BlockShow Americas 2018. Day 1

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Every time we kiss it's like a Runway to a place where nothing and.

No one can get in our way.

Every time we touch it's like a paradise.

Come on.

Come a little closer, babe. I want you right here next to me. I have a feeling that this will be a night we will never forget. So come a little closer, babe. Cause tonight is just you and me. I have a feeling that this will.

Be a night we will never forget. Sam.

Every time we touch I feel so alive. This is the best place that I've ever been in my life. Every time we kiss it's easier to bre.

Come on.

Come a little closer, babe. I want you right here next to me.

Have a feeling this will be a night we will never forget.

So come a little closer, babe. Tonight is just you and me. I have a feeling that this will.

Be a night we will never forget. SA. As they move across the floor we live the dream, Dream, dream, dream. And we are young and we are bright Together we can last the night Then we'll fall, Then we'll rise. Pushing to the limits and shift to overdrive. Sam. The sun will rise Rise as we start a brand new day. Breathe in the light Alive, alive, alive. Yeah, we are young, yeah, we are bright and. And together we can last the night. And then we'll fall Then we'll rise. We're pushing to the limit. We push the limits to overdrive. Push the limits, Push the limits. Push the limits to overdrive. Push the limit, Push the limit. Push it to the limits and shift to overdrive. Push the limits, push the the limits. Push the limits to overdraft.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Block Show Americas.

Your program will begin in five minutes.

Please take your seats and remember to.

Silence all mobile devices as a courtesy.

To your fellow attendees.

It. We got it. We got it.

Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats.

Your program will begin momentarily.

As a courtesy to your fellow attendees, please remember to silence all mobile devices. We have a problem string rigged dreams.

And I believe cryptocurrency with bitcoin not trusting any start to think this new world with the world of trust. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to block show America's 2018 where we bring you the most current and up to date information facing today's blockchain community. This is the premier blockchain expo in the world. I'm Roland Bird, motivational speaker, author of eight books, co author of the best selling Prosperity Factor with Dr. Joe Vitale, founder of Life 180, where we help you change that one thing in your life that's preventing you from getting the success you want. And I am your MC for the Block Show, America's Event 2018. Now, let's get the energy pumped up a little bit in here. You guys have been drifting in a little slowly. Let's give a big round of applause for all the staff. There's a whole army behind the curtain back here that you guys aren't even seeing that are keeping everything going. We've got the audio video. That's right. Now turn it up, make it louder. Awesome. Now, let's do a little experiment here. I'm going to divide you guys in half. We've got this side of the room, this side of the room. Easy enough, right? I'm going to say 1, 2, 3, point at your side. You're going to say, let's go. 1, 2, 3, let's go. And then I'll say, 1, 2, 3, and all together, stand up and say, block show. Let's see if we can wake the dead with this one. Okay. One, two, three. Let's see if you got to do better. Okay. One, two, three. It's a little bit better. All right, try again. We're going to go back and forth until I get some volume out of you guys, all right? One, two, three. One, two, three. One thousand two, three. All right, that's okay. Let's do it again. One, two, three. 1, 2, 3. I can't hear you. I mean. I mean, it's not like it's 8:20 in the morning. Come on, guys. I mean, this is Vegas. People aren't even in bed yet. One, two, three. One, two, three. 1, 2, 3. Bracho like that. Let's do it again. 1, 2, 3. One, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. All right, that's a little bit better. Maybe we'll get it after lunch. Okay? I mean, after lunch, you guys should have some more coffee in you and be ready to go. Now, why is block show, America's 2018, so special? This is the first time this event has been held on the American continent. That means for the first time, you get the opportunity to firsthand get all of the bleeding edge technological information and advancements from our panel of experts and all the individual speakers who are going to be working with us over the next two days. So you guys are going to get information that isn't available anywhere else from the leading source for that information, which is Block Show. Over the next two days, we're going to have keynote speeches and panel discussions delivered by the true celebrities in the global blockchain field. And we will also have a second stage which is called the battle stage that'll be opening a little bit later. I'll announce when it's opening. There will be a multitude of speakers on that one also. So you guys will want to go back and forth, check out both, see how everything's going for you. Now. How many people from here are from another country fair number? Cool. How many people are locals from Vegas? Alright. How many people feel like Vegas is another country? Okay. Awesome. So we want to make sure that you have the best experience possible. And in doing that, we're going to ask you like you've been asked before, make sure your cell phones electronic devices are silenced. Make sure that you're in the rooms in advance before the presentations start so there's not interrupting things coming in and out. And you know, you guys, right now it looks like you're all in trance. How many of you are in trance right now? Anybody? Okay, well let's if you are, come out of it. Just wake up, get moving. I gotta get you guys pumped up. I'm not. I love you guys. You're the best audience and I'm just, I'm not feeling the energy right now. Let's try a different chant. Let's say here we go, block show. Just like was on the screen earlier. Let's do it all together. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. One more time. Here we go. Alright. That was a lot better. That was a lot better. Cool. Well, I hope you guys are all ready for an awesome experience. And you know, I got a few more minutes to kill, so I'm going to tell you guys a funny story that happened to me when I was about 19 years old. How many of you know what a Chevy Impala is? Okay. My Buddy had his 69 Chevy Impala and this was up in Montana. This was on the dirt roads. And we were doing what they call drifting nowadays. We called it power sliding back then. We were going around the corners, just ripping it this way, ripping it that way. My buddy lost control of the car and that's kind of a big deal. We went ahead, there was a berm, a dirt embankment that was about 7 foot tall. And when the car lost control, it punched right through that embankment. So here we are airborne. My door flies open. I'm drifting out the car like this, you know, zero G in the air. And then the car starts to come down, hits me on the shoulder, knocks me back into the car. And we land. Cloud of dust spinning out and we look at each other and we do what 19 year olds do when something like that happens. We laugh hysterically because it was awesome, right? We just caught air. We just flew like 100ft. Then he tries to start the car. Nothing. Just nothing. Tries again. Same result. We look behind us. Guess what was in the middle of the road about 50ft back. Any takers? The gas tank. The gas tank that I had just filled. Thank you. So, like true blooded American teenage boys, we walked back, we made the best of the situation. We took that gas tank, we dumped it out in the middle of the dirt road, took a match, fireball, 60ft high. Nobody even blinked. This was Montana, right? Nobody even came. And when the flame burned down, we figured out that we could write words and they'd flame up and then they'd disappear. And once it was all burned out, we had to walk nine miles back to town because that was a consequence of being stupid, basically. But it was a fun story. And I want you guys to think about the consequences, which can be a positive thing, of you choosing to be here today. You choosing to be here at the opening, choosing to get all this wonderful knowledge that's presented to you by our speakers and everyone who is here. And you guys should all applaud yourselves and congratulate yourselves for making the choice that sets you apart from the crowd. And now I'd like to welcome Adi Creasy, CEO of Block show, with some special words for us. Nice story, Roland. I liked your energy. Like this. Here we go. Block Show. That's the first time we have like this at the show, and I'm not surprised that we have an MC like you here in US here in Vegas, City of shows. So, hi, everybody, my name is Eddie, and I want to welcome you here at the fourth edition of Blog show, powered by cointelegraph, the first time here in US and the first time in Vegas. So the concept of our today's show is don't hide behind the masks. What does it mean? Right. We think that the blockchain community now is going through a very important phase. It's going through a phase and it's getting mature. More and more experienced entrepreneurs with real track record, investors, I don't know, talents, developers are entering the community. And we here at blogshow want you to be open to each other, to be sincere. Right? That's why we say don't hide behind the masks. Just, I don't know, say hi to your neighbor. Right? That's why you're here. You came particularly to network, to get some insight, to get some knowledge. So just be open network. And we are trying to do everything from our side for you to feel comfortable and to spend your time here efficiently. So thank you for coming to Block Show Americas here in Vegas. The nearest two days, August 20th and 21st, we gonna share our knowledge with our speakers with you. We're gonna provide you with everything for you to network. And let's start the blog show America's 2018. Thank you. Thank you. Addy Warm round of applause for Addie Crazy. And next we're going to have a secret speech from ex head of White House Press advance for President Barack Obama, Johanna Maska. Johanna, currently the CEO of Global Situation Room.

