The Wolf Of All Streets - Travala (AVA) Founder on Discovering Bitcoin at 17 And Moving To NFTs | Matt Luczynski

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

At the incredibly young age of 22, Matt Luczynski founded Travala, a blockchain based travel company that put innovative technology to the test. Since Travala, Matt has become an expert at taking technology and applying it to a real world use case. Now that Travala is wildly successful, he went on to the NFT space and built HoDooi, a platform poised to be eBay for NFTs. While many people believe blockchain technology and crypto is the future, Matt has actually made it a reality for millions of people to enjoy and use. -- Matcha: Matcha is the easiest way to trade in DeFi. Matcha enables you to trade across all the major DEXs so you can be sure you’re getting better prices than going to a centralized exchange or Uniswap. Connect your wallet and start today at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/matcha --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Matcha. Stay tuned for more information about them later in the episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics, basically anyone with a good story to tell. Today's guest founded one of the largest travel companies around at the ripe old age of 22 years old.

Matt's company, Travala, not only became a globally recognized brand amassing over 3.5 million in monthly revenue, but was also built on blockchain technology and the popular native token AVA. On this show, we talk a lot about how blockchain tech and crypto can be used in real life when we talk about mainstream adoption. Well, Matt has actually done it, so he has a pretty amazing story to tell. On top of this, Matt has now entered into NFT space with his new project, How Do We? It's my goal today to better understand how Matt is turning ideas into real use cases for crypto and to have him hopefully inspire all of us to do the same. Matt Luchinsky, thanks so much for coming on, man. Hey, mate. How's it going? Yeah, thanks for having me on. Great show to be on.

Of course, man. We've been trying to get it done for a while, so I'm glad that we were finally able to get it on the books. Now, as I mentioned in the intro, man, you have quite a story. I want to start with the founding of Travala at the age of 22 and how this came to fruition. How did you get into blockchain and decide to start a company at such a young age? Yeah, so I guess like my background and from an early age, like my family are very entrepreneurial, have their own businesses, different things like that. So I guess that's where the sort of inspiration came from. I worked several part-time jobs while I was younger, going through university and things like that. And I always wanted to like do my own thing.

I actually initially came across Bitcoin when I was 17. in 2011 one of my friends who was a little bit older than me was at you started university and they started bitcoin mining and they were like oh there's this cool new thing blah blah blah so I was like started to look into it and that's where like it really started to you know take my interest then as I started to like go from like you know 17 18 19 year old I started to find people who were like starting to get into the space and starting to try and buy buy bitcoin or sell bitcoin in different places and just through the connections i had who were older who were like mining and different things like that i was able to buy a little bit cheaper sell it on and it just became like a little like side hustle let's say and the technology itself then i started to look into it and what could actually do and we started

to see hear about like ethereum coming out and and and the ripple as well and and those like sort of technologies especially ethereum with what it was capable of doing with the smart contracts and at the time it was a little bit like oh what will it actually be able to do because it couldn't do it yet um those sort of things were in play and and whilst i was in my final few years of university you know i was always like thinking oh you know how can we apply this how can we do different things in the space and um whilst i was in my final year of university i did start another travel startup it was it was a kind of a failed travel startup we we had some initial uh funding from uh bidu capital over in china the chinese google um and it just didn't take off it didn't get to where it needed to be

it didn't it didn't produce a product as it were but that sort of like you know pivoted me towards you know the travel space as it were i personally love to travel like I love to go places I've been all over the world like before I was 20 I was I've been all over the world um and it's something that I wanted to be able to do in an easy way and then I sort of started to think of like you know you've got this whole crypto thing I've made a lot of money in bitcoin I've got bitcoin I can't spend it and I luckily then, and I actually went to Vietnam and that's where Travala was founded. Myself and Steve, one of the other co-founders, myself and him being the initial co-founders in the whole, in the Travala.com brand, we sort of got together and

there was a few other people involved at the time as well. And we started to talk about like, he was in the travel space himself and like what we could do with like travel and crypto and Bitcoin and and how like not just Bitcoin, but like other things, other assets as well. And that's where Travalo was born. And that was my initial starting point, really, into the crypto space as a as a, you know, not nine to five job, but like we built up Travala. We invited on other co-founders. We scaled the company up to the point of merger with a company called Travel by Bit, which was majority owned by Binance. And then, you know, that's where Travala and AVA have grown up today. You know, you can see it all online and across social medias through Travala. And I'm sure majority of people have seen it across the space. You know, Travala has been everywhere. And that was like, you know, one of the main focus points behind it. You know, get it to been everywhere. And that was like a, you know, one of the main

focus points behind it, you know, get it to everybody who has crypto because everyone loves to travel. Whether you go away once a year or you go away every single month, like, you know, people like that product and service. And it's such a transferable product or service across the global economy. Like it's everywhere. Everyone books a hotel in whatever country you're in um luckily we implemented like you know key uh business business to business um sides of bookings as well as retail side of bookings flights which has allowed us it although we went to a global pandemic continue to grow obviously i did leave the i did leave the company in an operational role um around a year ago now after the after. And then obviously, you know, migrated into what is now HowDoWe.com in the NFT marketplace. We're going to get into that in a little while. I want to

talk about the fact that you stack sats for all these years. But a lot of people who do that just want to keep stacking sats, right? They never want to spend their Bitcoin. So you have this sort of like bipolarity. There's the people who want to see it as peer to peer cash, like in the white paper. And then there's the people who are like, I would never spend a penny of my Bitcoin ever. Did you find that to be a challenge? And did you find a lot of people just didn't want to spend their crypto even when you gave them the ability to do so? I guess that's the difference between like somebody who's looking at it from a like a macro perspective and someone who's looking at it from a like a macro perspective and someone's who's looking at it from like a personal game perspective like yeah you know personally like you know give me all the stats you can i'll store them like i'll keep them but like also from a

