The Wolf Of All Streets - Ruben Merre, CEO of NGRAVE on the Future of Security and Fixing Crypto’s Greatest Vulnerabilities

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

Ruben Merre, CEO and Co-Founder of NGRAVE has recognized a dire need for people to safely protect their cryptocurrency. Stemming from a passion to help people and prevent million dollar hacks like the ones his team has experienced in the past, NGRAVE has set out to correct the shortcomings of human error and fallibility. Scott Melker and Ruben Merre further discuss what it is like to lose millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency, demystifying the private key, the emotional journey of launching a business against all odds, and Bitcoin’s unique value thesis. --- 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 --- 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

What's up, everybody? This is your host, Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Every week, I'm talking to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, and basically anyone else with an interesting story to tell. So sit down, strap in, and get ready, because we're going deep. Today's episode is brought to you by Choice, by Kingdom Trust, and Voyager. We'll learn more about them later on in the episode. This podcast is powered by BlockWorks Group, the only events and podcast production company I trust. For access to the premier digital asset conferences and in-depth podcast content, visit them at blockworksgroup.io.

I promise you will not be disappointed. Today's guest is a jack of all trades, having started his first business when he was only eight years old. He's lived all over the world and speaks six languages, which I think is about five and a half more than the average American. He has multiple postgraduate degrees, composes and plays music, and is a trader. So definitely a man after my own heart, since he sounds very familiar. He also has a host of other talents. Most importantly, he's the co-founder and the CEO of Engrave, which is arguably the future of hardware wallets. I'm really psyched to welcome Ruben to the show. Thanks for being here, man. Thank you for having me, Scott.

So let's get right into it and talk about hardware wallets and security in general. I've always believed that it's one of the main barriers to entry for mainstream adoption. People find wallets confusing. They don't understand why they need them. They don't really understand security. So how are you improving on the whole concept with Engrave? Yeah. So I think the first thing that really differentiates us from all the other ones is that most of these players take a very focal view on security, meaning that they say, we build a hardware wallet. It's a secure hardware wallet, so it's security.

But we actually believe that a secure exchange is not security. A secure hardware wallet is not security. Security has to be an end-to-end story where you actually think about every what-if along the way of the user journey, and you find an answer to that. And so what we did is we basically analyzed the whole user journey from I create my private keys up until the point where I basically pass away, and my family needs to get access to my private keys. And we left no stone unturned in an entire journey. And we tried

to fix not only the security, but also the user experience. So what were the gaping holes with the existing hardware wallets and the other products? What holes did you see that you thought needed to be filled? Yeah, so the first hole for us was what is actually the root cause of all these hacks that are taking place in this space since basically the beginnings. And still today, we're actually breaking records every year in terms of number of crypto stone. And for us, we looked at every problem has a root cause. So what is the root cause of this? And it was the one thing that actually makes blockchain so secure, that apparently also is its biggest healer skill, and it's the cryptography itself.

It all comes down to one simple concept the private key um the one who owns your private key has access to your funds and so what we saw was these private keys are made online or they're they're managed online and and basically private keys are completely mismanaged in any way you can think of and for us we call we try to we like to work with metaphors and we we call it the box of Pandora of crypto. For us, when you open the box, it's the same as making an online connection. That's when hackers can try out their entire toolbox and they can try to find your private key. So what we decided there and then, in the very beginning of Engrave, was we have to go offline.

And not just a little bit, we have to go offline completely. If you do that, there are no longer attack factors hackers cannot make any connection to your place where you have your private keys and then you can actually talk about real security so the person would technically have to be in the room with you to even have a chance at hacking your Engrave exactly okay and so what are the approaches that you've taken that make you guys unique? Yeah. So the first thing we did was we completely air-gapped the device. So we removed a lot of residual tech factors, such as basically using USB to do transactions or do it over Bluetooth or any other kind of network connection. So we remove all that. We basically

built an air gap solution where hackers simply can never make a connection to your device and therefore they can never steal your private keys from a remote location. So I know that one of the big issues with hardware wallets in the past, and it's not necessarily the wallet, I guess it's the user, it's person losing their keys or just, I mean, human fallibility obviously is a huge issue. We know so many people have lost their crypto because they just didn't know how to manage it. So how do you account for that human fallibility and error? The human fallibility? Well, the way we see it is that

user experience is actually a level of security. Because if the thing can be as secure as it gets, maybe you can never get the private keys out of there. But if you thing can be as secure as it gets, maybe you can never get the private keys out of there. But if you can make mistakes as a user in the process, you can basically mess everything up. So for us, usability is one dimension of security. And that's why we also really focused a lot, if not obsessed about customer experience. And so our solution, we made it as simple and intuitive as it could be. So we basically had all these users testing it, giving us feedback. We made it simpler.

New users came in. They said, maybe this can be even easier, up until the point that it becomes as simple as your coins are always one tap away. I think what's really, for example, if you look at the existing wallets, is they let you install apps for every single cryptocurrency you want to support. Whereas you just go to your dashboard, you swipe and you say, I want this coin, I want that coin, you tap on them. And a second later, they're actually in your dashboard.

