The Wolf Of All Streets - Tokenizing Everything with Cyrus Fazel, CEO of SwissBorg

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Cyrus Fazel first experienced the power of Bitcoin when he wanted to buy whiskey for someone in Iran. After tumbling down the crypto rabbit hole, Cyrus founded SwissBorg, a company dedicated to bringing this emerging financial revolution to the masses. According to Cyrus, decentralization is reshaping the way the world can manage and accumulate wealth. Scott Melker and Cyrus Fazel further discuss the current market conditions, discovering Bitcoin through whiskey, a 52 million dollar ICO, an inclusive hedge fund, founding SwissBorg, creating the CHSB token, DeFi rug pulls, the rules of being a good CEO, managing 80+ employees, breakdancing and Napster, tokenizing stocks, the Spotify of wealth management, absurd stable coin interest, human capital and more. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- ELECTRONEUM Electroneum, has gained widespread adoption providing a mobile-first payment solution to the world's unbanked, attracting more than 4M users worldwide in less than three years. They have since launched a new freelance marketplace, AnyTask.com, which is providing thousands of freelancers the opportunity to sell their services to buyers globally, without the need of a bank account. Learn more at Electroneum.com. --- MYBOOKIE Bitcoin is the easiest way to Bet, Win and Get paid at MyBookie. Make your first deposit with Bitcoin and MyBookie and will instantly double it up to $1,000 to add excitement to all the Thanksgiving NFL action. Celebrate the holidays with MyBookie. The exclusive home of the Crypto Rewards Program and Turkey Day Free Play. Use promocode SCOTT at mybookie.com and double your first Bitcoin, Lite Coin or Bitcoin Cash Deposit today. --- 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

This episode is sponsored by Voyager, Electroneum, and MyBookie. Stay tuned to hear more about them later in the episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of Swissborg, a crypto wealth management company that's reshaping the current financial system. Building on the principles of blockchain, meritocracy, and fairness, Swissborg is servicing over 100,000 users in the crypto space. I can't wait to learn more about our guest Cyrus, what SwissBorg is up to, why he founded it, and what he thinks of the current market conditions in crypto. Cyrus Fazel,

thank you so much for coming on, man. Really welcome. Thank you so much. It's really exciting to be here with you, Scott. I'm sure we're going to have a lot of fun. Thank you. So before we get into the questions, once again, you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast where two times every week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. The show is powered by Blockworks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. Check them out at blockworksgroup.io. And if you like the podcast, follow me on Twitter. You need to check out my website and join my newsletter

where I share all my trades, charts, analysis, market thoughts, lessons on improving your trading and investing. You can check that all out at thewolfofallstreets.io. So now to get into what's more important. Man, Cyrus, what is going on in the market right now? Would you, you think it's fair to say that we're experiencing some euphoria? I should preface, we're speaking at the end of November. This will probably come out next week and everything could change. But do you think that the market is euphoric at this point? Yeah, I think so it is. But it's driven through something different though. I think so, you know, the picking up of volume, the training, all of that has to do of not only like hype, like back in 2017, though it looks like it's almost like three years ago, exactly

day for day, right? But it looks like it's slightly different. It has this, you know, this new decentralized movement, this new digital movement that goes with this confinement that we're all living in. And it looks like there's more institutional money in. It looks like it's, yeah, it feels better. But then when you're in a bubble, it always feels good, right? So it's always hard to say, but it looks like there's more fundamentals behind it. There's more use of blockchain. There's not like only some few proof of cases.

We're having like, you know, great initiatives that are happening with CBDCs and we've seen it right recently with China. We have all this DeFi craze that, you know, really went bananas this last, you know, 10 months or so of going from 1 billion to over 14 billion of pledge uh you know stable coins and other and other crypto so it is something euphoric for sure and we're gonna have a lot of swings most probably in upcoming days uh but there's a lot of room for improvement as well from bitcoin itself and other crypto assets which is still today a very small portion of what the financial markets have. So, yeah. I mean, I agree. I don't think we've actually reached peak euphoria and not even remotely comparing it to 2017, as you said. I mean, at this point in 2017, we were there, right? These were the final days. Everybody and their mother was calling you about Bitcoin. I

haven't, you know, I'm starting to see the tip of the iceberg with that kind of behavior. But like you said, I think it's different money and dare I say better money this time, you know, people who are buying it because they want to hold it, not because they want to sell it soon for more money. So I think that's great. Well, it's interesting. So you've built SwissBorg, which we'll talk about specifically what it is and what you guys do, but you kind of built it through the hard times. Yeah. And the good times, right? We started in early 2017 and the idea was,

it was really to create this, you know, new way of this new financial era, right? We're creating a decentralizing wealth management by making it fair, fun and community centric. And we, we, you know, we got into crypto very late. A lot of people, you know, we talk about, you know, first time they're in Bitcoin, the OGs, and they're in like in 2010, I got in much later. Um, thanks my dad, by the way. Um, long story short is, yeah, it's, uh, my dad's in Iran and,

uh, he had a friend that, uh, told me that that for his birthday he would like to have a bottle of whiskey and I'm like oh cool no problem and in Iran it's very hard to get a bottle of whiskey and what happened is that I said how can I send money to this guy and long story short he said all this is digital cash you could send then you know we accept it here and all that I'm like okay what is it and and he says bitcoin I'm like, okay, what is it? And it says Bitcoin. I'm like, you guys accept Bitcoin? And with my past, you know, experience and essentially in hedge funds and financial markets, I always looked at Bitcoin as a cool thing,

but I never really used it. And I got into Bitcoin thanks to my dad, which I paid him a bottle of whiskey back then. But it was quite late. And that's my more personal story. But more getting to Swiss pork, I think. So, yeah, we've seen those last three, four years. And it's very fascinating.

