear. And even if you're kind of like aware of what they're doing as long as you aren't helping them you're in the clear and so I think this difference here is if by complicit they mean you didn't actively try and stop it I think that's a really really crazy area that we're getting into versus if they're like hey we told you where it was going on and you refused to give us the data, even though you had access to the data. I mean, look, we can have a lot of debates over to what extent private companies should have to comply with law enforcement requests and things like that. But I think the vast majority of people don't want to live in a lawless state and I think actually are fine with, hey, these people went and got a warrant. They had specific things and the company had the data and could have helped prosecute people

who were committing crimes that are bad things. I think he's going to have a lot of trouble maintaining public support if that's actually what they were doing versus if they're just like, hey, we want you moderating way more, which like, no, fuck you. Sorry, that's just not the way this works. Alex Thorne. Sorry about the Alex confusion there. Dueling Alex's. Yeah. Hey guys. I mean, I, I don't have anything to add on the,

on the charges or the encrypted messaging or the social media stuff that this group hasn't already raised. I think the question for me that, you know, as a as a crypto researcher that i've been asked a lot about and wondering about is the reaction of tun and the tell you know the open network i was called telegram open network the open network ostensibly not related to telegram um an independent foundation obviously derives its value significantly from its integration with the telegram application so one of the things i've been looking at in those charges is the money laundering and fraud related charges and wondering although i certainly don't know if any of that relates to the usage of ton on the platform and of course course, if it does, and if any

kind of plea deal or arrangement between Durov and the French state requires a disavowing of ton or a, you know, degradation of the integration between ton and telegram, I think that's very clearly would be bad for you know, the outlook for the tongue token. Other question is i think more broadly like you know crime terrorism child abuse material obviously on the platter here but misinformation appears to be right around the corner um across most of the western world like the the left in the west is very focused on this right you've seen obviously, Elon has tweeted a fairly large amount about this.

He's quoted, he's tweeted the Tim Walz clip where he says that freedom of speech is not guaranteed if it affects our democracy, right? Like, to me, it's really not crazy to think that we're really still in the realm of the battles of the past over encrypted messaging, if you think about the San Bernardino shooter and his iPhone, or, you know, the various laws that have been proposed in the US Congress, although thankfully not passed about, you know, criminalizing encryption, or adding back doors, they have historically always related to terrorism and child pornography. But like, we are getting close in the sort of western world to criminalizing misinformation and i think that is one of the big questions to the extent to which election interference the irony of course being that the u.s government and and foreign governments heavily use telegram to organize covert actions and

political dissident stuff anyway right um but that's another question so ton value and and whether this deprecates any kind of integration with telegram the application um the extent to which this mission creep extends towards misinformation in the u.s and france in general and then i i would say the last question that i'm following is you know and there's some stuff about this in FATF guidelines, Treasury request to Congress, sort of hints at this stuff, but the extent to which file storage or transaction validation mining on public blockchains becomes embroiled in this, or in these types of sweeps, it's always been a question. I don't think it's necessarily meaningfully advanced by the arrest of Pavel durov that question but um you know the

extent to which the bitcoin blockchain ordinals data um or you know call data on eth or transactions between criminals right starts to become embroiled in this mika in the eu doesn't actually address on-chain stuff really um but fatf guidelines have always hinted at questions around this and so i think that's a question, right? I mean, Telegram, a centralized app with an owner and a CEO, Lance's private jet, sure, he can be, you know, addressed, right? And serve legal service and arrested. What happens if they start trying to go after public blockchains for facilitating these types of transactions, too? I think that's an open question.

It's not directly moved here, but you can see because of the fact that they have the TUN network. Yeah, it's slipperier than normal. If they go after Facebook or something for this and there's no Libra, then it doesn't raise the blockchain question, but I think this one does. And TUN, and that's why I wanted to dig in sort of to the token side. I guess structurally, as you said, the foundation is

unrelated, but people certainly remember the, I guess, ICO or launch attempt of Telegram, right? And there's a reason that the foundation is the way it is, but this has been one of the few, outside of obviously Bitcoin and the ETFs, this has been one of the few outside of obviously Bitcoin and the ETFs.

