EB42 – Tom Ding: Koinify, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations & Corporations

Transcript

live streaming yeah or we should have we tweeted it uh I can let's it this is a a whole other level of pressure now um you guys never doing this before never we we've always uh just on audio and you know recorded and it's edited uh I mean not massively edited but uh minor edits and we we've never done like live

streaming and we haven't done video so far so cool so I'm your a little experiment today yes so let me uh okay okay well we've got zero viewers

I'll let you know if anybody comes on where you audiences uh I'm sorry where did you see the audiences uh I can see it on the bottom my I don't know if you can see it no I can't see it actually no I don't I know I think you will be uh okay so uh episode 41 in 54 3 uh 4 42 oh are you sure well because we're don't you are we releasing the wow this is cool um uh we're releasing something else on

Thursday no the Sean's yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you're right okay so it is 42 all right so episode 42 in five 4 3 hello welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show which talks about the Technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is CIO and I'm Brian p and crane uh today our guest is Tom ding he's the CEO of coinify H coifi is a funding platform for decentralized applications and previously was a senior manager at eBay and before that he worked at Alibaba and did his own startup as

well um hello everyone welcome Tom thanks for having me thanks for being on so uh you you for for those of you listening to us right now and and not watching uh this is actually our first live Google Hangout um we're recording live on on Hangout now we don't have any viewers uh we have one viewer Apparently one person watching so this is something that we've been wanting to do for a little while and we're trying it out for the first time tonight with uh with Tom um so we will most likely continue doing this uh we're we're trying it out tonight see how how it works and uh and so far so good because I think people

can still hear us H just uh sort of off topic I guess do you guys know how you can not make this video disappear when you look at other is there some way to like overlay the video what do you H it's fine it's fine actually yeah I think I think it'll take care of itself uh the video of the person speaking is what shows up in priority yeah so I I'm really excited about today's episode and you I I contacted Tom after a reading about his uh funding round and then we can come back to that later but uh it's you know it's a topic that we've come to many times sort of from different angle we've

talked about decentralized many times you know whether it's ethereum we've had on several episodes on that and also crowdfunding we've had quite a few episodes on so we've had one with Mike Hearn we've had one with swarm uh I think we've had some more no um H we've also thought a lot about the the legal implications of that so it's really interesting to get kind of talk about another project in the same area and it's what I was especially impressed with was that you've raised money as well from kind of traditional Venture capitalists and it seems such a a controversial area as well that I thought that was quite interesting but uh perhaps to get

started can you give us a bit of an overview of what coinify is sure um so coinify in like a very simple way to put it it would be an ual list or the fueling and funding platform to kind of bootstrap and fund the new decentralized economy and decentralized economy you know including things like decentralized applications decentral autonomous Corporation op a organization Etc uh we're mostly focused on decentral application but we're trying to be the platform and kind of the champion to kind of boostrap this new economy so we're really excited about so specifically you're talking that people would develop uh their applications on your platform or they

would take existing applications and then and use your platform as a way to raise more money for development yes so I think we're trying to achieve uh two fundamental goals one is trying to get people who are not in the decentralized world kind of excited there a lot of great and talented developers however not enough people get involved in the decentralized space yet uh they haven't started you know spending enough time looking into what can be bu in a decentralized way I think we're kind of where we are at probably you know back in 2007 when iOS just get started everybody was excited but not enough developers actually you know look into it and being appreciate the potential of the kind of the mobile and the similar I

would say from decentral accy today so that's one of our main job get more decentralized apps high quality apps and help them view a economy that actually makes sense the second part obviously is attracting the existing daps developers we already working on it and get them to on our platform the main thing we're trying to help them today is when you look at most of the funding events I think you know since last year 20133 when mastercoin probably did one of the first crypto sale of to uh is there have been quite a bit of interesting project going on but by and large most of people do it on their own and many of them do a lot of Trials and erors so there's a lot of mistakes that I think you know we could help them do a lot better and much more streamlined way

most importantly so they can focus on their projects rather than building a crypto funding platform for their own each time some project goes up and we also trying to apply some of the really good best practices that kind of help me toili with that and we talk more uh in the next part uh so just briefly um and maybe this is jumping ahead a little bit but I know you've chosen a counterparty as a sort of your base layer to build on top of does that mean that uh projects that raise money through you guys also have to build on counterparty or could you could they also do something different and just raise the money on that platform sure um so I mean we as a platform are largely you know

philosophically platform agnostic we did start with plat counterparty platform uh because a couple coup good reasons I think one first of all you look for when you look for a platform you look for technology being Advanced I think counterparty is definitely one of the most implemented and you know well-developed platforms so far today ethereum is a little bit far away uh and uh sorry counterparty has some good you know wallets uh beding uh potentially you know smart contract in a future Etc and then plus there's also good reputation within the community um so when you look at the other platform I think counterparty had one of its strongest reputations uh and also there's some liquidity there as well know number of exchanges are having

