John Mullin on why real world assets matter

Transcript

how big is the opportunity for tokenization I mean there's literally hundreds of trillions of dollars in real world assets which stand gain from tokenization Larry think's on TV every day right now talking about it we have real estate over $280 trillion Global Market Commodities infrastructure art and collectibles financial instruments over a hundred trillion do the integration of these assets into blockchain through tokenization allows for fractional ownership and easier transfer of ownership rights what will this do increase liquidity and the market size of real world assets even further tokenization is a way to

democratize access to these assets and enhance their attractiveness as investment opportunities particularly when regulatory Frameworks are developed to support such Innovations did you catch that that big scary word regul that's what's missing right now a regulation ready blockchain in today's episode we are joined by John Mullen CEO and co-founder of Mantra and Soma Finance in this candid episode we discuss the rwa narrative and the potential for tokenized assets what led Mantra token M to gain over 1,000% in q1 why Mantra built an L1 on Cosmos that is

specific designed to accommodate Regulatory Compliance for a broad spectrum of real world and tokenized assets the business model of Mantra as a chain and an ecosystem and the launch of Hong by testet which is attracted over 75,000 users in just 48 hours and the opportunity for you our listeners to capitalize gmgm welcome to milroad radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto I'm Jay Hamilton and I believe that onchain is the next online this is the opportunity and I'm here to guide you to capitalize GM John welcome to milroad radio thank you sir in my

language right now I would be saying LM I just purchased a Celestine sloth this week and we're all about lazy morning so good to see you man love it I might start LM I got a 10-month old kid so I don't have any LMS these days you don't have I got I got 18 years till I get an LM okay we gotta start with rwa is one of the hottest crypto narratives right now I was looking up some stats up on across the whole sector 280% Returns on rwa in q1 2024 and was briefly actually at one point in like Jan Feb rwa was one of the most was the most profitable narrative in crypto but then in February you

guessed it mem coins took over and the AI narrative as well but let's start with rwa broadly why is it one of the leading narratives in crypto right now yeah I'm good good question I mean I think there's a few things one thing is just actually there is the concept of fundamentals coming in to the game you know RWS are implying that there's something with real world value getting moved on chain I still think there's a lot to unpacked there and frankly a lot of rwa projects are just total narrative right now which is fine but it is this like enticing thought that there's real fundamentals coming into the space that you know trafi or Finance is actually

coming on chain and that is true in some degree I mean not entirely but it's getting there so I think that idea is becoming more of a more of a thing there was a good tweet thread by rean bosan from ltis fund talking about how he thinks that AR bads now have pmf product Market fit because there's over a billion dollars of you know tokenized treasur on public blockchains nowadays I've said that I think that it's has better pmf with institutions than retail and I'll pull a number real quick that um there's been over a billion sorry not even a billion a trillion dollars of tokenized treasuries on the JP Morgan Onyx permission blockchain private blockchain yes so like you know a trillion to a billion big difference but you know you can see that this is

starting to become a real thing both at the more retail as well as the institutional level so I think that's part of it and you know frankly speaking when you got you know Larry Fink Shilling asset tokenization which is effectively RW on CNBC every day that helps why do you say that tokenization has more of a fit with institutions than with retail is that from conversations that you're having with institutions that's giving you that conviction is that from a broader view of the space right now well a bit of both but definitely probably more the latter just of how I've kind of like formulated my thought on the industry I don't really like the term rwa Frank um no I think it's kind of [ __ ] honestly like we're an rwa project but

we've been doing rwa since it before it was called rwba so like it used to be called SEO and there's all these other different names for for tokenization I just think it's purely tokenization and bringing tokenized things or making things tokenized effectively right bringing it bringing Real World products on chain and you know in the trafi speak RBA means risk weighted assets so it's actually kind of confusing and it's not a great acronym for I think what we want to develop over time but it's a narrative now you know we're building in it whatever we'll stick to it but um it is just more tokenization to me so I think that's one of the things I mean being in the space for a long time we we did regulated like tokenization offering in 2019 where we tokenized a

professional basketball players contract having seen how everything developed since then frankly it just been a lot of problems and a lot of speculation and a lot of hype but not a lot of substance there's still issues ISU with liquidity there's still issues with regulatory Frameworks there's still a lot of just technical user experience challenges when it comes to doing anything on chain and we live in this little b we like I'm talking like we as an crypto native you know people we live in this little bubble I think sometimes where we think that everyone just wants to use like signing keys and ledgers and all this stuff to transact it's like horrendous experience right it's just not good Awful and you know that needs it's awful you know and having been building in D5

for the last four years there's a lot of risks there you don't know what the hell you're buying sometimes you don't know what the smart contract means you don't know what this wallet address is and like that's a again horrendous user experience so there's a lot of stuff to fix it just makes me feel even more bullish to see how freaking early we are because I can see where it's all going and um yeah I mean it's but it is exciting to be you know we're kind of at the Forefront of pushing this narrative pushing this trend actually not narrative pushing the trend of asset tokenization I think trend is more more apt here because it's it feels more real narrative is feeling a little bit more Hye and you know that's an exciting exciting thing because there's just you