Thank you. I don't know how secret this speech is going to be. I know we're here to talk about blockchain and first I want to just thank the hosts of the Block show conference. I had the opportunity to go to the conference in Germany and it was an awesome experience. I met so many people who wanted to take on big challenges and to change the world. And so that's why today I want to take a little step back to how change happens, to the importance of one voice. You know, I think that we're at the point where we see that we're not that far away from a world where human potential can achieve human capital, can achieve human potential to that point where we actually have. Regardless of where you're born or who you're born to, you can achieve your potential. And I, to that extent, want to talk a little bit about my story. So it started with one voice, but now we've got this lovely slide. This is my life. For eight years. I traveled with President Obama to 42 countries, to almost every state, and I set the stage for history. I started at the beginning of the Iowa caucuses, back when people were telling me there was no way Barack Hussein Obama would be our next president. And I would go on with him to travel to NATO and to G8 and to APEC and to summits around the world. And in that, I learned a really important lesson about how one voice can indeed change the world. You know, it all started actually in Des Moines, Iowa. I grew up in Galesburg, Illinois. Galesburg, Illinois is a little economically devastated town. President Obama had talked about it in 2004. I was living in Des Moines, Iowa. I had worked in politics, both in Kansas and in Iowa, and I wanted to get on the Obama campaign. I'm sure many of you guys know exactly what you want, right? So this story is a Little bit about not taking no for an answer. The state director, Paul Tuze, had moved into Iowa, and I knew that they were thinking about potentially running. At the time, President Obama was thinking in Hawaii. And I was sure I wanted to work for him. So I met the state director at a party and I said, where are you going to live? And he said, 10th Street Lofts. And I was like, 10th Street Lofts, that's where I live. Totally true. I'm not a stalker. And so I was like, well, what floor? And he said, the fifth floor. And I was like, that's my floor. So I did the very Midwestern thing of welcoming him to town with freshly baked bread every day to the point where Paul started actually avoiding me and going to the fourth floor, taking the hallway across, taking the stairs up, because he knew that I was right by the elevator. And I would hear him the minute he would get off the elevator, because every day he would get home, I would say, I'm going to work for President Obama. I'm going to work for Senator Obama, for this campaign. I intend to, you know, do this. When are you going to give me my job? And at the point, he had no jobs, he had no offices, there was still a decision to be made. So Paul often tells this story and laughs because I would go on, of course, to the White House. I got my job in Iowa. It was a very hopey, changey campaign. But I must say, at the very beginning there was a lot of skepticism. You know, the truth is I had these big visions of President Obama. I had seen him in 2004 deliver the convention speech at the Democratic National Convention. And he talked about that world where, you know, it doesn't matter your perspective, but we are all working towards this more just more inclusive, more optimistic, more innovative economy. And I believed in that. Iowans would come to our events and they would walk away and they'd be like, eh, yeah, he's okay, maybe. We could barely get 12 people in seats to see Mrs. Obama. And people don't remember that now. They remember like, oh, it was, you know, this amazing, but it was really hard work. I often say to innovators, once you're successful, everybody says to you, I always knew you were going to be a success. But at that time, when you're taking the risk, they're like, what are you thinking? Good luck ever working in politics again. So at that point in Iowa, we had a lot of skeptics and a lot of people will talk about our tech savvy campaign and how we engaged People online and that. That how we won. But I actually disagree. This was my vantage point in most events. I was sitting between the stage and the audience and watching the president and listening to how it was going, and he was doing these town hall meetings. So then he was the senator, not yet the president, and he started telling this story. So at first, the audience was listening to him. He'd do a town hall, they'd leave. He started telling this story about a little lady in a church hat and the story of her shouting, interrupting his speech, that fired up, ready to go. So he would tell this story all over the Iowa, where he had gone to South Carolina to do this event. And again, there were, like, 12 people in the room. He was frustrated that he had gone there. He had driven so long. Bad paper, bad story in the paper. He was like, why am I even here? And, you know, he's shaking hands, just doing his obligatory work. And this little lady in the church hat in the back of the room is yelling, fired up. Ready to go. Fired up, ready to go. And the whole room starts chanting, fired up, ready to go. And at first he's like, she's showing me up, right? Like, I'm running for president. What's going on here? And he said, you know, before too long, he started feeling kind of fired up, and he started feeling kind of ready to go. And he was telling the story, saying, you know, after that speech, he would say to everybody, are you feeling fired up? Are you feeling ready to go? And that voice that changed that room changed our campaign. So people, at the end of this speech, President Obama would tell this story, and he's like, you know, if one voice can change a room, one voice can change a state, one voice can change a nation, and one voice can change a world. What do you think, Iowa? Are you fired up? And Iowans were on their chairs, and they are fired up now. And so here we are at the Jefferson Jackson dinner. President Obama. Actually, this was the Harken steak fry. President Obama's making fun of me because I'm pushing the press back in front of him at this lovely Harken steak fry. But we had crowds of people. Everyone was surprised. So this is a little lady who was in the church hat, Edith Childs. I often say, you know, I love the story of Edith Childs because I don't think it's unlike many of us. This is a woman who wears many hats. She's a city councilwoman. She is, I think, a nurse, and then also a private detective. And, you know, he would tell this story and kind of giggle about it, but I do. I often think that that's the story of a lot of people in America and a lot of women in America. Edith Childs. It was an extraordinary experience. I was with the president on election night. I was there the entire day. We went to Grant Park. We won. It was a surreal, unbelievable initiation into the world of the White House. So I would go on. This is back in Galesburg, Illinois, my little hometown, walking with President Obama back to my home. And for that time, I was so extraordinarily blessed. I would pinch myself all the time because I never could have imagined this life of getting to follow a dream and travel the world. It wasn't too long later, early in the administration, we went to Copenhagen for the climate change conference. And I was actually one of three people who found a meeting that was being held with a different delegation. The Chinese, the Indians, the South Africans, and the Brazilians that were not necessarily on board with the climate change regulations that others were Europeans and the US Were pushing for. And it was because a lot of people there didn't have power. They didn't have the same extraordinary amenities that many of us are blessed to have in America. And President Obama went to this meeting when he found out about it and sat at that historic meeting for about two hours, talking to the leaders about their concerns, listening to the leaders about their concerns, and then talking about the importance of investing on the front end in new technologies that will help revolutionize the lives of all of the people that we have, that we are all, any in government are responsible enough to look at making better. And in that meeting, I truly believe he changed the course of history and that now you have a lot of countries investing in clean technology and. And leading the way when we may be taking a little step back right now here in America. You know, I have a friend who tells me, Lorna Johnson, she says her mom said, to whom much is given, much is expected. And I think that that's right. You know, we were the dreamers. This is our little team in the White House at the Christmas party. We were the dreamers. We were the believers. And when I look back at my time in the White House, the only times I regret is when I didn't use my voice. The times that I used my voice, I don't often regret. And so to that extent, we didn't realize a lot the role models that you are for the world. And I think that when you are successful at changing the world, that you have to remember that to Whom much is given, much is expected. It is why I am very interested in this blockchain community. I am very interested in the dreams of the people around the world and I am very interested in trying to make that more just world. I, I had my son, I was running NATO NG8. We were hosting at Camp David in Chicago. And then I was in Afghanistan seven weeks after I delivered my son for live address to the nation on the one year anniversary of the death of Osama Bin Laden. I often say of all the cool things I did which it was an extraordinary experience. I got to fly over Petra and I got to tour the pyramids with President Obama. I went to see the Nelson Mandela's prison cell with President Obama. I saw Gandhi's home with President Obama. To all of those extraordinary things I got to do. Having my child was the best thing I've ever done. And I think those of you who are parents or you know, recognize this hope and the inspiration that our children give us. We realize the big dream, the big dreams that they have to have that moment where they can dream those big dreams and they can succeed. You know, this is my son. He was completely convinced he wanted to be a firefighter. And in my time I went around with President Obama and the thousands of times he was asked to sign something, he would always say, three dream big dreams. And so to you this block show community, I hope that you do dream those big dreams. I hope that you achieve them. And I just have one question. Are you fired up and are you ready to go? I think I actually have a few minutes for questions, so I will do this little catch box now. I, I am the test case, I guess, and I'm supposed to throw this out in the audience. Anyone have a question? Anyone have a question? No one has a question? Ah, you've got a question.

Trump.

I only heard Trump. I get that question a lot. But let's get his question and then your question. When will I break bread for Trump? Bake bread for Trump? You know, I think I left the White House in 2015 and saw my role as getting back into communities and working on big problems. I am of the belief that we've gone two steps forward and one step back and that we have a lot of change and that America is better than some of what Trump is doing right now. What's your question?

While Obama was in office and while you were working for him, was bitcoin or blockchain anything that was ever mentioned? And if so, what was the atmosphere like, if it ever was mentioned?

You've got a really good question because. Yes. Points. He's got points. He asked if blockchain was mentioned. And in fact, there were a lot of people in our Office of Innovation who were actually paying attention to financial technology and some of the innovations, and some of them actually have gone back into districts and have run for office and even done ICOs for their candidacy. I don't think. You know, and we'll be talking later about regulations and things. I don't think people should shy away from regulations. I think people should be working with people in government. And I think there are a lot of people who are very interested in that technology. I will say that I learned a lot more about it when I got outside of drinking for the fire hose every single day of another national security crisis or whatever we had. Do you want to ask or did I answer? Did I? Okay. Of course. Of course. Anyone else? Oh, yep. I have to actually test my tossing here.

Yeah. Sir, make sure you hold the black circle right next to your mouth so they can hear you. Yes. Hold the black circle right up next to your face and talk into it. All right, awesome. So thanks so much for your talk. And the question is that you said, to whom a lot of given a lot is asked. Something like that. Sorry.

For whom much is given, much is expected.

Thank you. But don't you think that. Do you think that you should be given to those who already have and can change something, or you should give more to the people who need it the most? Right. So we're talking about the poor countries. Do you think it's going to make more change globally if we focus on the more developed countries, giving them so they can develop even further? Or we're giving more to the underdeveloped countries so they can grow and be maybe on the lower level, but still progress. Thank you.

So, thank you so much for the question. I think that there are people around the world with big ideas and that capital can help them realize it. And so I think it's a really important question that we ask ourselves. What are we funding? Are we funding those who are in our community because we already know them and we trust them to develop something, or are we funding those big ideas and taking some risks? You know, with President Obama, he started different programs around the world with Young African Leaders Initiative, Young Asian Leaders Initiative, Young Latin American Leaders Initiative, and we worked to harness some of that energy in all sorts of developing countries. And I think it would be a shame if we don't give people the power to solve a lot of the problems that they realize every day. It's the idea of X Prize. Right. If you solve a problem for a billion people, you undoubtedly will benefit from that. But also you've solved a problem for a billion people. I think that we need education and some of the fundamentals in some places, really around the world, including right here in the US I think some of our technology education needs to be improved. But when folks have good ideas, giving them those resources and those steps and saying to them, this is what I need you to do to help give me the confidence that I can fund this idea. And this is how I want to work with you to, to bring about that idea. That mentorship is invaluable. And I think that that is something that we all have to look outside of our comfort zone sometimes for those good ideas. Mentor them, fund them, believe in them, and realize them. Any other questions with my little mic box here? We didn't have any questions for women. President Obama used to say, boy, girl, boy, girl. Ah, I've got someone with a question. I don't know that I'm going to be able to get this box all the way back there, though. I was told specifically not to kick it. See here.

Let's see.

Oh, we almost got it. We almost got it. Not terribly athletic. So we have a fundamental problem not having enough women in this space, as you well know. What is your advice for women? First of all in the space and then women who are not in the space as to how we get more women in and then why we should? Yeah, so I say often that women literally birth the future. And I think it's extraordinarily important for women and men to work together to change the world. So to the extent that it's important to be cognizant of your team and making sure that you have diverse opinions, it actually will benefit you long term because you're going to have a product that appeals to a more diverse audience. So I am of the mindset and I often say that we actually did work to consciously diversify. So even within an area where a lot of people from all sorts of different walks of lives were attracted to President Obama, it was important to consciously put that forward and make sure that your team is reflective of the diverse communities that you want to serve. And certainly as a business, it's in your business interest to serve those more diverse communities so that you have increased revenue and you can sell more product. In terms of educational programs, I think it's both, you know, yes, we have to do the stem and Steam and include women. But I also think there are a lot of women out there who can be brought into the community. For example, I spoke at a technology conference in Dublin and was invited time and time again to different conferences. And that invitation is really important to people from around the world. And so I think that it's. It's multifaceted. When you are in the privileged position of setting up a company, make sure you are looking for the best talent from every different walk of life. And you can often find people from every different background, every different gender, and work with them. And then the other side is when we, as female leaders are speaking to women who are at the beginning of their careers or at a point where they're looking at new changes, we can tell them, look at some of these new technologies that could really change the world. Get involved early. But I appreciate the question. Does that answer it? Yes, absolutely. Thank you. One more. Oh, can you hand it off? I'm sorry. Thank you. That was an awesome throw.

Good morning. I was just actually wondering, kind of what's your stake in the game? I know you said you were in Germany, so what brought you to blockchain technology? Are you hodling? You know.

So I actually started paying attention to fintech, health tech and govtech when I left the White House for the reason that I think a lot of those areas are areas that you can have terrific impact with technology. And so I had already started to get interested in the financial technology community. I will be completely honest that because of some of the issues with Bitcoin and some of the trading that's done on, you know, maybe not necessarily the best of cases, there's a lot of skepticism from those of us who have been in government. A healthy, I think, skepticism, probably. And so I joined these communities to learn more, to do exactly what we were just talking about. About to learn more, to realize, you know, those who have big dreams and could have big impact in the fintech, govtech and health tech spheres, because I think that could really change our dynamics. Anyone else? I am so. Oh, I think I do have another question over here. I'll take the box back and throw it. Thank you so much. Did I answer?

I think you did.

I tried to. All right, here we go. Okay, let's see how I do here. I'm going to try. Awesome.