macro level and building a product like you need to have that transferability of on and off ramps for a currency to to be valuable if it doesn't and it isn't liquid then you know it it could very easy if it wasn't a liquid currency, for example, it could very easily dump down. And if someone sold like a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, you know, the price has gone to, I'm not going to say zero, but it's gone down a lot. So it has to be liquid and it has to be able to be traded. And it has to be, it has to be used for that. There has to be the on-ramp and there has to be the off-ramp in different places and different scenarios. So for me, looking at like, look at like that, it's important to have that and have those services. Travala does see majority bookings in Bitcoin or did in the past. I don't know what

it is right now off the top of my head without looking through this stuff, but a lot of the bookings have been in Bitcoin over the past. So although we are seeing some people like you just mentioned, not everybody is like that and people people do like to, you know, spend the gains and whatnot. So when you were building it, what was the implementation of blockchain? How was the coin AVA involved? What was the utility? I mean, you know, you could have obviously just built a kayaker in Expedia and allowed people to just pay in Bitcoin and called it a day, right? And you could have used a third party service or something to transfer Bitcoin to dollars. You really built something. So what was the utility of the coin and how did you put that all together? Yeah. So initially while I was at the CEO of the company,

we did implement quite a lot of different things from the smart program where you can join this up to five tiers of the smart program and you get a stake in reward um you get there's a referral program as well which involves the ava token um there's with the smart program there's a give back there's a discount on the on the price of your hotel bookings um and there's a few other different utilities from like payments as well um where you can have like a partial payment in ava from like you give back that you'd had on the previous booking. And like there's a few different functions there that sort of are only possible because we have a native token. If we didn't have the native token,

then it wouldn't actually be possible to sort of create that micro economy within the crypto space as a whole on the Travalo ecosystem. So that's really where like, you know, the AVA token really fits in with that. And it was great what we did. And the guys, you know, the CEO now and the other founders who are, you know, still pushing on the project and whatnot, and then the merge team from Travel by Bit, they're doing some great things at Travala still. They've added a lot more use cases now to the platform. And you know, it's growing well,

and it's growing, and it's continuing to do well. So, you know, full credit to what they've done, and what they're continuing to do and build there. Yeah. So as you and I both mentioned, you've pivoted to Howdoi to start something in the NFT space. I want to talk about NFTs in general, because I would imagine that even you were surprised to see it on Saturday Night Live and 69 million dollar Beeple pieces being sold at auction and all of the craziness of the NFT space. What do you make? Well, first of all, let's just talk about what Hodooy is, what you guys are doing, and why you decided to put your energy towards NFTs. Yeah, yeah. So Hodooy is an NFT marketplace,

a multi-chain NFT marketplace to create, buy, sell, and resell NFTs. We are specifically targeting the resale market where you can bring you know, bring an NFT from another platform, such as like, you know, when Binance has the withdrawals or when OpenSea has withdrawals. We do aim to be this sort of resale market, the eBay of NFTs, as we've been quoted in the media, really to focus in on, you know, we see the market as for collectibles, which we see NFTs as, we see the market in the resale market not the initial market so for example um let's take night dunks you know you go and buy your night dunks

from the nike store the limited edition night dunks they cost you 100 from the nike store now the market isn't in where you're buying them from a nike it's actually on the resale platform where they're being resold so that's what we aim to become we aim to be the place where you know the mass user base the the the pivotal point where you know our nft is brought to and that also does build along the lines of we do allow people to bring nfts to the platform initially and create them and mint them on our platform and that's really where the multi multi-chain approach comes in uh where we you know we're adding the binance smart chain initially we're adding the flow blockchain we're going to add uh the crypto.com chain who we've you who we've partnered with

and took some big investments from. And we're really just here to be like the designated place for like anyone to sort of come. You don't need to have an NFT from like Binance or OpenSea or, you know, on the Ethereum chain. You can bring them all into one place. And that's what we really want to be. We want to be a user-focused platform

that builds things for users that we haven't seen out there right now. If comes in on one chain can it go out on another so that technology isn't built yet but we are doing some our into that um it is it is possible to do that you just need to destroy essentially have a destroy function from one smart contract or like a burn from one and it just transposes onto another chain. So it is possible you could, it's essentially like creating a bridge from like Binance to Ethereum. It's possible to do. And, you know, one of the main focus points with HowDoMe isn't necessarily that to start with. We are looking to add that function, but also cross-train perpetual royalties. So, or cross

platform, should I say, you know, one of the big things right now is like, you know, the royalties so or cross-platform should i say you know one of the big big things right now is like you know the royalties on open sea they're on open sea if you move that nft from anywhere into your private wallet they're not there anymore and that's a little bit of a problem it's kind of like platforms have created something that is designated for their platform and that's it and it plays no benefit to the you know the overall space as a. So that's something that we want to build into the smart contracts in our platform. So it allows users to create on our platform, pass them onto other platforms,

and it should hopefully change the industry in a positive way. Guys, I really hope that all of you are not still trading on the old platforms like Uniswap when there are much better options like Matcha. And now Matcha has upgraded to 2.0. Now I've told you about Matcha a number of times. They have limit orders, which these other platforms don't,

which is absolutely incredible. So you don't have to sit there staring at your screen waiting for that perfect moment to enter or exit a trade. And they also aggregate liquidity from all of the different platforms, finding you the best price and reduced fees. But now they have Matcha 2.0 and have added so many awesome features.

Matcha is now the only DEX with an integrated fiat on-ramp. You can put your dollars directly onto the platform. They also now have OTC trading for orders between 1k and 1 million, which is beyond huge. And maybe most importantly, matcha now supports trading on polygon meaning those gas fees will almost evaporate completely. Now, if you guys want to check out matcha, which you absolutely should, you can do that at the wolf of all streets dot link slash matcha. That's the wolf of all streets dot link slash matcha.