know so much potential I mean I think our tagline is like unlocking the 16 trillion dollar rwa industry or one of the taglines but Frankly Speaking 16 trillion is probably small actually it is small not probably it is I love that you say you don't love that name now I'm like okay what can we call do you have a better name I got I gotta ask that let's call it R Bay for this one I guess I'm not that's above my pay grade sir yeah you got Larry fin on the phone can we call him up he just says koniz he doesn't really say rwa right that's what I'm saying yeah he doesn't said rwa okay we got I gotta go back for a second tell me you tokenized a professional basketball player contract I don't know this story you got to tell this story

quick this is very thisit the milkman's gonna love this story absolutely man so back before even Mantra launched was just coming out of working on a centralized exchange project the B the two bare markets ago was like in full swing this is like 2018 2019 days we just had the big sell off from 20K to 3K in Bitcoin and you know we're trying to figure out what like what the space was going to be doing basically other than like I scammy icos so I had basically been working with a partner in a group in the US called torian Capital they're us broker dealer we spent a good portion of 20 18 working with finra which is the governing body for broker dealers and we had basically went to them and said hey

we have a we meaning the broker dealer have a private placements license for traditional Securities we want to do this with blockchain let us do it so we asked them and they said absolutely not not the same thing which others were just doing it and we just like the [ __ ] heck you can't do it we talked yeah we freaking talked to the the guys and they said don't do it anyway they're all not working anymore and we are so that's you know it's good basically we got this license issued after like literally just thousands of calls emails like paperwork I really got to give it to our partners Bill and Jim for you know getting that across the line like really incredible but we got this license and we expected a ton of fan and literally like crickets because like the way that the US

Regulators work is they don't share when you've done something like they don't promote like that you got a license which is fine but then basically I had seen on like coin Des there was an article about Spencer deny Spencer deny was a point guard on the Brooklyn Nets I think he's on the Lakers right now if I'm not mistaken and he wanted to tokenize his contract and you know he has this like moniker like Tech guy with a jumper and like he wanted to be an industry leader he's been in crypto which I think is really awesome I saw that and I'm a big basketball fan big sports fan in general actually do like the Lakers although I think uh my favorite team is Cincinnati Bengals go Jo you said from you're from Ohio originally I'm from I'm from Ohio yeah okay that that adds up Joe burrow

hopefully plays a full season but anyways we don't need to go down I love Joe man yeah we'll talk about that later and anyway I literally just reached out to this professional basketball player on LinkedIn and I was like hey I saw your article like we have a license we can help you with this we should talk and I didn't expect really a reply but he replied and you know basically we started talking to the team kind of long story short they ended up going with two different broker dealers first that didn't have the license okay and they both got shut down and then we were kind of like the third times the charm got around to do it we had a ton of fan for this offering we did under a regd private placement which is an accredited only I I think it would have been cooler

to do it under retail like a reg CF or something which actually is what the we're doing now on the US side but you know they didn't for whatever reason it's fine and uh you know unfortunately by the time that the transaction was actually about to close Co happened no one's invest investing in a basketball player shitcoin when the world is literally imploding and the basketball league is NBA shutting down and I'm pretty sure Spencer got covid himself so like technically the asset had Co we were tokenizing we're tokenizing Co so anyway we got the transaction done but um not wasn't like not much unfortunately yeah yeah but anyway it's a good test case and we learned a lot a lot a lot a lot from the regulator on

how to do stuff and how to operate and whatnot so I mean a lot of this experience from myself has just been like trying it honestly things just not really working out perfectly you make progress and then you kind of go back I mean I mean it sometimes works out great for a while but then you know it's not lasting and you gota can go back to drawing board figure it out improve and that's just a part of life I think but and you know what that's a great reminder for all the founders and entrepreneurs that are listening right now you're going to listen to the show and we're going to talk about Mantra and all this incredible success that you guys have had recently and it might be easy for you to sit there and think oh well John just made it overnight and

it's like no no no he was in the trenches dealing with this [ __ ] for years years trying to do this having many failures and that's what leads to the end success I want to talk about the success that you guys have had manra is the leading rwa token in q1 2024 up over a thousand per. what's Driven the incredible rise of your token price I got to preface everything as not Financial advice NFA I think there's been a few different things that have really you know been pushing us you know I think obviously there is just being positioned in the line with a good narrative and we're positioned in a line but the reason that we are is because we've been building this particular like thing specifically for the last 18 24

months and not calling it rwa we've just been building in trenches you know honestly suffering like legitimately suffering during the bare Market I mean for the first time in like nearly two years I'm taking a little bit of a salary and it's basically just to pay my rent and I've been putting money into the business like to basically keep things aat for two years you just yeah literally you know but you got to do what you got to do so I think that's that is paying off right like all the hard work from the last you know bear cycle is like coming to fruition now and you're getting that repricing I think the other or one of the other bits is that we had basically when we launch I won't get into the entire story of Mantra right now but Mantra when it initially launched was actually like a