counterparty as a potential token for exchange against BDC so these are some of the criteria that we look for and counterparty I really like the team as well I think they have a very very solid team and a very long-term view of this EOS system did that answer your question yeah absolutely no um and and so I guess in the future that means you would perhaps project on ethereum wants to raise money you would also offer your services on that platform maybe in a similar way that today a company would build an Android app and IOS app yeah would happy to look into other platforms you know once there's an demand beaut into it uh the other thing you know when some actually

some of the projects actually have their own blockchain so the way we use you know for example counterparty is most likely going to be a proxy token when they act before they have an actual blockchain of their own so in that sense it really doesn't matter that much as in which platform we really use okay now could you go into some of the the core components of of coinify sure U so we have a couple of things uh you know look at the whole funding cycle one obviously is the token sale platform which actually basically a very nice UI uh that allows you to kind of the uless feel that gives you an overview of what the project is about why is it worse backing you know the people behind etc etc and then a very easy way to actually put your Bitcoins

and potentially Fiat Dollar in the future uh that you can directly act the projects uh so that's number one the second part is you know once you buy the tokens obviously you want a tool to manage all of your kind of portfolio of tokens and see how they are you know reaching their goals and Etc so we have the wall components that's the second part the third part is also we're trying to uh partner with our partners to have a number of exchanges that can have these tokens uh so they have a enough liquidity on Market deps I think you would be three parts that's uh kind of the core component to that underline that uh we're also trying to VI a kind of smart contract that allows the governance of the these projects to happen so when people back these

projects they can have enough trust that the developers and people being funded are actually delivering what they promis and that's the smart contract part that come in and so what are some of the tools that you'll be building in order to bring that I mean you mentioned a while ago the kind of ease of use user experience aspect of all this that needs to be uh developed so what are some of the tools you're bringing to uh the uh creators of these projects and people that are investing in in these projects sure um on the on I think I should mention two part one on the product side I think we're pretty confident that we have probably one of the best most intuitive uis very simple easy to use for people who are not even very well vered in crypto spice and also the format that we present them is also

extremely uh kind of intuitive the second part I think is a lot of uh the work that we're doing behind the scenes that is not just on a product side and website but also the way how we select really good high quality products and also hand helding them on what exactly how to view a Dap like many developers when they come to the scam this is probably their first or second dap they ever Bo they do they might be really good in the technical side but they may not uh design the app to DAP in a way that have act business model behind it or very solid business model you could have a wonderful project but still has a token economy that doesn't make sense which makes it less investable from a backer perspective so I think that's the other part we're trying to help them as

well so by in sort of structuring the whole uh economic underlying incentives and make sure that they align both from sort of an investor perspective a Founders perspective I guess your perspective as a platform and and later use perspective right totally exactly of course a very tricky thing to do know especially because it's also something you have to get right once right you have to get right right in the beginning because very likely you won't be able to change it later exactly exactly and we have seen quite a bit you know screwups in this space so really want to help people in in that area uh we're not trying to be raising as much money as possible but we're trying to establish a fair valuation of each token say if this

project reach x amount of users x amount of adoption what is the fair value of this token what is a good distribution mechanism that will make it you know not like a scam you know analogy to that would be you know Facebook for example IPO Facebook is a wonderful company in terms of Revenue and profits but the way they overpriced it at the IPO time just make a bad investment and actually you know have a really kind bitter feel to the investor who invested early in the Facebook IPO so I think that's part the thing that we're trying to help them figure out now you mentioned you just mentioned briefly some some of the screw-ups that we've seen in this space uh what what are some of the things that you've

learned from from looking at uh other projects that you want to differentiate yourself from uh either from an ethical point of view or simply from a functional point of view sure um happy to mention a few features that I think are fairly um you know it consider kind of a pioneering displ uh one is the first thing that you notice is you know many of the projects especially in kind of scam coins they rais a lot of money and they're really not really delivering anything that they differentiated or based on a world so the first feature we're trying to deliver is multi uh Bitcoins so when a Bitcoin come in uh coinify doesn't hold a Bitcoin neither the developer holds a loan so we actually want a you know two out of three at least multi- wallet where

quantify has a key coign it developer had to cosign it and then potentially a third party security company or a community representative actually hold one of ke uh the developers are going to give us a promise a road map that they promise the community and tell hey we have three different Milestones if you reach you know proof of concept number one then we would able to get 20% and that's all transparent and uh completely transparent UPF front to the to the backers the backer will see that upon that point coifi going consign okay so you guys delivered what you have promised to deliver we're going to release the rest of the money at the 20% of money and then the same for the next cycle so that's the first thing we're trying to do the multisig uh kind of Bitcoin wall that's a you're going to

get yourself in a you're putting yourself in a very uh contested position there I can imagine there a lot of controversies will arise around decisions like that sure uh absolutely I mean we definitely hear push Backs from Project developers and uh I I think we would rather be more selective and work with people who want to be kind of more trustworthy and in the more long term um yeah definitely but I think this is something that this community really really needs is a trust and kind of align incentive that we're trying to view kind of radical transparency the second part we're trying to to to view is the kind of the auditing like where does the money actually go right so in a

