How the Blockchain Disrupts Venture Capital - MIchael Sidler, Redalpine

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel stackers if you enjoyed this podcast please give it a top rating and review on itunes and feel free to follow me on twitter at Manuel's dagger this episode is brought to you by the car to finance the cart is the leading switched digital wealth manager providing its products and services to individuals family offices charitable organizations banks and asset managers its investment strategies lead the way they harness the

largest know-how and only a digital investment advisor can to learn more please visit www.sceeto.com did read alpine venture partners in Zurich Switzerland where he invests mainly in tech and biotech companies but is investigating how crypto and blockchain technologies changed the VC industry Michael has a PhD in life sciences from the University of Zurich and he is active in organizations juries and boards for the support of innovation and startups in Switzerland and now to the interview

hello Michael and thanks a lot for making time today hi Michael you manage a VC fund out of Switzerland focusing mainly on tech and biotech investments but now you also started looking into crypto investments what is your approach there from a VC perspective right so Rodolfo has been around since more than 10 years now managing several funds we're a classical VC investor meaning we do equity investments we hold them and then we exit them again and now there is this

new technology and new field popping up cryptocurrencies tokens I chose blockchain all around that and of course as a classical VC investing in tech it is something where we have to have a focus or at least to figure out is this something that could be any of interest to us and therefore we started to look at that with red alpine a while ago we have dedicated resources just caring about crypto the crypto space so analyzing investment opportunities so far we cannot invest in tokens out of

our funds directly that would be a regulatory challenge nevertheless I'm quite convinced that in the not-too-distant future we will be able to do that and then we also will be able to do larger investments so far we do investments out of a site pocket that we have to just get our feet wet in that space but privately you've been investing for a while privately I've been investing for quite a while I've started to to buy my first bitcoins in 2013 I'm quite happy investor in that respect I was completely fascinated I

didn't understand it I was completely fascinated and I noticed that some very clever people around me started to look into that as well the the person who brought it to me in the first place was Lucius miser and shortly thereafter I saw some where a talk of vitalik Putin again I did probably not understand much of it but being quite liberal mind and an entrepreneur and all so curious about new stuff I was immediately hooked and I basically tried to buy a couple of those coins which was

an adventure in itself so what but what was the fascination for you I mean was it the ideology of Bitcoin of decentralization or was it more the you know the investment aspect what what drew you to it so basically yes I'm motivated to generate a return on my investments that's quite clear however here in crypto space and in the blockchain space to me the whole decentralization idea and philosophy is incredibly fascinating it's definitely a paradigm shift and to be part of that is

is really a great adventure so that's my first and foremost motivation and to generate the return or to basically be part of the right that's a nice side effect I would say is it also something that investors come to you for and say hey why we look at the markets we see all these gains why are you not investing in these kinds of companies plenty yes you know among our limited partners the investors in our funds we have really a lot of investors who are equally interested or fascinated with the blockchain space or with

cryptos and yet they have no clue how to deal about that or what to do with it and it would be probably not that difficult to raise a dedicated fund for that from our investors however I guess having said so before we would do something like that we have to have a rock-solid strategy because raising money and not knowing what to do is not a good start you said before you have one analyst I think dedicated to the crypto space how is the way that person looks at the crypto space

different from maybe looking at other tech investments that's a great question so March of it is quite the same how we look at it we look at it really from the perspective of a VC and that's a bit different from the perspective that many typical crypto investors or ISO investors have and I can elaborate to that so that there is that difference and then there is of course the difference between what a VC typically does and how you analyze a crypto the first one and I think our experience

from more than 15 years of investing into tech startups is really quite simple the biggest proxy or the biggest indicator for future success of a company or of a concept or of a project is basically the quality of its founding team and that's 60 to 70 percent of the future success is being driven by that quality and if we analyze a crypto investment opportunity yes of course sometimes it's a decentralized concept that has a foundation at its background

