The Wolf Of All Streets - Exclusive: @ogerkver Speaks Out – Fighting For His Freedom
Episode Date: January 27, 2025Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ... ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK. 👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000! 👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/ ►►NORD VPN GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Can you hear me, man?
I can hear you. Can you hear me, sir?
I can. To be fair, we haven't heard Mario's voice.
I heard you saying you should be close.
We haven't heard Mario's voice on this show
in at least three months.
You're here at least once every two or three weeks.
It's what happens when you're
rubbing shoulders
with the big people
and when Elon's retweeting your tweets.
It's what happens.
It's like you forget about the little people.
Yeah, Scott, promise me no matter how big you get,
promise me you're not going to forget about me soon.
Yeah, I think we're going to have to worry about that in reverse.
If you make the same promise, then I will as well.
I think we actually have uh roger here with
us already which is uh which is great so i think just before we start with roger we are waiting for
everyone to we are waiting for people to to uh to get on uh maybe worth maybe just discussing this
deep seek um uh thing in the markets what like scaring the markets uh knocking NVIDIA for a six. What are your thoughts?
I mean, I think that it's justifiable that it would spook markets depending on how it shakes out and more information that we get about it.
I mean, obviously, it sort of exposes a potential overvaluation
of U.S. largest tech stops.
But I mean, if you zoom out and think about this,
it's exceptionally good for humanity, right?
I mean, it's deflationary.
That's exactly right.
I mean, we're all fans of Jeff Booth, who I interview all the time, and his book, The Price of Tomorrow.
And technology is a naturally deflationary force in a perfect world.
It should bring prices down and should free more time for people to do you know
the things they're passionate about and to be entrepreneurs so like if ai becomes exponentially
uh cheaper and and more efficient and frees up more you know uh time for humans to innovate i
think that's generally a massive net positive so yeah i have a couple of other thoughts number one is i think that the us's
approach of um bullying the competitors by cutting off supplies of um chips and other things i think
it's a good strategy short term but i think what you do is you create a desperate enemy and you
know when people are desperate they do crazy things and they the best innovations come when
people are desperate i think when people
advance i always say give all of our competitors all of our ip and the reason why i do that is
because the more of our ip they have the less of the less of of the less ip they're being forced
to develop right and so they become lazy and complacent because they start to rely on us for
their ip meanwhile we're thinking and they're not thinking, right? And so it's the same thing with like the US.
The US is putting people in like it put China in a position
where China had no option but to go and innovate
without fancy GPUs potentially if they didn't actually use the GPUs.
Yeah, and I think that's probably a good lesson for people to learn.
It's like, don't force your competitor,
don't make your competitor desperate unless you have to.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, that's kind of been the must view on things, right?
I mean, go ahead.
Here's all of our technology, do something better.
And, you know, I think it's going to be,
it's going to be really, really interesting
to see how it shakes down. I just, it's interesting that it came out, you know, the big news sort
of came out on the weekend. I find it's interesting in context of how poorly the
Chinese economy is doing, obviously, and they're obviously suffering from potential deflation.
And then in context of everything that's happening with tiktok right just because there's sort of this uh negative probably justifiable view on chinese technology
given i understand obviously that deep deep sea can be run locally and open source so it's
different but i just find it sort of interesting that we're banning tiktok because it's quote
unquote chinese spyware uh but at the same time, you know, Americans are rushing to download this chat GPT competitor.
That's going to obviously interact with people in a much more,
I would say intimate way than a TikTok would.
I mean,
think about the things that you type into searches on Google or chat GPT,
just a really interesting time.
Yeah. All right. Let's get into um let's get into uh the discussion
i think roger's with us um for those of you who haven't been following the roger the roger bear
story uh roger has been uh one of the i think he's the earliest investor in the bitcoin ecosystem
he's certainly one of the early early early ogs in the space he was campaigning for bitcoin when when no one else
really knew about it he was one of the the first people to buy bitcoin in bulk so to speak or to
build build up a big stash of bitcoin um he's been a friend of mine and you know i've been you know
a lot of my journey i've bumped into roger many many many times and i've always had amazing
conversations with him i do know that um you know some people
may hold grudges against him because he you know he he encouraged or he he was part of the block
size wars which eventually led for that bitcoin um fork into the bch and bitcoin fork which was
which happened i think in 2017 or 20 somewhere around there um and uh now roger is in a bit of a
predicament uh roger maybe you can give us give us a little bit more clarity as to where you're at
uh so uh where i'm at i'm in spain is the the easy answer the more the more complicated answer is
that i'm in spain awaiting extradition to the United States on 100% completely false, fake, made up tax charges in the U.S. that bear no basis in reality whatsoever.
And it's really, really frustrating.
But I think this was a part of the Biden administration.
But now that we have a new administration that's friendly towards crypto, I'm very optimistic that all this is going to be coming to an end very, very shortly here.
But I need everybody's help to point out the injustice of the situation.
So let's actually just do a little bit of a history lesson for those people who don't know.
So this would not be your first time in jail. You did some time previously in jail. Just give us a rough rundown of what happened the last time. So yeah, perfect timing.
Just about an hour ago, we released a documentary on exactly what happened the last time around.
And I ran for political office as a libertarian around the year 2000.
And when I was doing that, I debated the Republican and Democratic candidates.
And they got mad about a lot of the things I said about the ATF and FBI.
And I wound up being the only person ever in the entire history of the world to be prosecuted for selling this firecracker
called the pest control report 2000. Even though I was, I was telling them without a license,
I was guilty of the laws written, but they didn't prosecute the company I was buying them from who
had no license. They didn't prosecute the manufacturer who had no license. They didn't
prosecute anybody else who was involved with these.
And nobody had a license.
And so literally, I became the only person ever to be prosecuted for those.
I signed a plea agreement.
I did 10 months in federal prison and three years of probation.
And I'm skimming over it.
But those people terrorized me the whole time in the probation department and harassing
me and harassing my business.
And basically, they drove me to flee from America because they had a target on my back
and they were coming after me.
And I never would have dreamed of leaving America if they hadn't been treating me that way
and just made me afraid to be home in California where I grew up with my friends and family
because these petty bureaucrats just kept targeting me and harassing me
and threatening to send me to jail.
So I wound up around that.
I know you want to get through it, but I think it's a context of what these people were harassing you for,
like the random nature of the stuff that these guys were harassing you for.
Just maybe give one or two examples because I understand why you tapped out and you renounced your American citizenship.
But for a lot of people, that's like they don't understand
why someone would possibly do that.
I think also you probably saw that Elon tweeted this week
and he said there's going to be no help for Roger
because Roger denounced his citizenship and, you know,
membership comes with its benefits.