traditional startup you have Board of director you have all that to kind of Monitor and third party Auditors uh we also trying to bring some of the mechanism actually Mak sense uh to kind of help uh the developer and help the community understand where the money are they going to the right places uh so that will bring a new layer of kind of transparency into it um yeah and the third part is what I just mentioned about is the economic valuation uh like one thing you know kind of really surprises me astonish me is in this community whenever people do crowd sale no one ever talks about what is the the crowd sale or the token actually worse uh no one Valu you just think about hey I need a $10 million you know why don't we just you know raise $50 million let's

see where he goes right instead of talking about is that a fair evaluation obviously evaluating AAP is hard you know I don't think it's any easier than evaluate startup which is hard too uh but at least we want to provide a number of scenarios okay scenario number one if this project hits one million user and get x amount of transaction per day then this token probably is worth somewhere between a dollar and $2 right and we can provide a number of these scenarios and help that out uh we would bu be one of these guys doing the analysis we might invest uh kind of invite more in Independence due diligence or economists to Due devaluation as well so that I think will definitely help provide more guidance for the people who want to backage projects yeah no I totally agree with that I mean one projects that I've

been sort of following along very closely is swarm because you know they gave a talk here we've had them on the podcast you know I know those guys um and I think they've done a great job in in some ways but one thing that I find kind of striking is that it was never very clear like how exact is like how many coins would be created what's that distribution it was just like want to raise that money now then later they came around it's like oh you know actually it works like that and uh there was there's really a complete lack of understanding I think what what people were doing it's so like in the South Park you know uh one of the episodes right it's crowd sale step number one

step three profits right no one talks about so um so I saw I somewhere it was mentioned I'm not sure where I got that quote but I I saw you mentioning somewhere uh kind of the the contrast between you know traditional sort of funding versus this type of funding uh and that you know one advantage is removing the trust I guess that's kind of what you alluded to as well if the possibility audit to release fund gradually do you think we will see a kind of broadly mov startup funding in that direction so uh first of all I think what we're trying to do we're not doing

Equity funding right we're trying to uh fund decentralized applications now the interesting thing is decentralized application kind of blurred a line between an application and a startup or a corporation in general uh some of the applications are so powerful by themselves when they combine with a peer-to-peer user model or you can consider them hiring these you know employees like in miners at the Bitcoin sense they essentially replace a traditional large corporation like Bitcoin replacing visa to some extent uh so I I think there's some blurred line there so I wouldn't necessarily think that funding you know V application will replace all startups in my view I think there will be two general directions one is you would see a number of Corporations especially those

commoditized slow innovational ones are going to be replaced or obsolete by the detial applications on the other hand you will continue to see a lot of very exciting you know robotics 3 printing these kind of start will continue to innovate and that will primarily be a human driven organization it will not be replaced by lines of Cal I don't think any any soon uh but these companies could definitely benefit from a lot of the Improvement in smart contract technology such that when they structor a company uh they could you know much more easier to fund raise and they could have a more distributed team and the smart contract will help them to govern the team that's kind of where I see the two different directions and we obviously have more focus on the first you know camp but I definitely see the

technology benefit on second count as well so then what are some of those types of companies that you like you mentioned that that will become obsolete uh through the development of decentralized applications and de decentralized autonomous corporations and so what and some what are some of the obvious of new applications uh that can benefit from that sure uh great question so right now obviously where I think we're trying to look at a case by case basis but the pth that I we kind of observed a little bit is is a few things number one is um commoditization so when you look at companies they're all companies who have a very high Innovation rate they keep devolving

their business model they keep updating their product and there are the other companies who are like 100 years old or uh not quite innovating and you have a very complicated management structure uh so I think these companies U couple examples like Insurance uh retail banking um you know all these these kind of company are not really doing tons of business Innovations and the thing that happen with these company is that you end up you know I had quite a bit of experience working with corporates so my observation is sometime people justify their job by creating something to do so you'll always find something to do for the CEO for the CFO for cxo but the manager overhead doesn't really create tons of value these kind of company I think have perfect uh targets for being disrupted that's one I think di mention

to look at it so we're talking about insurance we're talking about banking we're talking about we're talking about a whole slew of of uh sectors that can be completely absolutely or just easier any industry that is more than 50 years old 100 years old right these companies you know limited Innovation incremental Innovations and we can very easily be replaced by employees inap uh number two criteria is verifiable um so I think it's important that right now our the crypto technology is still largely uh limited to thing that can easily cryptographically verifiable you know mining is a perfect example is the most verifiable thing you can easily evaluate is that a good job is that a bad job um

obviously you can introduce some of the third party evaluators like an insurance example you most likely will have to introduce some humans to evaluate whether some that accident really happening or that are claimed but the more complexity in the evaluation Parts the harder I think to decentralize it so I think that's one of the limitations or the criteria that you look for you then that's why I think we people all started decentralized ation with the Computing resources storage computing power network band all of them are very easily quantifiable and verifiable so I think the other the second criteria we look to um the third criteria um and by the way in in that uh you know these two criteria I think one interesting big category broad category of things that