This has been one of the few legitimate darlings of this run. I mean, TUN was one of those tokens continuing to make all-time high after all-time high. And it wasn't only because of speculation, it was because of the growth of Telegram, real adoption of the token the gaming side of uh on telegram so it's going to have a meaningful impact even though you know he's just one man i think on that your thoughts on this looking at it you know as a as a trader and and from that perspective how are you looking at now the token side of it? Not sure who you're asking, but... I asked Follis, I'm sorry. Follis, I was asking, but I got cut out for some reason.

Yeah, sorry, I heard the question, but I didn't hear who was addressed to you, cut out a little bit. Yeah, thanks for flicking it over. I just want to give a little bit of background. First of all, I am a... Most of you may not know because I'm kind of so stuck in the trenches these days. But yeah, I'm a lawyer by qualification. So I kind of I have a passing knowledge or some kind of, let's say, educational history of kind of being of knowing something about freedom of speech. beach and you know maybe i'm not such an absolutist i'm not sure who it was who said that they're you know close as close to an absolutist as they can possibly be i'm certainly not that far uh inclined but i don't think it's an absolute right i think it should be qualified um i think we've seen that recently in the uk where we had um we had uh you know there was outrage on twitter because

uh people had been purportedly arrested for, you know, for merely posting things. But in actual fact, I think at least one of those people had tried to, you know, get people to go to some politician's house and harm her or there was some threat of violence there. And absolutely, I don't think that should be allowed. I think people crying, crying out for free speech, they're being very selective and hypocritical about what they defend. But it is, you know, it's one of those interesting cases. I think there's a very interesting hypocrisy at play here. I think someone touched on it earlier. They said it's about control and power. I

absolutely agree with that. And, you know, I think it's a balanced issue. There's a lot of nuance here. But I really think that this arrest falls on the side where there's there's really no there's not much defending it um i think you know it comes down to whether or not he had knowledge of it i think that uh ultimately it will be proven uh that you know he didn't have direct knowledge but maybe it's you know the argument will be made that he should have had knowledge uh it being his platform everything so just you know with that all in mind uh you know it's it's an interesting i think someone mentioned this slippery slope argument and it just reminds me of you know, with that all in mind, you know, it's an interesting, I think someone mentioned the slippery slope argument. And it just reminds me of, you know, the SEC going after Ripple. And, you know, the argument that people were making there that, you know, a win for XRP was really a win for crypto, because it meant that the SEC would be, let's say, somewhat limited in what coins they could and couldn't label as securities. I feel like that paradigm rings true here, where if we set this precedent where blockchains or communication technology can be implicated in crimes that are carried out using that technology as a medium,

it really does set a dangerous precedent. And it's one that I wouldn't like to explore, to be honest. So just looking at the chart itself, I mean, I don't have a huge amount to say on it, other than we've obviously seen this 20%, 25% drop since uh since durov was was arrested um i do think that the current market environment for alts is not one where where price automatically bottoms on bad news i think we have seen those environments in the past where if you saw an you know a fud headline um and price dumped 10 15 20 that was an automatic long, and you would almost always catch a relief bounce, you would almost always catch some kind of bounce back to the upside as the market rebalanced things. And you know, mean reversion kicked in,

I think that the current environment has not been that way for altcoins for probably about six months. And we've seen that you know majority of alts kind of topped out around march april and since then a lot of them are down you know between 40 and 60 percent if not more from those highs i just think it's it's a weird we're in a very strange market environment now for alts whereby bitcoin has put in a new all-time high this year. The rotations that we've seen in previous cycles haven't happened. There is a supply issue, and this is something we touched on on previous crypto town halls. But there is effectively infinite coins being created and not enough new capital coming into the space to, let's say, to buoy price for those coins. So you have a very select few coins that are actually getting the value of these rotations

or seeing the value of these rotations, and the vast majority of the rest of them are just bleeding out. And I think that with that background in mind, looking at TAN, looking at the chart, it doesn't scream automatic long to me. It really is one of those cases where I'm saying, let the price action play out. Let's see where it bottoms. Let's see where price wants to create a bottom. And then you should react based on that. I think that the potential for this coin to continue to bleed, as long as the duro situation remains unclear is quite a large one