defi app or Dow token so it's like a dow dap utility token in the beginning of the year we basically had a dow proposal that the community that was Community Le where basically we merged our plans for a cosmos L1 blockchain AR blockchain which initially was going to have its own separate token and our existing token into one and then we created like a unified tokenomics so like M or om has effectively become or gone from a Dap token to an L1 token and that that repricing is significant I mean we are the rw1 right now right rather than just a be a Dap token um and I think that has a pretty significant bearing here and

then finally speaking like our tokenomics are fairly unique in the sense that we've been around for four years we're at least on the ethereum side of the token Supply like nearly nine over 90% in circulation we're obviously expanding the supply with the new main net coming but uh even when we launch main net the token's going to be like 50% in circulation so it's not like we're going to be this like super high FTV low float kind of token which like sometimes is a disadvantage because like we can't launch just like if we launch now straight up we'd probably be like a 10B like whatever kind of crazy FTV thing if you wanted to but then obviously you're facing a shitload of dilution down the line and like right now instead we don't have to do that we have maybe less like Hey we're launching

and our token's worth $1 billion dollar it's shit's cheap now and we can do whatever the hell we want obviously just kick in the can down the road for the delusion coming but in this case you know it's slightly different thankfully we've had a good runup so that's been good and know honestly speaking other good thing is we're just on binance and that makes a big difference yeah yeah wild yeah the power of binance is just it's truly insane it's very interesting because you know I'm in Canada being in North America I mean being Canada I'm basically American in terms of my media and my news and the exchanges I use right we don't see binance here we don't talk about binance here it's not on my radar but you're in Hong Kong and every time I talk to anybody outside of North America basically it's binance bance

binance binance binance yeah it is yeah wow we're not on coinbase yet working on it you'll get there soon I'm sure two ones we want we want coinbase and we need the Koreans we need that Korean pump my wife's Korean so I just want to mention one more time that just so everybody knows M mantra's ticker is om om so you might hear us say m or hear hear us say Mantra that's what the token ticker is just your up speed okay let's jump into Mantra we've kind of talked a little bit around it tell us what is Mantra chain what are you guys building maybe take us back sometimes I find the best way to explain the story is a little bit like what's the problem you saw and as you said you got you've been building for longer trying other things what led you down this path

absolutely so my first foray into officially working in crypto was in 2017 I started working on a centralized exchange project i' had been doing like research at a bank before and I was you know pretty early Bitcoin adopter I got my first Bitcoin like 2013 but that was just on personal capacity so I got my first job in 2017 in crypto full-time work on this exchange we were looking to basically create like a regulated is or like more buttoned up style platform where you could trade all of products under one one roof crypto assets Securities stos FX whatever that was like the initial vision and I think it's kind of persisted just in different forms the idea of building a regulated like kyc Exchange in 2017 out in Asia

was ridiculous because you know that wasn't a feature that was a bug here yeah nobody wanted right nobody wanted that yeah you know so that was a good lesson but you know additionally like we kind of moved on we did that tokenization deal in the US we started working with regulatory for bodies that went well Co happened we basically like honestly I was like going broke I need to figure something out so we ended up launching this defi we were been you know pretty early defi adopters in in 20 yeah 2019 we're using like early un swap V1 and playing around and whatnot basically we wanted to build something in dii started working on building this project called montra we actually were initially going to be launching on polka dot we had this like idea for this Dow

that was governed by the community that had retail focused Financial products that's how we came up with the name actually it's like mantras you you say them to have peace of mind like rhythmic hymns that you say over time om is one of the first like om and you like say it over and over again you kind of chant it and the whole idea was to be like calm with your financial well-being and you peace and om is the first Mantra of course the idea of dows being both the da religion the dosm as well as the decentralized autonomous organization like that was how montra da came about we launched that and obviously as we you know mentioned all the Perils of defi smart contracts rugs scams sending things to the wrong wallet like all this stuff so we we did all that and we're

like okay this is great but after about a year we had some good progress we got listed on Finance in March of 2021 so we've been there for nearly three years and the D5 bubble popped like literally two weeks after we got listed on binance and um it was like down down only everyone went into the nfts and game five play to earn you know whatever so we went back to the drawing board and wanted to basically create something that had a bit more sustainability to it and a bit more of a competitive mode while we got back in touch with our us partners and we're like okay let's build something bringing this license and our defi onchain Tech because we didn't have those the first time around when we did the batso deal so so we started working on this we were looking at the US market

for basically creating like a permissioned trading deck for primarily for tokenized equities and actually that's still happening for the US market it's called s Finance so you can check that out as well it's like our us brand so like that's really kind of the focus for that market the idea is that we you know trade on equities can trade 247 and they can trade in a fractionalized way and they can also be redeemable it'll be the first of its kind when it launches and it's not too far off but it's been a challenge I mean like the US market has been a brutal challenge and from a regulatory perspective and it's been you know very hard to deal with honestly speaking but because of that experience we're able to learn a lot about what the regulator is looking at how to build permission regulated compliant onchain