can be centralized is information commodity anything that is related to information commodity middleman like trist no forums all of these websit primarily just being an in um intermediate layer between buyer and seller or between multiple parties are very are fairly easy and simple business model and most many of them I would say have a good chance of being you know decentralized or at least it would have some strong competitors in the decentralized world competing with them I agree but I think that one of the components within that so you mentioned uh information so say we we have a model where we can decentralize forms for instance I think one of one of the sort of components that perhaps we haven't

figured out yet and maybe it has just yet to be developed is what what is the platform so now we have the internet that's riant on uh on centralized servers and such uh does that platform move into some sort of a protocol that has an app uh which which pulls that information uh and and displays it to user there's still that user interface uh I guess component and and delivery method that really hasn't quite been I think explored very much yet so you're talking about a limitation of having to have a desktop client in order to be completely decentralized yeah I mean because we talk about you know decentralized applications but still the internet and websites for instance still rely on

centralized servers so where does that delivery mechanism come from then sure sure that's a great question um my personal view is obviously I think you know since like M safe and eum trying to decentral the whole internet that will make the whole decentral a lot easier but when you B challenge I decentralize internet that with with 25 years of of infrastructure and uh sure protocols such that's a big challenge sure um I think the decentralization is really a long Spectrum you know from the current model of like mostly highly centralized all the way to completely peer-to-peer NBAs decentralization I think there's quite a bit of area in between you know you could start with something for example counterparty itself is run on

you know a number of Federated notes right so I don't think necessarily that we have to go All the Other Extreme to claim victory I think you know something in between could be good enough for now you could have multiple people who are hosting their own web servers running a different copy of you know whatever thing that can be decentralized so was kind of my view but obviously the ultimate kind of ho gr is to completely de centralize decentralize all of things yeah but I don't necessarily by the way on my other thoughts other you know thinking from different perspective is I don't necessarily think that these everything these kind of makes economic sense or efficient sense to the central uh I think there's a large category of

that and we're just a tiny fraction of that yet but it doesn't necessarily mean everything still need to be calized okay so there's there's one issue I've been thinking about U quite a lot quite a few times when when talking about these topics uh over the past months six months or so uh and and I know I think it's something you've also mentioned in in a blog post you written and and that's the whole question of like where do the profits go in this model because it seems today startups that are successful they tend to be uh they tend to try to build monopolies right so if we look at Google or Apple or Facebook or LinkedIn or Airbnb they

all try to build like a strong Monopoly strong lock in effect a strong brand so that they can charge a premium now it seems there's I don't where's the place for that in a decentralized world yeah I I think it's a super important for deck well there I think a different category of decks there are some deck that you could potentially treat them as a public utility like a gas company water company you know these kind of a company doesn't necessarily have to get huge profits uh all you need is essentially the base Capital to compensate the people who initially develop it and over time it may or may not need tund of maintainance or development cost uh then you have the category of deenal application where

actually does require a fairly you know significant continuous maintainance but these projects I think like the biters model I'm personally I think that's maybe a good example you actually take a transaction fee out of every transaction you made you burn them which is essentially equivalent to paying dividends to all the kind of shareholders or coin holders uh I think there's some good examples out there so can you explain why does a uh dap de application model why do you need to have recurring uh profits in that case yeah so it depends right that from the kind of the public utility thing sure I mean there are also other Decks

that may not even decideed not to take any profits because you know someone could have maybe coded the apps on their free time and they're happy not to take any profits they don't need a huge team from ongoing maintainance and development I think that's totally fine if you want to make it profit free so basically essentially become the public utility in a broad sense in a software sense then you had a type of project who actually does need like ethereum etherum is a good example right it's a very ambitious project it needs many years of multi you know development phases of development so I think kind of makes sense that you would need to build into some mechanism to either raise fund such that these token actually has economic value uh or you build into the F system such that every transaction you know when executed takes a certain percent of

profits and then that will benefit back to the people are holding the T so I think it really depend on the cases and do you think in the case of ethereum I guess one issue that comes up a lot but I think it's it's a applicable very general in these cases is you know you could just Fork the projects cut out the money supply and and you know in that case if it's an open source project there there's really nothing uh they can do uh it seems the only protection against that is the sort of network effects right because they're the first ones the biggest ones and maybe that prot text them uh do do you think that is the General Dynamic of how it's going to play out so that basically the only thing protecting those decentralized

applications are going to be Network effects and uh I guess in cases where those don't exist you won't be able to run these kind of models I think it will primarily be a combination of network effects you mentioned plus the team itself right because people ultimately look at this project and see How likely ethereum is going to deliver what they promise or how exciting will be in the next two or three years consider that whether a worthwh investment either into this ecosystem if I'm buing an application on top of ethereum um or if I'm investing into the ethereum Tans I think of a combination of these two factors and I don't see that fundamentally being difference from the startup world uh especially you know I think ultimately you know competing for