Maybe just tell people like how bad this, I want to use the word harassment,
but harassment might be the wrong word, how bad it got before you eventually made a big decision
to renounce your American citizenship. So just one example of the pettiness there too
was after I got out of prison and I'm on probation, the first couple of weeks I was
living at my friend's house, a Korean American guy. And in Asian culture, it's a very, very big deal. Like no shoes worn in the house. And these
probation officers come over to my friend's house and they want to inspect where I'm living. And my
friend says, okay. And they're like, he says, you can come in and see, but please take your shoes
off. They're like, no, we're not going to take our shoes off. We're going to come in. And like,
they walked all over the inside of his house with the shoes. I know he was mad about
it. And then, I don't know, maybe a year later I bought my own home and these same people showed
up there to search that. And like, I told him, you can come in my house, but take your shoes off
and have this, you know, beautiful, you know, light beige carpet. And, uh, and they said, no,
no, no, we're going to come in our house and we're going to, in your house. And they said,
we're going to wear our shoes. I said, you can come in,, we're going to come in our house and we're going to, in your house. And they said, we're going to wear our shoes.
I said, you can come in, but you're going to take your shoes off.
Otherwise you're not coming in.
And they looked me right in the eye and his name was Jose Martinez.
I still remember very clearly.
He said, I'm going to come in your house with my shoes on, or you're going to go back to jail.
And it's just this, you know, crazy pettiness.
And they just did it over and over with every last little thing. And it was just three years of torment
by those people harassed me
every step of the way with my business
and my personal life and this and that.
And just, they made it a living hell for me
to deal with any of it.
And so like literally the day I was allowed to flee,
I left and then even though I left,
they were still harassing me.
And so you left.
And when you left, just walk us through the process of actually leaving.
So you announced your U.S. citizenship?
Yeah.
So I looked into it at the time.
And then I left.
I'd had a Japanese girlfriend before.
So I figured, okay, I'll go give Japan a try.
If I'd had a Brazilian girlfriend, I would have wound up in Brazil.
Or a German girlfriend would have been Germany. Germany was just kind of totally by chance. But when Bitcoin came
along, I knew, oh, my God, this is going to change everything. And I knew that they were going to
target me even more because of that. And so I knew it was just simply too dangerous to be an American
citizen because the, you know, these agencies are just targeting anybody that's going to promote this
sort of powerful world-changing technology for the benefit of everybody. And so it was just too
frightening for me to be another target of theirs. So the safest thing that I thought of that I could
possibly do at that point was to renounce my citizenship just because it seemed like the safe,
smart, prudent thing to do. And it turned out I was right because here we are more than a decade
after I renounced my U.S. citizenship because I was scared of them.
They're coming after me and proving that I was right.
I should have been afraid of them.
They're attacking me again, wanting to put me in jail until the day I die
because they claimed that the right amount of taxes weren't paid.
But the reality is I turned everything.
I said, I'll pay whatever I owe.
Tell me what I owe, I'll pay.
When you left the United States, the process
of leaving the United States is deemed to be
a capital gains event, right? It's a tax event,
which means that on the day that you leave, you
pretty much have to value your assets. You have to pay
capital gains tax, and then
those assets are pretty much out of
the United States, right?
Yeah, although I don't want to dive too deep into the details. My lawyer would be happy to
come on at some point, but we're saving all those cards for a little bit later. But if you head on
over to freerogernow.org, the motion to dismiss is right up there at the top of the page with all
the exact details. So you can see the exact evidence there. And the short version is that I'm 100% completely innocent of everything they're accusing me of. And again, my stance the
entire time has been, if they think I owe some more money in tax, tell me what I owe and I will
gladly pay it. But they have never come up with a number that they say that I actually owe to the
point where my lawyers literally had to file a Freedom of Information Act request telling the
IRS, tell us what you think Roger owes.
And they still haven't come up with the number that they think I owe. And because the fact of
the matter is, is that we paid what I owed. And if there's something different, they can't calculate
it either because the whole thing's so confusing. So what's the case now that you were in Spain and
you got arrested in Spain, right? Yeah. And in fact, like with no exaggeration at all,
like even while I'm on this, you know,
Twitter spaces with you guys,
there might be a knock at the door taking me back to Spanish prison today.
The lawyer said there's about a 10% chance that it'll happen today.
And as each day goes by, that number goes up.
So like I, you know,
any day now could be my final day of freedom here in Spain
and they'll ship me off to the US
and who knows what they'll do to me there
if the new Trump administration
doesn't see this for the lawfare
that it is against, you know,
I'm a proud American.
I'm born and raised, you know,
clearly my English is American English.
The culture, you know,
is a longstanding,
all of that says American through and through.
And I don't think, you know,
what passport I have changes my culture one bit.
We'll debate that in a sec.
But I mean, you were in Spain.
You were in Spain and you all of a sudden got arrested.
And the reason why you got arrested is because the United States wanted their tax, basically.
They said that you're under-declared and you didn't pay enough tax.
Is that correct?
I suppose you could summarize it that way, yeah.
Okay. And so what's happened since then? You've had multiple hearings. You've had an extradition hearing. Just walk us through what's happened since. Sure. So I spent almost an entire month
in jail in Barcelona, in a jail where I speak. I don't speak the language, right? I had two and a
half years of junior high school Spanish. My Spanish is not that great. And so I'm in a prison
where I don't even speak the language. And because I'm a pretty clean cut, well-spoken guy, the only
other, you know, there was one, two other Americans when I arrived, they thought that I was some sort
of spy. And then the bunch of the other inmates thought I must be some sort of American spy in
the prison because I'm, you know, not covered in tattoos and don't look like the
normal prisoner type. And so I did just under a month in the prison in Spain before I finally
got bail in Spain, completely against the US's wishes. They wanted to keep me in jail the entire
time claiming that I'm a flight risk, whereas the reality is I'm not a flight risk at all.
I want to face this whole thing head on. And the entire time, again, I've been telling them,
whatever I owe, show me and I will pay it. It's that simple. Like I'm not
trying to hide anything. I have plenty of money. I just want to live my life. And I just want these
people to leave me alone and in the law fair against me. I've had enough of this harassment
from bureaucrats in my life. I'm just doing my best to make the world a better place.
It's been almost a year I've been stuck in Spain.
And you had an extradition hearing? You had an extradition hearing last week?
Yeah, and I'm waiting for the ruling, you know, maybe today, even today.
I don't know exactly when they'll issue it,
but they had a 15-judge panel to decide whether or not they'll extradite me
to the U.S. last Friday.
And then, you know, probably this week or next week they'll issue that ruling.
And what was your feeling based on, I mean, you were in the courtroom, you saw the faces
of the judges.
What was your feeling based on the argument?
Unfortunately, I wasn't there.
There's no actual in-person thing.
It's all just written arguments.
And so I think I have a real good shot at Spain seeing this for the lawfare and political
persecution from the Biden administration that it is.
And so I kind of almost wonder if maybe the judges are going to wait a while
to see what the, what the new administration does. But the short answer is, I don't know,
but it's a, it's a horrible, horrible way to live life where every day, I don't know if this is the
day the police are going to knock on my door and say, okay, you're going back to prison here in
Spain and we're going to ship you to the U eventually. It is not an easy way to plan anything or live anything or get any sort of anything done in life. It's really a
frustrating situation. And why do you think they're targeting you?
