The Wolf Of All Streets - Institutional Money and Bitcoin with Richard Byworth, CEO of Diginex

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Richard Byworth is the CEO of Diginex, a multi-faceted crypto company paving the way for the largest players to enter the space. Before developing Diginex, Richard was a professional trader, focused heavily on derivatives in legacy markets. After reading "Sapiens" and becoming fascinated with Bitcoin, he decided to focus on developing institutional grade tools for crypto investors - leading to a listing of his company on the Nasdaq. Scott Melker and Richard Byworth further discuss the experience of trading derivative through the 2008 crash, acquiring Lehman Brothers, the “loser” talking about Bitcoin in 2009, moving to Hong Kong, suitcases full of cash in the streets, facilitating OTC deals, listing Diginex on the NASDAQ, the ICO craze in 2017, DeFi and Hotdog Coin, living in the Bitcoin echo chamber, “this time feels different,” your barber teaching you about Bitcoin, helicopter money and more. --- CHOICE IRA by KINGDOM TRUST Don’t be part of the 7.1M Bitcoiners who have bitcoin and a retirement account but don’t have bitcoin in their retirement account. With Choice IRA by Kingdom Trust you can hold bitcoin in your retirement account. The first 1,000 users to open a Choice IRA will receive $62.50 in free BTC - visit RetireWithChoice.com/WOLF to join the waitlist and secure free BTC. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- ELECTRONEUM Electroneum, has gained widespread adoption providing a mobile-first payment solution to the world's unbanked, attracting more than 4M users worldwide in less than three years. They have since launched a new freelance marketplace, AnyTask.com, which is providing thousands of freelancers the opportunity to sell their services to buyers globally, without the need of a bank account. Learn more at Electroneum.com. --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

I'd like to thank my sponsors, Voyager, Choice by Kingdom Trust, and Electroneum for making this episode possible. Stay tuned for more info on them later. What's up, everybody? This is Scott Melker, and I'm the host of the Wolf of All Streets podcast where twice a week we talk to your favorite personalities in Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, and anyone with a good story to tell. This show is powered by Blockworks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworksgroup.io. If you like the podcast, you follow me on Twitter, you absolutely need to check out my website. Enjoy my newsletter where I share all my trades, charts, analysis,

market thoughts, and lessons on improving your trading and investing. You can check that out at thewolfofdollstreets.io. Today's guest is the CEO of DigiNext, a multifaceted digital asset company bringing blockchain technology to the mainstream. I'm also very much honored to announce that DigiNext is the newest sponsor of this show, so I have to give a huge thank you to them for choosing to partner with us. Starting in traditional finance, Richard Byworth accumulated 20 years of experience in trading equities and derivatives. Now he's leveraging his past traditional market experience and fascination with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology to dominate a new disruptive front. I can't wait to hear his perspective because he has his hands kind of in everything in this

industry, which you'll hear. So Richard, it's a pleasure to have you. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. Scott, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I think I touched on it very briefly, but can you give us a bit, I guess, of a deeper dig into your background and how you got here? Sure. Yeah. Look, it was a long and winding road. As you mentioned, I was in finance for 20 years, started my career in trading in London. I moved out to Tokyo to run a distribution team for Nomura. Started building that team out, and then we acquired Lehman Brothers at the height of the crisis.

So that was a really interesting moment, trying to integrate, you know, the biggest, most aggressive American culture into the most domestic Japanese aggressive culture in Japan. And it was a very interesting time. It was actually about that time that I first heard about Bitcoin. So I was running the desk, distribution desk, so just integrated my team with the Lehman team for derivatives distribution. And there was a young grad on my team who was always approached by their head of IT and they were always chatting.

I was just trying to just get this guy off my desk so that we could carry on and do some business. And I was like, can you just get off my desk and stop talking about this stupid internet currency? And this is like in 2009. Oh, really, really early. Okay, yeah, okay. Yeah, both of those guys are retired now. I would imagine so. Yeah, obviously I should have paid attention

to what they were talking about. 2009, man, wow. Yeah. Anyway, 2009 end of, I moved to Hong Kong. I've been here ever since. So there I was again running distribution for Nomura. At that point, I started just accumulating businesses. So running derivatives, CBs, Delta One, Futures and Options,

and just broadening out what the team was offering, a very multi-product offering, and seeing how people really traded these products and interacted with them all, which really gave me a good base for what we built here at Diginex. It was beginning of 2017 that I read the book Sapiens. I'd been a bit disillusioned with what happened with Brexit. I was really just shocked with what was going on in the world, as I think many people were. Obviously, Trump had been elected in the US. That was kind of

shocking for everyone, even those who were supporting him. Yeah, I was going to say, even if you liked him, you were probably surprised. Exactly. So, yeah, I think it was a point where everybody was kind of questioning what was going on. This book was very impactful in terms of sort of explaining societal belief systems and particularly focused on money. Being in finance, I'd always had a big issue with where all this money was coming from, like where the printing was going to end up and how this wasn't just destroying our money. I'd been investing in gold for some time, but then reading that book,

I kind of started to really understand the, the, the quality of what had been designed in Bitcoin. And obviously the blockchain technology that underpinned it. And then I made my first investment in Bitcoin in 2017 and invested in Diginex as a startup cryptocurrency mining company. And then when I walked out of banking, the founder of Diginex asked me to come and help him design

what he saw as the future of investment banking in the digital asset space. So can you talk about what DigiNext is exactly? Because I know it's multifaceted, sort of as you touched on. It's interesting because I didn't know that you started as a mining company, you know, because it's so much more now. So can you talk about, you know, how that evolved and what it is now? Sure. So the founder was a banker like me. Um, we'd worked together at Nomura back in, in that period when we, we acquired Lehman. Um, and he'd been sort of running around in this space, building out the cryptocurrency

mining business. And he'd just been stunned by what was happening in the industry. I mean, people were running around Hong Kong literally with suitcases full of cash, facilitating Korean retail trades on an OTC basis. And he said, look, this is just never going to evolve into some industry where institutions can participate if this is the behavior. So really we started Diginex with this sort of mindset of we've got to replicate what we see in traditional finance. We have to build an infrastructure that allows institutions to have that comfort where they're not putting their reputation at risk, interacting with an organization that may not,

you know, actually do proper KYC and AML. So they could interact with terrorist financing. They could take on tainted Bitcoin into their organization. So really that was the premise. We actually sold the mining business into the hype of early 2018. Well played. Yeah, it was good.

And then, yeah, and then we really set about building what is the full infrastructure today. The center of it all is our exchange, ECWAS. And ECWAS launched just a few weeks ago. And today it's a spot exchange, but it's really just about building the infrastructure and architecture that will lead to much more efficient capital movement, portfolio margining, collateralization of positions around specifically derivatives. And so that's really the sort of the longer term goal of what we're doing. If you look at this space and you compare it to traditional finance, you know, FX is, you know, a market where derivatives are like a hundred times the spot market.