Capital uh like ethereum guys raised you know 50 million dollar that's a good rrap you can't you know have another project easily raise that amount of capital to dedicate to that development right it's it's hard to replicate that kind of capital um so true so perhaps moving on to the the types of projects that uh that you see um developing on on quantify um are there any projects that are under develop under development already today on your yes so we're talking obviously to a

number of of daps uh we can't talk too much about that yet right now but you should see that uh pretty soon uh and we're definitely you know looking for more interesting uh kind of daps in in in the space uh we're also trying to do a lot of evangelization work to help more developers to get into this space uh including potentially running our own kind of deck University program that actually starting have a courses of of uh kind of educating you talent development velers how can you decentralize your projects and thinking from a different perspective you know one challenge I think with the deck is it's not like you just learn a new language Objective C or Swift and you start a program the next day I think educating deck really requires a shift in thinking that what can I not you know

you have to stop think about beaing that application as a company you know as a profit Center but instead you know moving towards a very decentralized model which might be requireing token economy so so you guys aren't lifeit right so we're not so but we will be pretty soon um hopefully with our first project so do you know the launch dat already or what's what's your timeline uh it's about roughly I would say a month from now okay okay great yes and so perhaps we could touch on the legality of this because it has been brought up a few times uh on this show and and and and off off air as well um the legality of issuing uh equity uh in

the form of decentralized uh tokens what's your strategy regarding the legality of these crowd sales sure um so you know uh we have always been trying to be extremely transparent and U very professional in the way that we do that so we spent tons of time you know working with top law firms in the space actually you know a significant part of our cost you know on is on the on the legal cost uh I think my personal view on this is I think we try to focus on decens applications we don't want to touch anything that is do was Equity cpal Equity however you want to call it I think you know we would rather uh see you know uh job to act and these coming uh and some in angelist and the traditional companies I think are better

in doing that uh I think the power of Bitcoin blockchain what it really enables it the deck I think that's much more exciting so I'm not too worried about legality of that in in that sense what do you think but where do you think this is going to go because I mean this year we've seen quite a few uh regulatory bodies in North America and in Europe start addressing the topic of Bitcoin regulation from the uh mon monetary side from the currency side right and I think we can all expect that within the next year or so uh those same regulatory bodies and governments are going to start uh tackling crypto equity and uh and the sale of Securities uh do you fear that your that your model May

uh be subject to the type of harsh regulation that we've seen proposed for instance the bit bit license proposal in New York and others that we've seen draft proposes for yeah I mean the current most of the discussion on a regulatory side is pro primarily about you know uh money transmission and I don't think that's primier L Issue for us given we're primary talking about token um and then my view have on the token the nature of the token has always been it's first and foremost it's a software token it's a software license that you're selling however ever what you haven't deal with before I think great comes with the fact that if you look at you Kickstarter tons of project on Kickstarter no one had ever question about Kickstarter uh because primarily because kickstarters uh products on

Kickstarter is a you know depreciate depreciated assets now you're talking about software token that may potential appreciate value or depreciate value uh but I think that's a larger gr area but in terms of this nature we do believe it's primary software token and this is something that our Law Firm are pretty comfortable with as well so I'm not too worried about that so I guess is this kind of a similar position to the one that ethereum took in product product so I mean I I I think it's great that this worked out with etherum that way I'm just really curious in how many countries and how many places they would have been able to H

get this through you know because I I I think it's at least sort of open transportation is it either really a product or is it more like a security um now of course it has characteristics of both and uh in terms of uh tax regulation perspective of course uh for ethereum it's much better if it's a product because then they can do a lot of things um but I I personally have quite some doubts that this will really be uh replicable in many instances and I could very much see that especially one these tokens become traded and exchanges uh that then perhaps in the future people will say well perhaps this

is more like a security um do you see that to or did you I see a little bit differently I mean I mean the fact that you can trade them easily just mean that you have a more liquid Market uh the fact that you can trade any Electronics gadgets on Craiglist doesn't mean make them any more like security right so I I don't see or you can trade your licensed copy of Windows or Mac you know on on Craiglist doesn't really make them the security um you know I think the fact that security is primarily tied to the ownership in a corporation and they're not even a corporation per se in the decentralized application world yeah so I just don't see that being a SP so so something that when I was kind

of reading about coifi beforehand that it struck me know what was it's quite interesting so the your co-founder was this Co of blue seed before correct y yep and so blue seed for those who don't know uh and then you can correct me if I'm wrong but the project is basically uh to put a ship uh or sort of a Ship Island in front of a Silicon Valley where people could live on build startups on and uh that would be an international border so not subject to us jurisdiction so I guess from a regulatory perspective you could do a lot more things and also you wouldn't have to get USB Visa so it's kind of a very libertarian uh project got a lot of s I don't know if it's going anywhere or

not um but I think it's quite interesting also from the perspective of coifi you know because it seems to me and and perhaps you're right and this is not going to be the case but it seems to me likely that many of these Innovations will be pushed abroad and and people will have to perhaps go to places like that to do controversial projects in this decentralized space uh so it's just I thought it was an interesting connection and you know I guess at least I'm glad you picked up this connection because I I think the fact that darel and I were very philosophically connected aligned is the fact that we're really using different