I think because I'm such an effective advocate for the use of cryptocurrency as money around
the world and personal freedom and economic freedom and literally the ideals that America
was founded on.
But I mean, there's lots of other people that have that have been fighting as much,
and they're not getting targeted as much.
I don't know if that's the case. I think I had maybe a little bit of a bigger platform. But look at John McAfee, he literally died in the exact same prison that I was in. Or look at, you know,
Roman from Tornado Cash was literally just
writing software code that gave people more privacy with their cryptocurrency. Look at
the toss that guy in jail to look at Ian Freeman, who ran Bitcoin ATM machines, like allowing people
to buy and sell Bitcoin. They've tossed him in jail. Just I guess I'm just lucky enough to have
had like a louder, you know, social media presence and platform where I can make a bit more noise
about it than a lot of these other people. A lot of other people just go silently into the night and as they
get their lives destroyed by this sort of lawfare for speaking out in favor of what's right.
And so I'm-
Brandon, do you mind if I, yeah, sorry, Roger, to interrupt, but do you think that the
differentiator there obviously is the, you know, denouncing the citizenship? Do you think that
obviously is the thing that's making you the larger target? I would say that seems like a
glaring possibility.
I don't think that that is, like, to be honest, because a lot of my other friends who stayed
in America also have gone to jail or had all sorts of problems.
If you look on Twitter today, Jesse Powell posted an incredibly nice, wonderful thing
about me.
But look at his business in Kraken.
They've just been harassed nonstop
by the Biden administration. And I think that's coming to an end or just, you know, all of you
guys listening to this, you're all in crypto. How many of your American friends were talking about,
oh, if Kamala wins, I think I'm going to leave the US, right? Like so many of us. And now that
Trump won, you know, hooray for President Trump, because now finally crypto people can feel safer
in America now. But I was just
afraid earlier than everybody else was afraid because I was into crypto earlier than everybody
else. And so I think that's the only difference. Like I would feel much, much safer today under the
Trump presidency than I would under the Harris presidency or whoever else, right? Like,
it's just, I think I was ahead of the curve of being aware of the danger.
And that's the only difference.
So, I mean, Roger, technically,
you're not actually an American anymore.
Like, why do you think that Trump should help you?
Like, you're not an American.
You're not part of the, you're not a paying member,
if you want to call it that, of the club.
Why do you think that Trump should care
or want to help you? Well, I think that the not a paying member of the club. Why do you think that Trump should care or
want to help you?
Why I think that they're not a paying member of the club
argument cuts two ways. If I'm not a paying member of the club,
then why are they asking me to pay? Right? They want me to pay,
but I don't get any of the benefits. But to answer the
other question more directly, like America is like, you know,
it says, truth and justice for all. It doesn't say truth and
justice for just some people. Right? So like truth and justice for all, I'm not say truth and justice for just some people,
right? So like truth and justice for all. I am not getting justice in this case at all. It is 100% like political lawfare against me. And if I'm 100% innocent of what the IRS is accusing me of,
and anybody can go on there again at freerogernow.org and click on that motion to dismiss,
it is clear to anybody who reads it that I'm completely innocent. So if you believe in justice, you should believe in
having all the charges against me dropped, or, or, you know, or
a preemptive pardon or whatever else, because prosecuting me for
stuff that I didn't do is not fair. And it needs to come to an
end if you believe in, you know, the American ideals of truth and
justice and for all.
I mean, I agree with you, but you're not American.
So like to apply ideals to someone,
American ideals to someone who's not American,
like I'm trying to reconcile the logic.
So what does truth and justice for all mean to you?
It doesn't say truth and justice only for American citizens,
truth and justice for all.
I'm certainly part of all.
And I'll be an American in heart for forever, clearly. And what would you like, like, what would you want? Like, what, what, what, what,
if, if you had to ask Trump or one of his advisors or one of his associates or someone
for like, you know, for an action, he should, he's certainly not just going to drop the case,
you know, like he would need more.
I think you're wrong about that.
I think that there's a very, very good chance they're going to drop the case this week
or issue a preemptive pardon this week because anybody that looks at the facts can see I'm 100% innocent.
So if someone's 100% innocent, the case should be dropped.
It's that simple.
Okay.
Scott, any questions there?
A ton, but there's a panelist, and I think they can go ahead if they have their hands up and feel free to ask.
I don't really have a question for Roger, but I just want to say utskare sama to an old friend.
And I wanted to pay a bit of a tribute to you, Roger, and explain to those who don't know you from the earlier years.
You know, I had a dinner with Eric Voorhees after Satoshi
Roundtable number nine. And I remember chatting about Roger and about how he's misunderstood and
a lot of things like that. And my question to Eric was, you know, you who knew him really,
really well and are very close friends, would you agree that pre-Michael Saylor, Roger was the biggest sales rep of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
And Eric looked at me with a little bit of a giggle and he said, did you say sales rep? Roger
was the entire sales division. And that came from the mouth of, I think, one of the most inspiring
characters and personalities in crypto, Eric Voorhees. I sure got into crypto thanks to Andrea
santanopoulos and Eric voice in his first debate against Robert Robert Schiff on gold versus
bitcoins they had three debates but then what really made me fall in love with Bitcoin was
Roger's contribution in Japan Tokyo where he got the nickname of Bitcoin Jesus and he was literally
organizing Bitcoin meetups on a weekly basis.
And this was back in 2016, 2017.
And then 2018 kind of slowed down a little bit.
But yeah, it's more to pay homage to a man that I think
who's done a lot of good in the space.
And I hope that everyone out there will support him.
Thank you for that, Alex.
Simon, your hand up, sir.
Hey, Alex. Simon, your hand up, sir. Hey, yeah.
I'd like to say that in the early days, Roger and myself invested in many of the same companies.
Full disclosure, you're an investor.
Yeah, full disclosure. But, you know, I think and Roger and I sat on the opposite ends of the debate in Japan, where we were discussing Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and can appreciate that you've got to separate your opinions about Bitcoin
and the journey we all shared together in the block size debate and all that type of stuff from justice,
what it means to be a Bitcoiner.
Bitcoin is freedom money. And, you know, this was a 2014 event when it was very unclear the guidance around any type of tax.
There's clearly a background that led to the change in citizenship.
And so I just hope that people can separate, you know, the personalities, opinions, the journey that we've all been through in Bitcoin
from justice and what is wrong and right. And clearly to me, you know, this is something that
does represent what Bitcoin is, you know, freedom. And I cannot for the life of me
understand why Roger Ver should, under any circumstances,
spend the rest of his life in prison.
And I hope that people will come together to agree to that as well.
Roger, when you talk about spending the rest of your life in prison,
just walk me through the logistics here.