Yeah. Whereas today, you know, crypto derivatives are what like two to three times the spot market. And it's purely like perpetual swaps and of course yeah they're retail i mean they're they're totally retail products it's not yeah exactly so it's really hard well we just don't have the infrastructure yet to to start to see that now with things like backed coming along we are starting to see that and that's going to propagate that massive expansion but you know we've got 20 to 30x expansion from here in that market just to get anywhere close to where we see

traditional markets and derivatives so that's obviously a big focus of the core the core engine of diginex around it we've built a lot of of the ecosystem that we see as being really essential to the overall adoption of the asset class. So if we're thinking about that institutional adoption, one of the key things is, and I know true Bitcoiners will not love this viewpoint, but institutions need a viable third party custodian. Of course. They need one that they can trust. An institution can't put a few hundred million dollars on a ledger in a safe and hope for the best. I mean, it's just not reality.

Exactly right. So we've built a custodian out of our London office called DigiVault. So DigiVault was built by our CEO of DigiVault and his team. Rob is an ex-security specialist from the UK government. So he effectively ran a lot of their solutions builds. But he has designed a very solid, both hot and cold, custodian. We operate out of Global Vaults of Malcomit, one of the largest vault providers globally.

And it means that we can set up a vault anywhere in the world. But actually interesting for a lot of our clients, and I think in this time, again, when people are thinking about things like trade wars and asset confiscation and this sort of stuff, so many of our clients, American clients included, say, I don't want my assets stored in the U.S. So having a custodian that isn't in the U.S. Yeah, is actually a really big differentiator.

Why do they say that? I mean, what's the fear of being, is it a fear of regulation? Is it a fear of instability? I mean, you know, or that, you know, it'll be banned or off ramps, non-ramps will be banned. I mean, what is the fear there that the United States will negatively impact their holdings? I think it's obviously the U.S. is quite aggressive in tax policy, for starters. And I think the other thing is around confiscation potential, right? You've already seen in the last few years, central banks refusing to send gold to each other, right? So what happens if you have a vault that's controlled on U.S. territory. The implications are concerning, right?

It is concerning. And, you know, land of the free, home of the brave. It's not sort of what you think of, but it makes a lot of sense. And I often argue that the United States is effectively the worst country for crypto traders, investors to live. It's brutal. Yeah, I mean, look, we don't touch the US. We do not touch the US.

I mean, we're going to list on NASDAQ, but we don't touch US clients because it becomes extremely complicated. Now, we're going to go down that road eventually through licensing, but it takes time. You've looked at what Fidelity have done with Fidelity Digital Assets and that custody offering. They've got to go across 51 states and organize different currency regulation and licenses. Yeah, it's amazing how difficult it is because of that state-to-state sort of policy we've seen, you know, like Binance.us,

a retail exchange. But, you know, it's like July 4th or New Year's Eve every time they can add a new state. And imagine you're basically one country, but you're negotiating 50 different contracts and it's crazy. So I kind of interrupted you. So we talked about DigiVault. We talked about Equus, the exchange. So I know you also have an asset manager and an investment bank, correct? Yeah. So we have an asset manager called Bletchley Park Asset Management. So today, Bletchley Park is regulated out of Hong Kong under the advisory licenses and asset management licenses of the regulator here. And we operate a funder fund. So a funder fund, as I'm sure

you're aware, Scott, is we invest in other funds. So we came at this industry again, looking at it going, look, there's a lot of smart people in this industry, but they don't really understand how to structure a fund or set one up in a viable, investable way. You know, obviously everyone's doing self-custody. It comes back to that original point about institutions for third-party client money, making sure they have a viable third-party custodian, these sorts of rules and regulations. And so what we've done is we've gone across the industry, found some of the smartest managers and helped them get to the point of being investable in many cases and built a portfolio

across the industry that's focused on what we refer to as sort of very alpha-centric strategies. So things from long short to arbitrage to algorithmic trading, momentum strategies. So you actually help them sort of define what they are and how to then approach securing investment and marketing, basically the fund for people to understand that. No, generally they've come up with their own strategy. So they've found a way to make money in the industry. So we either, you know, we look at them and go, great strategy, but we can't invest in you. Right, I gotcha.

And this is how we can invest. Yeah, exactly. So these are the things you need to do. Then we can invest in you. And by the way, this is going to actually help you move from being a five to $10 million fund with your friends and family money into actually a fund that people can actually allocate capital to. Right. And so really expanding the industry and helping again, that institutional adoption, because, you know,. Because many of these players don't want to be sitting there trying to trade and work out how to trade Bitcoin.

They just want a nice alpha generating strategy in a very differentiated asset class, in a non-correlated asset class, which undoubtedly is. Right. So they want to take some idiosyncratic risk, but they don't want the responsibility for any of it, so they just want some exposure through someone they trust and a vehicle that they can understand, but they don't want to buy it, they don't want to sell it, they don't

want to hold it, basically. Exactly right. Exactly right, because it's complicated. It is so complicated. It's still the biggest, I mean, still to me, that's forget even institutionally, it's still the biggest, I mean, I still, to me, that's forget even institutionally, it's still the biggest barrier to mainstream adoption, in my opinion, is just the complexity of it. You hear people try to explain Bitcoin, it takes them like 10 minutes and you lose someone in like the first 30 seconds. And then you have to get into how you actually hold it and secure

it, which is a whole other, like be your own bank, you know? So you touched on earlier that I think this is just incredible and important that you guys are being listed on the NASDAQ. So could you talk about that a bit? Yeah, no, sure. I mean, look, it comes back to one of the biggest issues we see with the industry. And I talked about reputation for people. This is a big factor for all institutions. And so when you think about, and I've had this comment so many times in the last few weeks, I'm sure you've had the same. So many people asking about Bitcoin. What should I invest in?

You know, what, what, how do I allocate capital? And the big feedback that I've had for so long has been, I don't want to send my money to some exchange. I've never heard of. I don't know who the founders are. There's no transparency. You know, I want to invest a million dollars into

this asset class, but I'm definitely not sending a million dollars into somewhere in China. I have no idea what's going on. So I think, you know, obviously Quadriga, I'm not sure how many people even know about Quadriga that aren't in this industry. But, you know, that is exactly the example of what people hear about. And so, yeah, having that NASDAQ listing was something that we were always very focused on. We said that we just need that differentiation in terms of credibility and transparency that allows people to trust what we're doing here at Digenix. And so, yeah, we started doing here at Digenix. And so, yeah, we started the process in May last year. It's been quite a process. I can imagine.