That's one of the most annoying things in the world, I can say, definitely with a ledger. I've had that experience, especially if you're new to it, it only fits a certain amount of wallet so you actually have to like delete your wallet and re-add another wallet and go through all these processes and each time you have that thought in the back of your mind like uh am i deleting my coins or am i just removing the actual inner you know wallet from the interface so that's uh really interesting you touched on earlier what if you what if you die? Yeah, exactly. So for us, the questions start obviously from, let's say the hardware wallets today, they are decent. But what happens if you

lose your hardware wallets? They give you a piece of paper. That's what they all do. Sometimes they give you already a metal solution, or let's say there are a couple of metal solutions in the market. So there are at least two points of vulnerability. The first one is they're not durable. Paper wallets, you spill water on them, your keys are gone forever. It's not really a good practice. The second thing is that these existing metal wallets, they all have the same problem, which is they are a single point of failure

or let's say the Scrabble tile inside of it. And if I find it, I know what your key is. So what you sometimes can do with the words is you can cut them in two, cut them in four, maybe in 10. But if I find a piece of that, I will actually find information on your key. And I only have to brute force the other part. And with our solution, we basically said,

we need to find a way to completely obliterate the full key into, let's say, two parts that have no information at all if somebody finds either of them. And that's what we did with what we call the graphene. So we have an hardware wallet called Xero. We also have a backup called Engraved Graphene. And you can see it as a stainless steel solution that withstands house fires, floods, whatever you want. But if somebody finds it, they find nothing

because it's basically a cryptographic encrypted puzzle. Oh, that's awesome. So it's kind of like two pieces that fit together. So you need to have both pieces. Is that basically what it is? Is that accurate? Yeah, exactly. So the way you can see it,

after you basically bring your key from the zero onto the two plates with a special pen that is able to make holes in your two plates without even having to exert any power. You get two plates that have holes and holes and holes, but they don't mean anything unless you put them on top of each other and then you suddenly see magically the key appearing and that is your backup in case you lose your wallet you buy a new zero you buy another wallet and you take those keys you take the keys you type it in and every wallet you ever had will be restored sorry wow that's so cool what's the importance i guess for your average user of a hardware wallet in general what do you say to people who think that their coins are safe on an exchange or somewhere else that they might store them? Yeah, so there it's really important to understand how important the private key is and also what it actually does. So the private key is the one single thing that gives you access to the funds that you are supposedly on, right? So you have a public key that is your address,

you have a private key that is your password to whichever is on the address. So if you have a Bitcoin wallet, it's a Bitcoin public key, you will have a Bitcoin private key. And it's anybody who has access to that key has access to the coins. So think about this, if you go to an exchange as a customer, what do you get, you get a password, you can log on to the platform, you see the public keys, the addresses, but you actually never at any point see any private key. So what does that mean? You never own any crypto. You just own, let's say, a request account where you can ask, hey, I want to do this or that with the cryptocurrencies on the account.

And the exchange has all the private keys. And that is why you see so many do an exit scam themselves, because they can. They have all the information. And if they don't do it, hackers beat them to it. So keeping your cryptocurrency, let's say private keys or your crypto in general online, it opens up these attack factors that you can simply not circumvent if you remain online with them. So what do you recommend for traders who obviously have to keep a certain amount of their coins on an exchange? Is it sort of, you should move it back and forth and hold it

on your wallet, but then move it back to exchange when you intend to trade it? How do you sort of reconcile those? Well, you can compare that a bit with, let's say in the traditional world, you have 10, maybe 20% of your money that's on a current account, and you use that to go outside and go shopping and spend money on a regular basis. But everything else, 80% of your account is basically savings and investments. So hardware wallets typically cater as a use case for the second part of that portfolio, the biggest part, the most important part, your long-term investments. However, we do believe that it also comes down a bit to how fast can you get money online and offline again. And what we did is we integrated the most intuitive transaction technology used today, which is QR codes, and how you can interact with our zero. And let's say your

favorite exchange in the future will be that you just scan the QR codes to get your cryptocurrencies offline. And if you want to put them back online, you just scan it the other way back. And so imagine you're a very, very frequent trader. You can go to literally to sleep. You put everything on the zero. You wake up, you put everything back online. It takes you 30 seconds, except maybe for the trades that are ongoing, obviously, because you That has to be, right. Yeah. So those, obviously, you will have to keep them online in a way, at least for now. There might be ways that we can do this in the future, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. So we touched on the fact that you've been sort of a serial entrepreneur since you were a kid,

right? What made you focus now on hardware and security? What gave you the passion to pursue this instead of the myriad of other things that you could have done? Yeah, it comes from, basically it comes from, on the one hand, I like to do the challenging things.

And I think that there I chose maybe the worst or most interesting kind of venture you could start, which is it's hardware, which is hard, as they always say. It's security and top security at that. Because we really got to the level where we had the highest security certification in the world. It's crypto where everybody thinks whatever you're doing is a scam.

So it's really hard to basically put it in the market. And we actually come from a very small country, but a very bright country, Belgium, where blockchain and crypto, people think it's dead or it doesn't even exist. They haven't even heard of it. So it's really hard to sell something like that to banks or whoever it are in terms of buying into your story.

However, we were able to do that quite well so far, I would say. But if you put all of that together, you have a huge, huge wall, let's say the great wall of Game of Thrones that you have to pull down as an entrepreneur. And I think, obviously, the fact that we are, I think as an entrepreneur, it's always good if you're a bit naive, because if you know exactly what you're signing up for, you would never do it. I'm going to say like, yeah, exactly. If I would have known this up front, I don't know what I would have done. But it's, yeah, it's an emotional roller coaster.

That's how I see entrepreneurship. It's crazy ups, crazy downs, sometimes the same day. So, yeah. But in the end, it's the passion I have for doing things like this, like, let's say, entrepreneuring, building new things. And I think with this specific project, all my different big whys came together. For example, I'm really sensitive when it comes to injustice. When I saw bullies at school, I jumped on them.

We were proud of them being twice my size. I always had problems and I was rebellious always because of that righteousness I had. I have to say right now, we're trying to solve one of the biggest issues, security, where people lose their funds or they get hacked. That hits me really hard for myself, but also the fact that me and my co-founders have been hacked ourselves, especially Xavier with like $10 million of stolen crypto. Wow, can you talk about that a bit more? Yeah, sure.

So he has been in the space since like 2013, 2014, he got into Mungox and he lost his first couple of Bitcoins. And fast forward to 2017, he had a blockchain project. And they were hacked in the parity hack. It's a really famous hack. They were one of the biggest impacted. They lost 44,000 Ether on one day. So like $10 million then, and it was before the bull run. So afterwards it was like maybe 40 million. And what happened was he opened the smart contract balance. He saw that everything was gone. So incredible blow to you as a person in that moment.