Technologies solved really the same similar problems uh you know darel was lued was all about uh building a that enables Innovation more freely a permissionless Innovation uh I think you know what quantifi is trying to do is building using crypto technology instead of physical the atom technology to build something that allow people to more freely innovate uh a place where can know more freely competing so yeah I think it's very similar line goals plus offic and of course it may actually be that in the end you will need both to make it happen in that you actually need physical offices to those like that hopefully won't get to that space I hope The Regulators you know

won't go that stream but yeah I think there interesting connection there I think as as as the as the saying goes we should just go to the Moon yeah you we've been saying it all along we just need to go to the moon and nobody will bother us up there so where's that project uh is that project still uh being developed or is it going to fallen through uh you mean quantify the platform no blue seed uh blue seed oh the blue seed okay uh yeah so I think the blue seed was having some funding challenges it was a wonderful very exciting project uh but I think it have

some major funding challenges uh the initial amount of funding is pretty pretty uh significant yeah yeah yeah it's a expensive expensive ship to build yes absolutely it's that's something you know easier about software so much easier that you don't need that kind of a large to you can't do like a minimum viable product for a ship unfortunately the minimum is you know 3040 million yeah so talking about fundraising can you talk us a bit about uh through your experiences you know as as an entrepreneur uh raising money for a project like that that I think is very much sort of at I guess at the edge of

what people are doing in this space sure absolutely um I mean I this is like our second round of funding $1 million you know from ID gz Park uh you know Brocks and his Ula syndicates uh and another Chinese fund so I think the majority kind of my takeaway is uh people are really excited and that's something I I I'm really happy about and I did spend a lot of time actually educating you know these investors about what is Da you know why is exciting uh why do people need to come this kind of plat form and what kind of innovation this does it bring and I am really glad that these investors are super supportive uh Brock obviously has been an early investors in a number of that projects already uh so that I think that definitely helps and

uh you know the idg has also been a early investor in coinbase so they definitely have this knowledge base of what this whole kind of crypto ecosystem is about um the other kind of validation that I'm I'm kind of excited about is currently when you look at most of the project that the crow sale they're primarily about uh selling to crypto enthusiasts who have a belief in this system but I think over time we will see a shift or balance towards a combination of individual kind of backers who like the project and kind of hobbyists but also these kind of more institutional traditional Venture investors in these crypto assets uh and I think that's a really important development that kind enlarge ecosystem uh you know Bitcoin

overall is only about seven or8 billion dollar ecosystem when you talk about active Capital it's probably one or two2 billion uh and you know ethereum by itself already attracted $50 million I don't know how many more active Capital can have the interest appetite for these newer projects so it's important that we kind of get more of the connecting Bridging the older world the Legacy world and crypto what you just mentioned there is is interesting uh because these Technologies really enable for that type of crypto investor profile to emerge because investing in companies uh so far has been you know quite uh it's not it's not as easy um who do you think this crypto in you who's who's your typical crypto investor

is it somebody who's in you invested in Tech or could it be like just about anybody like I think that uh we're we're we're kind of opening the doors to a whole bunch of investment from people have nothing to do with with with with uh with cryptocurrency companies or or tech companies where just just about anybody could just walk in and start investing in in any kind of business so uh what are your thoughts on that sure um I think yeah so I think it'll be fairly different scene or profile uh mix of the investor group traditionally startup you know you have different staged funds you have seed investor ABC rounds you know based on their fund size now I think you will see probably a mixture and hopefully a mixture a healthy mixture of those individual kind

of backers who are either excited about a project at technology himself or it could be people who you know potentially looking for some kind of return or want that project to Happ happen and then you also have a people who are playing kind of the lead investor role as an institution uh who is either doing it as chick Investments or you know looking forward for certain returns so I think you'll probably see healthy balance of those and that's what we're trying to bring as well as ADD is going add yeah we've touched on this topic uh too before with a few people I know with py GMI and also with with ban I touched on that uh and that's the sort of limitations I think that Venture

capitalists have in general in you know correct me if I'm wrong but from my understanding uh most Venture capitalists wouldn't actually be allowed to buy uh some kind of crypto share asset or something like that so you think we will see uh funds in the near future I guess raising perhaps new funds with different terms if they Limited partners that would actually allow them to do this kind of activity yeah sure uh so yeah so we definitely you know noticed that you know certain funds actually miss with the I think traditional Venture fund has limited partner agreements that you know doesn't allow them to invest in non-equity assets and I think in at this