matthew you had some thoughts on that yeah just looking at it from a technical perspective it was 5th of august we had a low on tongue coin of 4.65 somewhere around there um so we rose to you know a high of 7 point something. That's not all-time high, but since that time, we got a high of 7 point something. We dropped, interestingly, we didn't drop below $5. So we haven't reached the 5th of August. Right now, we have hidden bullish divergence in place telling us that higher is likely. And also, we have a very clear, at the moment, three waves down from a five-wave

move up. So, I actually think from a risk-reward perspective, your risk is obviously the previous August the 5th low at 4.7, 4.65, whatever it is, somewhere around there. That is your risk. So, anything below that is your risk. The potential reward right now is really attractive. So, I actually think this is going to blow over. And I think we're in for a bit of a nice run, short, medium term on crypto. So we may bleed a little bit more. But I think from risk reward perspective, the actual trade is great. As I say, the risk is extremely limited. And there's a lot of technicals actually supporting a long position from here with that limited risk so i'm i'm bullish

even ton coin right now i'm bullish sounds great jonathan to uh compliment what matthew was just saying if you look at the on-chain analytics take a look at the active addresses on ton coin all right you know you go back to the beginning of the month into july things are things are like around 723 000 active addresses so these are addresses that that have a positive balance on the 23rd there was 711000 active addresses. There are now 3.58, sorry, sorry, 2.23 million active addresses. Almost a million were added between the 24th and the 25th. The total number of new addresses, if you go to Into the Blocker or Santiment, you look at the active addresses, there is a metric shite ton of money flowing into Toncoin from the retail side. And Toncoin isn't decentralized. 91% of the supply is held by whales or whatever you want

to call them. Only 8% of what's out there right now is owned by retail. But the number of addresses has absolutely exploded so much higher. Yeah, that's a great insight there, I think, as well. I mean, I see Mario lifting your mic. Do you hear? Maybe not. I know Mario is coming on momentarily. Listen, I think this is going to take a really long time to play out, right? I mean, is there any expectation that we get any real meaningful clarity on what this means for Tun or for Telegram in the short term?

Maybe one of the lawyers can speak, but I'm impressed. And I can't imagine that we're beyond the first strike of the first inning and finding out what happens with Telegram here, right? No, I mean, this is absolutely the first pitch of the first inning. And it's going to be interesting in particular to see how other companies react. You know, if I were advising a social media company that offered similar functionality to Telegram right now, I would be telling the CEO, don't leave the United States. And if they're based outside of the United States, I'd say get into the United States, because I don't see anything. There are no indications here that Telegram did anything that would have been considered unlawful in the United States. So Europe really, anybody

who's building any kind of application, which involves user generated content, which is supervised where the users might be saying or doing or promoting something illegal. And this includes anything relating to social media and anything relating to generative AI, honestly, I'd be telling those companies get out of Europe. So it's very much the very early innings. And I think that this is going to have long lasting consequences for the European Union's economy and also the United Kingdom has become much more sensorial of late online. So Europe's scaring away tech companies to be blunt. Yeah. I mean, if you're Elon Musk, do you literally not travel to France right now?

If I were Elon, so if I were Elon and I'm not Elon, and if I were his lawyer and I'm not his lawyer, I would basically say the advice would be remove yourself from the operation of the business, replace your executive team with people who agree with you on free speech matters and get them to agree that they're going to go on vacation in Colorado instead of Paris. Because, you know, if this is indeed a harbinger of things to come, it's going to be non-viable for a company to have a free speech emphasis. And there are all kinds of laws, right? They could have gone after Durov for, they could have gone after him for hate speech. They could have gone after him for fine proceedings under the EU DSA. They could have gone after him, you know, any other country in Europe could have gone after him too, under their hate speech rules. So if this is a sign of the things to come, really, I think the prudent business decision at this point is to pull out of Europe. And that's not me being dramatic or exaggerating.