Solid, thorough. So my question is, how do you see the blockchain affecting the developing world, like in Africa? So how do you see the barrier of entry into things like government being reduced?

Yeah. And to that extent, are you talking about in terms of developing countries that may not have as advanced governments?

Yeah, exactly. Like, how do you see smart contracts affecting government, especially in developing countries? So like pretty much the cost of running a government going down. How do you see that being achieved in the future?

Yeah. And you know, I know I've got some friends in this space who talk about this a lot and this space of saying, you know, with these kinds of smart contracts, it can rid us from some of the corruption.

Exactly.

That one may have gotten accustomed to having to deal with. And I absolutely agree that some of those technologies can help. But as one of my friends has said, more times than not, you have to really read the fine print of those contracts too, because once you sign it, you signed it. Right. So I don't think that we can wholly trust that all people in any sector, whether it's technology, are all out for. For everyone's good. Right. And so to that extent, I think there's going to have to be some consumer protections, obviously of the mindset of consumer protections. Now right now in developing countries, you don't have governments enforcing a lot of these laws, which twofold, then people could take advantage of that, which I don't want to see. And people could actually use that to help lift communities up out of a situation where they've been victim to corruption. And my hope is that those who really care about it will go in and help try to create that transparency so that people there are not taken advantage of. Does that make sense?

I think so.

Kind of. Yes.

Hi. Thanks. Thanks for everything you've done so far. It's amazing, you know, the path you've been on. My question is this. Is there anything during that entire time that you spent with Obama and the things that you've done that you. Some of the things that you wish you hadn't done that you would have done?

Yeah. You know, We weren't perfect. And anybody who tells you that they're perfect, I don't know, I guess I wouldn't believe him. I have done a little bit of this back and forth with politicians on punditry type work. And I'm asked that question a lot. I mean, I think a lot of people looked at President Obama and they thought that he was going to be able to solve a lot of problems. And we had a lot of problems on our plate. But when you're in the White House, you end up drinking from the fire hose and it's a lot of reactionary. Instead of, instead of being able to set the agenda that you want. I think businesses are actually in the position of being able to set the agenda that they want more often. And so I think it actually is incumbent on all of us to bring about the change. So one of the things that I look back on is I realize that a lot of times people. People were like, okay, President Obama's got this right. He's going to change the world, and we're just going to hang out. And I don't think that that's how change happens. I think that we needed to explain ourselves better on some of the initiatives that we were putting forth. We did not do signature health care or signature immigration reform. Health care wasn't perfect. We need a lot of improvement. But the point is that you're moving in that arc towards that more perfect union, towards justice. We're not there yet. We're a long way from there. But I think we need to be more inclusive and go back to our core, which our motto was respect, empower, include. And I think that that's going to be really important for our path forward. To his point, even with what's going on right now, some of the backlash in Washington. I have 46 seconds left. One last question, or are we. Yes, one last question. Oh, did I answer?

Thanks for being so humble. Thanks. Thank you. Let's go.

It was a good throw. Good morning. I just had you. I thought I heard you say something about candidates and running for Office and.

Using ICOs to fund them.

Could you elaborate on that? Yeah. Actually, in California, Brian Ford, who was in our Office of Innovation and Technology Policy, invited me to a number of ICOs and was involved in that. Now, this is a space where it's going to be heavily regulated in the US of course, because campaign finance is really important. It's a debate that we go into all the time. But there are. Unfortunately, he lost his primary, but he was starting down that path. And I think that you're seeing a lot of people who are interested. And I know we'll speak on a panel later today. I think it's at 11 about building democracy with Blockchain Technologies. And I know that on our call beforehand, it's come up that there are a number of people who are running for office with the perspective from blockchain, and I think that's actually going to be crucial for blockchain's full application in government. I think that's it. Thank you guys so much.

Thank you, Johanna.

Thank you. Oh, I walked this way, don't I?

Everyone give her a huge round of applause.

Yes, likely. I'LL come out. I'll come out after. Thank you so much.