We obviously, yeah, we had to get SEC approval and that was complicated. And I think obviously, once the SEC understood that we weren't operating any of these business lines in the U.S., I think that the comfort level increased quite dramatically. And so, yeah, we got to the point of SEC approval earlier this year. And so, yeah, looking at that listing very shortly. It's exciting because it gives people another way to be exposed to the industry without having to, again, buy, sell and custody Bitcoin. They can just, you know, invest in a company that's kind of, that's their core, you know, competency, but do it in a way that they're familiar with. I mean, isn't that really the value? So as much as it's valuable for you as a company, I think it's huge for the entire industry just to have one, you know, one person. I think it's a, it's a, it's the picks and shovels trade, right? That we always talk about investing in a new asset class. Um,

you know, is, is everything around the peripheral that's going to make money where the Bitcoin goes up or down. And that's the point is that ecosystem trade. Yeah, I think it's great for the industry. It brings us up to that level where people are like, oh, hang on a minute, you're seeing a company in this space listed on NASDAQ. I think it's secretive to everyone in the industry. That's for sure. Yeah. So it's interesting. You touched on the fact that Equus is launching with or has launched with a spot trading, obviously, but that the end goal I'm assuming is creative options, products and derivatives and stuff. You come from a derivative trading background. I think there's a lot of misconceptions in this industry about what derivatives really are

and how important they are and what their purpose is for making markets more efficient. Because like you touched on earlier, it's all perpetual swaps. We're talking about mostly 20-year-old something kids who are just, you know, gambling money around with 100x leverage. So can you talk about actually why it's so important and the purpose of options and derivatives? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, let's say you're a long-term Bitcoin holder, which I assume you probably are.

At this point, yeah. Yeah. So you're probably looking at Bitcoin here, what are we, $11,500 thereabouts, and you're saying, well, look, I'd definitely buy it at $7,000. Right? Well, you can actually go and sell puts today today or you would be able to sell puts if options were out there which effectively means that you go and buy that and you can do that

every month and get paid every month to have that limit order effectively in the market and this is the sort of portfolio management that you don't want to be sitting there in front of a screen every day trying to wait for 7,000 to come about. You just want to have a limit order in there and get paid to have that limit order there, which you do by selling someone downside protection in this market. And this is what we see in traditional finance. Like, you know, you have a core position and you do derivative overlay and underlay around it. And this optimizes your position. It puts you in a position where you really know where you're going to be.

You can manage risk. If suddenly something happens, you can make sure that you can knock out some futures very quickly, get decent liquidity, as opposed to actually trying to do a spot Bitcoin trade, which can obviously slow you down. And it means that you can have all your Bitcoin in cold storage where they're extremely safe. You can manage all around them to manage your risk. So another thing would be like,

look, I would sell Bitcoin here. I would sell Bitcoin at 30,000 all day long just to make a print. So you can just be selling calls every month at 30,000 strike and just keep rolling it and get paid to do so because you've got that core position. And if it actually gets up there,

then you sell a small part of your position. So actually for retail as well as institutions, there's a really nice portfolio management element to being able to use derivatives efficiently. And then you think, well, okay, if you sell a put, for example, then obviously, normally, you would have to post something against it. Imagine now that you're sitting in an ecosystem where Digivolt holds all your Bitcoin, you're selling a put on Equos, we're looking at

your Digivolt account and going, okay, he's got the collateral to deliver. So we don't actually have to take any margin off you. You've got this efficient portfolio margining within the ecosystem. I think that's the development that we're just not there yet. And yeah, we're going to see in the next six to 12 months really grow, obviously with our offering, but I'm sure we'll see it with others as well. The idea for me longer term is that you have this private bank situation and you touched on it before, we actually have an investment bank

and I'll go into that. But effectively what you have is you have this way of managing your assets in a single platform. And then with all that infrastructure, we've obviously already designed to support what we see as being the future of digital securities and the broader disruption of investment banking, leveraging blockchain tech. So, you know, Ethereum-based securities, for example, so ERC20, 1400, 1484, all those standards and delivering securities within that. So that's obviously further down the road in terms of regulatory capacity.

But we already run an advisory boutique investment bank today around securitization. So we do things like securitization of hard assets, LPs for private equity firms, etc., and then distribute them out to our client base. But we can also have, as well as distributing them in paper, we also have the flexibility to deliver those in digital form. So you deliver in digital, then the question for that investor is, okay, where's my marketplace? Where's my secondary price?

And then down the road, as Equos advances in different regulatory jurisdictions, then we can support that. Actually, DigiVault already fully supports all those ERC standards. We're in the process of getting regulated by the FCA, the UK regulator, for custody of digital securities. So it's advancing fast. Obviously, the opportunity set today around virtual currencies, as I said, is that model towards private banking and managing your own investments. But you imagine when you've got, you know, every security that you've ever traded sitting in that account as well,

you can use that all and manage your portfolio just so much more effectively. And obviously, you know, anytime you want to go and sell Google to your friend, you can do that peer-to-peer as well because you're managing it out of your own wallet. It's interesting. So, I mean, derivatives are really a way of stabilizing price by setting, you know, kind of a future standard of what the expectation is. It brings volume in and it allows people to hedge.

But like you touched on the most important thing that just kind of like when you talk about options or trading for dummies, you know, people don't realize that these things are used to trade around a core position. I talk about it all the time. Like I was just, I just shorted, had just shorted Bitcoin from $12,050 down to around $11,300. But I'm net long massively and always will be, right? But people freak out every time I mention that I shorted as if I'm like the devil and I'm betting against this asset. But they don't realize that it's actually, I want my short to go wrong, right? Yeah, no, exactly. Go ahead, blast off to $15, right? I want, yeah, no, exactly. Blast off to 15,000, let's go, you know?

Yeah, there's no denying this is a fun asset class to trade, right? So trade around your core position. You obviously want to be long, long term. So you have your core position, you trade around it with like a few percent of the portfolio. Why not?

Yeah, I think there's people that are just shorting because they can. And it's, you know, that's just not, that are just shorting because they can. And that's just really not the purpose of these products. So, interesting. Talking about the products, you sort of touched on it, but I know you're planning to roll all these things out. Is the decision on how to roll them out based on regulatory approval? Is it based on demand? What makes you decide, okay, tomorrow we're going to start six-month futures or whatever the next thing is?

Yeah, look, obviously, when you start to move into the derivative space, it comes with regulatory concerns. Obviously, spot Bitcoin is less concerning to regulators at this point in time. I think most regulators are getting to the point of being flexible with it. Derivatives in many jurisdictions comes under the securities and futures ordinance. Obviously, the US is one example of that, where all exchanges that offer those products have to be coming under the CFTC. Right.