You know, the technology, how's it evolved? The application of the technology has evolved. The people have, has it evolved? You know, and it's getting healthier and it's getting better. It's getting more scalable. And that's what good technology happens and with good people and good attentions. And not everything is good. Not everything is scalable.

Nothing is green. But it's, yeah, I'm more and more enthusiastic about the future of blockchain and the future of our world together. Yeah. So give us the, you know, the TLDR on SwissBorg, the, the highlights, the, the, the important points because I know I've talked to you guys before you're doing a lot and it's extremely impressive, but for the average person, tell them about the company and why it's important.

Yeah. So, I mean, I would say that, you know, it came to our first meetup. That's a thing I never discussed. First meetup we had was I think in June 2007, no, March 2017. And we like prepared like some pizzas and all of that for the pizza thing and all that. Right. And we had like two, we were like in a shitty co-working. Sorry for if people know which first co-working, it's not good time. It's another one, but we were in a small shitty co-working sorry for if people know which first co-working it's not good time it's another one but we're in a small shitty co-working very cheap though and the guy's like yeah you could be like 20 people i'm like yeah we'll be 20 max we turn out to be like 180 people it was crazy in a very small room too it was hot

and uh and that was like our first one we said, okay, this thing is actually massive. People are super interested. And that was like March or April or something like that, 2017. And then the second big milestone was obviously our ICO raising, you know, $52 million within a month. Not bad. Yeah. And especially the last two, three days, which like five, 10 million coming in, like shitload of ETH coming in Bitcoin, unfortunately ripple. Well, it's still doing, it's doing much better right now.

So hopefully we get some of those and other coins that we accepted. And, and, and, and, you know, being able to do that out of 149 countries, I think so, you know, that has, cause you could raise a big amount of capital and that's cool. But if you raise it out of every country around the world, you're like, okay, this now technology shows that this is something different. And being able from, you know, the guy in Tunisia giving $2 to the guy in Switzerland giving like, you know,

$500,000, they still bought the same token at the same price. I thought that was really cool as a, you know, big milestone. 2018 was about the referendum. We had referendums on the chain, which was really cool. So people, thanks to our token, were able to vote for big actions. So we wanted to do a wealth app, so crypto wealth app. And I wanted to do a desktop-based. Anthony, the co-founder, wanted to do a wealth app, so crypto wealth app. And I wanted to do a desktop-based. Anthony, the co-founder,

wanted to do a mobile-based. Two different ecosystems. People say, yeah, it's the same thing. No, very different. One is more trader-oriented, could go into institutional focus, creating a lot of things. Or there was more convenience

for Mr. Everyone. And the community decided that it was 8000 votes i think so on the blockchain decided for the mobile app which is he lost yeah i lost yeah but for the greater good maybe uh that's amazing so and uh 2019 was really the focus on how we could create a smart engine, which it is to how to aggregate multiple different exchanges and create one marketplace where people could really buy and sell any digital assets with multiple fiats and do it in the best way. So this is really what we've built. Some people, listeners will know Tagomi, what they built. We built something very similar to what Tagomi has. Back then, they didn't have it.

So that's why we built it. And this is a great way to bring in liquidity, get really best price to this order management system. And that's one of our great beauty, which was 2019. We launched a game as well it's called the community app which will evolve next year it's just a fun game of saying bitcoin's going to go up or down uh and you have to bet on that it's just yeah it's so funny because uh you know whatever you most people for and now we have 200 000 people on there most people are always bullish it's so funny there's a very fair amount of people that

small amount of people that are are are bearish on bitcoin especially these days which makes sense and uh so these are two big things and 2020, it's a day where I cried again. After I said I cried, which was really cool. But this year I cried because I saw SwissBorg token going from 400. So from hell, I want to eventually have in the top 100. And that was a big milestone for us. The release of the Wealth App, obviously, which was three years work, was a massive as well milestone for us. The release of the Wealth app, obviously, which was three years work, was a massive as well milestone for us. And now having 100,000 users on the Wealth app and servicing all

these great people to do crypto wealth, I think so is something very admirable. And I want to thank everyone for part of the community or people that have looked at our app to, yeah. So you're not an exchange per se, you're a broker, right? I mean, you're finding, sourcing liquidity for multiple exchanges and finding people the best price and then they can buy and sell. But so you have that aspect, but then the actual wealth app part, I mean, you're basically acting, in my understanding, as a hedge fund or a fund, even a mutual fund, you call it what you want, for people who might not have access to that structured product in other places, certainly not in crypto, correct? Yeah, I think so. So that has been always

the great, I think, so vision of SwissBorg is that a lot of people like yourself are traders, but there's not so many of those people, right? And though a lot of people should be investing into whatever they need to be investing, whether it's crypto, if it's stocks, if it's real estate, people have to be investing because right now we know with monetary policies, which are just printing shitload of cash day by day, you, everyone is with zero interest rates or negative yields and a high inflation rate, people are losing money. And our generation, you know, of the 80s or generation after the 90s is even worse. These people, if they don't inherit a fair amount of cash, they will never be able to buy houses or apartments.

Uh, it's just going to be more and more difficult for these people. And, uh, and, and back then our parents, it was very different. You didn't need to essentially invest so much because you had deposits in your bank and you would save cash. You can't save cash anymore. Cash would give you 10% a year. Exactly. And I think so we're trying to fill that gap and hopefully be able to make that any person around the world is able to invest in a smart way. And that's what we're trying to do at SwissBorg is very soon we're launching this smart yield. It's a robo-advisor that enables anyone to create their account, deposit different cryptos and get a yield on maximizing the returns and minimizing the risk. And that's what most hedge funds try to do. Most money managers try to do. And we do this on individual cases to make sure that uh yeah even if you're you're not a trader well then you're able to get a great rate of returns and this is what

we're going to be doing more and more is to bring in investment-themed structured products on an individual basis and could have a tailor-made risk and get to have a better investment experience. And I think so that is something that I've built the last 10 years in wealth management, hedge funds, and different things that could be done into crypto because it's just now easier to create great tech on top of it and to scale it. And that's really what we're focusing on here at SwissBorg. So where does crypto at the end of 2020,

because I know it would have been a very different conversation at the end of 2019, where does it fall into a responsible investor's portfolio? Say someone who is 44 years old with two kids, you know, how much exposure should a person like that have to, to crypto in their overall portfolio? I think so. The most fascinating case. I mean, I would always say back then that, you know, if you look at Bitcoin 2014, 2020, which had, you know, uptrends, but it had like 80% drawdowns as well in that thing. It would always give to a regular portfolio, a balanced mandate of fixed income and equities.