applications for trading for Investing For issuance Etc we started building on ethereum mainnet and and and other evml tws to start and we also saw issues there like obviously building anything on chain requires gas requires Keys transactions wallets Etc you can't do that on E really and this I mean you know unless you're just like a defi OG and or EOG and you you don't care about paying you don't care yeah you don't care yeah so for some you don't but for a lot you do as everything slowed down in the US with the regulatory landscape shifting and FTX imploding and all this stuff going on in the background we basically started looking elsewhere for other opportunities other markets where

we could operate in on an international basis so that's when we basically started looking in I literally did this like regulatory Road Show I went from the US where I was staying at the time because I was locked out of Hong Kong for Co for because of Co and not locked up I was stuck went through Switzerland lonstein Dubai Abu Dhabi Singapore Hong Kong like all on one trip all the way back I met with Regulators every place and we ended up basically settling on Dubai as our home they just launched Vara the virtual asset regulatory Authority we wanted to basically get licens there to give us some a home base where we could operate compliantly it's been a process there too do not get me wrong I mean we still don't have our license it's been nearly two years we're very very close I will say that last

mile I can assure you of that fingers crossed I would yeah but it's been a process we know as we got that we also kind of were like initial Vision we'd always thought we would have our own chain we had been like very early validators for many Cosmos SDK blockchains we ran validators for a lot of different proof mistake blockchains including actually including the faded Luna and you know others I was OG Luna to be honest um oh [ __ ] that was a yeah that was also going on the background for all this stuff but any who we kind of saw that we needed to basically build a technological stack that was purpose built for our use case that supported asset organization that supported identity management supported token creation and controls that supported permissioning and and compliance like

SDK effectively and you know that's when we were like okay we've been running these Cosmos nodes for a long time these Cosmos ecosystem nodes for a long time the cosmos Tech stack is amazing IBC is like incredible we don't want to have to deal with bridging we want to have a sovereign chain that we can upgrade as needed to adere to you know changing and different regulatory requirements around the world rather than having to be beholden to other like L1 that we're just taking security from so there was a lot of different things that we were considering and obviously like Cosmos as an ecosystem um was still kind of like it's not nent but it was still kind of seen as like the weird techy guys that were like all over were just doing their thing but it's starting having its own

moment so we just started to build you know a Cosmos app chain and we subscribe to that app chain thesis we have our protocol uh which is the mon chain we have our application that's an onchain Club um for trading these types of products so yeah so like you're taking all that in a nutshell we're really just heavily focused on bringing fin Finance on chain in a way that is retail friendly we're trying to really F I mean right now I understand our target market is still crypto natives but like we're building for is a market that's not pure Crypt Natives and they don't want to have to deal with keys they don't want to have to deal with am I sending this to the right person they don't want to have to deal with gas like we're we're basically building it to be from the

palm of your hand a one click or you know similar style one click experience between your wallet your bank account your brokerage account your Real Estate Investment Portfolio etc etc etc like that's the world that I want to live it and when you went on this regulatory Road Show which sounds sort of awesome but also sort of like scratching my fingernails across a chalkboard to be perfectly honest one of the key things that you guys always talk about is being a compliant ready compliant enabled L1 what does that mean how is that different than the other l1s that are out there sure I mean I think I get this question a lot like why another L1 how

are you guys different Etc I mean I think there's a few a few areas and maybe that's the better way to answer the question so it gives a little bit more context one thing you know is just the team we've been building in this space for years so like if you could call it a rwa OG like I feel like our team is that we've got that experience and we've been sticking together throughout the bare Market even if it's been tough so we've been Solly building towards this Mission and now we're here so like I think that's a big Advantage we're very focused on one specific thing which is asset tokenization and you know rwas which I think is also just different than a general purpose smart Contracting platform or blockchain like that's our core Focus even though that Niche is like a trillion dollar thing

great I guess you know crazy it's a big [ __ ] Niche big [ __ ] Niche yeah we have been doing the compliance and Regulatory leg work with getting licensing it's not just like oh we're going to spin up some new code and it's great now we can do this stuff like no no no we've been in the trenches building relationships spending time spending money frankly with lawyers and you know regulators and doing all this stuff that will give us distribution capabilities that no one else will have like you know I'm not going to say any but if any just general purpose L1 would go out and say oh I want to launch a regulated Dex now they like it's not their business model and two like okay get get the license say this all the time you can't Fork a license right you

know but you can't Fork a license right it's a real world thing it's the whole point of real world assets right like we've been doing the work in the real world which is the hard part and then I think think the last bit is just our backers are we're our biggest investors are not web 3 native like our biggest investor is called shuk Partners their base are the UAE from Abu Dhabi it's founded by Shan and mmud to ex muala guys muala is a sovereign wealth fund from Abu Dhabi there's nine I think Sovereign wealth funds that are LPS of sharuk including you know Saudi Korea Egypt and a few others so like super super institutional Capital at literally The Sovereign level which is amazing that's like real world money real world