nevertheless there is a core of people a core team of people driving that and here I believe it's exactly the same if you have a dedicated bunch of fantastic entrepreneurs then the chances that this succeeds are much higher than if you have sort of aggregated group of smart people who are not committed so in the end it's really important to understand who is driving it and who is the team behind it and what makes a good team in this field this is an excellent question a good team is something you cannot figure out by going to a data

room and looking at the Seavey's of these people you have to work with them you have to see them in action you have to see them interact you have to see how do they deal with their clients competitors customers the regulator so basically you have to follow them for a certain while to feel the chemistry in the team and to understand if they're entrepreneurs or not and that's basically what we say is the quality and what we want to see whenever we analyze an investment opportunity is we want to see as a movie of how a team or a

situation develops typically you see a snapshot of a situation so you see for example a whitepaper or concept and and then you have to decide do I want to invest or not what we want to see you we want to be able to follow these people for a stretch of time sometimes that six months sometimes does even 12 months until we are comfortable to do an investment and we would also want to do that or we actually want to do that also when it is about crypto investments because I don't see one single reason why that should be different in the crypto space than in the other tech

space area areas well the entrepreneur might say I mean one reason I can think of you know off the top of my head is the space is moving so fast you have to get on board now and otherwise for a miller or you know value at a billion dollars and then you can't get in anything yes that's true and you're absolutely right there and even more so we have really of deal flow so we have thousand five hundred to two thousand proposals that we analyze every year so by no means we can follow all these themes in detail in order to qualify the quality of a team though we usually are very often use our

network so we have a dense network of former entrepreneurs of investors and quite an international network who know how we think and what we are looking for and if we receive pre-qualified deal flow from somebody who we trust and who has observed the team and also the the idea for a while then that is a proxy for us that we can use and so therefore if somebody in the Bitcoin or block chain or crypto space comes up with an idea and and has an investment suggestion and we know how this person thinks and we trust their opinion then

of course for us that is a really good pre-qualification and the validation are they're comparing again the tradition work you know conventional let's say tech space and the crypto space are there any characteristics of the team that are markedly different that that you need for the project to to qualify for you a good question again I don't know I have not thought about that too much I don't think so yes maybe you have too of course it depends on the sector where we are I mean you have to have certain people with in-depth knowledge about what they do that's quite clear eventually you have to have I guess the same kind of people with an inner fire

burning for their specific course that's exactly what makes a good entrepreneur and then you have to have some people who are able to take very important strategic decisions and then you have to have people who are the natural leaders who can bond teams together and lead them to create success and I guess there is not big difference yeah I think you're right I mean I'm sure there's much more in common than there is different right yes and I've also seen people tell me you know they said well it's hard to launch companies like these out of academia for example because

these people may have you know a PhD or a group of PhDs but they don't have the entrepreneurial experience and then it gets very difficult it's not the case I guess statistically that first-time entrepreneurs are less successful than serial entrepreneurs if you look at some great examples in the tech world like Facebook and the like I think that's exactly what we try to do are these guys coming out of academia do they have the entrepreneurial talent or do they not have it and that's exactly the call we need to be able to make I mean it could

be a bunch of nerds that will never be good intrapreneurs or it could be a bunch of nerds as well and some of them have intrapreneurial Talent and that's exactly what we want to figure out how do you gauge that from somebody who has you know zero track record as an entrepreneur how do you see that they have this open Oriole gene yeah that goes back to what I said before we need to be able to follow them so if if we see them what I want to do they have a plan and they have a roadmap and a couple of things on the roadmap and then they tell us what they want to do and then we see them a month or two later and they tell us what they have done and we see that they basically have

delivered they have encountered a couple of challenges they have managed to deal with those challenges and and so and then they tell us now our next steps is this this this and then they come again back and tell us that they have achieved that they have plan that starts to really become then a movie that's what I was referring to before and we see that they continuously achieve for detail they want to do and then we start to believe that the future plans are achievable as well so that's what we want to see in in in a team and especially it's interesting it's of