It's that if you want to run a globally, you know, globally available interactive application where people can pretty much say what they want, as long as they're not breaking the law in the United States, that's no longer viable in the European Union. Yeah, it's like, show me the man, show me the crime. The way you describe it, it's like, I'm sure they could have done this or gotten in for this or gone out, right? I mean, it's just like, they can just choose. Yeah. Some guy on Twitter the other day, someone said, you're a moron to this guy on Twitter. And he said, be careful. I'm posting from the United Kingdom and that's a criminal offense, right? And

then he got piled on by loads of Twitter users. But the fact is he was right. Under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. That is a criminal offense in the United Kingdom. And so then you have similar provisions. There was another incident where the social media company Gab got a takedown request or a user data disclosure request because one of their users called a German politician named Ricarda Lange fat, right? Ricarda Lange, it is a true statement of fact to refer to Ricarda Lange as obese. She's a large woman. And the German government was willing to arrest someone for daring to say it online. So there's a whole regime of speech control that already exists in the EU. It has

long existed in many European countries. But historically, it was used very sparingly, right? For only the most extreme cases where you had people really causing significant amounts of disorder. With the new governments that are in power and sort of a recognition that on the online spaces, particularly Twitter post acquisition, are being used to organize political opposition, they've taken these very broadly drafted laws and they've said, you know what, we're going to apply them broadly as well, rather than using, you know, significant discretion in how they're, how they're applied and being very, very careful in how they're applied.

So Europe is really not a safe place to have an opinion, which doesn't accord with. Where is Preston? Where is the safe place then? The United States, to be blunt. It's the US is not... I wrote a post on this a while ago titled Compliance Impossible. And basically, there are two...

In my universe, there are two types of platforms that are going to own the future, in my opinion. One of them is decentralized finance, crypto, and the other one is publishing and the free flow of information. The United States, by virtue of Section 230 in the First Amendment, has really robust statutory protections for publishing. There's stuff you can do in the United States, there's stuff you can say, there's content you can host that would immediately get their opinions, you can express, which are non-violently expressed, right? Just like advocating for a position,

which you can do in the US, which would get you arrested anywhere in Western Europe. So in the US, publishing is really well protected and it's a great place to run a social media company. You've got all kinds of statutory immunities because the US made a choice in the 1990s that they wanted to have the internet be free and open and they passed laws which made that possible. In Europe, however, the US, of course course is very anti-crypto as we know so europe coincident weirdly is a great place to start a crypto company because they've got reasonable market structure legislation in the form of nika or in the form of the uk the uk has just amended their fisma their financial services and markets act so you have these two different jurisdictions with two different

approaches to do two different things europe Europe historically has always felt like the US is kind of its big brother that does much better and is more successful in financial matters. And so when they have an arbitrage opportunity to loosen up their financial regulations, they do so, which is why London became a thing, right? And why the Euro bond market became a thing. The US, by contrast, wants to control the financial system and the globe, particularly dollar hegemony. And it has this free speech tradition that Europe doesn't have because we never had fascism, right? Which is, I think a lot of Europe's speech controls are based in wanting to avoid a repeat of the second world war. Whether it's going to

be effective in doing that is another question. So you have these two regimes, the US weirdly is really, really good at protecting publishing. And Europe weirdly is really, really good at enabling crypto finance so far. And so I think the US will eventually catch up on the crypto front. But for now, for you know, and I know that the users of this group, this is a crypto town hall. You know these are both services these are both types of services that everyone on this channel is going to use but weirdly the us is really excellent and a really great place to do a social media company so i'm just checking right now what the top countries are i know we're going to move in move the discussion forward but the top countries when it comes to free speech i'm trying to see if there's a list here uh norway's number one

finland so some european couple europe all in one basket unless you disagree, Preston. The first five are, again, this is according to a report in 2023 by Reporters Without Borders. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands. So the Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Reporters Without Borders analysis measures a lot of things, not just like legal protections for speech, but also the health of the local media ecosystem. Norway actually does have a very strong free speech legal regime. So an interesting tidbit for the people in this space will be interested in. We all remember Craig Wright, who pretended to be Satoshi Nakamoto. I actually represented Hodlinot, who was the first guy that Wright went after. And what we did, when Wright threatened to sue us in England, is we turned around and said,

all right, up yours. We're going to sue you first in Norway. And so we sued him first in Norway, and we won in Norway, which was his first major. How did you sue him in Norway? For what? We sued for a declaratory... Well, so it was another firm called Atkins Thompson that was quarterbacking. I sort of took the case pro bono to start and then handed it off. But we sued him in Norway for a declaratory judgment that the words that Hodlinot said about Wright, the defamation laws favor the person who is speaking. So for the during the pendency of the case in Norway, the English courts were unable to proceed because of the Lugano Convention, because at that point, England was part of the European Union. So basically, once one court in the EU is has been seized of a matter has started hearing it, the other courts in the EU are prohibited from,

from hearing the matter. So we sued right in Norway. And basically that froze up the English proceedings for several years, which, which bought enough time for right to eventually face his downfall when he sued a Copa and those guys. So that's why we sued him in Norway. Yeah.