capital I mean it's just a different thing than like a web three fund that doesn't mean that there's not value that we want to get from web three native funds that's definitely we definitely want that but it just is like we have the real world part um of real world assets and I think that's an incredibly important thing because when you go into these conversations with institutions with asset Originators on the or just you know buy and sell side institutions like it just changes the game because they're like okay you're not just a random scammy crypto team that is going to like cut and run one we've been building this specifically mantra for four years and continue to iterate and continue to work on it so you know they know that we're here for the long run which we are I mean I'm I'm inevitably

in forever long myself so well you're still here after a few bare markets and a lot of pain so I think that shows that you're battle tested for sure I mean I'm just not in it I me I'm in it for the [ __ ] journey and I just like the there's a reason I get up at 6: am to do this call because I like this stuff you know I think that really comes across and it helps that the the markets that we're operating in literally at the highest level there's support for the industry and you know that just gives us a lot of opportunities to really like do pretty freaking amazing stuff I mean we have like crazy crazy BD and Partnerships behind the scenes that hasn't even come out yet like one of the goals that I want to have is for the

team is like I want the the industry to basically say like you know how everyone was like polygon has the best BD team well we're about to we're about to beat that like that's okay no hating on polygon right I mean I we we were in Genesis validator on polygon too they've done amazing stuff it's super aspirational but we want to be better I'm competitive as hell so improve okay let's get into a little bit about the business one thing that I think gets so lost often and we talk about this a lot about milk road is people like to talk about the tech but let's talk about the business because yes building the tech is so important but unless you actually have a business plan and a business model that you're building towards and you understand how

you're going to make Revenue look none of this can amount to anything you're really as you said yourself early in the episode there's a lot of rwa projects that are kind of jumping on the narrative right now but maybe not necessarily building a sustainable business tell us about what is the business model for mantra how do you guys make Revenue maybe now and in the future I know things are changing so fast absolutely so I mean I think it's been really a good process to have to build and raise money because we recently raised around in the bare Market it really really requires you well one it's just freaking brutal to raise money in a bear honestly I mean we were trying to raise for like 18 months

I mean it was just literally we were like going out to raise money as Luna is crashing and then we got started getting some traction and then FTX BL open and we're like okay hold on like let's just keep building that was a challenge but it does require you to really focus on being well one being focused you know not doing too much [ __ ] finding what is the attractive thing for investors to to participate in focusing on the business to build something that's real and really focusing on your numbers and and and making sure that you're legitimate so like that whole process has been really good for us it's it's made us stronger but in that kind of like focusing we really had to focus on like how does this business grow and how do we actually create value at both a token

in the equity level because you the way that the group Works montra group is effectively we have like a group structure that Services Mantra like the the token issuing entities outside right on the group level we basically are like a headcount plus a little bit of like a like a a little bit of margin that basically it's like building things for the foundation Association whatever that's like to keep the lights on Revenue that's not meant to you know make a ton of money but it's just meant to continue to make sure that we can continue to build you know that's basically funded via the treasury it w't that model was not from the chain or the ecosystem perspective it's not only going to be for us that like that's for other people too right like any other Dev students that we work with but we

also as a the founding team core contributor team like we have the longtail upside in M right so we have a you know pretty substantial claim on M TNA at the group level not only at the individual level so the the team individually has exposure um we do something where effectively we have this I mean not that we're even in remote like we're literally everyone's revest their tokens because we're issuing new supplies like no one's liquid even though we've been building for four years we have another multiple years ahead before anyone's taking money off the table which is good I get forever long myself but the idea is that we have this thing where basically no one ever gets tokens directly we all if ever there is a divestment it happens you

know via best execution with a market maker and then the proceeds are distributed pra so you don't have this first man out to sell is like it's a prisoners dilemma if you don't do it like that because you know hey he's going to do it so I should [ __ ] do it too yeah [ __ ] that we're not trying to you know all dump on one day it's not how it you know this just not how it works it's not good for the community it's not good for anyone so we've had this model always so that's like the just general like Consulting technology service model but then at the same time we are building an onchain exchange application that will be licensed and regulated in the UAE that's just really an exchange model transaction fees listing fees Etc it is a permissioned exchange I don't know if we're actually