Now, before we announce the next panel, we want to let you all know that the battle stage is going to be open in about five minutes. There's a lot of cool stuff going over on there today and it's a new format, so make sure you go check that out. And we've got a panel, Wall street versus Crypto. Fighting Back or Embracing new Opportunities. Your moderator is Mike Butcher. Please welcome Mike Butcher, editor at large at TechCrunch, who was also awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honors List 2016. Please, when do I sit at this one? I'll go over here. Please welcome Rich Gupta, CEO at Regulated Transactions at Titan dx, an SEC FINRA compliant exchange. Please welcome Alex Mashinsky, serial entrepreneur, venture investor, tech innovator, founder of the Celsius Network. Please welcome Anatoly Rachinko, co founder of United Traders, an investment company that raised 35 million during crowd sales in 2017. Please welcome Jason Bloomberg, Forbes contributor, best selling author, top five digital transformation influencer of 2018. Hey, Jason. Please welcome David Bleznak, decentralized exchange expert who founded the Total to make crypto investing mainstream. Now I'm going to let the panel get started. I'll see you later. Well, I don't know. You have an emcee and they do all the introductions. And then what does the moderator get to do? I don't know. Crazy. Well, now we've had some introductions. Let's start right at the end and have everyone talk about it just for a minute or so quickly, what you're working on. So everybody's more au fait with the actuality, as we like to say in London. Go ahead, David. They did the introductions and now you want us to talk about ourselves too? Absolutely. I'm David. I'm the CEO and founder of Total. We're building an abstract layer on decentralized exchanges. We have a live product that we launched in June, allows people to easily manage their crypto assets they have in their possession in their wallet and utilize decentralized exchanges to make trades and balance their portfolios. So you can check out our live product@total.com, t o t l e.com hi, I'm Jason Bloomberg. I'm president of Intellix, an industry analyst firm focused on digital transformation. I'm also a contributor to Forbes. I've been writing about blockchain and cryptocurrency now for about four years from a skeptical position. So I'm the Curmudgeon that wants to poke holes and all the nonsense. And I'm looking for my Forbes article for the little bit the gems that aren't nonsense in the sea of noise. So if you have one of those gems, I want to talk to you. Hello guys, My name is Anatoly, I'm from Moscow. I'm a full time trader. I started trading 12 years ago on Wall street in the proprietary trading firm and I switched to crypto in 2013. But our company is working for nine years and it's trying to rethinking about how the liquidity works on the crypto space because you know like every cycle, everything that's happening on our planet it's already been. So the evolution of how the exchanges and how the trading on crypto space is working, it should go on the laws of traditional markets. Good morning Rich Gupta, I'm CEO for Titan DX. Prior to Titan DX spent 20 plus years in different Wall street firms. So we're going to have a time to talk about those as well as Titan DX is a centralized trading exchange. We are focused today mostly on OTC side and trying to add value in the crypto market as a whole and on the blockchain. Alex Mashinsky, I'm the founder of Celsius network. We finished 52 million dollar ICO about four months ago. Our app is available, it's live. You can do two things. One, earn interest on crypto which really nobody pays you. Right now we're paying five and a half percent on Bitcoin for example and you can get a dollar loan against your holdings so you don't have to pay taxes, you can defer them and so on. Before this I did seven startups as a founder, raised over a billion dollars, had 3 billion in exits and I'm trying to bring use Celsius to bring the next hundred million people into crypto because I think that's our biggest problem. He'll be signing autographs later. Okay, just form an orderly queue for Fahrenheit. What guys, what, what are we doing right now? Everyone's very familiar of course in this room and of course many, many people are really highly expert in crypto trading. But Wall street is, and we're all familiar with how Wall street operates. When are the two worlds going to merge? Who would like to have a go? Go you need? Yeah. So I think that you're already seeing the worlds kind of merge in a sense that maybe not from a technical level or from an implementation of blockchains directly into Wall street and trading. But you are seeing a brain drain. You're seeing a lot of the top Wall street firms lose human capital to crypto companies. I think that that's a pretty explicit merging or clashing of the two groups, two phases here of the development of our financial institution. So I think as people realize the benefits, especially younger participants who realize the value of the human capital of their knowledge and as they see the value of the technology, it'll be. I think it's a long term battle. I think it's over the next 50 years we see this slowly. That's quite long term. Yeah, yeah, 50 years. Yeah, I think it's a 50 year battle. Rich, you're an experienced in Wall Street. What do you think from your perspective? I think is merging is happening as we speak right before us. Blockchain is being. Hold the mic closer. Blockchain is being added on to predominantly all the back office and front office functions you can read all about. Deloitte and Touch has done papers, PwC has done papers. JP Morgan is in front of it. So when the trade settles today, it automatically goes through when you buy an IBM share or equity share. We don't see after that today what we see on Bitcoin or Ethereum trading. If you want to buy a big lot, big size, not small percent. Yeah, small percent, you can go to any exchange and trade and no problem it settles, comes into your exchange wallet account and you're happy. But the behind that if you want to trade sizable quantity in crypto market today is a huge lack and we are trying to build that in the back end. As far as Wall street is concerned, some massive changes are going through as we speak and people are adopting to that, especially the blockchain side of it and the trading element will come into play. What sort of massive changes? Mostly on the settlement side and mostly on the back end side. So today if you buy a stock, perfect example, it takes about three days to settle it and there's a lot of back and forth between different houses, between people who own the stock transferring. It's still a book entry, but it takes three days. Shall we do that on nanosecond? Shall we do that in one hour? Yes, with the blockchain technology that could be improved. Go ahead. I just did a keynote on Wall street. There were about 250 compliance officers from all the different major banks and asked them how many people here hold a coin. Not a single hand went up. Okay. So until these people actually interact with the technology and so on, you're not gonna have any progress. Every bank, because they're afraid of compliance, regulation, you know, the SEC knocking on their door. That's not because they're not technically competent, surely. No, of course it's not a technical problem. It's. It's a question of when. Right there. Every JP Morgan I met with, their team, they have like over a hundred people on crypto right, in all the different parts of the bank, watching it and making sure that they jump in just at the right time. But my point is all those people have not jumped in yet. If they did, bitcoin would be at 50,000, because there's just not enough bitcoins to supply all of these guys on Wall Street. So the issue is just they would love for it to die, but if they see that it's sustainable, then they would all love to jump in and be part of it, right? So right now we're getting closer to that step where enough banks are saying, okay, I'm in, like Fidelity, State street, these guys already in behind the scenes. But the big guys, JP Morgan Chase, all those guys, what's going to make them jump, though? What's going to make them jump? Custody. Solving all the custody issues and fraud prevention. I mean, right now, they don't feel like they can comfortably hold assets for, as a custodian, for themselves or for third parties. Jason. So I think there's really two separate questions here. One is whether or not Wall street firms will be leveraging blockchain technology. And in the context of permissioned, centralized blockchain, there are clear advantages to improving settlement times and other technical advantages. That is a very different question from the question of cryptocurrency, which is generally permissionless and decentralized. And I think on that side, yes, there are reasons why traders will want to trade cryptocurrency as a speculative asset class. But I think there's a real time bomb there. And the time bomb is the fact that permissionlessness allows criminals to be minors. And as organized crime becomes more prevalent within the context of cryptocurrency, essentially now cryptocurrency becomes an arm of organized crime. That's a time bomb that Wall street is afraid of. And perhaps why the compliance officers are so skittish is that increasingly people are realizing that cryptocurrency is an arm of organized crime. And of course, once that becomes broadly known, then all permissionless cryptocurrency essentially will, will have to be separated from the permissioned centralized part, which is, which is really the only part of cryptocurrency that will survive long term. You're right. But the dollar is. The number one criminal activity on the planet is with the dollar. So, I mean, sitting here telling us about crypto, you have to jump through hoops to use crypto. That's the most common fallacy right now. Let's say you're stopped for speeding for going 75 miles more dollars in Arizona. You tell the cop in the United States and you tell the cops, I should be let off for speeding because somebody else was also speeding. That is a fallacy. The fallacy is that there's. It's okay for cyber. Criminal. Cyber cryptocurrency be used for criminal use because criminals use fiat currency. That is a fallacy. Right. That does not hold water. And if you hear that, you should run the other direction. We had a woman here, Dave, David's got a point. I have a comment on that. Yeah. So there's two separate. I see that as two separate issues. If you're. I just wrote a blog post about this actually last week on our medium that the whole importance of money being touched by criminals and then. Or funds or whatever you want to call US Cryptocurrencies, US Dollars, it's the importance of fungibility. I mean, if your US Dollar is used by a criminal and you go to Starbucks to use that dollar, you're going to know it's worth a dollar whether a drug dealer touched it or someone else touched it. Similar with Bitcoin, we need to keep a core component is fungibility is trusting that Bitcoin is going to be worth a bitcoin no matter who it comes from and who we're sending it to. So you have a couple different issues there. So I don't really see criminals are criminals. I don't see comparing the US Dollar, comparing, you know, using of Bitcoin. That's just what those criminals choose to use. So the stealing is wrong. Everybody knows that. We don't need more laws to. Isn't the point here though, that to print the US Dollar requires quite a lot of effort. But to mine coin, you know, you get a lot of free electricity in Georgia and you can, you can do it. No, that could be any. The point is, is that only the US Government can mint the US Dollar and that anyone, you know, can create a cryptocurrency or create a, you know, a protectable asset that they can distribute. Sure. But I think that's what, that's kind of what the criticism is. Look, the. I ran two public companies on NASDAQ Right. And so I sat at the top of the pyramid several times. You know, I got paid millions of dollars to do this. But Ethereum created more millionaires than any public company in history. Ethereum created more millionaires than any public company in history. What does that tell you? That, that this is a system that allows the average Joe to, in the absence of regulation, let's be honest, this is with regulate Ethereum. What do you think is here? Ethereum is not regulated. It's regulated in every country. The SEC came out and said Ethereum is legal, it is not a security. By saying that they are regulating it. By saying that they're saying it's okay to use Ethereum, it's okay to use Bitcoin. So the job of the government is not to tell us what's right or wrong. The job of the people is to tell the government what's right and what's wrong. And here the government is just following our wishes. If we want to use, if our. Look, I have six kids at home. If my kids, they don't want anything to do with the dollar or the $22 trillion in debt that we're about to hand off to them. They're like, you keep that. We're going to take our own currency and take it from there. I can see the argument for that, Rich. Well, Alex has a good following here and I like the cheering. But Jason made a good point of illegal activity compliance. There's a reason why Wall street is so successful. Have decades and decades of rules and regulations have compliance. We need that. We don't have that today. I'm not so sure about SEC coming on tomorrow, about the ICOs or ITOs or whatever, the cryptocurrency market as a whole is a wild wild west. Rich, what do you think has happened though? Do you think that all these rules, we have all these rules, they kept everything in place. We had a complete collapse of the system. That you are saying is so secure, so good. All, all these rules that, that's, that's called, that's called market participants. No, it's market activity happen. All these rules, separation of wealth. What they've done is they've created a in and an out. So all that's the regulations and licenses and all this stuff, it creates a very small group of people that can participate and a very large group people who cannot participate. I beg to differ. I mean, look, I beg to differ on that. I totally, I think it's that. So in this sunlit up plans of the future where we all become Millionaires, how is going to. Let's talk about the protection, consumer protection, and also, you know, what are the checks and balances that are going to be put in to allow, you know, getting back to the subject, to allow the crypto to be at the level of Wall street or at, you know, shall we say, being as mass market as possible with all the right checks and balances. What are those best? Checks and balances? Yeah, and I think it is the ease of use. There was a comment made down here that it's not that people aren't technically savvy enough in order to use this stuff. I think that is a barrier. And that's one of the things we're working on at Total is making interfaces extremely easy to use so people can trade directly from their wallet. And I mean, look at this conference, for example. We're all still going and registering plastic tickets. I don't even know where mine is. I mean, I wish we had some sort of, like, public ledger that could administrate that whole thing very easily and quickly. We're not even using it, and we're the proponents of it. So if until the people who really understand this technology are using it every single day, then it's still. It's not going to be. They're not going to be able to show the benefits to the people who are yet to accept it at this point. It's going to take time. Everything takes time. It's not going to switch a button. Everything's happened. We need rules and regulations, we need compliance. We need people to authenticate transactions, trade on as much you may agree or disagree with the regulations and rules. We need them to protect those little guys. We try to help. I mean, perfect example is perfect. Not allowed to invest, right? Well, no, everybody is supposed to invest. I mean, look at the pension funds. Look at the 401k plan. My job to make sure that the retail investor is the last in line. Absolutely not. That's the only thing they're trying to protect. Come on. Absolutely not. I'm an accredited investor and I can tell you, like, so am I. So. No, but the point is that we are in a private club. It's not. I mean, look, Alex, we can. We can debate this. Let me finish. Sure, go ahead. Only after Facebook was worth 200 billion, the retail guy got to get in. That's the whole point. So here there's a tsunami of innovation that for the first time in history, did not start on Wall street, did not start with the VCs or the institutional guys. And the average. The people all over the world are saying here, here is 17. But I talk about. I'm for it, I'm for it. But wait, but you're going on to that topic. But I want to make a point is that compliance is needed for the first time in 700 years, right? The average Joe can participate. Be there before. I have an employee, I have an employee who did not even know that he participated in Ethereum. He was in the presale, he just found his stuff is worth few million dollars. Now he's calling me and bitching me out because, you know, yet he made too much. That's the point. That he would never have a chance to participate in Facebook. My point is there's a tsunami of innovation that has to do with the public blockchain. To your point, it's not about the private blockchain. And here the rules are different. Wall street is not part of the rules. Wall street is not invited the VCs. We did not raise a dollar. We raised 52 million. Not a dollar from any VC. If I'm trying to build a community, why would I take money from VCs? My seven companies were all VC backed. In each one of them, I ended up with less than 5% of the company. I think they're masters at squeezing you out and making putting the profits in their own pocket. This is a. You and I can definitely talk on the sideline. We can spend as much time and I can convince you that we all want the same thing. Every little guy to participate. Nobody's stopping them. What stops them to participate? I'm sure that there's going to be illegal activity. If you're a U.S. citizen and you're not accredited, can you buy into an ico, Right? I'm sure there's going to be answer. What are we talking about, guys? Okay, I'm sure. Please go ahead. It's clear that there are a number of people who believe in the libertarian ideal of cryptocurrency in this audience, right? Where if we had no government involvement whatsoever, then we'd be all free to do whatever we wanted. The problem is that without proper regulation, governmental regulation, then the libertarian ideal just becomes a front for criminal activity. And it hap. It's happened time and again. It's time and again, right? It has happened with distributed network technologies. When and on a World cup goes bust and $200 billion disappear. So that's criminal. So we have, we have the time bomb of mining being dominated by criminals. Then we also. What was the number one cover mining issue number one form of cyber attack in 2017, it was ransomware. Only reason ransomware was ever feasible for the hackers was because of cryptocurrency. 2018, ransomware is number two. What's number one? Crypto jacking. Crypto jacking is the number one way that hackers are attacking big companies. So, and of course, crypto jacking is all about money. So we have tools for the criminals that give money to the criminals. And it's inadvertent because we have this wonderful community of libertarian minded thinkers who think that if we free ourselves from regulation, it'll be for the public good. It's not. Let's, let's, let's, let's. Now I think we've covered that very well that subject. Now let's just do a little bit on the subject of the panel and then we'll throw. Guys, I'm sure you've got some questions. Yeah, so we'll have some questions shortly. What I'd like to do now is just to pull us back a little bit, let's talk about timelines. Okay, so timelines. Is it the case that crypto trading in a Wall street fashion by institutions is going to happen in the next, what are you going to call it? 2 years, 5 years, 10 years? And then what does that look like? Let's have a little bit of a talk about that. We've done the criminal stuff, we've done the mining stuff. Now let's talk about what happens when it actually does become a legitimate exercise, perhaps with the, I mean, when I say legitimate, what I mean is fully accepted, gone mainstream, the whole works. Right? So I don't think it fully really happens until the whole concept. I think it's still the way the questions were, still trying to pigeonhole our economy into this system where institutions have to run things. And so that's, that's the issue there. The question, generally, the question is when are the institutions going to accept this? Well, the point of the technology was to reduce the power that institutions have in our miniature economies, in our micro economies, in our general economy. So when it's fully embraced, the system is going to look completely different. Shared economies like Uber and Airbnb are going to be administrated by, you know, softwares that are immutable on the ledger. So there's, there's not really a way for, I don't think personally to answer it, where, okay, institutions are now going to accept it and crypto is going to be mainstream. Because if that's the Case it changes what that looks like, right? Yeah, that's a good point. So there's this philosophical argument about, you know, whether or not it's an institution. The institution becomes a software. And of course, there is some talk about services like Uber and Lyft and Airbnb effectively just becoming blockchain driven. Not the purpose of public blockchain is to fix Uber or Airbnb. I mean, look, I view it in three steps. You have, you have the. That's not. Read Satoshi's paper. He's writing about replacing the financial system. He's basically saying the existing system will never be fixed. It doesn't matter how much regulation you apply to it. These guys flip a coin, it always falls. So when does it get replaced? Crypto is the replacement. Yes, but when? But the point is you don't need the timeline. You do not need the big institutions to do that. When is it then? Every exchange I talk to, every exchange tell me that they have record signs up of new people opening new accounts, right? So while the coins are going down crazy, the tide is rising all the time, right? I mean, talk to Coinbase. Coinbase has more accounts than Fidelity. Right. Robinhood has more accounts than E Trade. So what we have is huge manipulation. That is, we think that the prices are going down, but in reality the tide is rising. And like Warren Buffett said, you know, sooner or later you're going to find out that all these guys are shorting, have been swimming naked. Aren't you worried about market manipulation? Sovereign wealth funds are about to come in into this space. To your question, that's the first wave is the retail, and that's all we need to care about. The second wave is family offices. I do see family offices doing a lot of OTC trades. They're buying 10, 20,000 BTC at a time, and they're basically trying to put 2 to 5% of their assets into this class because they believe that there's a lot of value here. And the big guys, institutional guys. Look, Jamie Dimon is gonna, is gonna rest in peace and he's still not gonna believe in Bitcoin. Okay? We don't need to convince him, you know, that's not the point. But. But when you have JP Morgan, Citibank and Bank of America block all US citizens from using their credit cards to buy crypto, and at the same time they copy Ethereum, call it somewhat something else, and run to everybody and say, hey, here's blockchain. We invented it. Right? I mean, that is not cool. You know, Institutions are already participating at different level. So if you break down the institution. Alex talked about family offices. You can talk about family offices, you can talk about pension funds, you can talk about insurance companies. Those are the big bucks. Why they have not arrived. Big bucks haven't arrived because one thing which you don't want to hear it, especially the front row, regulatory impairment. Till we have the. You ask about the question when I would say between two to three years, if not five years. You will have regulatory clarity from sec, cftc, Federal Reserve, you name it. Without that clarity, institutions are not coming. We can't blame the banks. Banks are just the participants. Banks are nothing but following the environment of regulatory 2008 either. Well, no, you don't. You. I can, I can have a dialogue on that one on one. Explain. All the money the banks have came from us. From all of us. Absolutely. We don't need the banks or the institution. We take all of our money, we put it into crypto. Those guys just go out of business. Create a regulatory environment. That will happen. Till that happens, we don't need that environment. We just need to withdraw our 401k. What Jason talked about, of illegal activity going on. Alex, I hear your passion. I like passionate people but without regulatory clatter. I have six kids. Things are not going to move. Alex, Alex, what's your answer to the, to the, the middle income guy who puts all them his money into crypto and then one day he walks into the Venetian, someone hacks his wallet and he loses everything. What's your answer? I'm not saying all, but I can tell you that every major bank this month got hacked by Russian guys. Every major bank. Do you hear about it? I mean so saying that, saying somehow that not a single crypto blockchain got cracked in the last 10 years. So talking about, yeah, if I, if I lose my card and I pin my, and I put my pin number on the card so I can remember it and somebody else goes and withdraw cash. Yeah, that's silly. Same thing with a wallet. You don't know what you're doing. Lots of average people do that kind of thing. I understand. So my point is, is that all this money, my point is that all this money that we talk about institutions and all this guy, that's not the institution's money. It's the, it's our money that we gave to the institution. So if we withdraw it, all the power for the banks, all their power comes from us making monthly deposits. We take that check and put it somewhere else. Now the Funny thing is that our kids figured it out. We just didn't, you know, our kids know it. You talked. I was in Korea. 90% of Koreans in Seoul. 90% of them hold cryptocurrencies. You know, so. So they, they figured it out. Right. Great. I think actually we could do some Q and A. Shall we? I'd like to answer that. I'd like to answer that question. I think there's a microphone that we can throw around. Where are the organizers? I'd like to answer that question about. Go ahead. Yeah, please. I think we'll do this. I've got you guys, don't worry. Not a question of cryptocurrency versus Wall street to cryptocurrency versus the banks. I think it's a question of cryptocurrency versus the governments that issue fiat currency. And I think the challenge there is one of seigniorage. So how many people here know what seigniorage is? Oh, really? Well, this is a word you should know. Seigniorage is the difference between the face value of a piece of fiat and the amount of money it takes for the government to create that fiat. So let's say $100 bill takes 25 cents to print. I know something like that. Well, the difference, $99.75 is the seigniorage. Who gets that money? Well, the U.S. government. They can take a piece of paper and people believe it's worth $100 and it cost them 25 cents to make that piece of paper, and they pocket that difference. Governments. It's huge for the government. Imagine how much money the US Currency seigniorage goes into the pocket of the US Government and every government with a tradable currency. So not the third world, but, you know, the euro and all of, you know, Japan, Japanese, yen, et cetera, have seigniorage. That gives them huge advantage. The question is, will they ever give it up willingly? Well, obviously no. Right. There's no reason. So then the question, next question is, well, is there any way the crypto community can take that from them? Right. Because bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies do not have seigniorage. Right. Nobody is pocketing any money because of the difference between the, you know, is there's the amount you get for mining it, but other than that, There is no 10 seconds transaction. Okay, right, okay. All right. It's just, I don't see senior seniority. Let's talk about that. This is a 20 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe used to be one of the top currencies in Africa 20 years ago. Okay. Them and South Africa. Two top. You want a 20 trillion dollars in your there. No, it costs nothing. It's, it's worth. This used to be a dollar for dollar audience. That's what's going to happen to the US dollar if we keep printing them. And think you guys need to. Excuse me chaps. You need to hold it quite close to your mouth. Yes sir, I know. Hello. Thanks. Nice to meet you. Who are you? My name is Austin Lewis. We beat you guys in cricket all the time. I forgot the Caribbean originally. Oh, thank you. What's your question? My question is this and I'm going to start with it. I took, I built a model and there was a million dollars put into the model. What was your question? The question was that. Can I just say what I'm going to say, please? So I took a million dollars as a, you know, as a model, wasn't real and I put it into the stock market with Wall street and everything. And that money was optioned out at the end of 20 years, there was zero left because what I made in the appreciated value, the brokers optioned out all the money profit I made in fees throughout the entire cycle. So the point is that to me crypto is giving a bit of equilibrium to the whole market that a lot of the bankers not comfortable with. Do you have a question? Yes. My question would be is this, why is the industry so afraid of something that's going to give equilibrium between the fiat system and the crypto system? Why are you so afraid of it? Can you pass the microphone? Those who are afraid of it have the power right now and are the ones receiving those fees. So there's nothing wrong with the new system. I will respond with that. One last thing. There is that nothing's free. So there still has to be. If it's a more equitable system, you can spread those fees out among a group of people. But there has to be some administration for that. Okay, question. Hi, my name, my name is Vlas Lez and I actually spent seven years at Goldman Sachs working on the asset backed securities. So the question to you is that what is so fundamental about regulations that you say that cannot be put into those smart contracts? For example, I was working on the abs. Abs Asset backed securities have many, many layers. Lawyers, contracts, prospectuses, sec, Federal Reserve, everyone between people who pay mortgages and those investors. But all of that can be put into the smart contracts. All of that could be done, could be made transparent without need of the Regulation. Anyone want to go with that? I got that. Exactly. That is happening right now. What I mentioned before, Deloitte and Touch has come up with a paper. And back on industry as a whole, Wall street is not afraid. The banks are not afraid to get involved in crypto. From the earlier question as well, they are involved only if the regulatory impairment gets cleared up. If we don't have any regulation, it's naive to think we're not going to have regulations. But to ask your question, yes, asset backed securities are being debated and talked about to put everything on a blockchain. That's exactly right. Okay, question there.