Can't imagine. We also partnered up with a couple of white hat hackers. And what they did was also very extraordinary. They basically hacked with the same vulnerability around 500 other projects. They stole $200 million and they did that to do it before the bad hackers could do it. They eventually gave it back, but obviously in the vacuum where you are between

I'm stealing it and I'm giving it back, you are basically just stealing it. You end up in jail. Right. Eventually, they did give it back. And yeah, so I guess it got on a nice twist. And for him, it was the beginning of a real passion for security. And eventually that's also how we met the three co-founders with the same issue of which solution in the world would we trust with our very first and our very last Bitcoin. We couldn't find the answer. And then we decided to build it ourselves.

So obviously, the wallet protects you. I mean, it protects your crypto in general and a number of other things. But what other kind of security measures should people take in general, you know, in concert with having a hardware wallet? I mean, I've personally been SIM swapped, for example, you know, so your phone is obviously a huge vulnerability, your browser, all these other things. So, you know, you can only solve so many problems with one device, I assume, and it solves most of them. But what other issues should people be concerned about

and how should they be approaching that? Yeah, well, we try to make it very simple. So if you have any crypto, you can actually just send them to keys generated by our device. So if you do that, they are basically linked to private keys that are offline and will never, ever be exposed to an online source. So you can actually have full offline peace of mind, something that doesn't really exist yet today. So it basically comes down to buying the crypto before that point and the moment that you're actually using it to do transactions. And you really have to be aware at those moments that there are a lot of vulnerabilities.

So I think one warrant man is worth two or something. So just to come back on that, I think it all comes down to being aware of all the security issues, to just be cautious, to just, if you do a transaction, look at it three times, check it all over.

Basically, if you're sending all these things across the blockchain, that's the best you can do. It's basically just be aware of the fact that there are scams, there are hacks going on all the time. It can go from pasting your key in the wrong way to another address, even without you knowing to. So it's an endless list. Therefore, just be really aware if you're doing something online. You touched on actually the fact that there's been more crypto stolen each and every year as cryptos become more popular, which is kind of interesting because you would think that the security would be keeping up with it, but it seems that that's

not the case. Do you think it's a result just of it being so much more popular, more people have it, more people are vulnerable? Or do you think that's a trend that will continue, that it will always be a problem and basically we'll be trying to keep up with the hackers? Well, if we look at all the users we talked to, we also realized that even though people have bought the hardware wallets, they don't really use it. And it always comes down to really stupid reasons. Like, for example, the USB cable, I don't want to connect it to my computer. It's hassle, it's cumbersome even though it's a very small hurdle. It's enough to just not use it. Let's say the tiny screens of the

existing hardware wall is sometimes mentioned. It's all about, it's so impractical that people don't do it. I see that even with the most advanced users that they just say, I F it and I put it on, I just keep it on one of these exchanges. And I think it makes

sense. And I think what we try to do as well is almost have you look forward to the next time you use a hardware wallet because it's so smooth that it also adds more security because you're going to use it more and you're basically going to be protecting yourself more than just keeping it all on an online base. So talk to me about how you got into Bitcoin and crypto in general, because I love hearing sort of people's Bitcoin journeys when they got into it and what originally attracted them and why. Yeah. So I think I remember you went to like Wharton business school, I think. I went to the university of Pennsylvania. I Business School, I think. I went to the

University of Pennsylvania. I didn't, I went, I was in the Liberal Arts School, the College of Arts and Sciences, but it is

one of the four schools as a part of, yeah, University of Pennsylvania. Yeah, okay. Because that's also where like Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham

and all studied, I think. And so after my studies as a master's in business engineering, I kept studying in parallel with my job. I also did a lot of stuff in really diving into the investment fields, let's say. And I really went into value investing and looking at intrinsic value of projects. And so basically, let's say the Warren Buffett way, you could even call it. And what I really got from that was I, I was a bit brainwashed in the sense that I kept away from bubble markets

and anything that looked, that looked similar or that I couldn't understand. Because you were only trying to think, I mean, for people who don't know value investing, you were basically trying to find things that were undervalued. So you were never buying anything on the way up basically. So, and right. On the way up. Yes. But if you see, it's like bubble behavior with Bitcoin. When I, when I saw it in the first times that I, that I just automatically said in my head,

I'm not doing that. Right. And I would say, so I actually in 2015 did a strategy like a vision 2020 for one of the major banks here in Europe. And I got in touch again with blockchain and I think Bitcoin was $100, maybe $200. And I looked at it, but I didn't look at it like this could be an investment. And it took me until end 2017 when Bitcoin was completely soaring up to $20,000 almost that one of my co-founders said, Ruben, take off the eye- Blinders.

Yeah, the blinders. Yeah. And just look under the hood of the technology and think clear. And so I did that. And that was also when it struck me that this was completely like the next thing. Not from the perspective of Bitcoin is exploding and I want to buy it, but more like this is actually the first time you will be able to back the truth. And as we come back to, for example, what I said before, justice and all that stuff,

it's really important for me. What I was thinking of immediately was, imagine you're a farmer in a developing country, a tsunami passes by, it wipes away all the land, and there is a dictator. And he finds that moment very interesting because all the paper documents are gone, they're washed away. And he says, guys, I have a centralized database, all the stuff here is mine. And none of these people can actually contradict it. And blockchain allows all of them to say,

whoa, whoa, whoa, we have our own version of the truth. We all have the same one. You are actually full of shit. And that starts in giving a basis for them to fight back or at least to rationalize it and get more people on board.