So just walk me through what happens,
why it would be the rest of your life,
how did they get to 109 years yeah well i'm uh actually today's my birthday i'm 46 years excuse me 46 years old
today yeah thank you let me grab a little bit of water and i'll let you talk for a second sorry
quite a crazy story yes huh yeah no um it it really is and again like i just really hope that
people can separate their you know our opinions from what's um from what's wrong and right here
um and and that clearly roger is a high value target for anybody that was around in the early days and is sat on you know in massive
massive amounts of gains um in order to fear them to ensure that they sought out what happened from
way back in the day um and that would be you know a likely strategy here and i think there's many
many people that are you know in that situation when they had no idea
what they should be doing back then and I think this is clearly you know a way of trying to use
Roger as a mechanism for bringing in a bunch of money and a bunch of people and try and make
example and that's exactly what happened with Ross you You know, Ross did what he did.
He served his time.
He was told that he needs to go to prison for the rest of his life.
But it was determined that 10 years is enough.
And it was clearly a function of the time when they were trying to make an example in order to try and, you know, send a message out there.
And I think that's what's the,
that has happened quite a few times in Bitcoin's history.
And we all had to get behind that.
Thank you, Simon. And to answer the actual question there too,
like I've turned 46 today, they want to give me 109 years.
Like I maybe we'll figure out some of the super extreme, you know,
life extension technology here pretty quickly.
But with normal technology that we have today, I'm not likely to live to be.
Was that work? I do. One hundred and fifty five years old. That seems unlikely.
So and one of one of the lawyers that had involved previously said, oh, don't worry, you're not actually going to do one hundred nine years.
It'll probably be if you were to be found guilty of a trial, it would be, you know, 20 or 25 years, which is still a very, very long time.
If I did 25 years and I'm 46, am I going to live to be 71 while in prison for 25 years?
It's getting to be right on the edge there.
So, yeah.
It's not a good one.
It doesn't sound good.
No.
Roger, what I don't quite understand is the point you made before that you offered to
effectively just pay and and move on why wouldn't they accept that like what why is this uh you know
a case for extradition and for you to spend the rest of your life uh in in jail if you're willing
to pay the money plus interest to resolve it well i guess it's
because it wasn't paid in time and i guess that that's maybe a criminal no no no no no no everything
was paid on time and everything was paid properly uh i think the real reason for all this is that
it's not a tax case it's a political case and it needs to come to an end now that there's new
administration in power that actually cares about fairness and justice. Can I speak up for a moment?
Yeah, sure.
So I met Roger at Nomad Capitalist in Malaysia quite a time ago.
Amazing guy, obviously a long history.
Everybody that's on the panel knows that about Roger's origin story.
But also a really good friend is Robert Barnes from Barnes Law. He was a defendant or the chief
counsel for Kyle Rittenhouse and others. He's made comments just a few hours ago with Viva Frey,
specifically, like someone had said earlier about like your citizenship, should that determine
whether you should have a pardon or not? Some of the response to what Elon Musk had said, as well as commentary about the constitutionality of an exit tax. So like there is a pinned
tweet that I put up there, which is basically just referencing the Rumble content that Viva
Frey and Robert Barnes went through. And, you know, I've reached out to Robert directly to
try and get in contact directly with Roger as well to try and support the case thank you for that gary actually i talked to the lawyers about it like i paid all the exit tax
that i owed but apparently there's some real strong legal arguments that the exit tax itself
is unconstitutional and illegal although my understanding is that i have to like take it
all the way to trial and lose before I can challenge on those grounds as well.
And so we'll see if they want to do that with me.
But I'm not going to lose anyhow because I paid everything that the current interpretation of the loss is I owe.
Scott? Yeah, I just find it incredibly interesting that they wouldn't just take the money if they're asking if that's where the sticking point is for the United States government. What would be the process if you do get extradited? What happens? Where do they take you? Do you go into holding? Is there another trial here? Or is it effectively, you know, once they've decided you're here that you're in trouble? Can you get to the United
States and be absolved? Yeah. The short answer is I don't know how all of it works because I've
never been through this before. But again, I want to emphasize the IRS never once has said a number
that they think that I owe. In fact, we literally filed a Freedom of Information Act request
requesting the IRS to say, how much do
you think that I owe? And they've been delaying and delaying and delaying even replying to that
because I don't think they can calculate the exact number because at the time I renounced,
there were literally zero guidance from the IRS. There was absolutely no guidance whatsoever from
the IRS as to how to pay taxes on Bitcoin. So like, not only was I the first investor in the
world to start investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem, I not only was I the first investor in the world
to start investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem,
I was one of the very first people in the entire world
trying to pay taxes on Bitcoin.
And so like everybody knows philosophically
that I'm not a fan of taxes,
but I did my absolute best to comply
with the letter of the law
because I didn't want to be in the exact situation
they put me in today.
And it's really frustrating.
I'm sorry if I sound a little bit bitter or hostile. It's just
I don't think you do, actually. I would think that you would.
I'm really frustrated with this whole situation on all of this.
Yeah, to me, that's good. Let me make a quick comment, again, responding to the citizenship
issue. Recently, there was a lot of social media posts that Brazil didn't like, and there's a lot that
UK didn't like about certain citizens outside of their jurisdiction. And still, there's been this
threat of imprisonment if entering the country and things like that. So certain citizens decide
not to enter those jurisdictions just because of their posts, regardless of their citizenship.
And it's very similar in some ways, in opinion uh simply because uh rules of one jurisdiction now you can say well
i left from brazil i i went through the green card process i became a citizen i swore in as an
american and years later some posts on social media somehow is under the jurisdiction of brazil
or uk or any other kind of country.
So, you know, when it goes to freedom of, you know, and trying to comply with laws that are in some ways oscillating and changing depending on politics, that's really part of the issue. It's not only about tax exit or, you know, libertarian values and going to a jurisdiction where you're treated the best or at least better and less persecution uh it really is important to have you know the narrative of bitcoin not just be
the price not just the you know the threshold of a hundred thousand or a million or wherever it
hits in the future it is about the idea behind bitcoin which is freedom of transaction freedom
of speech rogers i'm digging into this i guess just trying to understand the brass tacks and i know that
you're not exactly aware of what it would look like as well but if you are not extra guided if
spain decides uh to keep you there what does that process look like is it just you're always waiting
for that to potentially change and in fear of coming back to the United States or the United States finding another way to bring you
back in? Or could you theoretically just, you know, remain outside the United States living
in Spain with this case hanging over your head in the US? Yeah, if Spain were to decide not to
extradite me that the case is just, you know, political lawfare from the last administration, I would have basically won at that point.
Like, that would be the end of it.
You said that hearing has been had. You're just waiting for an answer on that.
Yeah. And, you know, maybe that answer will come today.
It's 5 p.m., so we're getting towards the end of today. So maybe if not today, tomorrow.
Like, it's going to come any day now.
And if it's positive, great.
If not, then unfortunately, I'll be back in a Spanish prison on the way to the U.S.