stage you know daps wouldn't definitely not be considered as Equity um so yes and that's one problem that we're actually working on uh uh there are coup I think one or two funds at least I don't know de daps fund Itself by David Johnson I think they are actually a fund that dedicated to assets uh and I think you'll definitely see an emergence of more of these kind of funds happening on the other end there may also be a way to bridge the two world you know you can potentially uh view certain kind of a bridge layer uh Bridging the old the traditional fund structure into this new ecosystem that's interesting right so I guess you could have potentially Venture Capital firms investing into uh the equity of a startup that they then

buys uh some of those assets perhaps that would be a sort of circumvent way of achieving that yep potentially I mean if you look at Ripple I would say you know that part of the value of you know Andrew and Harwood investing in Ripple is probably for the Ripple of the currency right large am xrp so you're absolutely right on that perhaps we could take these last few minutes of the show to just kind of you know think about the future you know I like to think about this kind of Singularity stuff and um you wrote this blog post on the corly blog 2020 a call for daps and daos um could you just Briefly summarize the article and then maybe after we can kind of start

thinking like pie in the sky stuff and where this is kind of all going in the future sure absolutely uh I mean this article is partially inspired by y Comon there's a recent article a request for startups right so they listed a number of exciting spaces that they would like to see to apply to YC you know anywhere from energy Financial Services infrastructure Etc uh I think that's the kind of thing uh you know in cryptospace I don't think we have a lack of Technology that's a part of thing people work very hard on but we have a really a lack of good use cases and that's something we're trying to uh help out with community and also seeking feedback from the community what are the legitimate use cases that we would like to see so the 2020 you know kind of thought experiment is you know five

years from now uh not too far away uh is you know if you have a peak into the future what kind of decentralized application you think will become part of our life but you don't have it today uh so let start from there uh so the first part I was trying to list out the number criteria as we cover some of them know what is the guideline what are the guiding principles the thing that actually makes sense to be decentralized such that they will be more economically efficient uh such that there will be less you know Monopoly Etc so there's a couple thing commoditization you know low profit Etc the second part actually started with a list of thing that we have observed or people we have talked to uh that kind of get us feedback a couple of areas uh anywhere from Financial systems to kind of storage of

private data uh you know for example your smartphone contact and these kind of stuff and then you have these information commodity marketplaces uh so a number of area that we are uh trying to find legitimate use cases for so what's the one you're most excited about um to be to be very honest with you I think all of these on one are pretty exciting but I haven't find really the kind of uh killer use cases that people would call it yes so I'd love to hear you know feedback from from this audience or yeah anyone who's interested to talk more and we're very excited to help you fund that you know design that right that for us it seems like one one of those use cases that has gotten a lot

of a lot of projects in the area is is sort of decentralized file storage yeah exactly why do you think that is is well I I think the the fact that um I think it Mets one of the you know two or three criteria that I mentioned about it's commoditized to some extent I mean hard drive space is super commoditized uh number two you have it's super verifiable you know every you know gigabytes of space you know you could verify very easily whether someone retrieved that provide that space and able to retrieve a file from it uh and also it also potentially you know uh approaches I think kind of the Airbnb model when you actually look at the ly so when you look at economically uh the economics of a v St space may or may not actually be more

expensive than ESS centralized server farm right but when you buy you have a large economy scale but the good thing about that the other way to think about that you know it's an Airbnb model that you're actually you know reusing utilizing the existing spaces that are kind of wasted anyway uh so I think there number of criteria that it hits and kind of excited about people but and along that line you could have storage you have computing power which you could do a number of things within it like 3D rendering or supercomputing um or like big data you know Hadoop jobs a number of these things that you could do along with that and these are the things that I expect to see very very soon within you know this year or next year uh to kind of get started and then you move on

to things that are kind of less cryptographically verifiable uh you know potentially like uh transportations Ubers and you know these kind of stuff that are less verifiable or insurances and more complicated too uh but but it will take a while I think yeah absolutely I think I think we're sort of at the very beginning of a very long journey now yeah absolutely one actually I would probably name one my favorite am on this list at least uh I think it's a decentralized health insurance uh I mean today we already have betting system simple betting system on counterparty and insurance is essentially a probability game as well uh it's much more complicated obviously you have you know risk profiling uh kind

of things uh but I I think it's kind of thing that gets really could disrupt the current um kind Insurance system especially in the US the medical healthc care you know bills are just enormous and just doesn't really make a lot of sense for someone who's not doing tons of good job to take a huge profit out of each Insurance all the insurance company doing is pulling money in and then redistributing these money back to you and they take a huge cut out out it I just don't think that kind of thing uh is necessary in a long term so perhaps uh very briefly can you can you explain H how do you think a decentralized health insurance would do a better job at that it seems

like I have a difficulties picturing that to be honest if sure just what it would look like sure I haven't given very deep thought into it but briefly uh you know you could basically the first thing you start with adapt and look at what are the roles uh and when you look at insurance it's primarily people who are providing the capital or also the the same one being actually insured so you have the payout process uh which says you know their number of events that we're going to pay you out uh and then you have the people who are actually doing the uh kind of evaluation of what is the risk profile of this certain uh use case of this certain events an earthquake insurance for example or a healthcare insurance which says based on