And you can actually apply that principle to so many different things that I was really sold by thinking about that. And as it happened to be, I was also a technical analyst more as a hobby. So I said, let's do my first technical analysis on Bitcoin at like 18, 19K. And I looked at, I think it was the monthly, and I saw like a dead cross coming in the magazine. And I was like, and I really wrote on TradingView, my very first post, okay guys, I think this is going to blow, but I'm still going to buy some because I had FOMO. Yeah. You and everybody. Exactly. And so I bought some and I think a week later it crashed. I don't know how

much again, but it really went down. To like 10 or something. Yeah. And then back to 17 and then the slow cascade down. So you've, but you have been a trader before as well. So you also can, as you said, you opened a chart, you understand technical analysis. What were you trading before you were trading Bitcoin? I was, I was actually doing like, let's say, in terms of the value investing and dividend growth investing strategies. But what I believe that makes it much easier for a trader, if you don't have much time, because I didn't have much time, is you buy the companies you love and you do more like a swing trade. So you can still say, okay, like now this is oversold. Every technical indicator says to sell it. That's what I did. And I bought back when it was the opposite situation. And let's say if you buy expensive and the trade would fail, it doesn't matter because

you're in there for the long run. And that's a bit how I think trading can make the most sense for you. Right. So it's really a combination of investing and trading when you're value investing, because you are looking for a good entry, but you're planning to hold it for an extremely long time, basically. Exactly. I always, I mean, you know, I think most people, at least my age, who ever were into investing in the 1990s and stuff, you know, before we had like all the technology to kind of make trading accessible is exactly what you said. Like I bought Disney because I thought it was cool. I bought Apple because I thought Apple computers were awesome when they started to come out and I bought, you know, way later, but in the same, same premise, I bought Tesla because I thought,

Hey, maybe this thing will change the world, you know, and I was buying it at $30. And those were always the best investments. And it's kind of funny, because all this knowledge you have of how to trade or how to invest in stuff, at the end of the day, your instinct is probably to just invest in something cool. And you're actually right, because it's actually cool. So I can definitely agree with that. And so it sounds like you basically just use charts as like an extra tool or confluence for finding that entry, but it was really about the fundamentals and you seeing the value. Yeah. But I do remember like that I wrote a post like in March, 2018 saying in October,

the German market will correct and it's correct for like 30%. So I really use my trading strategies also for getting fully out of a position, getting back in like a couple of months ago. So I don't have much time to spend. Otherwise I would be trading crypto all the time, but I simply don't have the bandwidth. So I do it with stocks a bit because it's so much slower.

You can get so much more relaxed. And yeah. Don't be a part of the 7.1 million Bitcoiners in the United States who have Bitcoin and a retirement account, but don't have Bitcoin in their retirement account. Seriously, you can hold Bitcoin in your retirement account and not just GBTC. How can you do this? Through a self-directed choice IRA by Kingdom Trust.

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a new business. Obviously, you launched not knowing that a global pandemic was going to come. So how has the virus affected your launch? And I'm assuming tremendously, but you could definitely answer that. And has it been a huge challenge? Has it helped? Has it hurt? Yeah. And also we actually started the company when it was the beginning of crypto winter, like in April 2018. So you can call us crazy oftentimes, I think. And with Corona, yeah, so we were actually going to launch the campaign earlier. And exactly when we were about to launch it,

all the news came in and we were going to launch it at Paris Blockchain Week. Basically, we were going to have all these offline events, see maybe 10 to 20,000 people physically. And this is a physical device. So this is something you want to put in people's hands so for us i think like the whole that whole and that whole piece of uh of our people that we could reach completely fell away and i can't imagine that has a big impact on the campaign right now because now we have to do it all online and i can say the campaign is doing really well we're at maybe six or seven times the initial goal we had but still I don't think it compares

to if you would be able to go to all these events like in Austria in Paris in the US talk about these evangelized solutions so yeah but I have to say there are also really opportunities that came at the same time so So another entrepreneur I knew, a friend of mine, he said, you have to look at these guys in Germany, in Frankfurt. It's called Accelerator Frankfurt, and they do like a venture acceleration program. They accepted only like five companies out of 800. And so we said, yeah, why not? I mean, what do we have to lose? And I had a talk with one of the co-founders of the program. And after one hour, he said, okay, we're making space.

You're part of the program. And so it was then virtual instead of physical. You know, like these programs are normally three months, demo day. And it was one month, exactly one month before our campaign. So I said, perfect. I can reach more people. I can already talk to investors. Uh, everything was live streamed. So you can actually still find me speaking to these people online on YouTube. Um, and yeah, we actually made a couple of really good friends, like the guy that the guy at the program as well. Uh, um, so that was a big

opportunity. And tomorrow we are actually doing a pitch event because I'm also a Bitangels lead in Belgium, like business angels platform for crypto investors. And now I hooked them up with Accelerator Frankfurt, which is a big investment community. And tomorrow they're doing another virtual event so uh yeah we had a lot of impacts we also had a lot of opportunities do you have any supply chain issues for actually producing uh you know a physical device because of you know i don't know where you're doing it but in china or actually you know getting supplies across borders and things like that? Yeah. Well, so far, actually, it's quite limited. And it's also because we tried to anticipate things like this in the beginning.

Because as a security and hardware manufacturer, you have to be very risk management oriented. And so we looked in the Asian countries. We actually also looked in Belgium. And we found that in Belgium, you have amazing quality. The prices are still okay. And the risk management aspect is completely a whole other level. I can drive a half an hour and I'm in my factories. Exactly. And for us, again, in the end of the day, it comes down to your security. You are our customer. We have to be able to manage that. That's the most important thing. And that's why we decided to build this in Belgium. So it's actually as a label made in Belgium. All our factories are here. And in terms of supply chain issues, it basically comes down

to some components that have some delays. But apart from that, we're good. So totally switching gears. How do you end up speaking six languages, right? How do you end up speaking six languages? And it sounds like you had a pretty interesting childhood. Maybe you moved all over the place. Can you tell us a bit about how that even happens? Because as an American, as I kind of joked about at the beginning, it's just a very foreign concept for Americans to even learn a second language, much less six. Okay, so the question is, how do I go through this? I want to know where you learned six languages.