I mean, the US is, as I said, it's complicated. You've just got so many regulators looking at different things. Even outside as i said it's complicated you just got so many regulators looking at different things even outside of crypto it's complicated yeah yeah no absolutely so i think you know there are ways around and it's just making sure that we tread extremely carefully with all of these products but we obviously want to help people manage their positions safeguard their positions and and do so in an efficient manner that's accretive overall to both retail and institutions. I mean, like a lot of the positioning of what we've built

is for institutional standards, but it's also improving the landscape for retail as well and making a much fairer, more transparent product. I i mean i'm sure you've seen the way that we see these leveraged products get liquidated uh march march 12th i mean march 12th basically you know bitcoin could have been sent to zero on certain exchanges because of inefficient inefficient liquidation yeah engines you know i think, I mean, my opinion was the first half of that drop was real. And the second half was completely a function of inefficient exchanges. Completely, completely. And also, you know, seeing, you know, we've got many of these exchanges that actually trade on their own exchanges

with, with the information of all the positioning of where the triggers are. Not very hard to sweep someone's stops if you know exactly where they are. Exactly. Right. So again, that's a different situation. At a certain point, there's no demand. At a certain point, there's no demand and you're firing liquidations into an empty order book.

Yeah. Yeah. So look, we have solutions around that. Our liquidation actually goes to market uh for for for the um for the liquidation itself so we offer that out to quite a quite a few market makers and then we obviously have our own insurance fund in the same way that a lot of these are structured as well um so yeah look i mean our view is that if we were marketing and making on our own exchange that is a significant conflict of interest when it comes to these

sorts of situations. But people know about it and they still trade there. I know. I know. But that's retail. Yeah. But I think everyone will start to understand that they really are not having their best interests looked after. And so once you have an alternative option, then you can actually start to migrate your business away. I mean, those are casinos, right? And the casino always wins. You sit down at a blackjack table and you know that every hand,

you know, the odds are against you because it's fixed. And you touched on this before. So what do you need to do? What do you need to offer to make it an institutional grade product? Because obviously, like, I mean, you know, we know that we're talking about BitMEX, like someone can't, an institution can't go safely, put a couple hundred million dollars on BitMEX and start trading perpetual swap. So what kind of infrastructure do you have to compel them to, to actually, you know, put their money on Equus and feel safe?

Well, I think one of the biggest problems is actually account infrastructure. So I'm sure you've heard of a guy called Nick Leeson, who nearly broke a bank in Singapore, trading and booking his own futures. Institutions need basic infrastructure that they have because of regulatory frameworks. Things like segregation of duty. You don't want your operations guy to be able to trade your book or your trader to be able to move balances around. You've got to make sure that you've got that segregation within a bank or a proper large size institutional hedge fund. You need to have a compliance function. You need to have an audit function.

You need to be able to have all of those access points that they can check with different levels of access. So we've built that whole infrastructure. If you onboard as an institution today, you're onboarding through that process. So you define each of the people you're onboarding, what their duty is within the organization. And then you can, you know, obviously on that basis, define what they do and don't get access to. So that's the starting point. Then obviously there's KYC and AML. Like you go to BlackRock today and go, Hey, do you want to trade on this exchange? Like, absolutely no way unless I have full understanding of their KYC and AML policy and how their KYC and AML policy was since they started, because there's probably still Bitcoin

sitting here from 2009 or whenever it was that they were incepted. So where did that Bitcoin come from? And again, that's obviously a big focus for us, making sure, A, that we've got a very clean KYC AML process, but B, any Bitcoin coming onto the platform is checked to make sure that it's not directly come from a hack or terrorist financing or whatever it might be that's going to cause an institution like that to say, I can't even go near this.

It's funny, though, because people think that Bitcoin is anonymous and you can't tell where it came from, but it's quite the opposite, right? I mean, what is your vetting process like to actually determine whether the Bitcoin is gray, brown, whatever, you know, the colors they assign to them, or that it's actually come from a reputable source or miner. Yeah, so we do chain analysis. So chain analysis on any Bitcoin coming into the ecosystem. And that really just allows you to sort of grade very quickly whether or not this is high risk. I mean, obviously, Bitcoin is broken into millions of Satoshi, right?

So you've got Bitcoin that could have come from all different places as they've been reassembled. So generally, a Bitcoin is given some sort of risk assessment weighting. Now, if that's showing up a big red, it generally means it's come directly or almost directly through a few wallets from a criminal transaction that has been identified. It's obviously what the FBI use when they're monitoring the dark web. It's the same platform. So chain analysis is obviously the tool that we use to make sure that you've got that cleanliness. Don't be a part of the 7.1 million Bitcoiners in the United States who have Bitcoin and a

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for $25 in free Bitcoin and start trading today. Hey guys, I want to take a moment to talk about our sponsor Electroneum and their amazing new platform, AnyTask.com, a place where freelancers can finally be paid for their work without needing a bank. Freelancers match directly with potential clients and receive ETN as payment. Even better, ETN can be spent in over 2,000 physical and online locations worldwide. A lot of companies talk the talk of mainstream adoption, but Electroneum is truly walking the walk. They're banking the unbanked worldwide and offering opportunity to those who lack access to the resources that many of us take for granted. In the next few months, they're also adding more in-app purchases, including local food and supplies, paid TV, gaming, gift cards, and much more. If you'd like to learn more, head on over to Electroneum.com. That's E-L-E-C-T-R-O-N-E-U-M.com. So how does OTC transactions play into this? Because I mean, obviously, retail traders hear of this mythical world of people spying and selling thousands and 10,000 and hundreds of

thousands of Bitcoin at a time. I've been down that rabbit hole trying to help people and it's impossible. I mean, it's impossible to get a transaction done. So, you know, when you're talking about institutions and you're talking about training at this level, you're talking about moving huge amounts, right? So what does that look like? Absolutely. I mean, I think that when we're talking about institutions of that scale,

we're very, very early in the sort of testing the water phase. And they're going to, you know, work with exchanges that they've onboarded to or that their broking firm can use. Right. So the obvious answer always is CME or potentially backed. Right. right what we want to see obviously is is going going down that road and bringing it into an exchange where they understand the proposition of what we're offering in that entire ecosystem approach from the portfolio margining side so i think um you know you talk about otc we've obviously seen a lot of these in fact we even as recently as two weeks ago, we were offered a seller of 850,000

Bitcoin. Like, wow. So like there's a lot of scams and people mucking around in this space. Um, yeah, it's a, it's a little bit of a waste of time. Generally the OTC market is, you know, it's a million, 2 million, 3 million here and there. I think it's better structured now too than years ago when everyone was sort of trying to like broker those deals and make huge money. Because now I think there are reliable desks and brokers that you can go through and know that there's actually a human being on the other side who's not trying to scam you. You just touched on backed in the CME.

It's interesting. A lot of people, and I've never heard anyone's like in your position's theory on it but a lot of people say that um the cme coming online was really sort of the death of bitcoin for a couple years because the all-time high in bitcoin price effectively almost to the day i believe coincided with the CME launch. I think it was CVOE. Maybe CVOE, right? In December, yeah. Yeah, launching and big money being able to short, basically.