course interesting if they achieve their plans it's very interesting or even more interesting if things do not go according to plan to see how do they deal with that this is really interesting for us to see there is really a difference in the crypto space of course because there is a completely new paradigm which is the ecosystem of a platform or of a blockchain or whatever you want to call that which is going to be very important as well you can have two smart these people with the smartest tokens and block chains and concepts if you don't have an ecosystem which is using it it's

not gonna be worth much so therefore I guess that's going to be a quite an interesting important point as well to analyze and then of course the token mechanics aspect this is something new for a VC typically that it's not a point in a typical equity investment what is your background Michael I mean are you are you coming from the tech sector I mean you said you're an entrepreneur but how do you go about you know understanding what are all these companies are about I mean do you have a background in engineering or software developer yeah I'm a strange guy I'm a molecular biologist I did a PhD and then

I left academia and I went to management consulting and I spent five years in management consulting during the dot-com bubble and burst that got me hooked and then I basically left consulting and they went to a startup company in the biotech space and that's how I got into angel investing and then eventually VC investing so I have a scientific education which makes me capable to understand technical and theoretical concepts in a structured way I have

learned much of investing and also actually some technology and Internet stuff during my time at BCG in the consulting of tech companies especially also in the internet space so I did fin tech stuff before that term was even coined and then of course in order to understand new technologies and concepts the experience that we have here as vc's really helps a lot I mean we do analysis

of cases and technologies on a daily basis every day several cases so that gives you a lot of experience and helps you become incredibly quick you know understanding concepts and and new ideas in the crypto space right coming from from a VC perspective are there specific themes that you are more interested in than others yes so as classical VC we believe that the blockchain is a fantastic technology to change a lot of the existing processes in the IT landscape this is not really a

very disruptive thing it's just making existing processes better and jeepers but the blockchain is definitely going to change that landscape that's something we're interested in and that mostly can be classical equity investments something that we believe is incredibly interesting for a VC is the tokenization of securities for example so if the shares of the companies that we are invested in can be tokenized that would definitely in certain cases be really beneficial to enable a trading

or transaction in a very easy way this would be interesting to change basically the way equity investments are being done but it's still going to be an equity investment it's just an equity token instead of a title that you hold somewhere in a in an account but that means you would be buying tokens either we would be buying tokens but it's security tokens which eventually is going to be still a share or we would tokenize the shares of our portfolio companies such that we can start to

trade them and that will really change the way how venture capital is being done because the current paradigm is you invest a couple of millions in a company you hold that investment until there is an exit and most likely the exit is either the divestment of the company to a strategic buyer so called trade sale or the going public of that company now if you have a company that is already generating revenues that has a lot of customers that is growing and that is large enough to have some publicity [Applause]

you could imagine that a trade of shares could start to happen and for a VC it could be an interesting situation if you could start to trade some of the shares that you're holding before the company really goes exit and that is a new concept that will also enable or actually mean that VCS have have to become traders to a certain extent and that's definitely a new trick that the old dog has to learn I mean I want it's good that you said it now but I wanted to ask how you know the whole idea of tokenization actually disrupts your own business and you answered much of that

before but have as it happened to you that a company that you were looking at all of a sudden said you know what we actually don't need you or just gonna go make our own token sale yes I'm quite certain that we have discussed with companies that have decided to code the ICO route and basically started to through this kind of a way to raise money I'm quite sure this is this is a situation which is not going to be too sustainable in the end if you get money from investors you eventually have to

pay back a return or enable these investors to somehow get a return I mean selling selling the tokens on their own it's not sustainable you know it could be but the point is that most of these I SEOs happen with concepts and everybody who has built up a platform company in the conventional way with equity knows how really hard it is to build up a platform with demand and supply it's really really hard