So he's not Satoshi Nakamoto. Yeah. So, so the countries that were in order of reporters of our borders, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Estonia, which does not seem too surprising to be honest. Number seven is New Zealand. That was

surprising because obviously we're pretty critical of Australia. Australia is not on the top 10 list. Then Switzerland, Portugal, and Ireland. This is not a good list. mean New Zealand has a classification office which can take a publication and order it to be removed and sentence you to a thirty thousand dollar fine yeah I'll try to get a different list but yeah I just thought I'd just kind of come up with a quick list um yeah so let's let's move on discussion I think we've got uh adrian here from uh clap up adrian

how are you man i'm really great to be here guys so it's been an amazing discussion and i think uh i can really jump in with the topic of you know uh privacy and how this affects not only you know the world stage and geopolitical aspects but also industry. So we're from the media and entertainment industry. It's a funny thing. If you look at this industry, maybe you don't recognize it as being heavily censored, but it is. I mean, for an emerging artist, if you want to launch an artistic career, if either, I don't know, musician, screenwriter, any kind of creative, let's say, endeavor or a

career, many times you have to sign in with distributors or with promoters or with any kind of management system, which in many cases, because they have a different type of narrative or a different type of, you know, line of, let's let's say image or of branding they will shut down your artistic creativity so um i see this as a very interesting mirror to what's happening with uh with durov and telegram in a totally different field but censorship i think it stifles human creativity regardless where it is applied so So we're totally against that. And by the way, I'm also watching with, to be honest, I'm pretty terrified of the direction where this is going. So I hope this is going to be settled.

Where are you located, Adrian? Oh, yeah. That was the second part. So we're located in Europe. So it's funny. Great. We're in Europe. France? No, no, no, the second part. So we're located in Europe. So it's funny because... Greg, we're in Europe. France? No, no, no, no, no.

You sound like Spain, Portugal. No, it's Romania, by the way. I was going to say it's in Europe. Yeah, I was going to say it's in European. I was going to say, of course, you should have guessed Romania. I spent at least a year in Romania. Well, I had Andrew Tate on my stage. And yeah, he's pretty critical of the Romanian legal system.

He was there two days ago oh yeah well everybody has been watching his case with uh you know mixed emotions because he's i mean it depends who you're asking for some people he's a hero for others he's just you know a guy that's uh that's pimping yeah exactly guilty or not guilty it's it's uh it's not for me to decide it's more the legal system itself. It just seems very flawed. Again, I spent a long time in Romania. I used to have a team in Romania. I still have a few team members there for one of my companies. I spent a lot of time in Bucharest, but I know how corrupt the country is. It's a beautiful country, by the way, so I don't want to be too negative. But yeah, just going back to the discussion, man. Talking about the entertainment

industry, I also had Kevin Sober on my stage about last week, and he said he was the first actor to be cancelled because of his political stance. And obviously now everyone knows other examples today, Kanye being one of the most obvious examples. But let's kind of link it to Clap Heart. I think most people know the censorship in the media world and the artist's face

i remember there was an artist that had um that kind of did really well on the billboards charts but he was saying how he doesn't have any record label and he was using tick tock and instagram to kind of get traction he's a a conservative artist did really well I come out as a rapper or rock artist but yeah he had a lot of traction he started doing a lot of videos trying to expose the media game and how it's played but my question to you is

what do you guys do? how do you guys solve it? well there are two ways to think about it so on one hand we're kind of the, well it may sound ambitious but this is what we're aiming to be. The world's first decentralized record label. So we're a community based web free protocol that allows any kind of emerging artist to launch their career directly towards the community of fans and then track back the royalty. So it's pretty simple. It allows the fan base to be engaged both, you know, not just from an artistic or emotional side, but also financially.