Yeah, look, I mean, but that's efficient markets, right? And you get to a point where everybody's slowly starting to understand it. And I think that 2017 was way too early. Everyone had looked at what happened in the ICO space and was like, that had brought down the credibility of Bitcoin, right? Because if you're looking at Bitcoin as an institutional manager and you're going, actually, I'm going to present this to my investment committee today, and these are my arguments,

and this is my structure, and I'm going to make a good presentation, and then suddenly you've got this whole ICO nonsense going on where like every scammer on the planet is like, I'm going to do an ICO. Raising hundreds of millions of dollars for ideas that probably required like 300 grand. And you're like, okay, credibly, how am I going to sell this? And you're not going to go for it, right? So it just stops that whole adoption process. And then obviously anyone that doesn't understand is looking at going this whole thing is a scam. And just, you know, the future opens up for that institutional selling. I actually have similar concerns today around DeFi. I mean, we just...

I was just going to ask you about that. And like it... Yeah. In the last few days, I mean, even in the past week or two, I mean, I saw like four charts today of things that literally like dropped to zero in five minutes. Yeah. I mean, you know, we don't exit scams. We finally got to the point where Paul Tudle Jones is talking about this is the best inflation hedge there is buying Bitcoin. You've got micro strategy. There's, you know, big U.S. corporate going. We're going to allocate a significant proportion of our treasury balances to Bitcoin to hedge against inflation and what we see as a weakening dollar longer term. And then you've got suddenly all the clowns

come back and they're like trying to, you know, create all these new Ponzi schemes and scams around, you know, I don't know, yield farming, sushi and yams and potatoes and you're looking at it like, what the hell is going on? Like you say, going to zero in like four days is just just this is just losing credibility again right but what's so crazy about it to me listen i i think that the conceptually defy is brilliant i think it could be life-changing and one percent of those projects that are real are gonna you know make a significant impact but like in the ico craze at least we saw like a process

and then like a year of whether their github was dead or whatever of development now it's like on on crack it's happening in like four days like you see it conceived funded listed because you don't need an exchange anymore. You just go to Uniswap. And then it hits the real exchanges two weeks later. I mean, it's incredibly fast. I don't understand how it's even happening, to be quite honest with you, some of these things.

Some of them are brilliant. Don't get me wrong. But the one that went to zero is a hot dog. Hot dog. No, I'm with you. I think, unfortunately, decentralized finance has such an interesting future. And unfortunately, it's now getting tainted with this brush in that same way. I'm just hopeful that it doesn't spread through to the entire industry and to Bitcoin and people looking at that and saying,

Oh, I told you Bitcoin was all a big scam. So, you know, we're at a point of inflection, I feel now, with Bitcoin, where people are really waking up to the fact that central banks are really losing the reins of what they're doing with the money supply. And I think, you know, Bitcoin obviously is an extremely solid sound money and hedge against that. And so I think this is our time. How did you come to believe that? I actually read, I believe that you originally, you were on the other side, Bitcoin's kind of a scam. It's a joke and came around. Is that true? We all did. Yeah. It was like many people, I think,

you know, in, in 2009, I mentioned that those, those guys chatting on my desk about Bitcoin, I was like, guys, just stop with the nonsense. We, you know, we will trade some options. And, and yeah, then as I say,, early 2017, read Sapiens. I'd been questioning a lot of what was going on in the world, started looking at it. I didn't read the white paper until sometime later and really understand what we were looking at here. And the more I understood it, the more I was like,

oh, my God, this is just genius. And, um, yeah, like lots of people like, Oh, you know, why, why did he choose to be anonymous? Why, why did he deliver it in this way? And I was like, I'm questioning who he was to have delivered something this perfect. Like it really, it really makes me wonder. And so when you look at it, um, you know, just the whole, you know, let's keep it quiet at this point.

Let's, you know, build it so that it gets traction. You know, the whole approach, everything that was done was almost step-by-step perfect. So, yeah, look, it did definitely take me quite some time. And it was only actually when the whole of crypto started crashing in sort of late 2018 that I was like, right, okay, here's my opportunity. And started just windmilling into the market. By the fear, you can tell you're an experienced trader and investor

that you actually were getting interested when everyone else was panicking and selling. Yeah, I struggled to buy a lot of it in sort of 2017. Everyone's just like hype, hype, hype. And then when your Uber driver is telling you about Ripple, you know, it might be not time to buy, but time to be seeking the exit. So you obviously have been traveling in this circle for a very, very long time. You became much more aware. You believe in it. You decided to build products around it. But what do you think the general sentiment is, the people that you've been trading with and working with? Do you think that the institutional, a lot of them are really starting to come around?

Do you still think that you're like a small part of the few percent that actually get it and believe in it. Yeah, look, it's a really interesting question because obviously like you, I'm in this all day, every day, 18 hours that I'm awake, I am living, breathing this industry. And so you come out of it occasionally for air and you're like talking to people and they're like, what are you talking about? And you're like, what, what, like what are you talking about you're like what what how are you not up to speed with this and you talk to people and they're like uh yeah no i don't quite understand this bitcoin thing and and suddenly you realize just how early we are even

though it feels like everybody's talking about it because we're in our own echo chamber right so you know a lot of a lot of what I've done over the last two years is, is speak to people about it, speak to people that run institutional finance firms, um, and get them to the point of comfort so that they can start to put their toe in the water with, uh, with their own investment and then start to grow and represent the institution on that side as well. And I think more and more of this is coming. I had someone two weeks ago say, look, thank God you guys have built what you built because I've been wanting to invest in this space for ages,

and I just don't trust anyone to send my money to them. So finally, you've got a company that is regulated, that is going to be listed on NASDAQ and it's just a game changer. Have you seen more awareness in the past five or six months since there's been, I mean, you have to be living under a rock to not understand how insane the money printing and quantitative easing and central bank policy are as you touched on. So, I mean, are you hearing it more? Are people in your ear?

Like maybe this is a hedge, maybe this is real. Yeah, I did. Um, I did this thing where I, I, I taken myself off Facebook about three years ago, but I, I deactivated my account so that obviously I could just keep the network if I ever needed to get in touch with anyone. And so I thought, you know, just with what's been happening, certainly post COVID, I was like, look, I really actually now feel a responsibility to tell my friends about this properly. So I did this sort of mini campaign of my own personal Facebook, where I was just like, started talking about inflation, started talking about money printing, referencing sort of what happened in the eighties, um, runaway interest rates,

all these sorts of things. And then explain the dynamic of what's happening today and posted some chart. I mean, like once you see the charts of the money printing that we've done over the last three, four months, It's just mind blowing. You can't even fit it. You need like a new scale on the chart just to fit that. It's crazy. As we used to say in finance, it's off the chart. Because it is off the chart.