So was that in childhood? Was it something you were interested in as an adult? How do you learn six languages? So my mother tongue is Dutch, but I live in Flanders, so it's like Flemish, but it's basically the same language. And then you get French in high school because it's the second language of the country. When I was 15, I was a strange kid. You don't want to know what I asked Santa Claus, but it wasn't stories. It was like, I remember once I asked a medical dictionary

because I was really like making my own dictionaries and stuff like that. When I was 15, I asked a Spanish self-study course. And I did that all on my own. I think it took me six months to get through the thing. And when I was a bit older, like 18, I decided to go to Spain just on my own and learn the language eventually I actually ended up studying a bit in Spain also in Mexico so my level of Spanish got really good because of that I had a German girlfriend so I decided to

learn German I haven't even mentioned English yet which which is the language that we're going to interview in. Yeah. English. Everybody speaks English, I think, here because we don't dub anything. You know, like in Germany, they dub things. In Spain, they dub things. In here, we subtitle things.

So when we're kids, we already speak English. And yeah. And then so I was living in Mexico. It was in 2010. It was in the middle of the war on drugs. And it was the worst time to be there, especially where we were. It was the most dangerous city in the whole south and mid of America. And so I was there for a couple of months.

And then it all escalated. There happened a lot of murders and stuff like that. But it came down to we were repatriated. So they said, you have to come back to Belgium. And as rebellious as I was, I said, I'm not coming back. I want to go to another country. And they said, okay, you can choose between Spain and Italy. And I said, okay, cool. I have never, I haven't learned Italian yet. So, um, I went

studying in Italy and, uh, that's where I learned Italian. And eventually during my job or during my career, I did projects in Italy, like make presentations in Italian on slides, uh, for management, for managers. And, uh, I did that in also in Germany and Spain again. So in the end, I also got like to a professional proficiency in these different languages. Gives me a headache literally thinking about six languages. I'm terrible at even trying to find a second. Wait, so you were in Mexico. What city were you in?

Monterrey. So you were there during the middle of like basically cartel wars and refused to leave. What brought you to that place at that time? Well, I could still do like a sort of an international exchange through my studies. And I didn't want to be in Europe anymore. So I said, where can I go? And I still loved Spanish. So yeah, it basically was a no-brainer to go to Mexico.

And what I didn't know was that there just passed by a hurricane before I arrived. And it kind of messed up the separation between let's say richer and poorer and the sicarios, you know, like the, the assassins and all of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was a very messy time and there did happen like kidnappings and all. I luckily I was spared, but it gives a bad,

maybe a bad view on Mexico. I don't believe Mexico is bad at all. I think it's an amazing country. I think that you can find, you know, stories like that in almost any country in the world at some point, not a judgment of the entire country yeah no and you know like as a as a young guy i think i was 22 um you it's all about nothing happened to me so i'm still good you know and and you just want to normalcy bias yeah yeah really stupid but uh yeah yeah i spent a lot of time traveling and did some pretty stupid things in stupid places myself.

But nothing, like you said, nothing seems dangerous as long as you come out of it unscathed, I guess. Well, next time I can do a podcast with you and you can tell me. Yeah, we'll exchange stories. I have to decide which ones are allowed for public consumption at this point in my life, you know, but I can't share everything. So something you talked about before, we talked about obviously the timing with the virus, but you decided to start a hardware wallet company in April of 2018 when you were already starting to hear Bitcoin is dead, it's going to zero, tulips, internet bubble, all of these comparisons. What gave you, I guess, the conviction

to believe that A, Bitcoin was going to survive and that the entire market was going to survive in general? As it continued down after you started your company, did you ever lose that conviction or at least question it? Yeah, this is a very good question. And I think there are at least 100 answers I could give on it. And I remember that indeed, I made some presentations back then, like explaining to universities as lecturers,, like is Bitcoin dead? Because that's the first question I have to ask myself when I'm doing this, right?

And I remember that I showed the graph and it was really at $3,000 at the time. Okay, maybe Bitcoin corrected already a couple of times in history, more than 80%. But how do you know that this time is different? Is this the end or not? And I think a lot of ways you could look at it, first of all, is how big is this is it asset class

compared to all the other ones if you do that you you actually see that it's it wasn't even one percent of many of these larger asset classes also if you compare it to let's say the internet bubble I think it was 10 probably trillion at its top and if you would count in inflation it would be 20 trillion dollars and i think at the top of the market with crypto we were at 800 and we actually fell back at the time i was i was let's say lecturing about it to 300 so you were talking about something that was so small and i remember in april 2018 that the g20 came together or the g8 any of these as some of the biggest industrial countries and they they were talking about, should we do

something about the crypto space? And their answer was, why would we? If it explodes, nothing's going to happen. Right. It's too small. Yeah. It exploded, nothing happened. And so all of these things pointed into the direction. This is so small. We're still nowhere. Nobody knows what it is. We haven't even started yet. And I still believe that today we haven't even started yet. I agree. I think we're still nowhere. Nobody knows what it is. We haven't even started yet. And I still believe that today we haven't even started yet. I agree. I think we're very early, very early. Exactly. And there are many more points I could make on that, but I think those already are a few and maybe one of the most recent ones that might be interesting is I've done my master's thesis on quantitative easing and the impact on inflation.

Good timing. Yeah. Good thing to know about now. Exactly. But all the last times, it always came down to cleaning up the balance sheets of banks. So the money didn't really go into, let's say, your pocket as an end user. It went into the pockets of banks. The Federal Reserve bought, let's say, more illiquid assets or more like junk bonds kind of stuff. And what they did now is they printed $6 trillion,

if I'm not mistaken, which is more than all the other events together. And it's not just cleaning up balance sheets anymore. It's really also giving salaries to people. And that is when it becomes dangerous. You pump an extreme amount of money, you spend it in a different way. And if you look at, for example, I think it was in Germany in the early 50s or even before, and it was in Zimbabwe, I think,

where they had to make it $1 trillion bill. That was because it was, again, in Zimbabwe, I think, where they had to make it $1 trillion bill. Right. That was because it was, again, in the same way that they did the quantitative easing. And so what I just want to say is that so far, like in my research, I didn't see a lot of impact in terms of going into hyperinflation, and we haven't seen it. But right now, it might be different. Right now, we are really in a dangerous environment

to do something like this. And if you compare that to what Bitcoin is doing, being a deflationary asset, halving every couple of years, becoming scarcer and scarcer and people losing their private keys. We're talking about an asset class where there are 21 million in theory,

already 3 million lost, let's say, and there are over 45 million millionaires in the world. So even if every millionaire would want a single Bitcoin, it's already impossible. So compare that to each other. You have the supply and demand of Bitcoin, and you have the supply and demand, or let's say the inflationary stuff going on with quantitative easing.