But if you believe in truth and justice, I invite you head on over there to freerogernow.org.
Look at the motion to dismiss.
All the information is in there.
Anybody that takes the time to read it.
And if you don't want to read it all, toss it into, you know, chat GDP and ask for a summary or, or Google LM and ask it to make a
podcast out of it for you. Like it'll come to the same conclusion. Like I'm completely innocent of
what they're accusing me of. And this is just, you know, politically motivated nonsense from
the last administration who hated crypto. I look at how much the last administration hated crypto.
All of us here, you know, we're all into crypto. We know the Biden administration hated everything about crypto.
And so now there's a new administration.
There's a new sheriff in town.
It's time to end the warfare against all the people that are involved in crypto.
And so I think it would send a really powerful message to everybody.
If they drop these fake charges against me, it'll send the message that America is safe for crypto entrepreneurs again. Roger, what do you think the probability of
going to jail is? Well, I already went for a month. I think the possibility of being found
guilty of trial and going to jail is probably low, but going that far will take multiple years of my life and millions and millions or maybe tens of millions of dollars to do that.
It's not something that I would rather be building the tools that enable financial freedom through cryptocurrency for everybody rather than dealing with lawyers every day.
This is just life is short.
I'm 46 years old today.
I want my life back. I've been dealing with this already for
far too long, stuck in Spain for almost a year and dealing with the audit that was before this for,
I don't know, six or seven years. And again, my stance the entire time was,
whatever I owe, I will pay it. Just do the math and figure it out. If you think that my previous
accountants were wrong, show us where we're wrong and I will pay the difference. And to this day,
the IRS has never been able to do that because we did it to the will pay the difference. And to this day, the IRS has never been able to do
that because we did it to the best of our ability. And even in hindsight, it looks like we did it
right. So they're basically asking for roughly $50 million, correct? And so at no point in this
entire process, before charging you effectively, did they say, this is your liability, pay it?
Because it seems like there would be that gap there where
they would say, this is what we've come to in the audit, pay the money.
The short answer is no. The short answer is no. And in fact, when the indictment came,
we were stunned about any of the 2017 stuff at all, because I renounced in 2014.
I was no longer a US citizen in 2014, but they're claiming that I somehow owe
a bunch of tax for 2017 Bitcoins that I already paid tax on. The whole thing is... And my tax
accountants told me in writing, right? You're not a US citizen. You're not a US resident.
It's not taxable. Go and take a look at that motion to dismiss. It's all there.
And the whole thing is... Is there no culpability for your accountants?
They I mean, I do understand this works, but they come after you directly. Do they not go after the accounting firm that had a fiduciary duty to handle this for you or the lawyers that you were using?
None of that, because unless it would seem like unless they could prove that you were literally telling them to cheat, that it would actually be on them who prepared all
these documents and told you what you owed. Yeah. I'm not a lawyer or an accountant,
but my understanding is that there's this thing called reliance on counsel. And that's when you
hire a lawyer or you hire an accountant or hire a professional, you rely on their professional
advice. And if you follow their advice and you gave them all the information, there can be no
criminal intent whatsoever. And there is none in this case. I gave my accountants and lawyers all the information.
I followed their advice. And even in hindsight, their advice looks correct and just plain looks
like the IRS is lying. And I'm just sick of it and just wanted to all come to an end.
Right. Often in these crypto cases or cases in general, you see like mention of emails
or WhatsApp messages that, you know, they utilize with Binance, for example, you're effectively
saying there's none of that. There's no evidence that you told them, hey, you know, let's do this
in the cheapest way possible or that, you know, we're going to put these tokens, these Bitcoins
into these companies, you know companies for when I leave?
Do they have anything like that?
If you go and read the emails over on the motion to dismiss there, you'll see that I
literally told my accountants that I am 100% sure I am a target of the IRS.
I am 100% sure I'm going to be audited.
We have to do everything perfectly.
So there is no room for them to give me a hard time about any of this. So I literally instructed have to do everything perfectly. So there is no room for them to give me a hard
time about any of this. So I literally instructed them to do everything perfectly. And I instructed
them that multiple times over multiple years. So there's, there's, I just wanted to be left alone.
And yet the, the, you know, here's the political affairs continuing, but I think it's about to come
to an end under, under the new Trump, Donald Trump administration and presidency, because if
anybody knows what it's like to be a victim of lawfare,
it's President Trump.
Rand, do you have any more thoughts and questions?
It just seems like such an absurd...
No, I mean, I think that's...
Yeah, I mean, Raja, what can people listening do?
What do you want people to do?
I know I'm trying to get as much awareness for this as possible. What do you want people to do? I know I'm trying to get as much awareness for this as possible.
What do you want people to do?
What's the best thing?
Thank you.
I think probably the best thing you can do is head on over to freerojournow.org.
All the details are there, including a form where you can sign the petition and you can
even sign like an open letter to have all the charges dropped against me because it's
so clear.
If you spend the time and look into it, I, I'm 100% innocent of what's, uh, what I'm being accused of. And, uh, but what would,
how would that help? Like if we all signed the petition and we've got a hundred thousand
signatures in the petition, how does that help? I think it just shows that there's public awareness
of my situation, but again, I'm not the only one, but what I intend to do is when I get all this
behind me, I want to help the other people out there. I want to help the Ian Freemans and the Roman Storms and the Samurai Wallet guys.
And there's just so many people out there that have been the victim of lawfare from the previous administration that was so hostile to crypto.
We need to send the message to the world that America is safe for crypto under the new Donald Trump administration.
And you're not going to be terrorized like we were under the Biden administration.
And I want to be able to help with that. And I need your help to be able to help with that.
So I think that's the best I can do.
So your last question on my side, you've got a daughter, right?
No.
No.
You don't have kids?
Roger?
I would like to not talk about any personal life anything please so okay i was okay i just want to know if she's aware or he's aware if there were kids okay but no okay i understand
all right cool i think scott i think that's uh that's a wrap for that yeah i i i guess you know
i think everybody should take the time to go look into this. Regardless, I think, of your thoughts, I think it's very important to understand what Roger is saying here and what this could mean for himself and obviously for others.
And, you know, as you kind of talked about, I know that there's been controversy or polarization in the past, but this seems like one of those obvious times when
everybody should rally behind, you know, Roger as a human being, but also as an early advocate
and one of the first to really push us forward. I think it's fair to say that everyone can agree
that none of us would be where we are right now. Bitcoin wouldn't be where it is without his early
efforts and continued efforts.
So I think it's just very, very important that we do what we can to look deeper into this and to help.
Roger, I'm sorry that you're in that situation.
Thank you guys all very much for your help.
And again, I'm not the only one.
I'm just one of the people with a louder voice. But hopefully the new Trump administration can see exactly the crazy lawfare that was going on from
the Biden administration and put an end to it as quickly as possible.