It's literally off the chart. So, yeah, I had a lot of people after that come on to me and say, look, how do we protect our money? How do we protect our savings? And you start talking about Bitcoin. It's interesting. The minute you start talking about people like that stupid internet money, the majority, but still you've got that small percentage. They're like, okay, tell me more. I want to understand this. And slowly,

I think it's all about responsibility to share with people what this asset is and how it can protect portfolios, how it can preserve savings, how it can properly value your time. And all of these fantastic attributes that people have missed, I think, just because, like you say, it takes 10 minutes to explain it properly. Give me the elevator pitch. Okay, well, it's internet money. Okay, right. Bored.

That's it. So I think it's really breaking down that wall. It's getting to the point of identifying the problem, right? And we've got a very big addressable problem right here and now, and that is your money is being inflated away. And why not think about having at least some allocation to the hardest money that's ever been invented? What do you think that your average person's allocation to that should be?

Or do you think it's a totally personal... I've thought about this a lot. And there's like Chamath who says 1% and there's people who say 5%. I thought about this a lot. And I think it actually depends on your asset base. Like if you're sort of not in a position where you've got a lot of investable capital, then probably, you know,

your allocation is going to end up a little bit larger. Let's say you've got $2,000. You probably want to put 25% of that into Bitcoin would be my recommendation. That said, if you're, you know, worth a hundred million dollars, I would probably say that the allocation is going to be a bit different somewhere between the one to 10 to even, I mean, like, yeah, I mean, okay. So here's an interesting question for you, Scott. So I give you $10 million today. How are you allocating it? It's hard today. Because, you, uh, you know, if you would say,

even if you had said a year ago, it would be a different answer six months ago, but, um, I certainly wouldn't buy a lot of stock right now. You wouldn't buy a lot of stock. I'd buy some land. I'd buy some gold. I'd buy a whole lot of Bitcoin. And, uh, I would buy a whole lot of, uh, USDC and try to get like a 9% or 10% yield on one of these T5 platforms. There you go. But yeah, it's a really interesting question because that answer has changed. And that goes back to what I was saying.

Like we're in this last four or five months, there's this sort of grand awakening of how nonsensical all of this is. But I'm not going to buy Tesla. A year ago, I would have said like, I don't want to put a million dollars in Tesla. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We've got to a point with investment where it's just like, you know, what is a safe store for my money?

And actually more and more Bitcoin becomes that answer. So it went from a one to 5% allocation to needs to be 2025. That's how it is for me. I was, I was never until six months ago, I preached so hard, like no more than 10% to people when they would talk to me and they would ask me, I would say, listen, like, you know, and then I break that down to what I'm, you know, that 15% I'm willing to trade with and whatever it's ballooned because of the market. And I'm just not reallocating.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, what are you going to do? Put your, what are you going to put your dollars in a savings account and get point, you know, two, 5%. I know like that's what started me getting interested in finance. Like I'd take my money down to a bank. I'd get more money next month. I'm like, this is amazing. Now, you know, you've got a situation where, I mean, my family live in Switzerland. You've got negative interest rates. We get charged 75 basis points for sitting cash in an account. So you cannot have cash. You just can't.

So people keep, you keep hearing sort of this idea and I keep presenting it that it feels like now, like your savings account is Bitcoin and you're walking around money is dollars. Go spend your dollars, buy everything you need, but your savings account is, is Bitcoin. And the thing is that's even true if the price drops, right? Because this isn't even about the price of Bitcoin.

It's about having that idiosyncratic risk that just to know that it might move differently than everything else if the world goes to complete shit, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. No, look, I mean, there's a good meme out there. One Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. Yeah. And yeah, look, every time the price goes down, it's just like, great, I can get more Bitcoin. Yeah. And yeah, look, every time the price goes down,

it's just like, great, I can get more Bitcoin. Yeah, that's where you end up. How much risk do you see of legitimate hyperinflation with the dollar? I mean, a Venezuela or a Lebanon or a, you know, Germany pre-World War II sort of, you know, piles of cash in a suitcase to buy bread situation. Do you think that that's possible with the U.S. dollar?

I think the dollar would be the last currency. Yeah, I mean, it's the reserve. Yeah, so like you've got so much debt denominated in dollar, you've got so many obligations that need to be paid in dollars. Obviously taxes, but predominantly debt. I think that always creates the demand for dollar. You know, obviously, at some point, it becomes too much. But I mean, the Fed is not stupid. They know how to control things probably the best of any central bank globally. And I think that they are obviously very concerned

about making sure they've got that balancing act, right? You've got Kashkari going on and saying there's infinite dollars. And then, you know, that's the point he needed to say that so people stop panicking. And then I think, you know, they slowly start to say that so people stop panicking and then i think you know they slowly start to hold that back but yeah i think anytime you get close to it that's determined demand but but you know the infinite dollars it's it's a great uh talking point but that's you know it means that they're willing to lend infinitely to a bank which means that people need to really want

to borrow and people banks seem terrified to lend and people seem terrified to borrow to some degree. So yeah, I don't think that we see that sort of like a Mad Max dystopian future scenario that would come with a hyper inflated dollar, but it's scary to hear them talking about walking back policy that they've had for decades, you know, about inflation. I think the biggest risk is what's referred to often as helicopter money. The current QE is, yeah, like it's controlled, like you said, it's a lending based printing effectively. Whereas helicopter money effectively, when you start just distributing money to everybody, that's where obviously dollars really start to lose their value because everybody's just like, oh, great, I've got all these dollars, you know, spend them.

Hang on a minute, do I want to give you that for the same amount of dollars anymore with that many more out there? And that's when you start getting to that point. I think when you talk about Germany and Weimar inflation, you know, obviously that was, it was interesting to read about what happened in that environment where people just sat there going, oh, you know, shopping is getting more expensive or housing is getting more expensive. And you're sitting there thinking everything's getting more expensive. It's like, no, your money's getting cheaper, more valueless. And I think that that's often the problematic realization. This is something I've been looking at since 2008, which first started getting me buying gold and these sort

of store of value assets. Because you watch things like holidays, school fees, everything getting so much ridiculously more expensive every year. They're like, CPI is just not representative of what is going on here. $10,000 today doesn't cover nearly as much as $10,000 did in 2008. We've already seen quite rampant inflation. Sure, they've managed to keep prices low of the core basket of CPI, but that's an illusion. So how much similarity do you see?

Because obviously you sort of came into this industry, you were there, but in 2008, you're talking about when you really got interested in hard money, hedges, gold, how much similarity do you see? How much of a repeat of the past are we seeing in 2020 from 2008? Did we learn anything? Well, I mean, we're far more out of control now in terms of printing than we ever were in 2008. As you think about that, right, it's a global financial crisis. The U.S. was trying to save the biggest banks.