and just having an idea to build a platform and getting 50 million from investors is is an incredibly risky proposition because they have not delivered any proof so far that any of what they plan is going to be a is going to work or that they're able to implement that there's just nothing there and so getting back to your question if I think the current frenzy the ico frenzy will sort of the dust will settle and we will find a way how

the ico tool is going to be a worthwhile and valuable tool in the future not even necessarily in the competition to be seized I believe VCS will invest in I SEOs and I believe that happening it's happening already and I believe also that so I think that the really smart way for a company is to get some equity or some private money from somewhere build an MVP or just something on a very low level to demonstrate that what they're actually planning can work and then do the ico instead of just having a white paper without anything in the back and

some teams that's something you asked before mentioned to us as well we would like to get a VC in but we are too early to get a VC that's at least what we sees tell us therefore we cannot get a VC in and we need to do an IPO an IC oh sorry and so yes of course at that point in time I guess the the VC is not competitive maybe they spoke to the wrong VC no yeah I mean maybe not I mean yeah the the fact that you can raise money through an ICO doesn't mean that in the

future you don't have to pay a return and that's going to be quite tough for many of those icy O's but if I understand right the preferred way for you would be you become seed or early stage investor in a startup that has an idea for a token play of some sort and then together with the startup you and startup do an icy oh yeah for example that could be an idea I mean in the end again it's not that different if you want to raise money you have to be able to show something you have to be able to to substantiate your plans you have to have an MVP you have some fraction and

in order to do that you need to get financed do you need to get money from somewhere either you have your own money from your family or from angel investors and you can raise that in the form of equity or you can raise it in the form of a private token sale that works as well but I guess the best I SEOs and we have already started to seem that to see that are companies that have an existing business and then they do and I see oh and that's that's really interesting then like telegram for example and to build that existing business or that MVP you can help them we can help them that artist that's definitely I guess your

value problems our value proposition that's our job that's what we do exactly so but how in far does that change your daily work as a VC it doesn't that's what we do see it's it's exactly the same hour I mean the beginning the the initial setup that we just discussed the thing which is the going to be to be disruptive for the VC is if as I mentioned before we can to start to trade the shares of the companies we

hold in our portfolio because then we can as I mentioned before two partial exits of positions that we have in our portfolio before the exit of the company happens but you can do that if the company I see us exactly that's exactly what that what I'm referring to I mean no sorry with the IC oh of course yes but also when you can securitize the tokenize to securities or the equity you basically tokenize your own easy fund yeah that could be an additional option that we I'm absolutely certain that this is going to be completely normal in a couple of years that instead of having

old-fashioned shares or units somewhere in a bank account with an IC number you have a token and do you really have to understand the beauty of it when you look at how these shares usually are structured so typically when we see invests you have preferred shares with all kinds of rights so you have rights of first refused all you have liquidation preferences you have anti-dilution provisions you could take all of that into a smart contract which is basically connected to that token and

that would really make life of the companies and of the investors and shareholders much much easier because by having it in the form of a smart contract you can guarantee that everything happens the way it's supposed to happen because otherwise it just cannot get traded so I think this is going to be a major impact on the life of VC's how opening is the VC industry to the change I believe as with any industry you have the early adopters and you have the laggards and you have the the mainstream

guys and you see the early adopter setting up crypto fonts you see that happen you see the Draper family investing heavily in Kryptos you see also andreessen horowitz and many of them starting to invest there are still different ways how this is do this a lot of experimentation happening we're still in the very early days there but as I said the early adopters are already doing it the lack it's definitely don't and so therefore that's going to just be adopted as a additional tool in the tool

kit of over VC and yes some of the VCS may also miss the train and then maybe they will go out of business or have to do something else and I mean yesterday I had an interesting chat with somebody who said tokenizing let's say investments that were previously reserved for high net worth individuals like private equity venture capital is a great thing because it gives people access to an asset class that they previously didn't have um how do you think about that aspect the reason why the VC business is not completely going to be dismantled and disrupted is because in the end the most important