All right. In talking about regulations or even as an independent company, what's being done to mitigate or minimize or completely end any kind of environmental impact impact that's going into these blockchain mining locations? Because we're able to, we're able to mine in like places like Georgia where electricity is free.

But who's getting that money? Corrupt.

Yeah, who's getting that? Who's getting that money and how is that not a block to third world countries that don't have access to electricity?

Good question. Anyone? I think most of the participants in crypto markets are very generous and they are donating part of their income. Is there an environmental agency who can manage that and do it? I'm not proponent of this, but I'm definitely proponent of folks who are participating in this environment to donate some money for charitable giving. The environmental impact is a huge issue because right now 2% of all the carbon emission in the world has to do with the blockchain mining. Right. So we are definitely not helping with that. So I think all of us moving to proof of stake and other solutions is the future. We cannot do, you know, proof of work forever. And everybody, the smartest minds in crypto are working on that. Yeah. Question here. All right. Signorage is synonymous with gross profits. The cost of goods sold is the cost of the dollar bill. It also exists in bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies because it cost the nodes, the miners to actually generate that next reward. So it does exist in cryptocurrency. The question I have is why are you so caught up on the government as we know it today issuing the regulations instead of having for both or maybe all three, a free market, a reputation system where the people decide what people's credit and what safe really is, grants the door for the rest of the population to go towards. Well, I think the key difference is the criminal element, as I said before. So I don't want to repeat myself, but here's another thing to keep in mind, that yes, the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is the amount of money it takes to mine the Bitcoin. And if the price of bitcoin drops a certain point, then you would think it would no longer be economically feasible for anyone to mine bitcoin if they have an electricity cost. Well, so why would anybody continue to mine bitcoin if they lose money on the electricity? Well, either they're stealing the electricity, so they're criminals for that, or they have enough benefit of being able to process the transactions even though they're losing money on the transaction processing. The only organizations that can do that are the organized criminals who are leveraging cryptocurrency for nefarious ends. So as, so it actually works against the process as long as we're going to have to. I think we're running out of time for questions. Go ahead. What? Sorry, yeah, just one second, sir. Go ahead. Thanks, Mike. Andrew Rosso. I'm a, I'm a 28 year old Internet attorney, Millennial. What advice? We're talking about Wall street, we're talking about investments. What advice do you have for people our age that are getting into this and may come across some of these scams? What things do we need to be looking out for coming into this stuff? Yeah, personally, I've invested in several ICOs, especially 14, 15 months ago. And I think that there's a level of responsibility that's on the investor. I mean, doing your own due diligence, it's important. And investing how much you're willing to lose at first and figuring it out for yourself. So I don't think it's really. This isn't brain surgery. You'll be able to figure out if there's a scam very, very quickly. So, and I, and I would say my advice to, to young group, young people who are trying to get involved in this space is just to buy as much bitcoin as they can they can stomach at this point. Okay, we really are running out of time. I'm gonna let you guys just do two questions, one after the other. Okay, so you do your question, then you pass it to her, she does her question, and then we're done. Okay, go for it. How you guys doing? My name is Yada Dai. I had a quick question about the Zimbabwe bill that you picked up. Now my question is how will cryptocurrency be affected once the RV happen? Because it seems like most fiat currency are going to be Backed based by the minerals of the country. That makes sense like gold, silver. How's it all going to be backed up? Right, okay. Madam.

Yes, hello, my name is Kendra Wood and my question is about the derivation of your logical reasoning in the label of all crypto users and all crypto miners as criminal. The reason I asked this question is because all electrical impulses are going through a system that can be monitored not only electrically, but also through data packets that are going through a centralized server. HSBC laundered Mexican cartel money with dirty, filthy money cash. So how do you get explain the deaths of my people in western Kansas with your dirty money cash.