And I think you made yourself an interesting investment thesis again. Yeah, it's interesting because like you said, it was well, certainly in 2008 and 2009, it was about bailing out banks and about their balance sheets. But now you said it's not just about that. In fact, I would almost argue that they've thrown that out the window completely. They're blowing up the balance sheets on purpose and never intend to balance them again. I mean, do you think that that's fair to say? There's no way you can have this behavior and ever expect to pay the debts or balance the budget or any of those things.

It really seems like a new paradigm. Yeah. I would say, because our slogan or our tagline is start truly owning what is yours. And it's also a little bit what Satoshi Nakamoto tried to say 10 years ago. So indeed, banks tell you that you have like a guarantee of $100,000 maybe on your accounts. But at the moment that everybody is trying to get that money, they can't guarantee that. They're not a bit too big to fail. We've seen that as well. And so we basically came up with the question the first time we started with Engrave, which was very simple. How and when do you start really owning what is yours? And with banks, you cannot do it. Again, you have a password, they have your money.

And they loan it. I mean, your money doesn't actually exist in the bank. I think that's an important point. I was going to touch on it when you were even talking about Bitcoin and exchanges and all those things before. I don't think people realize that their money is not, many people don't, that your money is not just sitting in the bank waiting for you to take it out. I mean, you learn that with mortgage-backed securities and things like junk bonds, as you said, but it's very scary when you really dig into it. Yeah, totally. So that money multiplier is indeed something that they fixed a little bit more

as you now have to have a bigger ratio on your balance sheet. But in the end of the day, it's like you say, the money is actually not there. It's being multiplied. And the same issue still exists with exchanges today. We're talking about this philosophy of decentralization, but exchanges are all centralized. They have your private keys,

so you actually, again, never own any crypto if you only have exchange accounts. And we kept looking, and we thought, okay, hardware wallets are the closest thing to owning what is yours. But also there we saw that, okay, you're not making a key in the right way. These hardware wallets give you a key.

They all do. They say, this is your key. Take it or leave it. So there might be a risk that they have a database on all the keys you ever made. So again, you're not owning it or not in the way it should be. For me starting to truly own what is yours, it's you are the only one, you're the master of your money, of your funds, of your wealth. And you are the one who decides who else gets access to it and can use it. And that's already flawed with the existing hardware wallets. And the second thing that we touch upon is they all rely on the interior chip to make the key.

And if you just scroll a bit through the internet, you'll see that these chips are notorious for being backdoored. So there are backdoors from government agencies and so on. And so what we did with our engraved zero hardware vault, the one here behind my back and the one here in my hands, is that we revamped or let's say we created or upgraded the key generation process. So we do not only use the interior chip because that thing is good. It's been built for decades. But we also include external factors such as your biometrics, your fingerprint, ambient

light, one of the best maximizers of entropy, let's say, quality of your key. And we also introduce an interaction process between the user and the key. And as you know, our device is fully offline. So you're basically making the key together with a very smart device offline, which results in the fact that you have a key that is unbreakable, a key that nobody can brute force, because it's a strong key generation process.

It's built offline. It's unpredictable. Nobody can do the same process again and get to the same key. And that's basically how it starts, because if you get that key right, and you're the only one who has seen it, then you can finally start truly owning what is yours. But obviously it doesn't end there.

You still have the whole end to end story behind it. So owning what is yours. So we touched on, obviously, the potential, I guess, hyperinflationary environment of the world now. We've seen it in small places. We've seen it, as you touched on, in Germany at one point, in Venezuela now, starting in Lebanon, but we've never seen it with the world's reserve currency. So we all know

that the world would absolutely melt down if that happened to the US dollar. Whether it will or not, I have no idea. So we know that you view Bitcoin as an inflation hedge to some degree. How else do you view Bitcoin now? What is its purpose? Do you buy the digital gold argument? Do you buy the store of value? Do you think it's actually superior money and good for transactions? What are the benefits now beyond that hyperinflation hedge, which may or may not happen, reasons that people should own more Bitcoin? Yeah, I think it depends a bit on what your time frame is of looking at it. And that's difficult. It's a complex question because if people use it for a specific thing

and they're all using it for a thing, it eventually ends up to be being that thing. And that's also a bit what you see today, the store of value. Tomorrow, everybody could decide

that Ethereum is a store of value and suddenly Bitcoin wouldn't be worth anything anymore. So that's important to know. But I think if you look indeed like to Venezuela, to Argentina, where hyperinflation is a thing right now,

and every day you wait in spending your money, it decreases tenfold in value. The only thing you can do is buy crypto with it. And the easiest one to buy is Bitcoin. So that's also why Bitcoin is so interesting. And if you think about if 1 billion people in the world would own $1,000 of Bitcoin, we're already at $1 trillion.

And today we are at 100, maybe 200 billion. So it can still go up times 10 like it's nothing. So in terms of, let's say, speculation or smart speculation, I would say investing in Bitcoin

is definitely something that makes sense. I wouldn't bet the farm on it, simply because investing, you have to think about risks and it's risky and never. Of course. And you don't know how long the market will keep undervaluing Bitcoin if that's even the case. But yeah, it depends. And I'm sure that there still will be needed more advanced mechanisms, better cryptography.