factor for a successful company or concept is the people and to have a way to analyze those teams and to understand the business cases and how the people are able to deliver on their plans that is a core ability of disease and therefore it's not just going to go away and you have to have this function in some way or shape in in the system and then in the ico space exactly that's missing there everything that's missing to a great extent I mean plenty of of token

investors are more coming from a hedge fund site which is not not bad but not sufficient because again hedge fund investors typically analyzed the underlying securities or assets the VC analyzes to a very large extent the potential of the team let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsors the card finance take tradition into the future harnessing a combination of cutting edge technology and personal advice in the service of your personal interests the card cuts through the

financial noise and focuses exclusively on scientific and evidence based investing to give investors a better understanding of how to view the financial markets and provide them with the respective investment strategies to learn more please visit www.gfi.com/webmonitor you do you see there in that regard the big challenge I see is that somewhere in the world this

asset has to be physically and you have to have somebody who is guaranteeing you that the asset is still there and that eventually it's not being sold several times and to come back to the idea with the diamonds that's quite simple because diamonds are uniquely identifiable and you can hold them in in a storage space which is audited for example you can do the same with art pieces it starts become a bit more difficult

when you start to tokenize no ships or cars or real estate I mean eventually you always have to have somebody some auditor who confirms that the fraction you hold is still there and that it's still the same fraction and I think that's that's quite the challenge I mean some people told me it's a deal breaker it will not work because it's exactly what they do original idea of the blockchain you know it was all about keeping everything digital and now you introduce real assets so then you introduce a whole bunch of things that will you know

negate the whole concept I I don't see why this is a deal breaker I mean the the blockchain will in a ton of business models and applications and use cases which we don't see yet it will there will be [Music] information being stored and access made accessible through the blockchain there will be these micro transactions between you know robots and basically the IOT idea I'm pretty sure there will be assets that are getting tokenized some

of the simpler assets but then also I guess if you have if you have functioning legal framework you can also talk a nice real estate why not as long as you have you know the normal checks and balances that you have in the conventional world where you can check if it's still in the grunt book and and whatnot then of course you can put it on the blockchain I don't see a reason why not it's getting more difficult if you start to buy and maybe real estate in some African countries because then again you have to trust somebody who tells you that you still own a piece of that and if this is not really a well

trusted entity or institution then it's going to become very difficult have you seen applications of this tokenization of real assets that that work I pretend that I have seen a platform which is sustainably trading tokenized assets yet but dies there are plenty of concepts there and the application of the idea of let's say tokenizing diamonds has that happened yes as far as I understand to a certain extent yes so that's the proof of concept and

almost so it's now it's about scaling down yes no the there's a proof-of-concept of the technology behind it and maybe even of the logistics like again going back to the diamond getting the diamond into the safe you have to get it from somewhere put it into the safe and then basically make sure that it's there and then issued the token and then sell the token I mean this has to be this has proven proven but the big proof comes when that platform has enough demand and supply such that it runs on its own I mean this

I believe is the big big big thing that many of the I SEOs just don't factor in when they go and do their IC o---- every platform has to have participants and in the conventional world the founders know that these participants and users come at a certain cost so sometimes 50 bucks sometimes a hundred bucks sometimes 300 bucks you have user acquisition costs so if you have a white paper that shows I want to have 10 million users then you better make sure that you know how you come up

with maybe 100 million that you need in order to acquire those users so sometimes that's just getting forgotten that you have to have a massive marketing effort to basically get these users and it's not just one side of the platform you have something you have to have some users who do are are are basically building the demand side and some users who are building the supply side always if some transaction happens and most of the white papers just don't know how they're going to do that even if you have data on your platform who

acquires the data providers they just usually don't know if you ask that what do you mean who acquires the data provide there are companies I mean for example you are a platform that hosts and exchanges health data maybe not a very confidential stuff but more like the state count during the Fitbit I don't know that stuff so you still you have a lot of companies that are interested in this kind of information because if you can connect your your data that you track from your cell