So the fan base will be able to invest into tokens which are directly tokenizing future income streams from different kinds of income streams from publishing, Spotify, YouTube music and so on. And then the artist can produce, distribute, and promote their work. And then we have a multi-layered system that allows that the artist will pay back to the community the royalties which are being generated by different types. Okay, so let's kind of break it down for the audience

because a lot of people don't understand the tokenization of music. So when you say you tokenize the royalties, can you explain that for the audience? How do you tokenize royalties? Well, it's pretty simple. I mean, the way we have built the product, because unlike many other projects that are promoting themselves before the product is being actually released, we already have a live product. It's in the alpha testing with the artists but it's

still out there. So what we do is that we allow artists to declare exactly from where they want to generate those income streams because some, and it depends on what they're producing, they might do it from merchandise,, they might do it from merchandise, some they might do it from streaming, from publishing,

different types of income sources, right? And you basically say, okay, I want to tokenize 50% or 40% of my future income streams and trading them for an upfront investment or an upfront, let's say, buy-in to become a partner. In many ways, it's similar to what's happening on Patreon or on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. But in this case, we're directly tokenizing an asset, which is the IP associated with different kinds of artistic creativity from songs to, I don't know, screenwriting, novel writers and so on. So it can be pretty much anything that can generate from a legal standpoint royalties.

I don't know if that was technical or legal enough. Yeah, I won't go into the legal aspect of it because that's another rabbit hole. But just so essentially, for people that are not too deep in crypto, when you buy the token, you'll have access. So if someone has access to the royalties of a certain artist, any IP that they've created, the token will represent that IP, correct? Exactly. Exactly. And then what would be the benefits to the artists? I think you already hinted at them.'s no centralized party there's no level of control

gives them that level of freedom gives them that level of um you know owning your ip and monetizing it yourself for that and your third party is involved makes it more efficient as well and then for the so that's for the artist is there any other benefits that i'm missing um yeah pretty much that would be the starting point but not that's not just it uh you know there are two types of let's say artists that would be interested in working with us first of all and the most obvious one is the case of the emerging artist and in the case of the emerging artists they just want to kickstart their career they just don't want to sign with the record label by the way if you're not from the industry let me give you a heads up uh there's an average of only 12 percent of

proceedings which is going back to the artist that's very very low yeah this is pain so the rest the rest it's spread out through a lot of intermediaries um so pretty much to be honest that's the grim reality of many artists depending on whom they're signing with obviously when they're big enough they can change the terms but as a small budding artist it's it's pretty hard and um obviously for them it's don't they for playing devil's advocate there's another side you know it's two sides every coin don't they get that level of support from the record labels and how do you how do they get that level of support from if they decentralize it so they're giving a cut out of the probably too big of a cut but they're giving a cut out of their returns

out of their profits and to get that level of support and marketing well there are two ways of answering this question so what do you get actually from from a record label you get two things you get money and you get also you know the know-how and the connections and everything needed to to create a to launch and create your business let's say as an artist right so we're addressing this and trying to decentralize these two benefits in the following way obviously first you have the crowdfunding and the crowds you know the crowdsourcing of income streams from the community that's on one hand then on the second part which is about the know-how we have created obviously i'm going to jump in with the buzzword but we're using ai uh but we're using it on your website it it says like AI, what was it, AI record, whatever, let me find it, hold on, you used the word.

Artist manager, the world's AI. Artist manager, yeah, yeah, world's first AI artist manager, it's interesting. Whoever did your marketing is smart. Cheers. Well, everybody's talking about generative AI, and to be honest, you know, generative AI is like the Baba Yaga of artists. Everybody's scared of generative AI because they're scared that they're going to put them out of their careers. And in part, it might have some truth for designers and illustrators and people like that, even from musicians with Suno and other platforms.

But what we're doing is in the opposite direction. We want to empower the artists and we wanted to be able to extract as many know-how and relevant information from the people that we have co-founded this project with, which are people heavily invested in the media and entertainment industry over 30 years of experience.

We distilled their know-how and we have... Haohao, can you give me... What is the AI artist manager going to do? I'm actually curious. I love whenever AI replaces people and things. It's just beautiful to see that. Two things. Two things. Automation.