It would get a much better Sharpe ratio and therefore you would have better performance with lesser risk. And that's 5-10%. I think so now it's slightly different. Because again, the smart, the yield part as a very, it's a new asset class within it. It's a bit like what I used to do, right? You and the trading floor, I would call different banks and see, you know, what's the LIBOR rate of different banks. And based on the ratings, I would go with Rabo if I want a AAA bank. If I

wanted to go have a higher risk, I'll go for another one, have a higher interest rate. But that doesn't exist anymore. And all that interest rates is happening now through these decentralized financial applications. It's happening as well through centralized exchanges. And we're getting great yields because we're reducing the itineraries. And now you could almost say like you could put a very big amount of your capital. It could be, if you put, you know, 30% of all your capital into this crypto money market game, besides if you, you know, if someone gets hacked, that's a technological hack, then, you know, it's going to be very risky. But if in terms of performance, if you're USDC based, deposit USDC, I mean, the risk is not there.

Right. So we're talking about for clarity, and this is how I approach it as well. Like it used to be, how much of your portfolio do you want in Bitcoin? Right. And maybe you would have like a small percentage of your crypto portfolio in some other altcoins. But now when we say you should have higher exposure to crypto, you're actually saying deposit stable coins, specifically USDC, because we know that it's backed more than one for one, not like Tether that has question marks. And just earn your eight or a half, nine, 10. Sometimes, I mean, we're seeing higher percent

and call it a day, right? So it's not even, you're eliminating the volatility of Bitcoin to a large degree with, if you're in 30%, maybe half of it's stable coins and half of it's stable coins. And on top of it, I mean, in our wealth app is the case, you know, with Paxos Gold, I mean, these guys are super credible, right?

So again, you could deposit, you know, invest five, 10% more into gold. And that's really, I think, the most interesting part of crypto is that we had those generation of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lite, so these Litecoins and all that. And then the protocol started to come in and these utility tokens came in. But there's more and more asset-backed tokens that is just changing the game through stable coins, through tokenized assets like gold. And we'll have, obviously stocks will come in, we'll have the investment universe that just

offer these new asset classes. And two, four, three, four years from now, probably most assets and new asset classes will be on the chain. And therefore, you would be able to put 100%. It's interesting because you kind of talked about when you were on the trading floor, you had this tiered approach, right? You'd see more risk, but for more interest, but maybe you go with a AAA bank and take less interest. And that kind of reminds me of how we've seen DeFi evolve, right? Because you have the Swissborgs, you have the Celsius or the BlockFis and the Voyagers and all these where you can, it's kind of like a bank. You just put your money in, not saying you guys, but you put your money in, you know that you're going to get

it. But then you can go way down the line to like food coins and Uniswap and yield farming, getting hundreds of percent if you're willing to take the risk of a rug pull or something. So where do you guys fall in that equation? If I send Bitcoin into the wealth app and you're going to gain yield, is it wrapped Bitcoin? How are you doing that? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think so, you know, we look at three to four different ways to play this game, right? There's the centralized exchange that just said itself says and others.

So what you're looking there is the, just the same job I did 15 years, right? It's like, you look at counterparty risk and to do the credit risk for these counterparties, there's different ways of, you know, funding, who they lend the money to uh you know what's their team what's their legal structure uh what's the reputation what's the what's the link that you have with them and and and you could look at that i think so that's like the more traditional finance there's still more things to do into it because there's still that

hacking problem uh so you want to know like what is their custodian and if it's good or not. On the more funky stuff, which is more of the decentralized financial applications, this is a new world. And this is what I love the most about what we're doing here. Rather you're an accountant, an engineer, or, you know, trader or an analyst, you have to reinvent your way of thinking.

The scoring methodology is very different. Obviously, the first thing is to have an investment team that's not only a quantitative analyst that you've been having in hedge funds for some time. You need engineers. You just need security blockchain engineers that have to do auditing, or you have to rely on two sources of great auditors that we know for some time. And, you know, you, you know, their job is well done. And cause there's no SMP of credit rating of finance of, of DeFi yet.

Right. There's people are trying to get there, but we don't have standards and boards or Moody's or things like that. So that's what we try to do at Swiss work is really create this investment universe first. And the first is the investment universe. How you determine it's, are these guys smart contract? Has the audit been well done? Can we re-approved if the audit has been done?