your healthare uh profile health history what is the probability of that and then when you connect that for example to something like 23 and me you know a DNA database which says indicates what's your probability of having that disease and therefore your insurance premium is that is X right so you now you start having a pool of funds uh you have a probability database and then all your people doing it in a very simplistic way is people putting in Bitcoin and therefore when you build a large enough you may have a critical mass a pool such that your risk is significantly Diversified once you reach that point you know your deck probably potentially get started running and when certain events happens uh there could be a valuator a claim agent that actually you know independently or a combination of

claim agents uh in the network would evaluate is that a real event uh what exactly happens what should be the payout B and then redistribute These funds so cool it's an interesting thought experience yeah absolutely I'm sure it's it's the sort of thing that is really interesting and really really hard to do and of course it gets into another area where you'll be uh battling with an insane amount of regulatory uh oh yeah oh yeah definely definitely but that's why it's exciting but but if if you wanna if you want to maximize your your sort of uh confrontational encounters

with The Regulators then then this is the area to go because you won you won't only have like money transmission and perhaps un licens of security but also health insurance we're fighting five regulation bodies at the same time yeah speak speaking of which are you are you incorporating only in the US or you have offices uh elsewhere so far we're only in the US uh but we we're looking into officers well okay cool uh is there something else you want to cover before we um and the show um I think that's a really good conversation you know we are super excited about kind of bringing this new layer of radical transparency and kind

of the kind of some of the professionalism into the space and Trust I guess mostly uh I I think this you know crypto space is very exciting space but unfortunately in the last few years I think we have significant amount of trust thatb I would say uh that kind of accumulated for a while uh things a lot of things good things are just not being done in a very professional transparent uh layer so we're trying to view that transparency and uh we're trying to have a really good user experience fantastic user experience um and also bringing the liquidity and capital uh from a little bit from the Legacy world into the system uh so we're hopefully really trying to kind of ignite this this new economy into centralized applications and if people want to uh exactly learn about coin if I may add you know one

more thing is I think one of the really exciting future where we're kind of really passionate about is imagine you know 20 30 years from now or even shorter time 15 years from now uh that people would no longer treat a full-time job as something that you are supposed to be doing today almost everyone expected to have some kind of full-time job uh but in the future you know you could be just freely associated with a number of decks you know in the morning you might be working uh driving a few hours for a decentralized r you know in the afternoon you could be coding for a while contributing to an ethereum project and you get paid based on Smart contract uh you could and all of us I think as humans are usually gifted with a number of ways and we have number of

interests and having a full time job and not necessarily the best manifestation of that kind of talent and interest and Dak I think as it's by its nature is free association you enter into the system as a minor you can freely leave any time you compete based on your skill sets and your outputs I think that's kind of thing that I felt like Dak a lot of people would say hey does Dak kill a lot of jobs I don't think so I think Dak kills the inefficiency in the system and move people and and track people towards a more efficient and exciting jobs uh and the thing that they're really passionate about uh I think that's kind of the things that make me excited about that it's not a zero sum game well said indeed yes it is it is crazy to think about

this kind of world right where you just sort of fre work a bit here and get paid by some sort of non identifiable like non nonoc entity in the net as that this gives you work distributes the work output it's a yeah fascinating yep um but yeah so if people want to learn more about it so first of all important to point out a coinify is written with a K uh because there's not a coinify written with a c yeah so that's uh k i ny.com so uh I you can sign up for the

newsletter there perhaps that's the best way to you know kind of be in touch when uh when you actually go live and people can try it out also also on Twitter you coinify uh the the same thing at coinify yep you know feel free to shoot us an email at hello coinify decom if you have any daps ideas or anything that you want to discuss about deps and deps cool well thanks so much for joining us today it was really great talking with you and I'm super excited to see what's going to come out of Co fine sure thank you for having me uh great conversation with special you um so uh thanks so much for

listening if you want to support our show uh then you can do so by giving us a tip we very much appreciate that and you can do that at Ender bitcoin.com tips you can also leave us iTunes inter viw that helps people find the show and you know you can let us know what we're doing well but we can still improve um and finally we also send out a newsletter every Friday uh and that's how epb.com newsletter and I just want to say thank you to our one viewer our one live our one live viewer we have one live viewer right now I'm not going to say his name but he's in Los Angeles so if you're listening thank you thank you yes did he stay on the whole time uh well I don't know there

was one viewer pretty much throughout the whole throughout the whole show uh you know who you are yeah so but yeah this was exciting I really like this format and uh I think we should do it again sometime I mean we should probably start doing it uh regularly yeah absolutely so if you're listening to this in your usual way then you probably weren't aware that we actually now doing it in video etc for the first time so I guess keep a sort of look out on Twitter and uh when we do it the next time we'll announce beforehand that you know we'll do a live on videos episode uh yeah and I think we also have some uh interesting content coming out soon from

Sean Jones she did some produced some content for us at the crypto Valley uh conference in uh in the AL of man and also at inside Bitcoins in London so you can look forward to that so well thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week bye bye right