phones or your trackers together with your information about your person your age your gender your your fitness level what you eat and so on and if you can offer that in an aggregate is forum to for example pharma companies they would be really really interested in that and they would also pay money for that and there are a couple of platforms offering that through the blockchain because they say the blockchain is the only way how you enable the user to control his own data which is entirely true but then what you have to do is you have to start to acquire the customers the pharma companies who will pay for this information and you have to acquire the

people who deliver their information onto the platform and usually they just think about how to build the platform but they don't think about how to get the users and the customers onto that platform and that comes at a cost that comes out the tremendous cost and sometimes it's much more difficult than you think as us as the typical startup entrepreneur knows there is this the Lean Startup concept where you have to start with something try it out change it amend it measure it again change it again so really constant trial and error approach sometimes over months and months until you find a sweet spot and

that kind of that's the coming back to what you asked before this is to me the real proof of the concept if they have managed to get sufficient demand and supply on their blockchain platform for their specific use cases so in a lab environment it works but what if you go into the wild yes I mean you can build the smartest tools but if nobody uses it it's in vain you have to it's the biggest challenge usually is to change the behavior of the people it's not to build it technically it's you have to have these people to love it

to use it and to basically also talk about it because then it goes what viral and if you don't manage to change the behavior of your users on either side then you're just doomed so basically comes back to the main challenges in changing the world or not technology but how to change the behavior of people's I mean of course yes you have to be able to build it if you if you're not able to build it and also add not only to build it but also to build it at the reasonable cost and if you are not able to do that then of course you lost anyhow but once you've

built it then you have to make people love it and then it's user interaction user experience user satisfaction and that's really extremely old-school I mean what people love does not change just because there is a blockchain there is an idea and there you know a white paper and maybe couple team even who can build something and then there's a vision of what the world will look like when everybody uses it but how do we get there exactly and also there has to be a sufficient incentive for people to do it just you know if somebody has to be

really convincing and giving me a lot of money such that I would start to share my Fitbit data with the blockchain platform I mean it would be just too big of a hassle in the beginning when they make it extremely easy and maybe even trendy such that people start to talk about it and I see oh I can really make some money by doing that then it could sort of catch some fire but that again is is something you cannot just write down in a white paper it's something you have to try and adapt and and basically

costume engineer to the specific situation what's the lesson there for entrepreneurs you know in the blockchain and crypto space that they should you know focus much more on user experience onboarding cost you know you said user equation right I mean it's this that the main lesson or what else should they do to me yes of course I mean in the end two things that when I read a white paper I asked these guys so in order to have a meaningful number of transaction on your platform how many people do you need to acquire so going back to the diamond example how many diamond traitors or diamond sellers do you have

to get onto your platform such that you can do it may be transaction of a thousand diamonds on your platform so you have one traitor one supplier who is supplying one diamond or you have one who is supplying 100 diamonds or and where will they be located these guys and and how are you going to to win them over such that they trust your platform and then on the other side you have to find the guys the people who are willing to basically invest their money to buy the tokens the tokenize diamonds it's a huge marketing effort it's huge

yes the benefits for the diamond seller or maybe that the price is much more transparent he much maybe gets a much higher price than if he sells to as usual trading partners but there you have to really understand what is the benefit for every part in that in that the whole the whole ecosystem because if you have part in your ecosystem that don't have a sufficiently large benefit it's just not going to work so I I would like really like to see a quantified rationale behind everything and then on the other hand the second question that