Yes. That's the first level. Then the second level would be look at, what is really, what is the yield, why are they offering crazy yields? If there's an idea to that, okay, maybe there's yield farming through, done through this platform, giving great yields. Okay, can I then sell the token that that i'm yielding field farming for and is

it liquid enough right uh that that could be another risk and then you really have to weigh in all these different risk factors and create a credit score and this credit score is is will give you uh you know a global notation of your portfolio and say, okay, this is my standards. I want out of the whole credit score habits plus seven. And, and I can incorporate some of my positions saying, okay, this is 10 out of 10. This is five out of 10. I will probably put two third in the 10 and one third in the five like that. I'll have a seven score. Right. And that's what we're doing on a daily basis is how to recalibrate all this investment universe and then look into these different investment opportunities and see how you can maximize again uh returns and minimize uh risk

at all time sounds complicated and it's also i, I mean, you're completely reinventing the way that, uh, people are exposed to crypto. It sounds like, I mean, you know, you're basically taking a legacy model and applying it to a much riskier and more complex asset and finding a way to make that work for a customer. So do you generally like, are you offering a product where it's like someone wants moderate risk, someone who wants to be more aggressive, someone who wants to be extremely safe? Is it kind of like, you know, when you see in, you know, and almost any wealth management app, and then you're balancing it within the person's individual portfolio and say, Hey, listen, if this one ruffles, you were only 5% exposed to it anyways, and it doesn't hurt your portfolio. But let's take that risk so we can have some idiosyncratic risk in something that's completely, you know, can moonshot. Yeah, that's exactly the vision, I think. So it was eventually to really provide different investments, mandates for different risk profiles.

And right now, the first version obviously has to iterate, but we'll have a global one. So we thought this is going to be the one that will enable to have a flagship. And then we will probably be adding different risk profiles as we go. But I think that's what everyone wants, right? You really want to have at the end your own experience, right? If you're looking for hardcore music, rap or techno or classical music, none of them are better than the others. Just everyone has his year, anyone has mood, and everyone wants his own algorithm to say what's the best for him.

And that's where we're puzzling. I think so there's right now we're building a safety net. So essentially everyone will be investing in the smart yields. They will be able to have a safety net, which means that we will compensate 15% of the losses on that, which is good. So if, you know, there's a, whatever, one of our counterparty sushi swap, you know, we realized that we lose some capital there. Well, then it doesn't matter. We'll be able to compensate that. And what we always try to do is diversify the risk as most as possible. And that's why we refresh them on a daily basis. And we make sure that all the due diligence has been met. So you just talked about all all the different kinds of music which reminded me that

apparently you used to be a breakdancer and you were obsessed with Napster is that true yeah myself and Alex my brother I mean uh back then man we used to breakdance for yeah for a long time and uh and Napster was my yeah me, it's my biggest point of, uh, decentralization. I, that's my, I think so. I was a teenager as well. And I was like 16 or seven, 16, 17, something like that, 16 maybe. And, um, it sucked back then because we arrived in France, we grew up in the States, we arrived in France and music was horrible. You know, the only way you were able to get cassette tapes was to call my cousin and New York. She would send us get cassette tapes was to call my cousin in New York.

She would send us some cassette tapes, which was cool, and Hu Tang and all these different things. But then, yeah, we grew up, and it was really hard to get breakbeat. And one day, I don't know, Alex was more into this thing than I was. And he was like, dude, there's like a platform where you could download music. I'm like, really? How does it work and i was like well i have to talk to this friend this guy first so i was like hey man you're a

you're a b-boy he's like yeah i'm a b-boy and then i'm like why are you talking to this awkward guy he's like yeah he's gonna send us some uh good break b music like wow let me talk to him like hey man hey and then you know that's the first peer-to-peer way to exchange digital files. And that was great. And then when eDonkey or eMule came, I was like, okay, this is the future because now it's permissionless, right? You know, I don't need to ask if I could download. I just upload any content on a peer-to-peer basis. You're able to essentially download regardless who's in front of you.

You just trust the technology and people, you know, in a distributed way are able to upload, download any files that they want. So I was like, okay, this is now amazing. I remember. So yeah, Napster was kind of the end of college for me. Okay. You know, like the late nineties, early two thousands, I guess. And I remember we had this incredible, like you said, peer-to-peer way to do music, but the late nineties, early two thousands, I guess. And I remember we had this incredible, like you said, peer to peer way to do music, but the internet was so slow. I had a, I had the little, the little Mac with the blue back, you know, like the blueberry Mac, they sold it in like pink, orange, and blue.

And I had a 14, four modem when I graduated college and it blew everyone's mind that my internet was so fast, but I would like download a song an hour. Yeah. That was fast. Yeah. It it would take like like fucking three days so fast disconnect and like i would always remember alex was like four o'clock in the morning like what are you doing guys oh we might get a video man he was like please man don't disconnect you because you had to have your computer on if you remember that was the worst part. You cannot like download. And it was just like downloading and, you know, it was horrible.

But it was great. But at the time it was, it wasn't, you know, it's horrible in retrospect based on what we've seen now. But at the time it really did change everything. And I never really thought of it as you put it. I mean, that was sort of the first, I mean, that's sort of like the first Bitcoin, right? It was music files, but that was the premise and basis for peer-to-peer money would be

that kind of peer-to-peer swap. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I strongly believe that that was a lot of things that came from there. I think so. I had to reinvent a lot that peer-to peer, a way of doing things and how to, you know, not only the pirate thing, because obviously there was a lot of pirated files,

but there was a lot of files that were genuine DJs of breakbeat that were making their own files. And there was obviously no other way to share it. And, and I, I think that was, I think so the game changer, though that, I mean, tour a bit bit better they had their own token I never really looked into uh that token so much yeah yeah that enables you to have a better uh upload and download speed I think yeah I mean you know people have traded it but I don't know how much utility it has it's a Justin Sun product so apparently he claimed like 30 billion people were using it or something and everyone went nuts. They're like, are they on Mars? Like where are these 30 billion people that are using your token coming from? But, you know,

BitTorrent was another one though. Amazing, really a game changer. And I was excited when they, when they tokenized it. I think it's very cool. It just, you know, hasn't reflected necessarily in the price, but speaking of tokens, so you're doing all of these things that kind of reflect legacy systems, wealth management, and obviously investments, but it's tokenized for you, right? I mean, you had an ICO. So what is the purpose of the CHSB token? What is its utility? And why did you decide to go that route? Right. Great, great, great answer. Great question.