Yeah, so I'll answer the Zimbabwe thing. Well done. I support the second answer. It speaks for itself. I don't need to answer that. But most countries in Africa, their currencies are backed by the commodity that that country has. So South African is mostly diamonds and gold and so on, so on. But in the United States, the US dollar and the value of the dollar has to do with the profitability of the corporate system. The ability of the US corporations to produce more profit than anyone in history, right? Apple is the most profitable company in history. So the problem that we have is that behind every US dollar, right, there's a hundred. Every, every person here, Anyone who's a US citizen owes $165,000 to foreigners, right? And what we're saying to ourselves is, hey, we can make so much profit that we can just pay that interest anytime. And that's what happened to the Roman Empire and that's what happened to the Byzantine Empire, and that's what happened to every empire in history, right? They printed the currency and that currency devalued because they couldn't pay their bills because the debt just completely decimated them. So that's what we're facing here right now. And no one is taking responsibility. Our financial, our corporate, our political system is not here to fix the problem. Right? And all of us have to take action. And like Satoshi said, you cannot fix it by electing people or by replacing Wall Street. You have to create a whole new system. Well, on that note, ladies and gentlemen, goodbye Wall Street. Hello Crypto. There we go. Thank you very much. Please thank our panelists. Thank you to all of our panelists for welcome Wall street versus Crypto Fighting back or embracing new opportunities. Next we have AI revolution, the prediction machine for the crypto market with daniel im, cto and co founder of coins, CEO and founder of AI founded. Please welcome dan. Hi guys. My name is Daniel Lim from Quintess. I'm also actually a researcher from Janelia Neuroscience Research center as well. So let's get started. So when we look at the history of computing, the massive neutrons tends to appear every 10 to 15 years, such as silicon chips, the PC and Internet. And the significance of these trends were not always obvious. Many of us are here in this room because we speculate that blockchain and AI technology will be the new Internet of tomorrow. Furthermore, I believe that they will be the new economy of next decade. Let me talk about AI, the prediction machine part of the picture. This talk will mostly focus on how the prediction machine will help to create and facilitate a healthier cryptocurrency market. So when you hear the word AI, what kind of AI are you imagining? What pops up in your head? Here in the slide we see autonomous vehicle iRobot superintelligent system like AlphaGo or Jarvis from Ironman. So as you can see, there are many different forms of prediction machines. And here I want to focus on prediction machine that will help us understand the world and deliver insights regarding what's going on around us. So how much time do you spend gathering information every day, reading news articles, social media posts and maybe checking your coin price? And why do we spend such a significant amount of time on gathering information? One of the reasons I would say is because we want to make better judgments. In this era of technology and data, there are overwhelming amount of information every day and we need effective tools and methodology to really help us understand the world. So then, can machine learning help us make better informed decisions by fitting in BBC, New York Times, Twitter data into the machine learning and have the network help us make decisions? Let me narrow down the example to finance applications. Financial market is usually seen as black box. There's many factors that affecting the price. For example, price of cryptocurrency will depend on the value of the company itself, but it will depend on many external factors like price of bitcoins, US regulations as we heard, number of miners and maybe could be the weather or price of gold and so on. Because these relationships are so complex, highly complex, so often we see them as random processes even though they may not be. And more problematically, many of us suspect that there is some kind of corruptions and manipulations under the crypto market. Here are some of the problems that I see. As you can see, we see a lot of pump and dumps when we look at the price curves. You know I see a lot of great new blockchain startups with fresh new ideas. But these Pump and dump schemes can really ruin promising ideas. The signals affecting the price are scattered and inconsistent. The trading simulation requires lots of massive data and lots of processing power. And lack of education will lead to irrational behaviors and high volatility. Here I want to emphasize the lack of education. We have a lot of newcomers in the crypto space and a lot of them have own experience in trading and they need to be properly educated in order to reduce the volatility. Because there are overwhelming amount of information at each stage of coin trading, many traders make decisions based on scattered information from unreliable sources. They get scooped. So ultimately here ideal goal is to have machine learning algorithm to decipher black box and to bring greater efficiency to the crypto market. One more time. Okay, so let me briefly go over how deep learning works. My favorite slide. So deep learning is biologically inspired machine learning algorithm that mimics neural network in the human brain. Dnns deep neural network are composed of multiple layers of neurons as you can see in the diagram. First layer is responsible for sensory inputs, inputs from the world like speech, sound and images. And followed by intermediate layers with artificial neurons. They are called hidden units which are responsible for representing simpler representation of the data. And finally we have last layer that outputs the prediction. Initially these connections are randomly initialized and network makes several random guesses and other just strengths of the connections depending on whether they get right or wrong or how much they get right or wrong. And with the repetitions of guesses and refinement, the network eventually learns to make probabilistically correct predictions over time. So these networks take tremendous amount of data to perform human level performance. In our case, the data comes as a collection of modalities which means multiple sources of data like for example price indices from different exchange, social media, Twitter, Facebook data, news articles, New York Times, BBC and so on. And thanks to blockchain we have a blockchain transaction data. So we gather all of these data and then feed it to your network and have them model the behavior of the crypto market. So some of the analysis that we can do are how to classify segments each segment of the data into three different major states. For here, up states, down states, uncertainty states on the right figure. This is a club work done with a collaboration with Columbia University grad students. We can also have machine learning models to predict and analyze the trends and even come up with new indicators through learning rather than hand engineering them. We can have bots model looking for hedging and arbitrage opportunities. Currently we have we're working on rating coins, rating exchanges. One of the goals in creating coinchus is to detect price manipulation and fraudulent activities. Here the ultimate goal would be to have a machine learning method or method that uses machine learning to determine what coin, what exchange, what things to trust in the crypto market. From the perspective of underlying technology, blockchain and AI do not overlap. However, I believe that the two paradigms can coexist. Blockchains are decentralized, open and transparent, whereas AI and machine learning are pretty much closed and centralized. However, in fact, I believe that the two technologies can come together and bring game changing scenarios from technology and economic standpoints. Because what AI does in the industry, to any industry is make the predictions better, leading to better judgments, better actions and ultimately spurr outcomes from the economic standpoint. All of these reducing the cost, especially in prediction and producing better outcomes. And yet the data that's going into the predictive model is still increasing. Today everyone noticed the importance of the data and significance of data collection. Many big companies like Google and Microsoft are starting to close off their access to their data. So for example, the price of search engine API has been going up. They are putting limited number of queries that you can query through search engine per day. Here is where I think blockchain can really help to reduce the cost of the data by making system more decentralized and creating more open development platforms. Finally, machine learning and blockchain are cutting edge technology that will drive the economic growth. And at the end of the day, our vision is to fully realize the powerful synergy between blockchain and artificial intelligence technology for creating healthy and stable ecosystem in cryptocurrency market. Thank you everyone for listening. Here is information about coinchas. Feel free to talk to me at the booth, to me or anyone who's wearing this Coin Chess T shirts, anyone has questions, questions. Going once, going twice, questions. There's a hand up over there. Daniel. Let me see if I can throw the fur. Nice toss. Nice throw. Nice. Good morning, my name is Pablo. I'd like to know what do you think about the security when you talk about AI and crypto related? Because when I see all these big names going up after AI as Elon Musk. Elon Musk, Richard Brinson, Mark Zuckerberg, all those guys in AI for example the company. My big concern is how AI is easily like as you talk about conscience and judgment and decisions. So with the value of the crypto and how this how you are looking to that. Well, I think one of. Well, as I mentioned, we want to have AI technology to be Less centralized because as you mentioned, a lot of big companies are putting a lot of investment into machine learning technology. And if only these big companies invest in this, then they'll dominate and they'll become more powerful than now. And I think here we want to counteract this and then somehow make it more open and decentralized like here blockchain community, I think. Any other questions? Don't be shy. There's one over here. You don't want to catch it or you do? Okay, not sure. Okay. I thought the, the use case for AI and blockchain was the one. I think it's been published many times that when you have self driving cars negotiating between themselves with some bot AI bot to, you know, one car wants to get the faster lane because he's maybe his wife's in the back seat, you know, in labor or something like that. So the cars pay off each other to get faster lanes and, and so the point is there's such a high volume of these transactions, much more volume than Visa Network and all that we have today with fiat currency that you'd have to have blockchain and AI do those transactions. Cyber currency would have to handle that. You couldn't have fiat currency because we can't clear those fiat transactions at volume per night. So are you looking at that or you know, that seems to be more interesting and more profitable than worrying about quality of predictions. I mean that could be, I mean depending on how you use the technology can make it to make more money or make as I mentioned several times, you can try to have a more healthier ecosystem in the crypto market if you really care about the crypto space future because right now there's a lot of pump and dumps if you look at the pricing charts. And also you can get away with a lot of technical analysis because a lot of newcomers, a lot of new traders, even my friends, they never traded before and they enter this space but they need to be educated and this is what my focus is to help them understand. Yeah, sounds good. Any other questions? There's one right here. This will probably be the last one. A concept in AI called human in the loop. Sure. Have you looked at that as well? Yeah. So those are normally called interactive learning or active learning, but for now we haven't looked into that. Those require. There are some goods and bads in terms of. Because those require a lot of human in the loop to train the model which means that more effort for human labeling, clicking and interactions with. But these networks models require lots of data, lots of time. So it requires that part is I think more developing, but it's not currently not many research or industry applies those yet in practice. Does that make sense? Okay. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you. Let's hear a warm round of applause for Daniel Im. Next we have a panel driving the ad tech development with Blockchain. Your moderator, Stuart Rogers, director of marketing, technologist and analyst at large at VentureBeat. Please welcome Stuart. Kenaway Yusiko, founder and managing partner at Uniquely Wired. Please welcome Kenowai Kyle Ellicott, techie and innovator, chief labs officer and founder at ReadWrite Labs. Please welcome Kyle. Please welcome Kelsey Cole, Marketing magazine's top 30 under 30, co founder at Adbank, leading female in crypto Angelo Daddaro, investor, CMO and co founder at Adbank, marketing expert with over a decade of background and Christopher Obrador, serial entrepreneur, CMO at TV2 listed as Forbes 30 under 30. Thank you. Thank you. Well, good morning everybody. I see you are all still alive, which is very, very rare for Vegas, I'm sure you will agree. We are going to talk about ad tech. We're going to talk about ad tech from lots of different perspectives. But before we get started, you know, you've had a short introduction of all of our wonderful panelists here, but I'd like to just get them to give us like 30, 45 seconds of why ad tech in particular is important to them. You know, what is, what is your particular driving need for understanding ad tech and cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology right now? Kanawi.

Hi. So Kanawi Cinco from Uniquely Wired. I think ad tech's really interesting at the moment because at the end day, the landscape in the terms of the crypto space is changing. So a lot of the initially in our world, we call it now traditional, but Google, AdWords, Facebook and so forth, which is where typically we want to advertise and where we get the most reach, is now looking to potentially or has kind of limited the advertising space in those forums. So in a sense, ad tech for us in terms of the crypto space is much more limited. So we need to look at new innovations, particularly how the blockchain switches working and how we can bring transparency to that and actually get exposure for a lot of our projects. So in terms of the space, it's very hot topic because at the end day we've got new innovations, new blockchain startups that we want to be able to get out and let the rest of the world know. And how do we do that? It's a really interesting space to get to understand. So hopefully we'll get a little bit more light from the rest of our panelists.

So I'm Kyle. I'm with Read Write and Read Write labs. For me, advertising tech is quite a big deal in terms of its advancement. I've been in the advertising space probably for 15 some odd years, and transparency has been one of the biggest issues when it comes to figuring out where your ads is being served, who's viewing them, what the actual view count is, and what the level of engagement has happened. So for me, it's actually a very big topic. Running a publication, but also advising several others and then also working with a lot of companies to help get them that exposure. Being able to authenticate that and also see some authenticity as well would be pretty exciting.