G to have listing fees probably paid an home or something but you know there is an exchange style business model which is transactional volume Etc we're looking for other ways that the group can make money I mean within the group we have different businesses we have the chain we have the exchange we have the USPS and maybe others in the future they'll have their own unique business model I Envision that they'll all have their own token as well like the long-term strategy for the group is effectively like I just believe in like a tokenized world in general and everything should have its own token if you can and only if you can create a unique value creative token model that both aligns the equity and interest in the shareholders as well as the token holder interest so if that doesn't get met then there's no token but if that

can get met which I think in many cases it can then it's a good opportunity to have you know two parts of the capital stack the token Capital as well as the equity capital and I effectively think that our Mantra Group business is effectively like the defi dcg or the defi consensus or the tokenization focus consensus where it's like a holding company brand with different products that's kind of what I wanted how I want to build it and again I just want to but I want to build this more of an intern style internationally focused with a token spin on everything I mean I I I hope that someday if we ever go public I mean not only will we go public in a you know traditional Stock Exchange but we go public on our own Exchange in a token that would be I mean that's that's the

way it should be anyways right that's everybody should be going public and I think 100% we'll definitely get there soon tell me a little bit about what are the growth metrics that you guys are looking at in your business that allow you to measure your success any numbers you guys can you can share with us that can demonstrate what's going well maybe what's not going so well or what hasn't gone so well sure I mean I think recently a lot of it's just pointed to the hung by test net which is the latest phase of the test net that we launched for the chain I mean it's literally been two days maybe like not even 48 hours but I think we can point to some numbers let me just pull up the

Galaxy Quest actually because it's like our it's an incentivized test net so I'm just going to refresh if it wasn't an incentivized test net would anybody care say it but it's true no no of course of course not okay so in the in less than 48 hours we've got 73,000 participants on the test net Quest so that's one I mean it's we need to have that I mean some of the other metrics are we looking at is like who's creating decentralized IDs so who's actually onboarding so onboarding wallet id id Creations you know obviously these quests are a good barometer dap's being deployed so we actually held a hackathon like on the devet before the test net even launched over the weekend we had 70 developers come out and we had nine

working daps deployed by the end of the tway hackathon on the weekend Dam working front end and back end so we'll have nine rwa focused dabs deploying imminently on the test net for that's not even the ones that we have buil our right that's not even your prod these are external yeah these are external we're going to be launching a something pretty exciting so next week uh we're going to be announcing a partnership on Tuesday it's like this basically one of our investors is a big company secretary in the UAE they've worked with over 880,000 startups with advisory Services Visa related Services regulatory Services compliance Services Etc called virt Zone they've basically taken a floor in the dwtc which is the Dubai World Trade Center one the the economic

free zones in in the UAE in Dubai that is also where VAR the regulator is is set up that's also where we're set up and we're basically launching a joint incubator together with Virgin Zone in the dwtc building where we have a whole floor 177,000 sare feet of floor of of office space where we're going to be hosting companies to come build the companies that come work on on Mantra ecosystem get connected to The Regulators utilize our licensing capabilities Etc we're announcing that next week I'm going to be investing uh $500,000 into five different startups to go through an incubation program over the summer where we're gonna send five teams you know ideally a builder and a maybe a bis guy or girl hopefully girls totally hopefully girls we need more

girls in crypto holy geez need we need a lot we need a lot more for sure but um all invest in basically five teams 100 Grand each that will then go through this program and this program is basically going to be one month in Dubai you get to go and live out of a hacker house we're gonna have a cool Hacker House that you can come live at go through and work at this dwtc for for a month you're G to be able to meet The Regulators you're gonna be able to meet our invest investor Partners learn how to pitch learn how to talk to investors learn how to structure your business learn how how to do all these different things in in Dubai then we're going to fly you to Hong Kong for a month do the same thing here work out of our office

get to meet everyone get to understand L to land in this web 3 space there's a ton of stuff happening in Hong Kong too it's a big big big ecosystem then we're going to have another month in San Francisco one of our investors 280 Capital they have a really cool like Hacker House thing in Los Altos in the valley and we're going to end there after a month so month in Dubai month in Hong Kong month in the valley end with a demo and the pitch day we're going to have other you know again five more daps that are battle tested we're going to put them to the ringer it's going to be an amazing summer I mean that's going to be probably one of the coolest Summers ever I think for a lot of these people end in the valley pitch day hopefully they've raised money we'll help get our

investors to invest in these guys make sure they Deploy on Main net again like the idea is I invest in them but the whole purpose is just that you basically go to market build on our chain and then drop a token to our community and then we're actually going to even more you know further on bring them over to single for for token 249 in September and do like you know whatever it's going to be pretty cool we're going to be doing that's awesome yeah so it's going to be badass oh it's so cool I'm just curious coming out of this um hackathon what are you seeing that other devs are excited to build on Mantra yeah so we had a bunch of different cool products like one of the ones that I thought was quite cool was a real estate perpetuals you could like short real

estate which is kind of cool there was like a gold token there's a yeah I mean I think the real the art the real estate purpose was pretty cool I think that's pretty badass we're seeing a lot of different stuff across the board and we will have a very specific ask for those like five companies that I'm investing in I'll basically make it like five very specific ones we need lending protocols we need a CDP we need different style of purpose protocols we need prediction market like we need a yield spending protocol like Pendle unless Pendle wants to come to play which know we'll see one of the issues I not even an issue but one of the I guess challenges that we have is because we're you know Cosmos based we're very I don't want to say we're like Cosmos aligned I mean we're