Thank you, Roger. I know you have other important things to do, everybody. Just give us the website
one more time before we let you go, please. Yep. That's freerogernow.org. And actually,
there's a new 20-minute documentary that just got released today that I think people will find very compelling as well. So thank you all so much for the time today as
well. And that documentary is on your ex account as well, right? So everybody can give you a follow
and check it out there. Exactly. Thank you all very, very much. Thanks, Roger.
We're gonna keep chatting here for a couple minutes. Let Roger go. I you know, I would love
the Alex, Simon, Gary, you guys are up here. Just kind of your final thoughts after talking to Roger here.
I mean, Simon, you mentioned you were – go ahead.
I don't think of cryptocurrency, any form of cryptocurrency as a stock market. I don't think of it as a real estate market.
I don't think about anything other than the libertarian values that I think it was launched for.
So obviously, Roger has history in the origin story of the most popular cryptocurrency, which is Bitcoin.
But like this affects everything in the industry.
And there's a lot of issues that have been talked about on different panels,
whether it's the tornado cash or what's gray and undeclared as far as regulation,
as this industry chooses to thrive, both because of market forces as well as the political forces now supporting it through the Trump campaign. So anything that can help Roger, I think,
helps the industry across the board.
Alex?
Yeah, and I would love to share some more stories for, sorry, I'd love to share more stories based on what Simon said and I said back in the Tokyo days, which by the way, I saw that debate with you, Simon and Roger, which was very, very interesting when you were doing a lot of work with regards to Bank to the Future.
But, you know, for everyone who sees him or portrays him as a villain, because you came in maybe later, maybe 2018,
and you saw like Roger arguing with the Bitcoin Foundation,
creating Bitcoin Cash because he wasn't happy with the block size.
Once again, the origins are really, really important
because he was so vocal about Bitcoin and he was literally he gave out.
I don't know how many hundreds and hundreds of Bitcoins during the meetups back in the day when Bitcoin was maybe at a three or four hundred dollar, had a three hundred, four hundred dollar price tag.
And he did the coolest things to educate people on how to make them truly understand Bitcoin.
He would simply get people to
line up. He would make three to five queues. So maybe have like 10 people per queue. And what he
would do is he would give five Bitcoin in almost every single meetup once a week. You know, we're
talking about this across, you know, the entire year and was very, very active between 2016 to 2018.
And what he would do is simply say, imagine you have your phone and you're the first in
line across these 10 people.
He would say, I'm going to send you one Bitcoin.
I want you to keep 0.1 Bitcoin and send 0.9 Bitcoin to the next person in the queue.
And the next person in the queue keep 0.1 Bitcoin and send 0.9 Bitcoin to the next person in the queue. And the next person in the queue keep 0.1 Bitcoin
and send 0.8 Bitcoin. And his whole point was literally he was timing it with his watch,
I believe. He didn't even have it on his smartphone or maybe on a smartphone, but he would time it.
And then once both, you know, all the queues finished, you know, as a game, you would say,
who can send it the fastest, who scan each qr code as fast as
you can then he would just ask them now how long would these transactions take you with a bank
if you're using swift and what are the chances of that being censored and he would obviously
challenge the the broken not the broken out to'd say the legacy financial system, right? And that really converted
so many people, like so, so many people. And I have a more of a funny, one more anecdote for you
all listening out here. And this is more of a funny one. And I know there was, you know, back
then, because they call him Bitcoin Jesus, you know, Roger's a pretty good looking man. He's a
jujitsu, you know, he's quite
strong. He's alpha. So obviously you guys can imagine there were some women who were interested
in Roger to say the least. And there's something in Japan called GoCons. GoCons is essentially
like a group dating mechanism where girls and guys go out for dinner, have drinks and food,
and they're all single and they're trying to meet,
you know, and make their boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. Um, and there was speed dating. Yeah.
It's like, it's like speed dating, but it's like a group setting it up together, right? Speed dating
is more like you pay an organization and you swap tables, right? Yeah, I got it. I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to interrupt your important story. She was literally serving him and stuff like that. She was trying her best to get his interest, which he had no interest.
And one of the first lines he had when he started talking to her was,
by the way, have you ever heard of Bitcoin?
And I swear, guys, for at least, I would say, 25 to 30 minutes,
all he was doing is talking about how Bitcoin, how awesome Bitcoin was,
how important it is for financial freedom.
He got her to download a samurai wallet back then.
And that's about it.
That's all I want to share with you guys so that, you know, for those who maybe see him, you know, potentially as a supervillain because there was that friction with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core or the real Bitcoin as we claim it.
Prior to that, he did so many good things for the industry and for our communities.
Yeah, so I guess I'll just add this.
Look, in 2013, I lived in the UK and I became a director of the UK Digital Currency Association.
And it was just a bunch of us.
And one of our first things we did was sat on the table with HMRC to try and get clarification
on the tax treatment of Bitcoin.
And we were sat around the table with all the tax authorities and you know all the the
bitcoin community at the time um and uh you know they the answer they gave us was well it kind of
depends if you're if you're using it as currency it may be treated as a currency if you're mining
it then maybe that's income and it might be treated as income. And if you're holding it, uh, then it may be
treated as property and you may be a capital gains. Um, but you know, you kind of let us know
what you think it is. Um, and then we'll, uh, you know, and then you pay it, but if you get it wrong,
um, then lawyer up was kind of the outcome of it. And I, you left the uk not because i not because i wanted to leave
my country i just wanted to innovate in bitcoin and therefore the only safe place to do that
turned out to be you know hong kong at the time so i know i know and i remember very clearly
the the industry made a really best effort to try and figure this stuff out.
And the advice was awful. The guidance was completely unclear. And the reality is,
is because none of the tax authorities knew how to treat it and didn't know what to do.
And so, you know, because this was a 2014 case, I just remember very, very clearly what the industry was like at that time.
And the fact that, you know, I had to leave the country that I had no desire to leave simply because it was impossible to innovate back in those days without risking getting something wrong.
And so, you know,
that's what the industry was like. And again, I just want to kind of repeat what I said previously.
I'm on the I've been on the opposite side with, you know, Roger on the whole Bitcoin,
Bitcoin cash debate. But it's very important to separate that ideology
from what is actually happening here.
And so it would be a massive, massive injustice for Roger to spend the rest of his life in prison for, you know, really being an advocate for Bitcoin in the early days and really actually demonstrating to all of us in the end that there was really no way to fork or copy Bitcoin and Bitcoin become what it is today
because of that friction and because of that block war debate
and all of the challenges that we went through then.
So I just want to say,
I think most people are going to find it very hard
to separate those two things,
but I think you need to look deep within yourself
and kind of think what is wrong, what is right and make your decision from there
yeah i listen i think uh we're not uh necessarily lawyers and accountants on stage and it's
listen you know i don't think any of us understand deeply the the nuance of the case i'm getting tons
of messages from lawyers in the
background saying that there are emails from him very clearly to his lawyers saying, move these
coins here, move these coins there. What are the implications? And kind of forcing them against
their advice to, I won't say hide, but move coins around in a way that could have theoretically been, you know, more.