Maybe we have to step away from the elliptic curve that Bitcoin is using today. We're talking about these post-quantum cryptography standards. Like our partners are working on that right now in the NIST competition. Multi-party computation is something that's also like coming up a bit more as a buzzword. So there are many angles to look at and I think it would be a bit crazy to

touch on most of them here. Right. Well, it seems that one of the major use cases or something that's very popular now is obviously DeFi. And that's sort of a side of the space that's growing tremendously, both with stable coins and lending and all this. Obviously, to take advantage generally of earning crazy interest on your assets, they have to be lent. So it's kind of like the old bank model. What are your thoughts on DeFi and how popular that's becoming in the space? Yeah, I think it's sort of, let's call it the buzzwords that overarches or encompasses a lot of different things that are already a bit there in fintech. But if you would say the pure DeFi

things like decentralized exchanges, I think that's something that has potential because it's more into the thought, area of thought, school of thought of what crypto actually stands for. It's also how we position ourselves. If you think about centralization, we give you the most decentralized solution to own what is yours. And over time, you will have to move back a bit because people simply need to outsource or want to outsource their asset management. And I think, yeah, for us, it's important to know what are the tangents or the touch points of these DeFi solutions with us.

And I think, for example, with decentralized exchanges, we are the perfect medium to interact with such an exchange. Interesting. So totally switching gears. I know that you have a unique approach to reading books. Is that true? Can you tell us about that? Yeah, it's very strange. So I read books with my finger. But what it basically does is it makes you read visually. So I've always done it. And I also read about it, obviously, to understand, like you have the smart reading, fast reading, because I read around 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute. It depends on the language.

I think in English, it's like, it's more than 1,000. In Dutch, it can be three lines at the same time, I think. And I go back and forth. So you actually read from left to right and right to left. And so actually, by doing that, I'm able to read the book a week, and I only need 15 minutes a day to do that. And I think it's really valuable. And I'm happy that I have that skill, let's call it, because it allows me to read books continuously about the phase I'm in right now with the company. So I actually have always these things to, you know, like, see where am I now with the company? Are we doing, let's say,

are we talking to assembly guys? Okay. I need books on assembly stuff. Are we talking with investors? Okay. Maybe I need some VC books on venture capital. And yeah, so I tried to read like 50 books a year in that way without really spending too much. I don't understand how that works. How do you read right to left to the language that's left to right? And how do you read three lines at a time? I mean, I'm assuming it's some skill you practice, but I don't even understand the mechanics

of that. It's actually pretty cool. Um, cause I, I tried to teach it to my mom eventually. Like I, I figured out the theory behind it because people have studied it. And then I tried to teach my mom. And you have to think of it as this. So if you talk smart reading,

all the people are making the same mistakes. One of them, you will know, you always go back to the beginning of the sentence when you're reading, like just going back, oh shit, I think I forgot a word. You go back and it really slows you down. Another one is you are talking to yourself out loud.

And that means you're auditive in terms of reading. So you're reading so slow because you can never go faster than you speak. And you actually have to move into visual reading. So you see the words, you see the phrases, but you are processing them at the same time without having to read them to yourself. And also one thing that people do a lot is you drift off, you go to Honolulu in your

mind and you're thinking about... That's my thing. I go back three pages and I'm like, what did I just read? Like classic ADD case, thinking about the beach in Mexico while I'm trying to read a book. So that doesn't happen when you use this technique. It basically can't. Yeah.

So as far as I understood, and I tried it out a lot with my mom, it really made sense. And I think the most easy way to double your reading speed, and you will find it so strange, is you just use your finger. And like, look at, can you see my eyes? Yeah. Okay. you will find it so strange if you just use your finger and, um, like, look at, can you see my eyes? Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to make a perfect circle and you have to tell me if I'm making a perfect circle. Yeah. Yeah. I see a circle. Don't you see like that? I'm making these.

Oh yeah. It's more of a, yeah. It's more angular and squared off. Certainly. Yeah. And now now look at look at my eyes again i'm making a i'm making a circle all right because you're looking at your finger as opposed to just trying to do it okay that makes sense it's but suddenly it's smooth right it's just one circle you're making and uh you can try that at home and and and try it with somebody and you will see that actually, I don't know what you were doing. And now I have a migraine. Thank you.

Yeah, obviously. But so basically it comes down to people are jumping when they're reading, reading book. Right. And if you use your finger, you're suddenly smooth. So it's less tiring for your eyes. And you can actually read twice as fast without even noticing it by just using your finger, following your finger really slow. And after that, let's say the next phases come off going faster. But by now, it's actually an art that some people can learn. So how's that impacted your career?

I mean, does it make you more efficient in other ways? Does it make you work faster? I mean, it seems like you can apply that, whether it's the exact technique or the concept that you learned to getting things done. Yeah, actually, like I remember there was a project in Germany we had to do and it was about pricing strategies.

And nobody in our company, because we're like a new startup in management consulting, do and it was about pricing strategies. And nobody in our company because we're like a new startup in management consulting had ever done anything on pricing strategies. So I just said to my boss, okay, give me a budget. I will buy books from McKinsey, from Deloitte, everything I can find. And I will read that over the weekends. And on Monday, we're going to start the pricing strategy. Wow. And we actually did a really interesting, it was a really good case and we had the customer for afterwards again.

So yeah, it sometimes can pay off something like this. So what instruments do you play and what kind of music do you compose? Now let's talk about something I really care about. For me, music is my real passion, I would say. The one thing that makes my heart stop and go faster. And so I started when I was 15. I got really school sick.

I couldn't see data hours a day and basically brain dead. So I had a really rough time back then. And it was also by coincidence that one of my best friends gave me for my birthday guitar and i started playing and i was like whoa it's that i had to only find out about that at 15. you you feel you feel old at 15. right 15. and and so yeah i mean i i i played it every day. I slept with my guitar. I bought an electric guitar. I played Jimi Hendrix all the time in my room. Max distortion, the neighborhood couldn't sleep.