definitely that's even a thing I know it's like ethereum aligned now but we are stewards of the cosmos SDK and the tech and supporters of that but from an ecosyst perspective we're like anything but Maximus so like we support a number of different chains and products but we are using kmom smart contracts rather than solidity and evm so that is one challenge I think but we're very much sticking to the guns there and I think over time there's techn reasons why we've decided to make this change or not even change but decision and you know over time I think people are going to start you know continuing to build on this great smart contract language of of KM wasum it's a it's a really powerful tool frankly and in my opinion better than solidity so because of that we're and don't hate me ethereum Maxi please

for saying that just my personal opinion doesn't mean that I don't think there's good stuff happening ethereum there is so that's one of the challenges that we're seeing but you know again you're seeing the progression of people moving and DEP working and building in Rust that's a cool thing to see yeah definitely one of the the challenges that I think most retail and most people don't see is how much learning needs to happen in order for devs to start to build in a new language oh yeah and that makes Innovation and development slow right like we all expect we're like why you know I got an idea why can't a Dev just go build it and it's like well okay hold up for a sec there's a lot of learning that needs to happen and steps that need to happen and there's lots of

some products out there that are trying to solve that by making learning languages easier and making it easier to if you know one language it could convert to another and so I think the Innovation across the whole Space will solve that problem and we're going to have more and more devs also obviously in a bull cycle we're attracting a lot of great devs into the crypto space now which is great to see you jumped on one of my my next questions here which was what keeps you up at night what are the challenges you mentioned this smart contract language being what what are the other things that keep you up at night I almost never have a hard time going to sleep because I'm stressed or worried it's because you're saying oh I no actually I'm I should um I think maybe I say it too

many times during the day so I think it's partially just because I mean I think there's two things by the way that doesn't mean that I'm it's easy for me to go to sleep it's just that I'm not worried necessarily about stuff usually honestly I just think I have like an innate and uncanny ability to handle like immense immense loads of of stress so you know I say like I do CEO coaching with a group called the mashari method and you know I think through that experience they have a lot of crypto Founders as as as clients including Brian Armstrong Antonio from dydx and others it's funny because a lot of them don't really want to be CEOs I'm not saying Brian or Antonio or anyone but like a lot of these clients they don't want to be the they don't want to run the business yeah I do like I I think I

was like literally just put on this planet to do this job this is my life's calling and I'm built for it so because of these like just general characteristics and traits that I have it just it doesn't ever seem like I'm working it's just life so because of that like most of the time 99999999 out of 10 I'm not like so stressed I can't go to sleep I'm actually just my mind's racing because I'm thinking about what I want to do the next day and all these other things that we need to do and stuff like that so it's not it like oh my God what's going to happen it's just like oh [ __ ] we have so much other stuff to do like let's [ __ ] go do it and you know that's sometimes one of the better times for me to think and I'm always like not a good

thing but I'm always kind of like I go to bed like glued to my phone and then I need to then I like put it down and I like keep thinking about stuff and I'm like oh [ __ ] I need to write that down again on my notes or whatever so I need to figure out a little bit better way to deal with that but um well you got you got two dogs so are you going on daily dog walks that's one of my I got a dog too so that's one of my favorite times to digest and so many great ideas come to me in that time that's a it's a good one I mean so like one of the things that I found that's kind of a good way to kind of separate the craziness of my schedule because I mean literally like

the minute I wake up to minute I go to bed I'm I don't say I'm glued to my phone but I'm like I'm on I'm I'm thinking about it and there's not really a waky moment when I'm not but finding the ability to have flexibility in your schedule to do what you need to do like that's an important part of just knowing that if I wanted to do something I could and just managing and owning that is is a good thing for me I really like to go to the gym and when I'm in my routine I'm traveling a lot so it's a little bit hard hard but like being able to go and I'm G to go to the gym after this podcast for example just like being able to have that moment and de-stress a little bit and try not to think about it

too much sweat it out or what whatever it is for you like I also think you know I'm I do a lot of massages here I can like get in a state of Zen where I'm just I'm almost sleeping but I'm thinking about a ton of stuff and like can really really get deep into it during during a massage so like I don't know I just found a couple things that work for me and that's some or haircuts I get my haircut all the time if I ever really blow up I seriously man if I ever really blow up I would have like a haircut haircutter Barber who just follows me everywhere in the world no way I dude I get my haircut like every seven to 10 days and I would do it every day honestly it's like it's therapeutic I keep it tight on the sides

and this is actually this get long for me I like it even shorter you got a hat on right now though so and I got crazy long hair I've been growing it up for years so you and I are we're opposite ends of the spectrum it's funny because one of my partners one of our team members Prof K shout out to Prof he always tells me that like there's so many good crypto Founders that are bald and obviously you had the bald meme coin he's like you have good hair John like you need to not wear hats on these on these amas and podcast and stuff because you gotta show the hair I'm like I'm like bro it's [ __ ] 6 am right now like I'm not doing my hair to do this call it's okay most of our listeners are on audio not on video but