You guys get the idea. Right. So there may be something here.
The question is, would that possibly justify one hundred and ten or whatever he said in years in prison, especially if he's willing to pay?
Right. So I think that maybe with all these cases, the truth is blurred and lies somewhere in
between.
I don't think anyone in the world thinks that someone should go to jail for over 100 years
for evading taxes that they're willing to pay.
But maybe there is certainly something here that's not as clear cut as our conversation
had that should be answered for in a smaller manner.
It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out i mean i
think right now he seems like he has his hopes hinging on spain you know and i'm not extraditing
him and if he doesn't have to come back and face that music then uh there there won't be an issue
um but it's a really uh interesting and nuanced case uh but we're gonna we're gonna move on from
the end of that conversation i've got pg up here and uh
pg i know you didn't expect to necessarily uh come on to talk about poly trade which we've
had planned for a long time we do this pretty frequently on the day that roger vera was going
to be here but we're we're definitely still thrilled to have you man now hey just give us a
test you can hear me hi guys perfect awesome. Perfect. Awesome. Great. Yeah, we hear you. Great. So listen, obviously, we want to talk a bit about Polytrade, of which you are the CEO and founder, I believe. So can you just tell us, give us the TLDR on what it is and why it matters. You guys are obviously one of the larger projects in this space with one of the larger narratives, which is real world assets everybody's been hearing about
and being a marketplace for that. So very exciting timing for you to be building what you are.
Yeah, thanks, Scott. And thanks again for inviting me here. I think it's important to
understand how RWA's are shaping up. And we've been in this space for four years. And, you know, it's really interesting how, you know,
one small action by BlackRock a few months back
triggered the whole RWA space into the frenzy, right?
We believe that that was just one event which triggered RWAs.
And we are going to see a lot of such events coming our way.
Now, coming back to Polytrade, we, you know,
I started Polytrade in 2021 coming
from web to background you know doing trade finance um realized that there was so much
tokenization happening in the market but there was no distribution whatsoever everybody was
tokenizing everybody was trying to sell to retail institutions but there was literally no
common market marketplace or aggregated marketplace where people can come and buy and sell think of it like an open
sea you know there was this nft time when nobody knew these nfts and open sea came and suddenly
the whole paradigm of nfts changed exactly same as going through uh with rws today um i can talk
about more than 50 asset classes which are being tokenized by people but literally there is no sale
happening there is no sale happening there is
no one common place where somebody can go and identify what are various tokenized assets
polytrade has exactly stepped into the position where we are we are today listing more than 7000
assets across 50 protocols diversified across 11 chains our idea is very simple that if if we want to target retail
the retail should find a common place where they can buy and sell these tokenized assets
and we are still far from there scott you know there's still a lot of dominance from institutions
but we are seeing retail slowly increase you know steadily coming in so polytrade is uh you know 2025
uh polytrade is exactly uh where we want it to be but yeah that's that's the tldr on polytrade
uh we are we are in the business for four years brilliant team we are based out of Dubai uh
perfect place for us to you know bloom um regulators are supporting everything is great here
um so yeah happy to answer any questions around that
well i mean you're arguably the largest rwa aggregator is that the best way to describe it
there's no there's no one thing so what kind of assets largely yeah when you're when you say aggregator, what are the mechanics of that?
And, you know, what kind of assets are we talking about here?
So largely the market is, you know, currently centered around real estate, credit, private credit, as well as treasury bills.
You must be knowing Ondo.
Ondo is a classic example where, you know, tokenized treasury bills have been gaining a lot of momentum uh then lastly we have uh private credit markets uh centrifuge goldfinch maple which were the ogs in this space
and um now more innovative ideas such as green energy climate um you you can see a lot of
commodities being tokenized now you have gold silver uh brilliant players like paxos which are
which are actually quite big now
they are tokenizing gold and silver um we're seeing collectibles uh pokemon cards have been
you know since probably longest of the times um you know tokenized pokemon cards now we have
tokenized watches now we have tokenized green ev vehicles uh we are tokenizing um you know
solar power we are tokenizing bitcoin mining we are tokenizing solar power, we are tokenizing Bitcoin mining,
we are tokenizing
the AI
driven HBUs
and so much is happening in this space
that we
believe that the way
tokenization is growing, there will
be a lot more asset classes
which we use in our daily lives
will be available in web3 on blockchain
that makes perfect sense thank you for sort of explaining that i mean it seems like we're just
at the very very very beginning of what can happen with with this market and i do generally believe
that this is going to be one of the biggest narratives
of this cycle and moving forward. I mean, what do you think about the level of adoption that
we've seen so far in RWA space and where it's headed? Because we obviously had this kind of huge
awareness moment, I think, in 2024. And now, I think we're starting to see it actually bubble
fundamentally and build. So, you know, Scott, I would answer it in this way that, you know,
last one, one and a half year, we've been so much focusing on supply side. And typically,
you know, probably that's the right approach, making it an e-commerce kind of business.
You need to focus on supply side. Today have as you again said aggregated largest aggregated
marketplace today we have these 7 000 plus assets on our marketplace now 2025 we are just focusing
on one thing that is distribution um and you know i i would i would love to talk about exactly what
we are focusing on when we talk about distribution today um ai is literally something which is not a fancy thing it's it's
it's as good as a requirement today and the way i ai is expanding i'm in whole um you know cities
talking about deep seek and whatnot um we are building a very streamlined um ai agent network
for distributing each asset class out in the market.
So you will be seeing
a lot of agents in coming days
which will be selling specific RWAs
with category industry focus,
geography focus,
which will give you complete TLDR
exactly how these assets are tokenized,
what are beneath them,
how to redeem them,
how are they valued,
what are the nuances in web 2
you know whole nine yards around it and and i think that is one of the biggest problems of rw
adoption because people do not understand how what they are buying see if i tell you that there is a
apartment in in dubai which is being tokenized by some protocol naturally if you're sitting in
some other country you would have a million doubts about it
you know who who is holding that apartment on my behalf who is the custodian there who is going to
collect the rent who is going to sell it who is going to pay the property taxes blah blah blah
you know if there is a repair maintenance all those things are currently being missing from
the ecosystem and that's what exactly we are we are focusing on in 2025 bringing a lot of transparency bringing a
lot of data on chain and making these tokenized assets actually understandable so education is
currently being missing from the retail space and that is the large problem today with our AI
network with our AI agents we will be actually talking about specific pointers about each asset
each category,
so that users are more aware.
And then slowly and slowly,
we hope that adoption will kick in.
But that's our target for 2025, Scott.
Yeah, I'm reading more deeply
kind of as we go and listening to you.
Did I see that you're working with MasterCard
and some other huge name institutions like that?
I'm sorry, I lost you for a bit in the last, but yes.
Yeah, I was saying that I see you working with MasterCard
and some other large institutions.
How did that happen and what does that look like?