Sorry. I think so. You know, when you do an ICO, you quickly understand that you're community centric and that you need to have a token that has a great use. Back then, which was good, is that you were able to sell an idea and people buy the idea and buy your token. Now it's a bit the opposite. You build great tech, then you yield farm your token that has different usages, right? But a lot of those companies very often have funding probably from the regular way, such as Kampa, which is a great project.

I think so what we really want to do at SwissBorg is create a token that is really the heart of ecosystem and to live the dream of building a DEO, decentralized autonomous organization. And as we did this in 2017, obviously, the best protocol back then was to do it on ETH. We're very happy to do it. And we said, okay, let's create something which is very important, is governance. Because obviously, blockchain has multiple different reasons to be in place but I think the governance is something that is really cool so as mentioned you know

a big milestones to run these different referendums we had two of them in 2018 it was really to give the power to our community members, token holders, and each time that they would vote, they would get rewarded. So we would pay them out as well. And I think that was a really cool way to distribute power and as well incentivize them financially to do that. Then we built this wealth app and the wealth app, we said, okay, how can we going to use this as a really cool way to get the most advantage of the wealth app by

staking Swiss part tokens? So we said, okay, you know what? Let's do something crazy. BNB did 25% discount fees. Now, why not? We would do like 90% discount fees. And that's pretty much what we did is that today, if you stake 50,000 Swiss sport tokens, you're able to have pretty much most

trading pairs for free, uh, fiat and crypto, uh, which is really good. And, um, we're going to be developing different tiers. So we have one premium, we're gonna have a super premium. We're gonna have different ways where people could essentially reduce their trading fees. But now on top of it, you're going to double your returns for yielding. And this has been one of the reasons why our token that has exploded extremely well, because people are like, okay, back then it was to save fees, now it's to boost returns. So I have to become premium. It just doesn't make economical sense to not be Prima anymore. So that's been a big factor. We added to this as well a way of doing protect and burn.

So again, inspired by different other utility tokens is how can you buy back your token and burn it. But we do it in a very cyclical way. We are very systematic, but we do it as a sport. So we said, you know know what let's think about how can we support in the best way so essentially whenever it's close to 20 day moving averages and it hits the support or it falls down the support we buy back the token makes it by pressure and we've seen in the last five six months that it helps a lot. And actually 20%, the whole entire revenues of our ecosystem goes into that protect and burn protocol.

So I think that really shows as well a lot of confidence we have with the SwissBorg token. And last but not least, we never talk about this, but we have built a DEO, which is really cool. There's very few amount of people. There's only 300 token holders that are on it and um basically you have different governance rights with our different with our tokens and you could collaborate on different projects so you could get rewarded you could do

a lot of different things and it's a cool platform that enables you to again give a stronger voice into the community and how you could build stuff, how we could get rewarded and how you could learn as well at the same time. And these are the real four utilities that we have. We have two that will probably come in the next three months. Don't want to talk about too much, but it's going to be great ways to... Come on, stupid. Just a big idea without saying is how to do yield farming on SwissBor token. That's going to be the big, big news that we will share probably in upcoming weeks.

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still not done. My bookie knows that your love of crypto is matched only by your hatred of credit card fees. So they decided to issue back those credit card fees in the form of crypto rewards, and they're doubling it. So if you incur $10 in credit card- So Protected Bird is so interesting. And you said you're taking, did you say 20%? You basically set aside for that. Is that effectively an insurance fund? Like price drops too much. We guarantee we're going to buy it back. So you're providing a guaranteed floor and you're saving money to do that. Exactly. That's exactly it. Yeah. It shows again, how important the token is for us. And, uh, and you know, we're only seven months out.

So the revenues we're making are not great, but you know, this month probably made $600,000. Uh, you know, it's quite cool to say that $120,000 only going to that protect and burn, uh, which is, I think so a good thing. And that will boost, uh, it will protect the, um, you know, a little bit like Gandalf, you shall not pass and push that support again right you're talking i was a total lord of the rings nerd as a kid okay so every like holiday my parents would buy me some like different version of something lord of the rings i was so obsessed with it i even tweeted the other day about the all-time high using the like one ring to bind them quote with one line to buy them. So I still, yeah. Any Lord of the Ring reference is a

winner with me a hundred percent. So I want to dig in more to what it's like to be a founder, the challenges of that. I know we talked about kind of building through the crypto winter and all of that, but I mean, everything falls on you, right? At the end of the day. And I think it's even more unique in the crypto sphere because you have the token and government governance in a community and you just answer to a lot of people even though you're the boss right yeah well you know we try to really make sure that you know i'm probably a leader and and and i influenced the network but we tried to have this more Swiss way of leadership, which is really that the idea of Switzerland is really to have this real direct democracy and have that the man is not the one. It's men that will decide the fate of the network.

But practically, though, on a daily basis, I'm still the CEO of this company. And it's great. It's amazing because you could be considered as a piece of shit, the dark lord of 2018 when your token drops to the god of 2020 when your token goes like 10, 12, 15x more. And you have to always embrace that yin and yang approach of life, which is in the the dark matter you can learn a lot of good stuff and in the white matter you could learn a lot of good stuff too and uh

and me as an experience i think so the the thing that you have to have is that obsession that's very close to insanity it's to but you should not repeat the same things you should have to learn by your mistakes and insanity isanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result. But it's always an obsession to insanity just to not to replicate it in the same way and create a new approach and grow from it. And it's really a fascinating thing that one thing for me, it's the visualization part. It's really where I, the Swiss Borg token here. Okay, I don't have a t-shirt today, but usually I have t-shirts.