Please check them out. I'm telling you, it will save you so much money and is such a superior experience. Do it now. Royalties are obviously bread and butter in the music industry. You know, every time a song is played in theory, even though it may take six months to get paid your fraction of a penny, the artist gets paid, the label gets paid, the distributor gets paid, everyone gets paid. Until NFTs, to my knowledge, that wasn't really a thing in art, right? I mean, the Picasso Foundation isn't necessarily getting paid if somebody privately sells a Picasso to another

collector. So we haven't talked about it much, certainly on the show, but that royalty aspect for an artist is absolutely huge. And I mean, that's why NBA Top Shot is such a huge business for the NBA, right? Every single time you sell those on Top Shot, resell, resell, resell, they're getting their royalty. So how big is being able to pay an artist a royalty for second, third, fourth sales for NFTs, the space? Well, it's quite big and and it's also um it's also bigger if they can move it from platform to platform because you have got the whole thing of someone being able to someone wanting to store something in a private wallet and someone wanting to go somewhere else

to sell something like you know there's no word of a lie that you know you could buy something on amazon and want to go sell it on ebay well the same principle will apply to nfts you know you might buy something on how do you want to go sell it on binance or buy something on binance and go on a site on the open sea and you know we can see that in the space because we're like sort of i'm not going to say we're new to the space because we're not but like a new platform coming to launch um and you know we want to provide that to the to the to the users and we've had such positive feedback by you know pushing that forward with something that we're going to be doing. You know, we're pretty happy that we're going to be trying to change this space in a positive way. So it's interesting. A lot of people obviously looking forward to Ethereum 2.0 to reduce gas fees and for Ethereum to be able to scale.

There was a time a few months ago when Ethereum was near all time highs that artists, unless you knew you were going to make a lot of money, it wasn't even worth minting an NFT because of the gas fees. Right now, gas fees are at an extreme low. But how will those problems be addressed if we go back into another bull run? I mean, it's fine for someone to mint a $200 NFT if they're selling it for thousands, but if you're going to sell it for $10, it costs you $200 to mint it. It doesn't make very much sense. Yeah, literally, literally. And this is why Howdoee is a multi-chain NFT marketplace. We've initially gone out on the Binance Smart Chain. It's the cheapest chain to mint an NFT on. You're going to have options. If you come to Howdoee, you're going to have

options. We are going to implement Ethereum later on, whether it's by the time Ethereum 2.0 is out or before that. And if we're in a bull market, you've got options to be able to mint on Binance Smart Chain or Flow Blockchain or any of the chains that we sort of integrate within the platform. So our platform is focused on usability, putting the user first, making sure the user has options and not sort of penalizing them for what's sort of happening on a macro level in the space. That makes sense. I'm curious where you think the NFT space as a whole sits at the moment. I mean, like I said before, I mean, $69 million NFT is no joke. And seeing it on Saturday Night Live with a skit, I mean, it clearly made it to the very mainstream, which are, I mean, those are bubble top type signals,

right? So, you know, so what do you make of the space as a whole right now? I mean, you just mentioned exactly what I've been thinking and been thinking for a while. So we initially started to come together with How Do We, like maybe 10 months ago, when it was really starting to look interesting and starting to pick up. We've been in the space for a while anyway, like behind the scenes, just playing around with stuff. But right now, and it has been for the past, let's say, four or five months, it's in bubble territory, 100%.

That doesn't mean that it's going to pop and burst and be nothing anymore. It's a bit like, you know, when we say Binance is in a, not Binance, Bitcoin's in a little bit of a bubble. It's in a growth stage and that's great. And it's probably going to plateau and it's probably going to come around again i mean one of the interesting things with the nft space right now is like you know we've like for example on how do we tyson fury's nft like one of the biggest boxes in the world like it's crazy these people are actually willing to do this and take the risk in the space and and kind of put their names forward to to push forward with it because for us it's like wow like

this is this is like mass like wow like this is this is like mass adoption right now this is this is crypto going into the mainstream 100 percent like people can say oh yeah we're going to go down to 10k bitcoin like it doesn't matter about the price of bitcoin it's about the exposure that it's getting and it's about the users seeing what this space really does and what it's about and actually cap like people not necessarily capitalizing on in terms like people not necessarily capitalizing on in terms of value, but like capitalizing in terms of like user growth and usability. So yeah, for me, like this is like, this is a really good thing. And this has been a really

good thing for the crypto space as a whole, for the for adoption, which we all want at the end of the day, because adoption brings, you know, growth and growth brings more benefits to everybody. Yeah, I mean, those of us who are passionate about crypto obviously live in our echo chamber. And so the narratives are probably different for us. I'm curious if you think your average person, your suburban soccer mom, if they make that connection between Bitcoin and NFTs, or if they even understand that blockchain and crypto, that they're related and what they're seeing. Because they definitely see Saturday Night Live and they definitely probably know what Dogecoin is, but maybe they don't even understand Bitcoin or the relationship.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean, this actually brings back a point back to Travala, why we initially built it. One of the, and I've said this many, many, many times on publicly and stuff like that. Like one of the reasons why we built it and one of the things that we really implemented was,

you know, my mom needs to be able to use this product and essentially we want to bring a product to market that um you know anybody can use it doesn't matter whether you're in crypto or not and with traval we added credit card payments and things like that but there was still a tokenized reward in the system so everybody got crypto like it didn't matter if you knew how to use it it came across as a loyalty point, but everyone got it and everyone used it. And that's where we see and I personally see products moving forward in this space for the mass adoption of things with NFTs itself. You know, how do we will implement credit card payments and debit card payments and have the ability for anybody to be able to buy an NFT? But then in the background, there might be a tokenized reward. There might be a tokenized, you know know a function that happens within that and they are burning nft so it's it is the crypto

assets in itself and so i think like that as a whole that sort of like sets the sort of point and that you there are other products doing this now as well we i'm not going to say we're the only ones because we're not um but yeah i see that as a whole like you know that's where the nft marketplace is going and that's that's where I see like the mass adoption coming from, not just with NFT, but other products as well. give them 10 bucks or 15 bucks or 30 bucks as a reward. And then they see it skyrocket like AVA obviously did. Maybe that really is the path. I mean, listen, in El Salvador, they're about to airdrop 30 bucks into everyone who everyone's wallet. Right. Don't you think that's the way? Well, I mean, yeah, if you, if you, it is, it is. And if you can,