So, RWAs, you know, are, you know, always institution focus will be there.
We were part of the start path, you know, our, you know, always institution focus will be there. We were part of the start path,
you know,
so MasterCard runs this cohort in every year where they pick up around seven
startups from crypto AI space who are doing some great things.
We were lucky to be part of that,
you know,
cohort last year,
MasterCard chose us.
So we were winner of that cohort.
We came out as a winner and we were the only startup today where MasterCard has actually built a dApp for their Play Store
where Polytrade will be used by banks and institutional partners of MasterCard
to tokenize any assets and list them on the marketplace.
So that project has been done with MasterCard.
Now we are actually almost monthly basis go to various partner banks of MasterCard and, you know, display our product to them, tell them exactly how tokenization works, how fractionalization works, how can they actually tokenize their banking assets and bring them to retail use.
And, you know, there are so many things which we are working with MasterCard on that side.
So there is always an institutional game which is going on.
You know that Visa, MasterCardcard both are quite actively participating here they want to get share of the market in which they already hold in fiat world
they want to get the same capture in in crypto as well so um necessarily they have to be ahead
in the game and i'm glad that you know we are we are so closely working with mastercard on that
so mastercard is completely targeting institutional side of play here. Okay, so another question, obviously, you have this huge institutional play,
what plans you guys have to make this more accessible to retail or usable for the average
person? When does RWA become so you know, everybody who is participating in crypto and not just on the institution.
Yeah, I mean, we are the ones who are waiting for it most.
And as I said, adoption is something which will happen only when a retail understands what they are buying.
Unfortunately, Web3 is still very speculative in nature.
They want to buy and sell assets like cryptocurrencies,
which are probably promising them 100x returns.
But at the same time, you know,
the volatility is insane there.
RWAs are not like that.
If you're tokenizing a house,
if you're tokenizing a corporate debt,
if you're tokenizing a bond,
you know, you don't see that kind of volatility.
But then again, you, me personally,
almost everybody of us would be
participating in buying fixed income bonds or stock markets or commodities or um you know
currencies in web2 world all that is slowly creeping in web3 and as and as more infrastructure
is getting built around it you know the more uh i would say oracles are getting built so that the
price gets matched with actual stock price so today
if you want to buy a Tesla stock on chain you probably will not buy because you don't know the
information behind it who is the custodian where is this Tesla stock being you know hold on my
behalf what if I want to redeem it tomorrow what is the process is the price exactly matching the
price on the on the stock market all those issues still exist in in
rwa space and as we speak uh you know there are players who are continuously solving it and our
job will remain clearly to become the master distributor of these products so we are distributing
these products across um across the network we are going web 2 we are going web 3 we are using
ai network we are going social media channels telegram whatsapp you know everywhere our agents will be present and um you know talk about and distribute
these tokenized assets so retail is still yet to come uh scott no doubt about that but we are we
are trying our best and hopefully 2025 will give us you know some some numbers there
right and i know we're kind of running out of time i want to be respectful of that but there's also
the trade token right so that seemed like a more retail sided play i would imagine right so how
does that play into the ecosystem uh trade um you know typically any d5 protocol if you look at the
you know the underlying um the the token it captures the value in the protocol today
whatever capital we have raised so far
you know it's all attributed to basically through token holders and whatever profits we are making
we have already done three buybacks of our profits which have gone back to the community
in form of trade buyback so we continue to do that in future as we make more and more revenues
all our profits will be used to you know know, kind of purchase the trade token.
Other plans are such that,
you know,
we incentivize more and more users
to use trade as a currency
on the marketplace
to get more discounts.
We will be building
insurance pools
with, you know,
people sticking trade
so that they can give,
you know,
they can secure the product
underneath whatever,
you know,
they're buying real estate or they're buying, you know, any sort of asset. They can secure the product underneath. They're buying real estate or they're buying any sort of asset.
They can secure it using trade pools.
So yes, trade will continue to grow its utility as we see more trade in demand.
Okay, so finally, maybe you can share a success story or milestone
that showcases what you guys are doing or what impact you guys have made just to kind of, you know, bring it full circle and explain how it's actually, you know, helping in the real world.
I think, you know, success stories, I would say my favorite story is still MasterCard in because um the way the way we have worked with
them for last two years is great but i i would still like to focus on one thing that last year
uh more than 90 protocols across globe have partnered with us and they all understand that
you know it's it's the distribution business is something much bigger than an individual
manufacturer if you see how Amazon is Amazon today,
because it is accumulating all the assets at one place,
all our 90 plus partners understand this.
One of the biggest success stories I could tell you is that
when we are looking at these high yielding products
like Bitcoin mining or GPUs,
doing this whole sort of AI work.
I think these 30, 40, 50% APR opportunities,
which do not exist today in the crypto world,
will be big, mind-blowing opportunities
for people in the coming days.
So I think, you know, the innovativeness
around identifying these assets,
making sure that we can onboard them,
making sure that we are able to tokenize and fractionalize them.
And then there is a buying and selling market, a global market.
I think these are some key features which I'm really proud of.
And we look forward that each of these modules will keep growing from here.
So we got to wrap, obviously.
We're way over time here.
But where can everybody check you out?
You know, final thoughts? Where can they follow you participate how can thank you so much so yes uh everybody can uh find us on um on twitter uh you can you can know
exactly what's happening with the company what are our vision uh we are about to release our
roadmap for first quarter uh so yes you can look out all these things on our
politrade handle uh which politrade underscore fun and um you know you can join us telegram handles
and um please check out our marketplace because that's where the actual game is happening
uh so it's at app.politrade.politrade market.politrade.app my uh my bad
so you can go to our app and check out what are the tokenized assets,
how you can buy and sell them,
which currencies can you use to do that.
Once you buy it,
you can actually wrap it
and sell it again on the marketplace.
So check out these features,
be part of our leaderboard,
you know, get benefits in future.
And yeah, that's more like it.
Thank you so much, Scott, again,
for having me here
and talk about Polytrade.
Awesome, PG.
Really appreciate you taking the time.
I really do think that RWA
is going to finally explode in this cycle.
So I appreciate that you've been at this
for four years already.
Thank you so much.
Absolutely incredible.
So everybody, I encourage you to check them out.
Yeah.
And also, if any of you missed it or want to go back to the beginning, it really was an incredible conversation with Roger Ver today.
And I encourage you all to go check out.
Now, I can't remember.
Free Roger.
The website was there.
We'll share it.
My brain's not fully functioning today.
And keep up with everything that's happening for
him. Like I said, I don't really know the nuance of the case or tax law. And there could obviously
be something there. But I think it's also important that we recognize how powerful a voice
and force Roger was to bring us to where we are with Bitcoin and crypto. We really would not be here
without him. And that maybe 110 years for tax issues is a bit excessive. And maybe there's
something that we can do to help. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate it. We'll be back
with a more normal show tomorrow, of course. Thank you, everyone. See you tomorrow. Bye.