Where’s the adoption? How to integrate real world assets into the crypto realm

Transcript

okay all right good afternoon everyone hi i'm alec cullen i'm co-founder and ceo of minespider and this afternoon we're going to be delving a little bit into how to bridge real world assets into the crypto realm and you might have heard other types of bridging you'll probably hear a lot more about other types of bridging during this conference but we think this is very key to adoption just a little bit about us i actually spoke here last year about mine spiders so i'm not going to dive too deeply into mind spider but we are a blockchain based traceability platform what does it mean it means we track mineral supply chains so things like gold tin tantalum tungsten all the minerals that go into your devices and your electric vehicles into your jewelry

and we do this by trekking from mine to manufacture so essentially we gather information at every stage of the supply chain we affix it to the materials with a qr code and you end up with this beautiful looking product passport which gives manufacturers an idea essentially of where this stuff is coming from now we've been doing this for about four years and we're very fortunate to work with some of the world's biggest companies so for google and cisco we check you know for the devices for companies like toyota volkswagen renault and ford we check for battery materials so they know they're coming from a clean source without human rights abuses without environmental degradation but about eight months ago my cto and i got the amazing task of

exploring some new business models because you know we're an established company now we wanted to figure out how to incorporate more of the cutting edge technology that have been kind of up and coming in the crypto space and how we could yeah bring about more people to to blockchain to our protocol um and one of the use cases that we came to was actually with trade finance now trade finance you can think about it if you don't know is about being paid up front for goods or services that you're selling so a lot of small businesses in the world have issues with trade finance because they imagine i sell you t-shirts you might not pay me for 30 90 days and that's perfectly normal practice but if i'm a small business it might mean i have cash flow issues so this gap is actually around 1.7 trillion dollars

globally it's a big gap and and we have around 65 million credit constrained companies in the world sounds like a an issue ripe for d5 right we have this beautiful defile liquidity how do we hook it up to trade finance so we went over to the us and we started speaking with manufacturers and figuring out whether we could actually provide this kind of service and we we focused um heavily on the garment industry which has this real issue that they have to work with alternative lenders who charge them around 20 so around credit card fees and then we would essentially factor or take these invoices and transfer them to the d5 protocol and it works in a way that probably many of you are familiar with you have a

senior trance you have a junior tranche and the apys are around 12 to 18 uh depending on the risk profile of of the investor or the investment so all well and true right and actually we were lining up to get some funding for that project and then we hit some barriers in terms of timing which i'm sure you're all very familiar with with the recent crash and i think the discourse at the moment is very much see if i broke defy didn't which is true and this is from a bankless author i think which is true to some extent the d5 also needs to be reinvented if we want to move forward and we want to rethink the entire financial system we need to make d5 stronger and we believe that's really by generating

trusted returns by bringing a lot of the value in the real world on chain and i have backed by real world assets and brackets here because i think there's always going to be a bit of a degen defy play and that's normal that's also what pushes the innovation but we want to bring on trillions of dollars of assets from the real world to kind of push d5 forward in the future and great use cases in this space maple finance goldfinch and even centrifuge has some really nice world asset pools not financial advice um on the other hand nfts which you'll also be very familiar with with myspace we have also companies coming to us asking us hey can you buy a mine for us can you buy a diamond mind in canada we had some we were looking

into some shipping vessels in greece um around the 30 million investment mark and this kind of this asset class is generally just something that's not accessible to your average retail investor and that's also why we thought the model with nfts was really fascinating we're like this would be really nice to provide retail investors access to that kind of asset especially at a moment which we all know micro economic factors are not really working in our favor right now inflation is surging so a super nice way to kind of balance their have an anti-inflationary effect essentially so we wanted to build this asset management collective and then offer dividends or staking returns um to the nft holders and when you hear me say dividends you'll think of securities and you'll

probably get to where our next hurdles were with legislation and honestly we've been around for four or five years and i we had hoped that somehow legislation would have moved forward a bit more by this time at the moment you have two choices right you go to luxembourg or switzerland you spend 300k you spend one year you're basically doing everything perfectly with your lawyers to get um permission to sell securities and then you have to do prospectuses for every individual country that you want to sell in which is fine but it's not incredibly fast moving and it's hard for crypto companies to take on that kind of you know unless you want to make it your full company the other option is you go to bvi you spend 25 30k and you're up and running pretty quickly