People went nuts when they tried to bail out banks. And this is so much more egregious. And it's the same people that went nuts who are supporting it this time. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Look, it's of a factor of like 10 of what we saw in the global financial crisis. So, you know, it's, it just begs the question, you know, why, why did we do this to our economy, where there would have been such an easier way to potentially deal with it? But that's a, that's a whole different conversation. It's a good one, though. How, so how much do you think that, I mean, we're talking about the irresponsibility, obviously, of central banks and their policy. They're coming to digital currency, right?

I mean, we already see their testing. I mean, they're testing the yuan, the digital euro. We're seeing it all over the world. Literally, even the United States now has a task force under the Fed to test the digital dollar. So assuming paper money will be eradicated, which is just the natural evolution, I believe, you know, for superior money, how much do you think that central bank digital currencies will affect the cryptocurrency market? Because they're different.

Oh, yeah. I think central bank digital currencies will only be good for cryptocurrencies because all you're doing is just tokenizing a fiat currency and, you know, using it within your infrastructure. I think then people get much more comfortable with that problem than we talked about before. How do you deal with it? How do you deal with your wallet, your custody, etc.? So the thing that this will propagate is really the adoption of knowledge around how to deal with this. And I think more and more people will go, okay, what is that Bitcoin thing? And start to question it a lot more. Obviously, more and more people from a credible point of view are taking

an interest in Bitcoin. I think that is now really hitting the next snowball for the next phase of adoption. So I think central bank digital currency will just raise the education curve. So we won't have to go through that whole process of set up your wallet. This is how you do it. Everyone's going to have one. You'll just know how to transact digitally. Exactly. And it will become a normal way of doing things. When I talk to my kids, I mean, my son's nearly 10. The idea of Bitcoin for him is totally normal. I mean, he loves playing Fortnite. So using V-Bucks, he's like, Daddy, can I get some more V-Bucks? And then we end up in a nice debate about what V-Bucks are, et cetera. But the point is that he's got used to transacting in this way

and I think this will just, as I say, speed up the adoption curve for everybody else rather than just that younger generation. I think there are very concerning things about central bank digital currencies, obviously. Privacy. Privacy, control, right? It's like you look at, you know, what China did when they, you know,

if someone's being antisocial, you're not allowed to travel for six months. They cut you off from public transport. You know, what does that mean when they control all money? It's like how do they punish you then? And it's not just going to be China. It's like anyone that has control of money ends up going down this sort of route. So I think it's very concerning.

And then when you talk about Switzerland having negative interest rates, well, then you don't need a bank account and they can tax you with negative interest rates in any wallet you hold cash in. Just take it right out. Yeah. The idea of like saying, you know what, I'm tired of paying 75 basis points. I'm going to store a load of cash in my wardrobe.

No chance. You can't do that anymore. There was actually an IMF paper, I think it was about a year and a half ago, talking about how with the advent of digital currencies, they will be able to implement negative rates on a much broader, uh, sway of people. Makes sense. I mean,

it's there in plain sight, right? This is the strategy. One argument I've never heard. I actually never have even considered that, which is strange because I've had this conversation probably 20 times, but that's true. You want your taxes, you want your basis points,

just take it right out of your digital wallet and you can't hide it. There's no cash. I'm sure they'll find creative ways for people to mix and hide their digital currencies at some point, but, uh, Oh, Bitcoin will be one, right? So do you, you know, we hear this kind of idea that uh bitcoin is digital gold correlated to metals and stuff i always sort of make the make the argument that it's actually

more of an inverse correlation to the dollar like and that you know we're seeing more like dollar weakness equals bitcoin strength i wonder if you have thoughts on that yeah i i mean i think what's interesting about bitcoin is obviously you have thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting about Bitcoin is obviously you have this finite resource, so this finite amount of something that everybody is starting to attribute value to. So obviously scarcity is only interesting when it's something scarce that people want.

And so now we're getting to that point where you've got that scarcity level. I think, obviously, to your point, when we talk about the devaluation of dollar, then you're going to a store of value and that is a natural space to go and store your money. But I think there's another element of it that Satoshi sort of gamed into the whole thing and that's the the game theory of of the price of Bitcoin actually going up and so and starting to create that that FOMO element where you know someone like yourself you've been sitting there accumulating Bitcoin over the last two three years you're kind of relaxed it's going up gently gently when. When it starts ripping, you're like, hang on a minute. I don't have enough Bitcoin.

And then that becomes such a driver for people like you and obviously the new adopters. Like, oh my God, you know, I've got to chase this. And so you have that number go up kind of game theory element to it. Stocks only go up, right? Yeah, but obviously that leads to peaks and troughs. kind of game theory element to it. Stocks only go up, right? Yeah. But obviously that leads to peaks and troughs, but it's an important part of the adoption cycle.

So I think yes to your question, later in a more mature Bitcoin, we will start to see that decorrelation from the dollar and it will behave very similarly to gold. But right now we're just at a massive adoption curve. that de-correlation from the dollar. And it will behave very similarly to gold. But right now we're just at a massive adoption curve. So you get those sort of massive peaks and troughs as that number go up theory really starts to play out. It's really interesting.

We saw it a little bit. I mean, we experienced it in 2017, right? And now it's like we're doing it without that retail FOMO and we're still at those same prices. Three years later, we're sitting at 11,000 bitcoin has not spent much time above 11,000 that all happened in like a month or two so it's really encouraging to see that you're not you know the guy who cuts your hair isn't telling you to buy bitcoin right yeah you know so clearly there's something this is it i know there's no more dangerous words than this time it's different but this time it actually does somewhat feel different yeah

it feels a little different i think you know like like we kind of touched on you've got people that are um savvy around investing their capital that are looking at what's happening with the Fed, with central banks across the world, not just the Fed, and saying, okay, I need stores of value. And they're looking at gold. And then they're obviously seeing, you know, people like Paul Tudor Jones turning around and going, actually, Bitcoin is the best store of value. And I think that is just so important.

And then you've got, obviously, the micro strategy approach with the corporate treasury. It's huge. Absolutely huge. So I think, actually, we are looking at the beginning of a new adoption cycle. It might not be your hairdresser at this point in time, but it's certainly every person in finances who has some sort of basic understanding of what's going on in M2 supply is saying, hang on a minute, I need to look at this properly.

Right. But it's so small. I mean, the big money is still to some degree can't enter, right? I mean, it's just like the market cap's not high enough, the price isn't high enough. There's just not enough there, right? Not enough meat on the bone for them to even come in. So if we get that sort of rise, shouldn't we see it go absolutely parabolic when it's actually big enough for the huge money to come in? Yeah, look, I think absolutely. There were a series of charts or one particular chart during the round talking about time to the next bull rally post a halving and expanding out.