if you can do it in a way where you know it isn't um isn't going to cause too much buy uh too much sell pressure once once they get that so like with the bitcoin el salvador thing you know that's that's quite a cool thing because people are going to start interacting with bitcoin they can start buying products with it off people and it's not just going to cause a mass sell pressure on the market which nobody really wants it would be no one's benefit if that happened but because of how they've gone about it, you know, doing the whole, creating the whole economy around it, really, you know, I think it's going to be a lot more beneficial

for Bitcoin than anyone really thinks. And, I mean, just building onto this as well, like what's happened recently in, like, the sort of media and outlet with the Chinese miners turning off, like, I see that as a massive positive thing. Massive positive thing. You've reduced the price, reduced the sort of the work rate that the miners need to work on a macro level to have that Bitcoin reward over the 24 hour period. You've taken out of China, which really we wanted that control to be taken out of there anyway.

If it went the other way, then it wouldn't be good for anybody um because there could have been a 51 attack if if if you know they are the people that would probably have done that um and so yeah i mean it's a whole positive for me like this this everything that's happening at the moment is uh the only way is up probably you understand mining i i never mined before and when the china news broke, I love compass mining. I actually have Whit Gibbs coming up on the thing. And I just went on their site and started like a normal customer, just buying a bunch of rigs and setting them up. So now I'm set up in Manitoba, Canada and South Carolina. I mean, like you said, I figure that it's a short-term pain, long-term gain situation with mining. You obviously have a better understanding of mining

than me, but I thought, hey, if this difficulty is about to drop 25% in a day as we're recording this in a couple of days, this is absolutely an opportunity to get in on this if you have a long-term view. Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. If you can scale up a rig as well, like you've got some good options there. And if you can make it from renewable energy and different, like, you know, you've got endless, endless possibilities. Unfortunately, I live in the UK where there is absolutely zero possibility of me using very sustainable, renewable energy. So yeah, not happening for me, but yeah, that's cool. So I'm curious when you started Travala, obviously the infrastructure was probably lacking to some degree in the crypto space in general,

like easy to use wallets for somebody so that they could actually get Bitcoin and buy it. Have you seen a major improvement in that infrastructure, making it more obvious and easy to use for the average person? And if not, what do we need still to build so that your mom will say, this is easy. This is like going in my bank account. This is like using PayPal. Yeah. I think with Travala in itself, obviously, since we added credit cards, that's what made it easy for the everyday user. With the crypto side, the Bitcoin users, there was already wallets out there. There was already easy to use wallets. One of the things that the guys have done over the past, since I left any of the operational roles was integrated with Binance and added the binance pay option and that seems to be quite very like a lot easier to use um people can just like you know use the binance account i mean who

doesn't have a binance account these days use a binance account straight payment easy to use again same with crypto.com to be fair as well um you know we did integrate with them a long time ago years ago that was one of our first additional payment flows and crypto.com, to be fair as well. You know, we did integrate with them a long time ago, years ago. That was one of our first additional payment flows. And crypto.com is great as well. You know, it's easy to use their app. That's probably, for me, crypto.com is probably one of the easiest apps from a retail user point of view. Not just with Travala, but with anything that they use on their platform, whether it's, you know, your Netflix payments or whatever. You know, your bitcoins in there it's an easy transfer over to you

over you sort of like your fiat what they call your fiat wallet and there you go your payments made and and it's easy as that so that i would say like that would be probably one of my favorite personal wallets with the crypto.com side of things and obviously you know we will be integrating that with how do we as well because i know how well well it works and I know how good it is for like, you know, the user point of view. So you live in the UK and of late, they've been some of the more aggressive regulators, certainly with leverage trading and then the utterly fake news about Binance being banned in the United Kingdom. But do you have any fears of attempting to operate a blockchain based company in the united kingdom what does that look like what does it look like in general with regulation and in countries and how much of a threat is that to everything that you and others are building

so the uk is just very um similar to the us as well um very like protective of the sort of the people with less funds let's say um the i'm not going to say lower class because they're not um you know people with like say who have like 50 000 50 000 pounds or 50 000 they want to protect those investors because they don't want them to go oh yeah put all the 50 000 in and they've lost all the money like they want to protect those people whereas you know like you've got like let's say institutionals the high net worths and whatnot with like over a million dollars plus we might be putting in 50,000 well they have that money to be lost and and that's where like i see these regulatory bodies

really focusing in on they're putting out regulation to protect these people because there are stories and there are people who will just go and risk it all and and and and i understand it from that point of view from like the fca the financial conductor for in the uk and you know the sec in the us as well um for me the regulation um you know it isn't too heavy we're not we we as a platform and a product that how do we aren't running a uh we're not running a cryptocurrency exchange we're not running an exchange of of things we're a buy and sell marketplace um we aren't actually based in the uk our company operates in a different jurisdiction um not because of any other reason

than i don't intend to stay in the uk i'm actually only in the uk to see family um and it was just purely while covid happened that i ended up being stuck here so um but still you know i do have friends that operate companies from here and they're doing fine. And, and, you know, the, the regulation in itself is to protect the users who are investing. And as long as you aren't promoting, you know, a financial product or promoting things to, you know, grow as a, as a, as a cryptocurrency and things like that, then, you know, there's no, there's no real massive issue. It's just a case of, you know, making sure that you're up to date with the regulatory frameworks and what you can and can't do publicly. Yeah, I love that the concept is that they protect the little guy, but what it ends up always being is more opportunity for wealthy people that doesn't exist for the poor people.