And yeah, and I really, it really was like an eye opener for me. And I did a lot of performances and gigs, but I was just like the solo guitarist. I just love to play solos um when there was a guitar solo on the radio I zoned out you couldn't talk to me anymore um and eventually only when I was studying and I had my guitar and no band anymore I started singing and some people gave me like compliments and so I was like okay maybe my thing isn't that bad because you know you can't hear yourself singing right the same so I was like okay let's try this a bit more and a bit more often and then I started to play other instruments and eventually when I was working because I'm more like

my natural state is more like improviser, visionary it's not really a structured person so that's something I learned over my seven years as a consultant but I realized I have to go to the studio otherwise I'm never going to record anything

I'm just going to make new ideas and write them down and I will have a backlog of a thousand songs. So I went to, by coincidence again, the guy, he was 70 years old. He was a rock star. He played gigs every two weeks. He enjoyed life like crazy. He had his own studio. And I went there every two weeks with nothing. And it put me there like three hours four hours you're here and you're gonna play one song you're not gonna do

anything else and that made me finish a lot of music so I went there every couple of weeks I played every single instrument separately I composed them and eventually it became a thing it became a song and then i started publishing them um some of them made it to let's say the radio um but it was always in parallel with my job and i think for me after an engrave it might be that i actually go back to my roots which are for me it's all about music in the end yeah i wonder if i'll ever make it back. I really retired three or four years ago for good,

and I don't even touch it at all anymore, which is strange. It's funny that you talk about starting to play music at 15. That's kind of when I was burning out, because I started playing the piano when I was five, and I was like a competitive, you know, I played classical piano. I was, you know, I excelled at it. But by 15, it was like I was like a competitive, you know, I played classical piano. I was, you know, I excelled at it. And, but I, by 15, it was like, I was in high school and who wanted to practice the piano. And so for me, it was sort of a different thing. I came back to it really when I started DJing in

college, but I started playing the piano again, you know, 10, 15 years later, really. And now I play all the time again, But I have the same experience as you, which is that it's the one thing that I'm truly passionate about. It's the one thing that can set my mood or like, I guess, reset me if I'm sad, it can make me happy in five minutes. If I'm happy, it can make me sad. So I find that for an entrepreneur who can play music, I think it works very well in tandem because it can, you know, as I said, reset your mood or bring you back to the place you need to be to get your work done. I can also actually definitely have the same experience where if you actually get your

butt to a studio for a little while, you get so much more done than sitting around. I probably have 2000 beats or songs that I've started that I never, that I never finished. So I have to ask you, so who do you think is the greatest guitarist of all time? It depends. You're going to say Hendrix because... No, no, no. But that's what you're blasting your neighborhood with. It was one of the things. I mean, I remember that I was playing Freebirds, just like improvising. I guess you know the song. It's like seven minutes of a guitar solo.

Yeah. I remember that I saw like Ingrid Malmsteen. And okay, it's just like the technical level of proficiency that I've never reached in my life. You also have like Paco de Lucia, like a guy from Spain, like a famous flamenco guy. So I don't really have the answer to that.

And I think in the beginning, I was always like, I want to get better, more technical, faster. But afterwards, when I matured, let's say, I realized that it's all in the simplicity. And feeling. Yeah, exactly. And how you can get in the emotion from just two two tones which would be in the time you play two tones he plays 50 so um yeah it's it's a question i don't have an answer for uh yeah my favorite rock guitarist mine is prince but uh i think yeah there's there's arguments for for a whole lot of them oh i don't

know i don't know i don't know i'm not i'm not really like an idol kind of guy or something so yeah i never understood like the the squeaky squeaking when you see your idol or oh yeah me either no they're just just people but i can still it's still uh you know worth discussing their talent this is always one of my favorite conversations. Any more information about Engrave or what you guys have coming before we finish and then also where everybody can follow you and

keep up with what you guys are doing and what you're doing personally? Yeah, sure. So we've been live with Engrave since exactly 12 days. We did it on Indiegogo so it's an international global crowdfunding platform for hardware technology. We've got over 500 backers already. I think we're closing in on the 600s.

We actually just reached the second stretch goal. So stretch goal is when you reach a certain funding goal and we unlock a new thing that's only available during the campaign. Right now we unlocked two limited edition colors, emerald green and glacier white, two very cold colors for the coldest wallet. So these things are only available for the next two weeks.

And then they basically disappear from our, from our product range. And yeah, so you can find us on Indiegogo, under Engrave. And if you would go to, let's say our website, it's engrave.io, very simple. And our social media, it's Engrave Official or Engrave in all of these

different media like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. It's very simple. You can find us easily. Yeah. And what about you personally? Where can people find you and follow you? Yeah. So my name is Ruben, one B and then and then, uh, Mera M E double R E. So you can find me like that on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to connect. Um, you will see that, uh, in my description, I have like a little PDF. I made it just to, um, inspire people a bit, like just to pump you up and get you happy for the day. Uh, just, just, you can, you can read that and if you want, you can, you can connect. Um, yeah.

And besides that, I'm on Twitter. I don't have much follow a lot of followers, but, uh, always happy. We'll help try to change that. So, well, thank you, man. So much for, uh, for, uh, being on here. Complete transparency. I'm waiting for my engrave. So I can't wait as you know, so I can't wait to get mine and get my hands on it and, uh, take that.

Which color are you, are you getting? I'm going to go with the white man. I can't wait to get mine and get my hands on it and take that. Which color are you getting? I'm going to go with the white, man. I don't know. White? What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of green. So yeah. Anyway, I can probably choose all of them, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, I think you probably have access to whatever color you want. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, exactly. So thank you so much. Yeah, exactly. So thank you so much for being on, man. And I hope everybody goes out and buys one. I think that it's the only solution that I've seen

that actually solves the entire problem. So I think that you guys are going to do exceptionally well. And I hope that everybody here grabs one. Thanks again, man. Thank you. Those are very kind words. Let's go. Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening.

New episodes go live every Tuesday at 7am Eastern Standard Time. Links to our Apple and Spotify channels are in the show notes. You can also follow me on Twitter at Scott Melker to continue the conversation. See you next week.