I have everywhere the token. And I'm always thinking about the token. So we just had an executing meeting, three hours, always talking about token, token, token, token, token. And when I'm thinking about it, it gives me a lot to, you know, a lot to digest and and uh and yeah that that fact of being very obsessed about one idea is is extremely important the number two rule that i'll give is to you know just bring the best people around you humanly uh technically uh and and and philosophy obviously and and that has to do a lot too right if you if you bring in, technically, they're bright people, but humanly the wrong people, the wrong philosophy,

it's not going to help you on the long run. And, you know, we are so, so lucky at SwissBorg that we recruited a lot of amazing people. We had to change from my financial background, Anthony's financial background, to a financial technology company to now a technology finance company which has been a really a massive spread of brain and and everything so that was very hard for us but it's so much easier now I think so and better and we're more Google than a bank right it's more it's more that and on a smaller more agile approach but

we're more really a tech company today and that has to change a lot of the culture and how you build stuff and how you learn from it and and the last thing that I would you know really think about especially for blockchain is that you always have to think community, community first, community first and doing the power videos I do every Tuesday, doing the transparency with them, building with them, getting the feedback loops for these people that are

amazing and I think that's something that we really appreciate at SwissBorg the feedback loops for these people that are amazing. And I think that's something that we really appreciate at SwissBorg. And the trust that we put in the community and the community of the trust they put in us as well is a bond that really creates something magical. Yeah, it's incredible. And I was talking to your brother the other day. And in passing, he sort of like said, well, you know, our 80 something employees and this, and I didn't realize you guys were so big. I mean, you're not like, this isn't like some mean little team of five guys in a, you know, in a work space, you said, you guys are a big company.

Yeah. Now we're big. Yeah. 80 plus probably be 120 next year. So yeah, it is scaling a lot. I never thought in my life, you know, being in a company with so much people, because in finance, you're always like five people, 10 people, or, you know, working in a bank, but still in a small department. Now it's just bigger, and it's different. It's, it's really cool to learn every day and hopefully inspires old people. Right. But that touches on what you said. You wouldn't think you need 80 plus people when you see the front end and you see like, okay, they're wealth managers and there's probably some tech guys back there doing things and pushing buttons and we don't understand, but what are these 80 people doing? That means you have a lot of departments, people doing a lot of things. And I guess you dig into it, quants and tech guys building.

But what are these people doing? Like how, you know, what are, what are they all doing? Yeah. It's over the half of the workforce now is engineered essentially. So it's, it's, it's scary to see how much work should be done. And which makes sense. I mean, look at Binance or 2000, you know, I think so Coinbase, the same thing. And, and yeah and yeah you know I remember Nicola our CTO one of the smartest man in the world he's like yeah but Sarah's you know engineering team is like a pizza you need six slices more than six doesn't

work like motherfucker we're like Pizza Hut now we're like for you you want to hire 40 more next year exactly and heyou-can-eat pizza buffet. Exactly. And he's like, yeah, man, I didn't ever know it was going to be that big either. And even with that, it takes so much time to... But then the beauty of Swiss Fork, and I think so, I have nothing bad to say against Revolut, or to PayPal either. These are two biggest fintechs ever, right? Europe, number one fintech, PayPal, probably the biggest fintech in the world.

But you see there how it's, you know, one is software company, PayPal, obviously was acquired and, you know, different things that go with it uh but you see that now when they're incorporating tech like crypto they need to go through example which i need three to go to paxos sorry paxos which was a great company and i think so they it's very smart for them to going through them um but it's quite weird you're like okay man you guys like how many five thousand people you can't even incorporate this yeah like you guys can't build this yourself and it's quite weird. You're like, okay, man, you guys like how many, 5,000 people? You can't even incorporate. You can't build this? Yeah, you guys can't build this yourself? And it's going to be such a huge market, right? I mean, it's the biggest driver of the cash app, which is a competitor, right?

So the example is there. But when you get to be such a big company and you have such a legacy behind it, I imagine then it's very difficult. And then you have the other companies, which are these Revolut that don't necessarily have this engineering culture, but that take a lot of stacks from a lot of different bricks of different technology and then scales and scales so fastly

by the position of customers that they're in the position of customer business, but not in the tech company. And I think so at SwissBorg, there's a fine line between building the position of customer business, but not in the tech company. And I think so at SwissBorg, you know, there's a fine line between building the community and developing tech, but we're definitely those who believe that if you have your own tech, then if you want to add a feature, like we're building a smart yield, right?

By, by scratch, you want to have a yield on SwissBorg token. Hey, no problem. We're going to work it out. Right? You want to have different risk profiles there? Okay, well, we could build it, right? And then you could add in more and more. And vertically, you could start to build a lot of application, a lot of products that are extremely interesting. And I think that's something great that we've built, is that we aggregated a lot of exchanges. Now we're aggregating a lot of different decentralized

applications but then we're building on top our own products and it's it's our technology and that that's a winning strategy i think so because you're capturing already what exists which is great but you're building on top your own intelligence and your own products that could be automated and and get scale as well. Because all of we were building Scala, which is one of the best programming language that's invented in our city here in Switzerland. And it's used by Twitter and multiple, a lot of different great tech companies. So that's, I think it's a big plus at this point.

So I talk about PayPal all the time. I mean, I think obviously it's massively bullish for the space that 200 plus million people are going to be exposed on a platform that they're comfortable with. You know, it kind of removes a lot of the barriers to entry. And obviously, we've seen them jump from giving access to 10% of people to 100% and from a $10,000 minimum maximum limit to 20,000. So obviously, there's the interest there. But I didn't think about what you just touched on, which is that they probably didn't even consider building it themselves. So I wonder if they just did it because they felt they had to, like customers were demanding it, but didn't see it was so seriously. So they just kind of found a partner and said, we're going to offer this so that we can keep up, but didn't really, it seems like it would be far more profitable for them if they really believed in it in the long run to build it themselves. Right. So do you think that this was just a matter of customer

demand? And so they acted quickly, there was pressure to do it. Or do you think that they really have this like, firm belief in the future of Bitcoin? A lot of people have been talking about this for some time about how PayPal has always been like the Darth Vader of Bitcoin. I don't really know. I don't know so many people from PayPal. I just know some people from the Tokyo team, which had crypto and some of them are in our ICO. But what I know is that when you're touching to something that has some legal pressure in the states you don't want to do it yourself and i think so that's the thing yeah the now that the cc and cftc is not on board 100 but getting more important and this great way of why i'm in license uh that

seems to be pretty much approved now uh anyway, Kraken is using it very well. There's more and more confidence that we will see eventually big players getting into it. But I think so their default thoughts is like, okay, let's test it. Let's give all the pressure on these guys, you know, and maybe let's integrate it. And one day, if we really want to make a move, we'll make a move. But that's a losing strategy. I agree. I mean, I get why they would do it, but that's not a real, that's what I was kind of getting at. I mean, that's not a real commitment to it, right?