Certainly, that's how it is for accredited investing in the United States. I can't speak for the UK. Also, if you have $30,000 and you're going to lose it all on one altcoin trade, you're going to also lose it at the casino or the track, right? I'm not saying that investors should not be protected. They absolutely should. It's just that in practice, it seems like a gambler is a gambler and they're going to find their way to gamble, right? Yeah. And I think the same. I think the same as well. I guess can't do anything i i guess i guess from like their point of view like they can protect people going through like investing through companies or investing through like financial services stuff like that they can

protect people like that protecting people gambling whole different story because people they're doing it themselves they're doing it themselves and it's their responsibility at that point um i guess that's kind of the difference but i still yeah completely see your point i completely agree with you it's slightly um slightly stupid really isn't it yeah so you guys want to be the ebay of nfts which means i assume that you um are going to sell things from the lowest end all the way up to the most expensive and crazy things and you're sort of agnostic as to the i guess the level of of quality or who you'll allow on the platform is that accurate yeah 100 100 so we have like you know we have some cool partnerships with like um the australian shepherd uh team so the ass token guys

we have some cool stuff coming with them so theirs is quite like um interesting their approach to how they bring things to how they bring things to market they have a lot of like only fans um so like they're kind of like you know the the the porn girls as it were um interest like they they had a lot of that around them which is interesting for us like we can have an adult section on the platform we can do different stuff i'm not going to say like that's definitely going to happen but like that's a possibility for what we can do on the platform we obviously have the sport side as well, where we have like Tyson Fury coming on. We have some other boxers as well. Ricky Hatton, one of the famous British boxers.

We have quite a lot of others, but I don't really want to mention any names because they're not really confirmed yet. We have some cyclists coming on, some really big international cyclists. So like sport side, like we have some really cool stuff and like, that's kind of higher levels things. Whereas like, you know, we might have some individuals who bring on some like cartoon style, like, you know, like the I'm not sure what they're called. The apes that have been going around the crypto pumps, different things like that, you know, like we, we have that capability to sort of push out and we have those that reach to,

you know, different people to bring different sorts of things to how do we, so you know we're really yeah like you mentioned we're open as a platform we have some cool stuff i mean titan fury 101 nfts it's or we've already seen a million dollar bids that's going to be put on because somebody wants to buy it for that much already um so we're pretty excited with you know what's going to happen there with with with that big nft the smaller ones you know maybe they go for for $50 or $100 or something like that. But like, for us, we just we're just focused on like, giving the users what they want and giving it in like, you know, making any user be able to buy, they shouldn't just be like an American thing or a British thing where, you know, we've essentially got a higher income,

like this should be like fitting for people across the world, wherever they are. So you talk about the sort of the higher end partnership deals like a Tyson Fury, like that's very well planned. It's a very specific thing. And it's a launch. It's like a real release. We're seeing every celebrity and athlete now wanting to do that. So what do you think differentiates the ones that will be successful? Because in the United States, at least we've seen, we've seen some pretty huge athletes do these and they're sort of half-assed and they completely flop. Like literally like sell almost nothing. You'd think this huge celebrity would do it. So what makes, what makes a good NFT release? What makes it have actual value? What makes it get people excited as opposed to it just looking

like a money grab from some celebrity who heard the word NFT last week for the first time ever? yeah so i think i think one of the big things i'm going to use tyson's as an example um this is a sort of basic example um tyson's one-on-one nfts comes with also a physical piece of art which corresponds to the digital piece of art and the physical the physical piece of art has been created by a a very very um very very good artist called george rollo um he's based out in dubai he's british um very very professional piece of artwork and that that that comes together it's signed by tyson fury um it's what it's a one-of-a-kind piece like it's amazing and that that comes together with it so that in itself that's really why that has value and that's why i see um you know it going for over

over one million dollars which i'm pretty impressed with already that we've had that we've seen those bids come in and privately um now those nfts for other other artists and other um other celebrities let's say i feel that the more professional ones and the ones that are going to do well are the ones that sort of it isn't just a nf digital nft and gary vaynerchuk did this really well really really well he sort of brought in you know buy this nft and you get to come meet and greet with me buy this nft and you get a phone call with me buy this nft and you get access to my uh you know uh talk show or whatever conference now that that's where i see the value in the nfts and that's that's where we see like and also bring this onto physical assets like we just mentioned with the tyson photo and things

like that it could be um i don't know conor mcgregor's freaking boxing gloves that he used to hopefully beat up khabib in the future or you know different things like that all those different added benefits that really sort of showcase that this nft gave you this and it or gave you access to this and like on someone's wallet digital wallet for example this NFT allowed you entrance to this conference that happened on this date that's where I really see you know like the transactional side of these things really growing um then we can move on to even things like ticketing for events and we have something like that that's coming into play with some very big music artists in the United States in the

future um and it really adds a lot of value to those kind of things not just like not just from And we have something like that that's coming into play with some very big music artists in the United States in the future. And it really adds a lot of value to those kind of things, not just like not just from the artist's perspective or the celebrity's perspective, but also from the user's perspective that like, you know, they had that and they did that. And, you know, they have that to say in the future that that was them. That makes a lot of sense because the ones that fail are going to be the, here's a picture of me that you can get anywhere, but I'm going to call it an NFT and mint it and sell it. Or I'm going to like put a little movement on it and all of a sudden. So it's really about the physical connection or for a fan in these cases, that experiential connection to what they're buying. And we've seen that outside the NFT space for years starting to build sort of incentivizing super fans to, you know, join your monthly club or one of those

things because you get special experiences. And this is really a way to do that on steroids. Yeah, literally, literally that. And that's exactly how we see this growing. And that's what all the people that we're working with, we're aiming to do different things like that. Obviously, it's at their discretion at the end of the day. But, you know, that's where we see the growth and we see the benefit for users and for the creators bull and you know you see you hold up the iPad and the painting starts to move and and things like that so incredible are you seeing a lot of interest in those sort of things where there's not only like do you get a physical thing or an experience but there's actually a digital element in the physical that you're looking at yeah yeah definitely definitely and it's something that we I mean we haven't got to the stage yet I mean our platform