Two things. First of all, obviously, based on the know-how, on, let's say, the distilled information from our colleagues that they have, like I said, over 15 cumulative years of experience in the media entertainment industry. This is the knowledge base, the base knowledge base. But then on top of it, which is less like that's the ground level, then you have a very rich data which is being generated from the trading of tokens from that specific artist. So for example, if I tokenize one song of mine, half of the future royalty streams

from one song of mine, from the trading data, we can extract patterns and see what the community likes and what they don't like because, you know, there's this saying in the stock world that everything is, you know, accounted in the price of a stock. But you mean, they mean the token, if they don price of a student but you mean they mean the token if they don't like a song they'll just sell the token and vice versa yes i mean pieces of it you don't actually have ownership over the ip itself you have ownership on the future royals the royalties yeah exactly so i own royalties of m m's songs okay and if you release a new album

which i think you release one today and I still need to check it out. And not today, this year. But if he releases an album, and I think his music did not do as well as expected, I would expect the royalties to be less. And therefore I would sell the token. And then they,

it's like, it's like, it's like a poly market. It's like the market determines what people really think of something. It's like when I, when I, whenever I want to look at the polls in the u.s i look at polymarket before the polls because people are voting with their money

yeah indeed i mean it's the same idea there is this concept it's a mathematical concept it's called the wisdom of the crowd so basically when you have hundreds of thousands of people trying to bid on on a certain let's say the the value of a certain asset, you will have, let's say, the average of all the trading, let's say, points. You will see that it kind of fits smack down in the middle of where the objective value should be. So a lot of people trying to bid and ask for the value of a token, they will very well, um let's say pinpoint if the artist is doing things in the proper way or or not and from that the ai artist manager will be able to extract actionable data like people are not liking the direction in which you're going they want to do you to do this more

and that and that and that and this will be very very relevant for emerging artists but you know this is just this is just one one aspect in the sense that we're just uh you know scratching the surface this is only for emerging artists but the highest value is for established artists and for their fan base because you know we have we did a pilot of our technology and of our flows last year with a major artist here in Romania. And it was promoted by Binance. It was a partnership because, by the way, we're on BSC, on BNB chain, right? So what we did back then, we tested the entire flow. And what we really saw, it was that when you have millions of people, let's say you have like 10 million followers on different kinds of platforms,

as an artist, usually you can only reach up to 5%. That would be like top. Yeah, social media. Exactly. So the algorithmic restrictions. But through what we are doing, I mean, it's pretty simple. If I have even 1% of a song that you have released, I have full financial interest to generate traffic for it, to share it to my friends, to actually let it play on the background because it generates traffic which means more money for the artist and then when the royalties are being redistributed more money for me and this is where it it was an eureka moment because you realize that we have generated the new economic model so everybody's talking about you know play to earn learn to earn this is literally consume arts to earn so once you

buy in as a fan then just by listening or consuming the arts that you like you gain incentives to do so financial incentives let's talk about financial incentives let's talk about your token so you guys have launched your token do you have a date I don't think you've launched it already have you no actually the there is a current ongoing pre-sale on Fjord Foundry, which is a great platform. And we have upcoming ideas, which is spread out through multiple launchpads. And then we're going to have the listing at the beginning of September on two tier one exchanges.

So the token is being launched right now. We've been working on the project for the past two years but we wanted to have the product out first. Are you worried? Do you have a launch date? I mean launch in the sense that for the IDO or launch for the token listing? Yes, 9th of September.

Are you worried with the current market conditions? Frankly, yes. You know how it is i mean i mean in many cases uh it's pretty hard as a project to just wait for the right moment sometimes you just have to gamble yeah now look i i wish you guys like i'm going through your list of artists and congratulations on what you built so far and the traction you guys have built and um and uh congratulations on your on your uh token sale the traction you guys have built. And, um,

and, uh, congratulations on your, on your, uh, token sale on Fjord Foundry. It's going to be exciting to see you guys build this. I know there's a few people working on the solution, but whoever builds the winning platform,

I think it's going to be very lucrative for them. Um, so yeah, good luck guys. Much love for Romania. It's been many, many years I haven't been there. So,

uh, you know, if I go there, I'll let you know. I appreciate it, man. Thank you. it's been many many years i haven't been there so uh you know if i go there i'll let you know i appreciate it man thank you thank you it's been a pleasure thanks bro appreciate it for everyone else i'll see you again tomorrow um and uh we'll talk then thanks a lot everybody bye-bye thanks guys