They're basically saying, Paxos, you guys, you know, you go back it, you build the tech, you do all the work and you take all the blame if this goes down. Yeah. And I understand it. But hey, I mean, with Deceptive being launched in China, Libra, I'm pretty sure these guys are going to launch very soon. It's just about time about these guys. If they don't have a wallet, they will not be in the wallet business anymore so uh yeah i think so we've seen with time that there's been a lot of napsters uh that you know could have changed the world financially they changed our philosophy but they didn't change it say financially and and i'm sure there's a lot of fintechs today that will eventually get kicked out and there's going to be these alipay 10 cent wechat guys that are just going to take over the markets uh and uh and you know i think so line is doing great business there uh we never talk about line because it's japanese and it's in thailand

but these guys have their wallets they have their token you know they're very they're very vocal about it in their own countries. So we're definitely going to see some great actors. And, uh, and I think so Switzerland has a great position regarding crypto in general. Um, and you know, I think, so that's why we call it home today, Swiss, uh, Swiss parts. So do you think that sort of half-assed commitment from companies like PayPal in the end is going to force their replacement by people who have gone all in and done it the right way, kind of like what you're talking about. I mean, I think PayPal, now that I'm thinking about it, they're at tremendous risk of being

replaced. I mean, crypto is a much better product than PayPal, right? For sending money. It's always interesting to hear, hey, we're going to accept Bitcoin, which is probably a better version of PayPal itself. Certainly stable coins are. Stable coins, yeah, for sure. I think that when I'm thinking about it now as we're having this conversation, they just don't have much vision. I think so. They have a great vision, probably. It's just that, you know, it's the thing.

It's like if you're talking about this industry with boats, right. Swiss board, we're like that, you know, that small jet boat that you do like wakeboard and like a mastercraft, right. We're like a cool guy. We can onboard as fair amount of people and we could jump around and go super fast coast to coast. When you have that huge sailing boat, you that's a real tanker titanic model which is not paypal i really have respect i love paypal too but um don't have that agility to move so quickly you know they need to have you know 2 000 validators before making you know uh change the color of the brand of paypal well then obviously you know incorporating

new technology is just going to be that just going to take more time and the risk that goes with it it's going to take more time and then you see the guys that are starving like us that need to uh want to change the world and are able to take the risk for it and uh and i I think that's why we've seen with time that there's going to be many blockbusters and Netflix, uh, in the next 10, 20 years. And then after maybe everything will be in the matrix, but, uh, I'd rather be Netflix than blockbuster right now. Blockbuster was such a fixture of our childhood. You grew up in the United States. So, I mean, blockbuster was the was like the center of youth culture. Blockbuster and the mall, I guess.

But two things that have suffered tremendously, certainly in the last few years, which is interesting. So do you see a future where the PayPals and the Venmos and all these payment sort of facilitators, they just die because crypto is better. Are they dinosaurs? I mean, that's what I mean. It's going to be interesting to see.

I mean, you know, PayPal say they have 350 million users, which is probably true. Are they active? Right, that's 350 million people have signed up. Yeah. You know, I used to be the, I mean, I don't, I think so. PayPal was the first thing I ever made.

I used to pay my ass off. Yeah. There's like only credit card before credit cards. So you can have PayPal for when, you know, in the early, I don't know, 2000,

whatever. And, um, I think so. Yes. Some of these guys won't be able to, to, to,

to match the competition. And, uh, and you know, we're going to see newcomers and, um, and, uh, there's a lot in the U S there's a lot in Asia. Uh, there's few here in, in, in, in Europe and, uh, and it's going to be a very fierce competitor and, uh, and probably a lot of people that are backing Libra or part of the association, they're making a smart move. People are not. It's going to be more complicated. I think so. Did you choose the name Swissborg and to be operating in Switzerland because of the positive stigma of a Swiss bank?

Yeah, I think so. Probably. I mean, myself, I'm originally Iranian-Swiss and I I grew up living in a few different countries and there's one thing I like about Switzerland it's that it's extremely Swiss but over 40% of the people are immigrants yeah that's I'm not even nervous people yet are not Swiss foreigners I mean it's listen so it's a very a country that has very strong genes of their own culture, but has a very open-minded regarding religion, regarding politics. And it's only their own direct democracy in the world. And the Swiss has this stamp, which is that you're never going to get robbed by a Swiss person. It's just never going to happen. It has that quality.

It has that trust that you want to have for wealth, right? That's why people have been depositing a fair amount of, and why it's the biggest wealth management platform in the world is not because people are not paying taxes. That would have been true maybe to some like 2007, but still the case and people are paying taxes now. And it's just because Switzerland never had any wars last 300 years, never political, social, economical crisis. The Swiss franc is one of the best safe haven play. Obviously Bitcoin is better, but Swiss franc is still a great one. And that was one of the side. And then the Borg is coming from the cyborg. So it was how can you do augmented Swiss, you know, way.