comes live on the 12th of July 12th of July yeah so in a, I mean, we haven't got to the stage yet. I mean, our platform comes live on the 12th of July, 12th of July. Yeah. So in a couple of weeks. So we haven't quite got to the stage of like being able to do this yet, but it's definitely something that we've like, our team's got in play and we're trying to work on and trying to work around at the moment. Yeah. Okay. So you can tokenize anything, right? We talk about art and collectibles for NFTs because that's where sort of the bubble has, but in the early days of NFTs, people were talking about more boring things like mortgages and car titles and medical records, right? So do you just see yourself as being the eBay for art and collectibles? Or do you also see that there'll be a sort of a secondhand resale market or a way to facilitate all of these other

transactions where tokenizing something and eliminating a third party or tax collector in between will be viable or is that for someone else with the like i want to like with like mortgages and houses and things like that and like different asks like what you could essentially class as like you could if you tokenize it you could class it as like some sort of security with things like that we won't touch we't touch. Unless the regulatory framework in a certain country allowed us to do it, we just won't touch it. Just because of the implications of doing that could be catastrophic for the platform and for any business that does that.

I have seen OpenSea facilitate in a house sale or something similar. And me and my lawyers were straight away, we were very very skeptical even why why have they even allowed that but open c is very much a platform where you can do anything you could you know publish a walt disney photo if you wanted to tomorrow and right yeah like they ain't stopping anybody so um yeah i mean as an open platform we're probably facilitating certain things and you know make sure that like um it's we're we're regulated

like that's that's that's the thing we're regulated and we want to stay in that regulatory framework we don't want to we don't want to impede on different things and cause ourselves problems as a platform it'd be very very stupid and naive to even think about doing that we've seen many platforms fail because of that as soon as you go into like legal battles with things with countries or whatever like yeah you've got a problem unless you've grown exponentially and got a lot of capital that you can play with like that then you don't want to really risk that so for now yeah we'll we'll be we're monitoring carefully but yeah yeah so if how do it be literally becomes the ebay of nfts though and you have millions of things for sale how is it possible to police the

copyright owner of every single piece that's being resold well we can't and that's you know NFTs though, and you have millions of things for sale, how is it possible to police the copyright owner of every single piece that's being resold? Well, we can't, and that's, you know, that's the bottom line. No platform will be able to, and we can monitor things. We can have algorithms in place that sort of, you know, do, do run, run over stuff and whatnot. But like the bottom line is there'll be things that get through no matter what, you know, if that happens, it's a good position to be in if we have the problems you know i'd say we're doing our job right because we're getting there it's like facebook having all the problems with like the united states government like they've done

something really good because they're having that problem um you know if we get there as well you know we'll be happy to we're happy to deal with problems like that if we got to it. I'm curious, since we talked about, you know, giving crypto as rewards, do you think that moving into the future that could effectively replace rewards programs and miles and points and all of these things, that could be a superior reward? Because I'd much rather get paid in an appreciating asset than in points that I have to use by a certain time and are losing value alongside the dollar that they're pegged to literally a hundred percent a hundred percent and like i've said that for like the past four years since we sort of came up with the ava

like token incentivization program like a hundred percent i mean even to the point of like when i was ceo to all like i had air like airbus so like the big um like, when I was CEO of Travala, like I had Airbus. So like the big, they make like the jumbo jets and whatever, like the big planes, like they got in contact with me and it was part of their innovation team. And like, Matt, how can we add

like token incentivization rewards like you've done with ABA? And like, these are a billion dollar company. Like they're huge. They're like, I think they're a listed company. I don't know what they're worth and whatnot, but like they're massive. And for them to get in contact about something like, and at the time a listed company. I don't know what they're worth and whatnot, but like they're massive. And for them to get in contact about something like, and at the time, like Travala wasn't very big.

So like we'd obviously done something right. So I guess for me, yeah, it's definitely a thing that I think is going to be big moving forward. It's going to be big for other platforms. I do feel like, I know Travala's built AVA, like, and it's native token, but I do feel like somebody can probably make a protocol of like a rewards token protocol where they could implement it into any platform. So for example, like, how do you could implement it into the platform

or like, I don't know, like another platform could, and it doesn't have to be a native token to their specific platform because then you're opening it up to, you know, platforms that are already live that aren't in crypto. And that could be like a really good thing. i do foresee someone building that someone maybe listening to this podcast will go into what go away and build it um but yeah so like that's something that i do see like happening in the future whether it be like its own blockchain and an additional protocol on

top or like you know something cool i think that would be like you know very beneficial you probably couldn't do it with bitcoin because you'd need some tokens in the system to be able to give out initially and whatnot and grow it. But yeah, for sure, for sure. So it's a cool concept, definitely. Yeah, I think people just obviously, your average person fears of volatility because they see if Bitcoin sneezes, literally like every other coin reacts. Do you think that we get to a time when we don't see 90% altcoin retraces during a Bitcoin move, even if that altcoin has fundamental value and is being used by users on a platform and utility?

But do you think we get to a point where the market matures enough that some of these can shine on their own? Yeah, I think with Bitcoin, obviously Bitcoin needs to get to a level where it's more decentralized, it's more split up. And it has like, I mean, right now, you've got people with like, a lot of Bitcoin who can manipulate the market. And that's what happens once that sort of like, over time that you've heard, like decreases, you know, some of them

will that maybe die and lose the Bitcoins or like, you know, wallets will get locked away and or like things will get dispersed amongst like, across the space., you know, wallets will get locked away and or like things will get dispersed amongst like across the space. And, you know, that will be probably when the market's matured more and the price is a lot more stable. Let's say like gold, it's a lot more stable and things like that. It might, you know, might be 6% a year or something like that. We will get to that stage eventually when it gets there. but for altcoins if they have grown with bitcoin like you might see like ethereum ripple the bigger coins they might do that but like you know the smaller ones they're probably going to still be very volatile with people jumping in and out and trying to make the gains that they are and

i mean no one's going to be able to stop more altcoins opening up and starting as well so like how does that play out and how does that start and i And I think, yeah, it's a big question really to ask that. What do you think? What do you think about it? I would love to, because there's no reason that something that's a reward token for a specific platform should have volatility based on a completely unrelated asset. But that's the nature of the nascent market, because it's largely driven, I think, by people trading those tokens and not using them. So I do see a future where some of them shine,

but like you said, I mean, there's gotta be 10,000 tokens now, if not more. So don't we need to see like 9,500 of those eventually disappear? I mean, isn't that probably what will happen? Yeah, a lot of them will. I mean, every bear market, a lot go, Yeah. A lot, a lot of them will. I mean, every, every bear market, a lot ago, a lot ago, we've seen it, seen it multiple times.