I'm Kelsey. I'm the co founder and chief strategy officer of Ad bank and I'm also a proud advisor to a couple of projects I think are going to help shift the space as well, called Cool Cousin and Red Pen. I believe we're in the midst of a huge global renaissance. I like to look at the ad tech space as a very actually romantic place right now because I feel like somebody's laughing at the same time. Maybe they're laughing at me because I said ad tech is romantic. But I think we're kind of getting back to that same place as content consumers that we were back, you know, back in the day when we loved listening to soap operas on the TV and we love, sorry, soap operas on the radio and we loved watching TV and commercials were good and there was a story and everything was beautiful. And I think as consumers, we're really looking for that again. And ad tech has gotten us to a place where it's so transactional. And I think we're starting to move past that where we have the opportunity to really create great advertisement. And technology helps it reach the right people instead of, you know, harassing you and following you online.

Thank you. My name is Angelo Dodaro. I am the chief marketing officer and co founder of Ad Bank. When I think about ad tech and blockchain, to me it gets me very excited because I see advertisers and content creators as the critical stakeholders that keep the ecosystem alive that we all enjoy, and that is just content. There is a model that has worked for content for over a century now, and that's advertising. So people consume content for free. Advertising helps pay for that. The problem is that that system has become broken and inefficient with Too many middlemen that are clogging it up. And in some cases, some people are estimating that between ad fraud and cuts from middlemen taking up to 90% of the total advertising spend before it actually reaches the audience. And to me, that's just something that is totally unacceptable when you have the content creators on one hand that are bringing the audience and you have the advertisers on the other hand that are bringing the money. These are the most valuable people in that supply chain, yet they are the most underserved. And I think blockchain is the best shot that we've ever had to fix that. And that's why I'm very excited about it. Yeah, great point on that. The content side, really cool. So I'm Chris Obrider and I've done marketing for a while now and then over the last months did a lot of ICO marketing. And now it's interesting to see that, like, there needs to be more creativity in marketing, like ICO as a crypto in general. Like, we've seen a lot of changes and the whole space needs to figure out new ways to market it. And that's always what interests me about marketing. You have to be creative and just try new things. Like if you had something really good, it worked for like two months and then the market shifted and then you lost your best advertising channel. So just stay creative in that sense and. Yeah, let's get started. Alright, so look, some really interesting points here. I want to pick up on one of those immediately. We are saying that 90% of ad spend is currently wasted. And even worse than that, the ad spend that isn't being wasted is being misreported. Many of the networks are actually saying they're getting a conversion because of the way they attribute the advert through to the sale, when in fact they weren't involved in that. They literally were on the screen for a millisecond and then they've said, that's our sale. How is blockchain going to fix that? Because it's quite clear that we're not going to find the next generation of publications and media unless we can feed their coffers and help them to pay for their writers. And they do that through advertising right now. And we have ad blockers as well. We should talk about that. But how are we going to use blockchain to fix these problems? What are the most obvious solutions right now?

Well, there's a few different ad tech solutions out there. One that's out there is called the SAT token, for example. Where rather than just have a forum where it's an open process or supply chain in terms of advertising space, it's. And you have the creative and then that gets ad served. And then whoever gets an impression or gets a view of that ad they attribute to an impression. Now with blockchain technology, in essence, which is where the innovation is coming in for ad tech, it allows that transparency where you can actually see where a consumer has interacted with a particular ad. And if they've actually interactive and engaged or clicked or purchased, then that way you or you, you're clear and that's recorded on the blockchain itself to say, okay, we've served that ad, that actual end consumer not only interacted and engaged with it, but went ahead and purchased. And that can then be recorded right through the entire blockchain. And you can then see who are all the parties involved. And it's only the parties that are actually involved that get actually paid. So it's based on action and incentive, based on rewards, rather than a pseudo of potential bots that could serve impressions or things like that. It's actual human interactions, human engagement that actually serve a return in terms of awards from advertising space, which can then be recorded in the blockchain for that transparency, which is now fundamentally changing the ad tech space. But don't know if you guys have. Yeah, I think also just the fact there are so many players in advertising. So if we think of it from a brand perspective, let's use like Coca Cola, one of the biggest brands in the world. You know, they've got an entire marketing team, they've got a digital team, they're working in their planning. But then they have multiple agencies as well that are involved. Somebody that's involved in the creative they're paying a fee to, somebody who's doing media planning, someone could be doing digital separate for media planning. They're all getting a piece of the pie. But then they have to actually tap in and use ad tech software to run those ads. Whether it's Google, Facebook or even something small like an ad butler or a smaller ad exchange, everybody's getting a cut along the way. And then one thing we haven't even talked about yet is all those people who wind up on the publisher website who really shouldn't be there. Ad fraud is the number two most profitable source of organized crime in the world, second only to drugs. So we've got a lot of really shady players that are making a lot of money by faking publisher views. So of that 90% that's getting wasted along the way. What about the 10% that all of a sudden is bot traffic? We have a huge problem. So blockchain can solve every single piece. You hear about blockchain talked about in supply chain, a lot. A lot of people don't think of supply chain when they think of advertising. But it's one big massive supply chain with a lot of people who have to get paid along the way. If it can help clean up and cleanse that process and just bring some more accountability and transparency, that's immutable. They can't go back and tamper with it and change it. It's going to save a lot of people a lot of money to the tune of billions of dollars.

So ad fraud is number two to drugs. But nobody ever got high on ads. That's a problem. We have to fix that.

Maybe you, Evan Stewart.

So how do we get the money to the publishers? Because we're not going to find the next big thing unless we can get them paid. And my problem here is that we put all these controls in. Those controls actually reduce the amount of ads because we get rid of the ad fraud, which reduces the revenue to the publisher, which means we're still in a problem because publishers aren't getting paid. How do we solve that? You know, I think, excuse me, this is a common misconception and I think publisher, some publishers are almost afraid of blockchain because they see it as a threat to their revenue. And I can tell you, I've managed several multimillion dollar campaigns, you know, using tools like Facebook, Google, AdWords. There is not an advertiser on the planet that will tell you to reduce or stop spending money if they're generating a profit. And so what publishers need to understand is that a world where advertisers actually make more for their ad spend is a world where they start spending more money on advertising. So it doesn't actually reduce the amount of profit for the publisher, it will increase it. Now, is it going to increase it overnight? Not necessarily. But by fixing these problems in the supply chain, it aligns the incentives with the key stakeholders. And that's really at the root of the problem. You have greedy middlemen that are taking too much of the money, that are letting ad fraud run rampant. And they have untransparent ecosystems that don't allow anybody to stop it. So, you know, it's this, the example I always use with ad fraud. How good of a job is a teenager going to do cleaning their room if they know nobody's going to sit and that's what's happening right now with Google, Facebook, whatever. Insert the blank here. And it all starts with creating transparency so that we can see what's going on inside the house. The houses need to be glass houses, and that's what needs to happen. Which also doesn't necessarily limit supply. I didn't mean to cut you off. I saw you talking. Sorry. But it also doesn't necessarily mean a limitation of supply. It actually could increase supply because now it introduces a level of transparency of what people are or not engaging with what people like what demographics like what. Which now can create new levels of content or new levels of advertising that we may never have thought of. I mean, right now we've seen really schemy, shady advertisements that say, vote here. You know, one question with four, four little bubbles and you click it and it takes you to some random website. What if you can actually vote within that box and then when you vote it says you give, you receive an award. Well, now that award is sent to you automatically. That's a new level of content or a new level of advertising that today is either very shady or just not done appropriately. So it could actually increase supply versus decrease it.

I just wanted to add in for the publishers as well because they've, you know, fundamentally they are at the heart of this whole ecosystem. And again, going back to that renaissance of how important good content is and how we value it now more than ever. But it seems to be getting lost because we can't pay our writers. Well, the biggest struggle for a publisher, which is the person that's in charge of making money at the establishment, is the reporting system. If they can't accurately say to a marketing manager or to a cmo who has to report into the CEO, reports into a board of people, people to showcase profit. If they can't show that they've contributed to that profit, they're going to lose the spend. But just like Angela was saying, you know, if an advertiser's campaign is going well, they're going to turn the heat up. There's a great Henry Ford quote that he says, if you're trying to save money on advertising, stopping spending money on advertising is like stopping a clock to save time. It just, it doesn't happen. And any good publisher knows that. But the publishers are struggling because they're not tech companies. They're having to rely on these ad tech companies. It's too expensive for, you know, a smaller publisher, especially to have a coder in house. They have to rely on these ad tech, tech Companies, the companies are lying and so their customers are getting ripped off all along the way. And they, they can't help it. If we give them transparency, then they can solve these problems in their own ecosystem.

Yeah. And then also regarding the. I think blockchain in general will disrupt a few monopolies. Definitely. And like, basically publishing is like in the hands of a few. We know that. So I think it will make it. And especially that coupled with like AR and AI, especially AI, I think can solve a lot of problems. Because right now, like, look at all the views that you're getting and all of that. Like, you don't know what the views are. Like, like, you see the number, but in general you don't know much about it. Just think about like adding like AI to it so you know how much attention is actually spent to it. And then if you bring it on the blockchain, make it more like basically anyone can follow the process, know what happened and all of that. So I think we're still far away from that. So maybe like three years, five years. But in general. And the monopolies will try to go against this, of course, so we'll talk it down. And they also have the power to like, control kind of the information a bit. So they will try to keep away the information how actually helpful it could be. And we'll try to spread information that it's actually not so useful. And that's my opinion on that.

The other good thing, I suppose that ad tech does and the addition of blockchain is the fact that really at the end of the day, because we have now the ability as consumers to own our data, it means that through the blockchain we can document very visibly and very transparently to say, yes, that we are open to certain types of ads. Yes, we want to be rewarded. Yes, we want to be incentivized to view certain types of profiles, whether that's travel, whether that's, you know, certain financial investments, whatever it might be. But as a consumer, we would. The blockchain, we're giving a lot more control in terms of the levels of advertising that we're going to get open to. And then that way also for. In terms of the revenue, then you're only advertising for, you know, any company who's spending money on advertising. It means that your money in terms of advertising spend is actually going to consumers who are saying, yes, we're interested in this. Yes, we want to engage with you in this. And the blockchain allows us to do that by saying, you know, that that tick box is clear, it's open, it's transparent, it's recorded. And that way you also, from a consumer perspective, don't have things bombarded at you that you don't want. And also from a company perspective, your revenue is not being wasted on advertising. To consumers who haven't wanted to see any of your ads, it's much more transparent, much more focused, much more relevant. Because I genuinely believe that people think they hate advertising, but they don't hate advertising, they hate bad advertising.