I asked why are you eating 10 billion tokens why not 9.5 billion why not 6.5 billion why not 1 billion why 10 usually they don't know that just the no 10 billion is a nice number and they know that the other platforms do the same but basically what I would like to see is that somebody has been sitting down and thinking about it like you calculate the amount of money in a monetary system for example it's

really not easy and I would like to see that justified why exactly 10 billion tokens and how is that going to work if you have a thousand diamonds that are getting traded every year maybe it's 10,000 diamonds maybe it's only 500 but just your tokens in connection with the diamonds for example doesn't have to be the diamonds it could be something completely different but that I think is something that in most white papers is missing as well in most white papers who said I meaning how many of the companies that you look at how many have like serious

flaws like the ones that you just just mentioned how many percent I'm not even sure if it's a flaw or not it's just not there and then just something that disqualifies them yes then I think the typical thing what you do is you say to these guys look it's a very interesting concept I would like to understand more can you sit down with me and explained it to me in detail and then maybe you figure out these guys have sorted it out all it's just not properly explained in the white paper or maybe you figure out they have not and then of course this is really a red flag that that's the first test again if the team is is an entrepreneurial and high quality team or

not the way they react to these kind of questions cool recently I had an interesting chat with somebody who does marketing for companies in the blockchain in token space and he said they can just pay for people to use the platform that's one thing many of the companies do they issued tokens for usage of the platform and then some people will always use it and so you know instead of going down and marketing cleverly you just pay people to use the platform I mean how sustainable is that lets ask me like the Pepe to mobile a I mean that sounds great if you can pay people to use the

platform such that the Platinum tokens pay them in tokens such that the platform is getting used and becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy maybe that works I'm not even sure sounds cool but eventually there and there's got to be a reason why you do on that platform something either because you can make money or because you can get fun nor because you can get some satisfaction in some way so again it boils down to the benefit if you can make money by trading tokens and you can keep doing that it's fantastic I just

think that it's probably not going to work but it's something that we would have to discuss in more detail I guess it interesting concept at least you need to provide a value for the user just pain I'm old enough to have experienced the dot-com bubble and in the dot-com bubble sometimes I mean when I look back to what we told people in that time it's completely delusional from today's perspective at that time when you were in the bubble at that time you really believe that and to a certain extent you

have some similar tendencies today that people just start to tell stuff which they have heard from other people without really questioning it or without just believing it and I still believe the fundamental mechanics of behavior and economics have not changed just because there is something which is called the blockchain and in the end I mean whatever you do it has still to to interact and work with human people human human desires and and ideas and needs that's not gone that's not going

to change do you think more people are overestimating what the blockchain can do then under estimating it in the short run it's completely in certain areas overhyped in the long run it's we underestimated what's what's going to happen or the changes that are going to be brought about by this technology what do you see or what is what is on the horizon you think in the next six to six months maybe to two to three years in the space something that I'm eagerly awaiting is decentralized exchanges having violence and and coinbase and the

likes who are actually centralized institutions and I'm taking the lion's share of all of those traits and and and exchanges I think it's needed but there the concept of a decentralized exchange is tremendously interesting and it's called going to to be a game-changer because it will make trades possible at lower costs which is sometimes really required especially for micro payments and stuff and therefore I think this is going to be quite an interesting concept which is hopefully coming along in the next six to twelve months and beyond

that beyond that anything can happen as I said as an investor in vcm look actually what I think should happen and what I hope it's going to happen sooner than later is a proper regulation of the space such that we can move on and we know what we can do and we cannot do I guess especially in asset-backed tokens and security back tokens that's that's going to change how we do business but right now it's quite difficult to deal with it because of the regulatory

aspects which are not clear and I hope Switzerland is really not missing that boat because it's it's a fantastic opportunity for Switzerland to to grasp and to to basically be one of the global centers to really shape that space well it's been very interesting and also I really appreciate your sharing you know how you work how you approach this asset class I think it's very exciting and insightful also to you know to listen to this from the perspective or as an investor or also from that as an entrepreneur so thanks a lot for taking time today Thank You Manuel was a pleasure thanks for

having me thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our sponsors isn't the show notes of this episode and on the podcast website the blockchain and ascom to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel stackers and I thank you very much for listening [Music]