for those on video you can see John's premium hair kind of he showed it a little bit he took off his hat maybe you got to come on to YouTube so you can check it out you got some killer hair too man thanks thanks my man okay well that was a great Sidetrack I was not expecting that question to go in that direction I want to talk about Hong Bay test net though you guys as you mentioned we talked a little bit about it you guys just released that a few days ago there's lots of ways that our listeners can participate tell us a little bit about this test net and how people can get involved yeah so I mean one of the first things I would like to just talk about is why is it called hung by and you know it's a little bit of an

elude to the Denon testet that ethereum just launched and that was obviously predicated on Denver Cancun which were two important sites for the ethereum foundation you know Hong Hong Kong by Dubai you know we're not necessarily targeting Hong Kong per se but we are base here in Hong Kong and duai our our two hubs basically um we basically want to create a a blockchain that becomes the tokenization corridor for the Middle East in Asia I mean it will be bigger than that eventually but really like where our core competences are and where our coordinate connections are is in the Middle East and Asia so I think that's an important thing to just you know throw that out there so you can understand like why and frankly I think Hong B sounds pretty cool other than

that you know in order to get involved we do have an incentivized test that as I mentioned there'll be both on and offchain activities that you can use to participate and earn points with as I mentioned we nearly have like 75,000 people who are who've already begun which is crazy we are also doing Genesis drops to you know strong Community Partners we've announced some gen drops to different nft communities in not only the cosmos but on etherum actually so Pudgies are getting to drop Cosmos projects bad kids bit kids which is like the derivative celestian sloth I think we're the first project dropping into celestian sloth that's like the Tia uh Celestia um nftd project that's like gone absolutely Bonkers this past week that's why I said lazy morning in the

beginning Pudgies as I mentioned and then we're also doing it to other Cosmos or just other related projects St so definitely the atam stakers um and a few others um which I I can't name just yet but anyway so we have a lot of different ways to kind of be able to get exposure to this drop and be able to participate on this point system on the incentivized test net and we will have additional things coming actually just on the existing platform not even on Main net but will then be deployed for example we'll be doing yield vaults and different types of vaults that will then deploy stable coin liquid or other types of liquidity onto mainnet after the yield term ends which will be attractive obviously so like there's a lot of different ways that you can participate if you're obviously a developer that

hackathon and incubator program that's coming up for the summer will be badass we'll actually have a proper ecosystem fund as well incubation program outside of what I just described so there's a number of different ways and you know if you're interested in getting more involved hit us up on you know X holls and telegram although like right now our telegram's like going crazy it's so hard to respond to stuff telegram uh Discord but that being said we're we're pretty on top of it and you know we'll definitely uh be in touch if you have questions and we'll learn more sweet awesome we'll also put a link in the show notes uh for everybody to learn more about Hong by testet and to get involved incredible 75,000 people in under 48 hours just what an incredible start excited to see uh where that's

going to go next how long is the uh points program running for if you put a timeline on it so up until May a few months so I'm a little hesitant to give like a hard hard date but just to give some like general baselines what I say is we want to do it before the US election and after the summer okay so that's not a little bit of a small window that's a small window yeah yeah I feel you on that why before the US election because God only knows what's happening after that yeah I figured that was gonna be the case uh oh oh boy just take out that degree of whatever the hell you know just after that that's going to be the you know Talk of the Town so let's just get out there before totally totally awesome John this has

just been an incredible conversation thank you so much to you and your team for everything you guys have done it's amazing the amount of leg work that happens in the background that most of us do not see and dealing with Regulators in the way that you have is a noble effort that somebody needs to do it and so appreciate you and your team doing it before we wrap where can our listeners find you on X or where are you active and anywhere else that you want to tell our listeners to follow yeah absolutely I would say um X is probably the best along with telegram although my telegram is pretty swamped as you can imagine X I'm JP Mullen m l l i

n888 so hit me up on on X we have this thing with eight over here so it's a lucky number in Asia very fortuitous Mantra currently has 888 m888 888 ohms as its Supply so very fortuitous but that that then then we'll change with the main net coming online but um still it's a very lucky number here so we like to that's one of our numerology we we you know we have our mantras we have our numbers like OHS and eights and things like that that's that's how we do it over here I love how intentional you are with all of like all these micro decisions but very intentional 100% I mean it's all about the details it's all about these little things and I think when you think

about this stuff every wakey moment because I just can't even help it like if you think about it all the time and you do this for several years like this the end output right yeah yeah it's amazing fantastic all right well John thanks so much for getting up at 6: am to join us on milro radio pleasure appreciate your time definitely will be following Mantra we might have to write a milro pro report that's a weekly report we write on various tokens in the space and I think we might have to do one on M coming up if you guys want to a mil Pro report if you guys are listening send us a note and ORD or hit us up on Twitter and let us know we might write that but until then we'll be following closely and JPM have yourself a great day in Hong Kong thank you sir I

appreciate it thanks for having me on it's been awesome thank you for listening to milk Road radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto if you like this episode share it and hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game then we'll leave a link to milk Road Pro as well your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto is risky so you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and we'll see you in the next one