So how can you keep that DNA with a Swiss person, with a Swiss direct democracy and all of that trust? And how can you then bring it into the chain or bring it into technology in general? And that was a bit the reason why we put that contrast of on-chain and off-chain, which I always talk about, and how we are merging those two worlds together. You talked about the first time that you basically used Bitcoin was sending it to your father in Iran. So we've seen hyperinflation in a number of countries. We've seen, I mean, Iran's a great, great example of what like sanctions have done to Iran and the

use case. Is that the sort of future where Bitcoin itself or cryptocurrency really, really thrives is, you know, money printing, hyperinflation, when people can't trust their own currency? Is that still one of our major narratives? Yeah, I think so. You know, I really liked what Paul Tudor said recently is that I invest in Bitcoin because there's human capital behind it. And I invest in Bitcoin because it's an inflation hedge. And it's the only inflation hedge that I have that I'm able to essentially invest in human capital. Because usually I short the market. That is the opposite. It's how to essentially short human capital. Yeah, short humanity. And I think so what you could talk on top of that human capital is that, is that the philosophy behind Bitcoin and throughout Napster and this is

distributed or decentralized movements, which is that today we are mining and using Bitcoin in the U S and Russia and Iran and North Korea and Switzerland and France. And we're all in that same position where it's like, Dan, we're actually backing the same philosophy. We're backing the same economy. And no one could say anything about it. And I think so that has the real beauty of one's life is to find its purpose.

And I think so, you know, the idea of decentralizing wealth and what Bitcoin has been doing for the last 10 years and how Ethereum has brought a new game with smart contracts and how other projects such as Binance, such as Usborg or BAT or all these different applications, decentralized finance, Aave, all these different guys, which are bringing to the table is something very new and something has a strong merit. It's not only about financial gains, it's about creating new products that everyone can get access to and creating it for a better cause, which is essentially closing that gap

wealth that is just bananas. And it's just exponential, that gap. And 10 years from now, it could be very dangerous and the world will be living and hopefully digital assets will be one way that we could reduce that gap and and and have better equal access to to to wealth which is the idea of how to change the world today it's with wealth wealth is the it's it's really that dividend that enables you to get power and get power is how you could create better things for the greater good. Totally agree. So you just said, so you mentioned 10 years down the road. So I know that we're getting up against it with time.

So 10 years down the road, where do you see SwissBorg? What's the vision for, you know, that far down the road? Because in this market, 10 years is like 10 minutes, right? We live a decade in a day sometimes with price action, certainly as traders. So what's the vision for 10 years for SwissBorg? And where do you think that the entire ecosystem could potentially be? I'm not asking for wild price predictions or anything, more general idea. I mean, the idea is really to be a decentralized autonomous organization where

you have a fair amount of token holders around the world that would be deciding the faith of SwissBorg. There won't be any employees, but just people that would essentially build great applications, great financial applications. And more as the product itself, beside the governance around it, is how you could essentially, like Spotify, you get into your app, you choose different investment themes. These investment themes match your profile, but as well your purpose in life, right? If you want to invest in green energy,

if you want to invest in the new talents for singing, I don't know what, if you want to collect collectibles in whatever video games, all of that will be a marketplace where you could have, you know, tailor-made investment mandates that matches, again, your risk profile and essentially your purpose. And that's really the end game is how to provide the best wealth management experience to anyone starting like, you know, $10. And do it always as well through this community mind and has a great meritocratic way of rewarding people based on each of contribution that has broadened and the world i see it tokenized to see a place where you know we're going to be working less and less probably and more and more and things that we really like and strive for and um and being able to invest in you know in a restaurant that could tokenize that restaurant and be able to you know to buy a share of that and contribute what you want and be able to, to trade that piece of restaurants against, I don't know, a fraction of Bitcoin and that fraction of Bitcoin, you could rent your apartment for X amount of years and, and have a really, yeah, digital marketplace where anyone could benefit from it and there won't be

any censorship less intermediaries i don't believe in the zero intermediary thing i think so you still need intermediaries uh but um just be a better more accessible place so we tokenize everything tokenizing everything exactly i love it so so i'm writing it down now that you will, in 10 years, SwissBorg will be the Spotify of wealth management. And we will be trading your employees because you won't have any, but it's really, it's an incredible future. And I agree that that's what the world will likely look at, look like, you know, and whether it's any specific cryptocurrency. And I agree that that's what the world will likely look at, look like, you know,

and whether it's any specific cryptocurrency that survives or whatever, the technology behind it and the idea of tokenizing things, democratizing it is, you know, our inevitable future. And then you'll have a lot more free time for break dancing. Exactly. For sure.

Do you still bust out any moves? What was it last time i was i was in the mountains and i tried to move man i hurt myself so bad you always get injured i get injured every time i try to dance now because my moves i just don't have those you know i don't have that as well i just like love dancing i was a dj for 20 years and so like my i used to break dance when i was a little kid my brother and i used to have matching parachute pants and we would actually like this huge roll of linoleum everywhere we went. And like one day we were allowed to bring it to school like each week. And we would like put on little break dancing shows,

but we were terrible. We were like, we weren't like, you know, on the floor doing moves we we'd like to think we were, but we were like breaking like early turbo no zone just but yeah man that's my background as well so if they can tokenize everything give me more time to get back into break dancing then that's a future i can certainly support so where can

everybody follow you and find out more information twitter twitter obviously vocal there uh then there's obviously our website swissport.com uh check out anything over there it'll be awesome and uh yeah and hopefully meet in in the real world when we'll be physically allowed to switzerland is very very high on my uh first places to go and they allow me out of here i expect uh i expect uh good treatment snowboarding in the winter and skiing on the lake on summer it's uh they're it's both uh cool stuff yeah i'm ready we're gonna do it so maybe 20 late 2021 or uh next winter i'm coming skiing all right, thank you so much for taking the time. Really inspired chat and looking forward to what you guys are going to put

together in the coming years. Will do. Thank you so much. And thanks for listening. Cool. Let's go.