Um, so yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that. I guess it's a bad thing though. I mean, you know, the, the, the, it's like, uh, it's like natural selection. Yeah. And it's like, you know, nine in 10 startups fail. Right. Well, like,, these these products, whether they've got a token or not, they sort of push the ball forward for the successful companies, right? So I mean, we just have a lot of entrepreneurs piling into this space because it's exciting. And there's actually things to be built with the technology that should be viewed as a good thing. Yeah, for sure. I 100% agree with that 100% so listen you've probably been pitched like every use case for cryptocurrency you've seen it all we love to think that blockchain is great for everything but are there some things it's just terrible for that people want to use it for yeah there are like no word of lie there are it can't be used for everything. I don't know off the top of my head. That's quite an interesting question without dropping people in or different things.

But yeah, I don't want you to, you know. Yeah, there's some products out there that don't really fit the use case of blockchain or crypto as a whole. And I'm not just going to say like blockchain as in, you know, like the Block Explorer thing, you know, like payment. I think payments are like a really cool thing. Like, you know, like the block explorer thing, you know, like payment. I think payments are like a really cool thing.

Like, you know, Troll are really, really good. It's got a really solid use case that's like different than anything else. And it works. There's a lot of like, let's say blockchains, native blockchains that are just sort of like, you know, copies of other chains. They don't do anything different. They're just kind of there. And some of them top hundred that like they just shouldn't be there it doesn't make sense they've just got like a bit of bit of volume behind them a bit of

institutional backing and it doesn't make sense why they're there there's actually no reason for them to be there um they'll eventually die off you know once they've run out of funding or ran out as a token like whatever they'll die off um so yeah there's a lot of different things like that and you know projects that make multiple tokens for things um you know whether you've got your like your two token protocols or whatever like they don't really make sense it doesn't it doesn't really work um so yeah there's a lot of stuff that i i don't think is very good in the space to be honest you know but that brings you back to the natural selection side of things you know nine and ten things are going to fail to fail. So yeah, it doesn't mean it's harmful. It just means maybe

it wasn't a good enough idea to succeed. Yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure. Exactly. So like I said, when you use your cell phone, you don't think about how your cell phone works. When you use the internet, you don't think about how the internet works. Do you think we get to a point where there's just all of these things powered by blockchain and you just never think about it it becomes just sort of universal and your average person just that's it it's powered by it and it's just you know the technology of the future and they don't think about it yeah for sure i mean i i do you know what i've mentioned about this before not on this short show but like in in the past like um do you know what technology is behind the email

no but you use it every day like a prime example of it so yeah i do see like you know certain products and services you know implemented blockchain and and especially in and this is more business to business side of things like in supply chain logistics um like that i see it really being implemented on a mass scale. It won't, no one will know what it is. It'll just be used within the background and it'll verify things. And it'll be really easy for the user to use because it's got to be, it's got anybody who's got to be able to be employed and see what's happening and make it work. But yeah, that's where I do see like a mass, mass uptake with this side of things in there.

So obviously there are poor use cases, as as we said like what are you most excited about as the best use cases where you know that maybe people would be surprised or just the ones that you think will win over the next even five ten years you know yeah so i mean clearly nfts nfts obviously um loyalty rewards programs like i'm a strong believer and i created one i think it's really cool well me and me and the guys did we we create a very very solid one um you know bitcoin as a whole like as a decentralized currency like that's gonna it's gonna end like it's just unstoppable it's unstoppable and it's amazing and it's going to be it's going to be able to constantly grow uh binance is doing some ethereum with ethereum 2.0 that's going to be really cool and interesting as well been waiting for that for so long um you've just got cool things popping up

everywhere really to be fair like um some interesting stuff like i would i have looked into this myself and and i think it'd be really cool if someone can really focus on and create some sort of like blockchain um blockchain gambling product that really like, that really does focus in on decentralized gambling. It sort of allows people to, you know, use cryptocurrency for like playing games of poker with your friends. Like we could sell like some cool online game and we could, you know, all about our Bitcoin and whatever.

Like I think it'd be really cool if someone could create something like that. There are a lot of regulatory issues with that, but I do see that as something that hasn't really been done properly yet. That really could be a big thing. There's some big fucking Bitcoin holders in the world. So pardon my French. Oh, no, it's fine. You can say whatever you want on this.