but you better hope that nobody lays any liability claims against you and obviously that wasn't the way that we wanted to operate as a company but there is hope on the horizon so the eu actually just released a plan for a pilot regime for tokenized securities and this would come into full force in march next year so if you're an innovator if you're a builder really keep an eye on this one we certainly will be because i think we're going to see a lot of amazing use cases popping up when you can actually tokenize securities more easily and in this in this regime actually you can also have retail investors so they have to have a basic knowledge of dlt but finally we can access retail investors with securities and the uk has a similar similar approach as and the us is kind

of looking into it as usual in terms of nfts what do we think of the future of nfts well up until this point they were kind of lacking in utility to some degree and we see now them really moving forward in the form of kind of collectives you know you have like 1 000 or 10 000 nfts that gain you access to this this community this ecosystem they also are diving in a lot now to franchising to licensing opportunities merchandise even restaurants you know depending on obviously some of the top nft collections so and and also then um nft staking so that's what obviously we were looking at doing and we're kind of you know borrowing from from the whole yield farming concept from d5 but we're we're

hoping that nfts will start to bring a lot more value to their holders and some amazing people in the space their proof collective admit one who i think i missed uh world of women squiggles cyber brokers hopefully all of those sound familiar they have a bit of a buy-in but um even worth following even if you don't hold the nft so after all these amazing use cases and this progress we we came back and we asked ourselves okay maybe we can go and easier we can find an easier route to adoption you know we have the world's biggest companies what if we just bridge them to crypto to some degree in some way and like the other ones we started with an acute problem and that acute problem for the world's biggest companies is carbon emissions right now

so most of them or 20 of them sorry not most of them but 20 of them have pledged to reach net zero by 2050 and we know a lot more about to follow right something you might not know about carbon emissions is that there are actually three types so you have scope 1 which is around the company's operations you have scope 2 which is like indirect like energy and all things around the company and you have something called scope 3 which is actually the emissions along the entire supply chain in which i would say very little if any companies in the world currently track and possibly the more interesting thing about scope 3 is that it accounts for the majority of a company's emissions 90 up 80 to 90 depending on the industry and the sec our friends over at the sec

just proposed a law where large companies will have to disclose their scope through emissions in the coming years so we see this increasing regulatory pressure coming in from all sides on these companies so what does that mean for us as as builders as technology developers well this kind of scope 3 it requires supply chain traceability which we already do right so okay how do we make it then easier for people to to basically capture the right information and this is a use case we're building out at the moment so now companies will start to be able to track logistics commuting traveling um waste and recycling we already track a lot of recycling capture that directly and have a complete overview of who the suppliers are how much carbon those suppliers are

admitting and eventually like our dream would be that they can even optimize their supply chains depending on what kind of carbon emissions they want to have or help their suppliers to offset or improve their technologies essentially okay so we've got to the point that we're tracking these people's carbon this company's carbon how do we bring it back to crypto and we thought long and hard about actually building our own crypto our carbon offsetting platform and then we decided screw it there are so many amazing uh protocols out there already doing this let's bridge to them you know let's really bring them them greater liquidity and that's what we're doing now you have like moss which you should check out the amazon nfts really amazing for reforestation it's low carbon which

is all about offsetting on chain cuts which has like biomass green tokens open forest protocol which is like satellite technology for reforestation and tucan which they call it a carbon stack so kind of a infrastructure for carbon offsetting all amazing projects all struggling to get real-world liquidity and that's where we we really want to come in and be a bridge to them and really think about ourselves as being part of a crypto ecosystem and not as a singular company in the space so this is our journey for the next year or more we want to bring the world's biggest companies and two billion dollars in carbon offsets to crypto so thank you so much i'm ella please shoot me an email if you

have any questions or i'm happy to answer any now if we have time thank you anybody cool looks like i answered all your questions okay thank you so much you