And someone was making the case that if, you know, because you need more money to send it higher, those curves are going to get more and more distance. And I'm like, well, actually, I don't think that's right. Because what you're seeing is much bigger money, to your point, starting to enter the space. and so the amount of money coming in actually will at least pull that that uh curve to a much more normalized curve obviously the first two halvings were kind of so early you know so early that the price could move on on on

very little now obviously we're getting to a point of adoption with those curves that I think you're going to see much more of a normalization of the curves. But I think, yeah, to your point, big money needs the market cap to be bigger. And then that is self-perpetuating. What's so interesting, you just kind of talked about it, but the first two halvings and every event that's ever happened in Bitcoin in

the past, the existence of the word or idea of backed would move price massively, right? Any news in this space would move price. And now it's like news that's much bigger than any of those stories were two or three years ago doesn't even land at at all right i mean and because we see it every single day occ says the united states can you know banks can custody bitcoin in the same week paypal and venmo are coming in the same week square and cash app are doing the bulk of their business it doesn't even move price anymore so like now it's we I mean, yeah, this time it's different. Exactly. No, I think we're now at a point where that big money is sitting there on the sideline. You're not forced into a trade if it's not moving.

So once we start to see that movement, then it forces people. Hang on a minute. We've been talking about having a portion of our treasury to Bitcoin ever since the micro strategy news. Now it's moving. We need to act. And that will start to really push things. So I think it's just a matter of time.

Are there other coins that you're personally interested in? Are you a Bitcoin max? I hate to use the term maximus, but is Bitcoin in for you? You think that's our one shot? Or are you, you know, interested in all coins? No, I'm very interested in all coins. I think that, you know, Bitcoin has a particular usage and for that,

Bitcoin will always win. Right. It's like, it's that store of values, the digital gold. No, no one, I believe at this point is taking that off Bitcoin. I'm what I think I would refer to as a Bitcoin centrist. I very strongly believe in Bitcoin, but I also believe that the other protocols have a lot to offer. I mean, obviously, we have an investment bank that is positioned to obviously really grow the digital security industry. And I think that's an entirely different use case.

I think Ethereum is obviously extremely interesting. It's already proved out a number of times that it has a use case. It is a viable protocol. And then you've got others like Polkadot coming along very recently. I think this is extremely interesting. And, you know, again, when we come back to what we do at Diginex, and particularly around the exchange Equos, you know, we want to provide a sort of a standard of governance around listing of tokens

that, again, is differentiated that protects investors that you know oh it's listed on a cross i know that that's not a scam right so you actually have a level of due diligence so we're going to be having quite a thorough process around listing um of what we list on the. And obviously that will be combined with what we see as being viable use cases, be it a smart contract delivery platform or a particular interesting utility. But I think that there is a lot of value in this ecosystem. This technology is yet to be properly proved out other than what's happening in Bitcoin.

And I think that's why you get these Bitcoin maximists that are like, well, the only true working version of blockchain is Bitcoin. And yeah, there's a strong argument to that, but there's certainly no reason not to explore the innovation that's being achieved with something like Ethereum. And obviously, we talked about DeFi earlier. There are some really interesting things happening in this space and forgetting sushi swaps and hot dogs for the moment. Yeah, I mean, Yearn is cool. Some of them are really cool. I mean, you can, I mean, you know, and that is, those things are very bullish for Ethereum in general, sort of, as you said, I mean, hey, now you can stake it. so you're reducing the supply and getting yield but where that yield comes from i guess could be a mystery we'll see but then but there are i mean ethereum

also is struggling with this new boom i mean i don't know if you've uh participated at all or experienced any of the gas fees or the slow transaction times but it's becoming a bit absurd yeah we're uh we're having to top up our gas fees on the exchange quite regularly. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty crazy. But I think there are so many interesting projects. And I think you nailed it, which is that, you know, Bitcoin is what it is. And that's untouchable. But there's so much more, you know, interesting technology and use cases for blockchain. blockchain that can be tokenized. I just don't see the reason to be married to one

or be a hardcore community member and not look at the other projects because there's so many and so many of them are going to make, even if you don't care, they're going to make people so much money. Yeah, I mean, you think about the talent that's in this industry now. Like, yeah, some of the greatest minds in tech and finance are moving into this space. I mean, I had a pretty big checkbook to hire people at Nomura. I couldn't hire anywhere near the level of talent that I've hired into DigiNate because people want to be in this industry. They want to be a part of it. And yeah,

we've got some exceptional people in the organization, but it's not just us. I mean, this industry is populated with some very talented, very smart people. And what I always say is, when you put smart people on a problem, they're going to work out a really great solution, an innovative solution. It just feels like we're at the beginning of an entirely new boom in finance. And yeah, it's just the possibility is huge. So shutting yourself off and just saying it's Bitcoin only, I think that's kind of a limiting mindset. I legitimately can't sleep at night anymore because it's become so exciting.

Really, I mean, I have trouble. Like it's, it just feels like it's at this crazy inflection point. So, yeah. So, you know, I know we're getting kind of up against it here. So I guess, can you give me the top line? What does the future look like for you guys? You know, six months out, a year out, five years out, what should we be looking at from, for, or from, year out, five years out, what should we be looking at from DigiNext and what can we be excited about? Yeah, look, I think it's really about that expansion of offering around the derivative product and making sure that people have options, not just options literally, but options to manage their portfolio, right? And then really paving the way for this future that we see that disrupts investment banking entirely around digital securities and be those smart contracts

listed on Ethereum or Polkadot or whatever the smart contract protocol may be. I think it's just, obviously, as you say, it's an extremely exciting time. We're getting closer. And I think the advent of digital securities will be transformative for the investment world. It's very, very exciting. Love it. So where can everybody keep up with you after this, follow DigiNext, you know, and sure that they they know what's what's coming next sure so we have the group level uh twitter account is uh is at diginex global uh all one word um we have the exchange account at equos underscore io and you can follow me as well on Twitter. I'm at Richard Byworth or one word, um, B Y W O R T H. So, you know, that's, that's everything we're on LinkedIn as well. Um,

but, uh, obviously that's sort of tilting towards the more traditional space. And you got me pumped. I just like, I, I, honestly I feel like this is the best job in the world. You might have the best job in the world, but, um, you know, that, that like getting to talk to people because it just, this is why I won't sleep tonight. Right. Because I'm just going to be excited and my wheels are going to be spinning and I'll be thinking about what we can do tomorrow. But, uh, I really do appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time. And, uh, just, just really excited, man. Very

inspiring. So thank you very much. Great. Thank you, just really excited, man. Very inspiring. So thank you very much. Great. Thank you, Scott. It's been an absolute pleasure. Great chat. Very enjoyable. A lot of ground covered.

Thank you. Yeah, we really went there. Yeah, we did.