So you said you've been waiting for ethereum 2.0 for a really long time and you were a miner what do you make of the move from proof of work to proof of stake in that regard and what happens to miners i don't i don't i don't personally mine anymore i did when i was like a couple of friends did directly but um you know i do understand the whole process and whatnot um i do think it's very good and it's you know it's more energy efficient it's more beneficial for everybody involved ethereum 2.0 is allowed like users to stake and gain a reward from staking and things like that that's going to really what's going to propel ethereum from like you know not just in like value terms of like usd but like also in like usage of it because like right now you you've mentioned a key thing with the you

know the gas fees of nfts when it was at all-time high being crazy price like that is not sustainable and that is a massive issue if that isn't fixed then ethereum will not be used in the future if it is fixed then we've got we've got a real you know a killer product on our hands which any any any other like blockchain even binance you know they're going to struggle to keep up with that just because it's decentralized, people like the fact that it is decentralized over a centralized authority, having the ability to change things,

play with things and do things. People like that decentralized aspect of it, me included. So yeah, I'm really, really looking forward to the Ethereum point of view side of things, to be honest. Do you think that layer twos can solve that problem, at least in the meantime? I mean, obviously we're seeing pretty wide adoption of a few of them i mean polygon obviously matic has has skyrocketed over time or do you think it really it has to happen at the layer one level with ethereum yeah so i mean you know the layer twos are adding value and they are adding um i didn't do what they're supposed to be doing but like it's inevitable that we're going to have the layer one improved so we need to see the layer

one improved see how much it's improved and then the layer twos need to come into play and improve it even further and i think as long as like some of them can do that and i do know the polygon guys as well we will be doing something with them at how do we um and yeah like i do think what they've got is you know it's a very good product and and and as far as i'm aware it will continue to be as we you know develop and the chain migrates over 2.0 um so yeah as long as they can stay up to date and and yeah i mean they're okay right now it will improve and it will get better do you think that bitcoin is a layer one? Could use some improvement? I mean, yeah.

But again, it's like, it works. And it works for a purpose of what it has. And it is that store of value. And whether Bitcoin Cash or the Bitcoin scam version comes along. That's a good name for BSV. Not Satoshi's Vision vision bitcoin scam version yeah yeah yeah um i i mean you know inevitably like there's going to be people that are going to like fork these things make copies try and do things better but you know for me bitcoin's bitcoin i wouldn't touch anything else and it will always remain to be and it's proved itself over over

time you know it could have it could have plateaued but it hasn't it's proved itself over time. You know, it could have plateaued, but it hasn't. It's continued to be strong and it's continuing to be strong. So I think everybody in the industry right now, all the big holders, everyone agrees that this is the one. This is the one. And it will continue to be. It will continue to be that, you know, that gold standard in this space. I totally agree. There's just obviously people who make the argument that anything you can build on Ethereum or another blockchain, you should be able to build on Bitcoin as the layer one,

which is sort of dismissive, obviously, of all this incredible technology and all these entrepreneurs who are trying to do things. I'm not saying that I agree or disagree, but I guess what you're saying is that Bitcoin is now digital gold. It's the store of value. Ethereum needs to be improved because there's real issues with gas fees and the actual technology, right? Yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure. Yeah, so being here for so long, what do you make of finally seeing

all of this institutional adoption and countries talking about Bitcoin and all of those things that were like the crazy ideas in our heads that everyone told us would never happen? I personally thought it was over the past two years or so, it was inevitable that this bull market was going to be pivoted towards the institutions getting involved.

Some of my friends in the UK were in some of the biggest Bitcoin brokerages in the UK and Europe. And for the past two years, they've seen majority of their purchases have come from institutional investors. So like and they dealt with a lot of retail in like 2017 and prior to that, just purely from like the information that I had to my hand, like, you know, it was inevitable what was going to happen with Elon Musk. Like he'd sort of played around with it before like people kind of knew he had personal

bitcoin like he trolled it for too long to not um like you know it's it's it's that kind of thing that like you know it's just things playing out as like they they possibly like oversaw and it kind of like looked from the from the public eye let's say um but yeah i mean like it's interesting with tesla like buying bitcoin and micro strategy and things like that and like you know you've probably got other country other companies there like that are going to do similar just to like have exposure to that asset and and especially with like you know the united states government printed so much money into the market like that has just escalated what the bitcoin adoption this year i don't think we would have seen, not necessarily saying we wouldn't have seen the growth,

but I don't think that we would have seen the growth in terms of like users and we wouldn't have seen the growth in terms of like these companies getting involved if the United States hadn't printed so much money into their economy and to the world as well, because it's inevitable what's going to happen. You've just caused hyperinflation.

Yeah. And it turns out that giving people money, they're going to buy stuff with it. And the price of that stuff might go up. Funny how that works. Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, it's not bad for everyone in Bitcoin for sure. Yeah. It's been what a ride. I mean, in like March of 2020, everybody said it was dead and everything was dead. And that really was the beginning of all of it. Kind of incredible when you look back. So I know we're kind of running out of time. I want to ask you, being that you're in the NFT space, do you have any advice for new users who are looking to get into NFTs,

how to navigate the space, how to get started? Come to howdoe.com. Come to our social channels. We'll talk you through everything. I'll be there. Don't worry. I'll be there. Don't worry. I'll help you. So, and how easy will it be for people to take their existing NFTs and move them to your platform? Right now, the functions aren't in any

of the platforms. I don't believe they're not in how do we either to deposit or withdraw. They will probably come in the next three to six months. We will also have a mobile app to make it as easy as possible for all our users. We do see that's where everyone really wants to hold their NFTs on their mobile phone and their iPhone and whatnot. So at first, it'll be things that are minted on your platform and the Tyson Fury type things, and then you'll build it eventually into all those other functionalities that we discussed. Yeah, exactly. And you will be able to mint on our platform. So if you wanted to bring an NFT for the first time, come and bring it to a how do we and that's fine very cool so where can everybody uh follow you after this and follow what you guys are doing yeah so how do we come on twitter um

same on how do we on telegram as well uh how do we.com go onto our website you can access to all our socials there um and all our channels and you know i'm active in all of them and on twitter as well feel free to find me what's your name on twitter where can they find you matt l-u-c-z matt looks zed you know i like the zed i like this i just love hearing zed it makes me think of pulp fiction because americans we never hear that you know thank you so much man for taking the time to do this really enlightening i'm looking forward to seeing what you guys built because i really do view the nft space still as so nascent even though we had this huge bubble i think kind of got ahead of itself and now it's going to settle in and we're going to see the cream rise to the top you know yeah exactly exactly it's going to be fun it's

going to be a fun time awesome man well thank. Well, thank you very much for doing this. Nice one. Thanks very much, mate.