I'm sorry about the monopolies, by the way. We do embrace competition, but it's just the way it is. So look, let's change gears a little bit. Obviously there's a lot of people with blockchain projects. They need to get them funded. They will do some kind of event. It doesn't matter what we're calling it this week. It's. Is it an ico, a tge, an STO or whatever? It's always a damn acronym. Can we just get away from that? But, you know, what are the practical things that people can do to build their communities to make sure that they have the relevant number of investors so that they can reach their hard caps? Because we've been strangled in this space recently. I mean, Facebook have done a bit of a flip flop recently because they're quite clearly, they've bought a company, then they're going to go down the token generation event route at some point. So they've started to switch the funnel back on because otherwise they can't advertise their own thing. Right. But everybody else is still strangling it. What can people do to still promote themselves and build that community using advertising? I'll take that one. So we did our ICO and concluded it in January, and we had our hard cap eight days early. And I've spent a lot of time looking at what other projects are doing, analyzing, you know, what was it that really kind of pushed things over the hill? And I think, you know, one of the things I see projects not do well enough, first of all, their branding is it's shit. Like, you will go on an ICO website and you can't understand a damn thing about what they're doing. Like, I'm in advertising. There are many projects that are in the advertising blockchain space. And I go there and I don't even know if they know what they're doing. And so that is a huge, huge problem. But when we're talking specifically about advertising, paid ads, it's usually a problem of not spending enough upfront and then having a proper retargeting strategy to keep that audience engaged. Because the thing that you need to remember in advertising that makes it super effective, your messaging is very different to a person that's never heard of you before than it is to somebody who's been on your website. And you have to balance that with different calls to action and different creative that is speaking to those people. And obviously the targeting and the placements in terms of where is that ad going to live, you have to go to the sites and the traffic where there's actually people taking action. So, you know, we've classified what we say is low intent traffic and high intent traffic. We have the world's first blockchain based ad network specifically for crypto. It's called Intergalactic Ads. And we look at the global campaign performance and we could see the kind of websites that people are actually taking action on. And there's sites like chart sites, you know, where you can go and see the performance and look at different charts and you know, look at the countdown sites like CoinMarketCap, CoinDex and et cetera, ICO listing sites. We have another site called ICO Creed and that is, you know, no surprise, the highest performer on the network in terms of actual conversions. And you know, when you see lower conversions, it's sites that are going a little bit more on the fringe. Or for example, I'll give you, if you go on a website that wrote an article about Bitcoin hitting 20,000, everybody was reading about that when Bitcoin hit 20,000. So if you have an advertisement on a site or on a page that's talking About Bitcoin hitting 20,000, my grandma read that article. My cab driver read that article. That doesn't mean that those people are actually action takers in the space. So, you know, without getting into the minutiae of the creative, which a lot of it is garbage from ICOs, it really is kind of neglecting that balance of quality traffic at the top of the funnel and then having a retargeting strategy.

Well, and then if you want to make millions and millions of dollars, you got to look like it. I mean, come on, start to spend, spend like what you want to be, right? You want the job, you got to dress for the promotion.

Well, and even taking a couple steps back from, from Angelo's point, I mean, first and foremost, you have to have a real product. You have to have something that's tangible, something that, yeah, we're assuming that, yeah, we'll have a good project, even though we may be assuming it, we're going to state it for the obvious. Our last panel was way more controversial than we are right now. So let's throw that out there. Gotta turn the heat up. You gotta have something that's real so that you can build a branding or advertising strategy around it. Second, forget the fact that you're in blockchain or that you're in crypto. You're building a product, you're building a company and you are building a promotional or advertising strategy just as if you were a mobile app, you are a car wash. It doesn't matter what you're doing, you're building a business. And third, your community, you need, I mean, Angelo brought this up. Great. Is that your community is not one and done. I've seen so many of these projects.

That are like, we will never leave you alone, trust me.

Yeah, they're like, oh, hey, join our community. You see no other content. You never hear any kind of engagement. It's just continuous. Join, join, join. You are building a community, A community that's going to fund you, that's going to use your product, that's going to continue to fuel and promote you give a damn about them. Learn how to separate them into different buckets. I mean, look at the basics of a funnel analysis that any company who is building an advertising strategy would put together. You need to think in that exact same way. And most of the companies, to Angelo's point, don't. It's just, oh, we're going to advertise here, we're going to advertise on these very few networks. There are so many places in this world to advertise your product. And if you are solely focusing on the cryptocurrency or the blockchain based, you know, community websites for instance, you're fucked. I mean, go out and actually look at where your community is going. If you're building something esports, Target esports, Target gaming, Target Mobile, look at where your community lives, traditional and non traditional, and build a community from there and be authentic about it and listen to what Angelo just said, said and build upon it. Wait, can we just back up a second? I can't give this part out of my head where you said we're trying to build real products. I thought we were just like pumping out ERC 20s just for the sake of it. I don't know, that's what it seems like these days because this is a huge, huge problem.

Here is my white paper. Send me $30 million.

You know, and how many projects. If you are an ICO founder, you get bombarded with emails every day. 20 a day.

At least, at least 20 a day.

Send me, you know, 20 ETH on Telegram, no name, no website, no nothing. You know, and people are still doing it because they're chase, they're not trying to build a real product. And I think that's, that's at the root cause of what's happening with why the branding sucks and why all the messaging is off is because they actually don't know what they're doing.

You can hire the best marketers in the world, but if you don't know what your product is, they're not going to be able to tell everybody else what your product is. And I think, you know, we've seen it now in terms of the crypto space. There's been a lot of opportunistic ICOs which has actually given a bad rap for the entire industry. And if at the end of the day, if we can't go back down to the basics and really fundamentally comes back down to that is what's the problem we're solving for that consumer, what's the problem we're solving for that business? And it really comes down to that. And actually looking at your business, what is the foundation? What's the bricks and mortal. It's the technology like blockchain, which is fantastic. We're all fans of blockchain, hence why we're all here. It's brilliant. But you know, it's an enabling technology at the foundations of it. You've got to have a solution that solves a problem for the consumers and you got to understand those consumers, whether it's a business to business solution or it's a business to consumer. Like, like my panelists, co panelists mentioned here, understand them, do the foundation. Basic marketing analysis of understand your consumers, what do they need? What do they want? How best do you talk to them? How best do you take them on that journey? And if you really want good marketing, get them part of your business, you know, engage with them. We talked about this historically is how do you engage with that community? Get them to be brand ambassadors, tell them your cause, tell them your vision. It's got to come from a level of passion. From that passion, then you got to have the foundations. What are the financials, what are the, you know, roadmap that you're actually going to build that business on and then from there bring everybody on board, bring your team on board and use it like a, like another business that you need to get it up and running and then from there you can build something great.

Yeah, yeah. And then in general, I would say what we can see as well, it's kind of, we're entering marketing phase two right now. It's getting a lot harder. And like fundraising has never been easy. It's been easy maybe like the last months, like in the hype phase, it's been easy. But look at like if you try to raise funding for your startup in Silicon Valley, you have to pitch like I lived there two years, you had to pitch like 500 times. And they always said no. Like 99% of the time they say no. It's the same now with the crypto investors. Like right now if I see an ad from Angelo, for example, and it's like an ico, I'm really skeptical right now because I lost money. Like I'm in, I'm. No, no, no, not just in general. I'm just in general. I mean like, I'm really skeptical because I'm in the like kind of minus, you know, like the retail investors that invested then they all lost money, so why would they invest now again? And that's the question you have to answer to them. And that's why everyone is skeptical right now. So that's, that's. And in general, I would say be careful like where you spend money. Like hold on to it. The last month's people or in general, companies spend so much on ads, spend so much in general because they were going for high raises. Now as Stuart mentioned going for hard caps, people are trying to reach their soft caps. The hard caps are really far away and it's really hard to get there. And Kyle also mentioned try to target new ad groups. That's very good I think because if you try to just go for the retail investors with like an ICO rating page or something like that, they all lost their money. So if you had to target me, don't target me right now. Like it's not good because I'm like just trying to save right now. So. But in general, just go for new groups that didn't aren't in crypto yet and then you might be able to convince them easier. You know, I'm in a object on that because I've seen a lot of different data and different campaigns. It's very hard to get people who aren't in crypto over the hump now. They're very interested. But there's so many steps that exist between them being a no coiner to joining an ico and that is A really complex process to navigate. And with the short timelines that ICOs generally exist in, you're better off going off for the targeted high intent traffic and saturating that as much as possible. Any campaign that I've ever seen that was underperforming, it was because they weren't getting enough impressions on their campaign. They just simply weren't spending enough to get in front of enough people. You know, if we're talking about an ico, these aren't people who are buying a hundred dollar pair of shoes or something. You know, you should be able to afford to spend a few bucks to acquire a contributor. And this is the problem. People aren't spending enough upfront and they're not doing it on the right sites. So if you are targeting things that are a little outside of the crypto niche, that's why you're not succeeding, is because you're going to people that aren't going to take action now. And you know, while it makes sense in theory and totally a great idea logically in any other business scenario, if you are, you know, esports or whatever to target people in that niche, the reality is, is that those people, and this is kind of the elephant in the room is people don't really want to talk about the fact that the outside world from crypto is still dipping their toes. Barely dipping their toes. They're cryptoing. Who do I give credit to that?

Dylan Sparts.

Dylan Sparts. Credit to you for cryptoing. Great, great phrase. When you're tiptoeing into crypto and these people are very hard to push over the hump. And if you're going to do that right now, if you're trying to convince people, people that are on the outside looking in, in crypto, you're screwed because they're looking in the news and all they're seeing is doom and gloom. And while that may, may or may not be the right decision, you know, was it Rothschild that said the best time to buy is when there's blood in the streets? The fact is, is that most people just don't do that even if they should. So I just wanted to add that. Sorry, that's interesting. I love it, I love it. Just go for it. And but in general right now everyone is pulling back out of altcoins. So like if you have an ico, like right now people are just trying to save their money in like Bitcoin and basically the kind of safe haven.

So you guess who's, guess who's waiting in the wings though.

Yeah, yeah, Wall Street. Yeah, yeah. Like, hopefully the ETF is approved soon, then it will all change, of course. But right now it's in general, it's very difficult to market it and you have to be very creative. Definitely. I think there's a few people who are saying our ads are better now than they were in January, of course, and the conversion in January was crazy for ads, of course. So you just needed to get in front of people and they would invest. So these times right now, it's not the same. So we want to leave a little bit of time for any questions from the audience. But I've got a hypothesis for you, and this is something that's been bugging me. In the traditional marketing technology world, we are able to have hundreds of advertising technology solutions to help us do this stuff. Right. To help us get out there. And they can all coexist and everyone's, you know, got offices and staff and, you know, cars, probably not Lambos, but they've got cars. And that's great. But theoretically, in a blockchain technology ad tech world, we can have multiple people start up a company. We've got 12 solutions right now that are trying to solve mobile advertising problems, fraud, for example. But surely once we decide which one of those transparent distributed ledgers does the job, we don't need the other 11. You know, are we really just creating these oligopolies? Is that the truth or can these solutions coexist?

I think that the good ones need to be modular so they can partner and pair with each other. Because this decentralized society that we're moving into, or the hope of it, I know it's all very ethereal right now. We still live in a very enterprise driven world. We have to work together. The biggest brands in the world use hundreds and thousands of suppliers. We have to be ready to play together and build our tech so we can start to build this beautiful castle of all kinds of different stone.

Well, in having a few major players that rule the industry is exactly what's wrong with the industry. So people also need to realize, especially people in crypto, how nuanced ad tech is. There are so many different components, it's very fragmented. There are so many different things that are very complex issues that are being solved in ad tech, blockchain and on blockchain. And so this isn't a winner takes all sort of scenario. And we want to utilize blockchain to avoid having a winner takes all scenario, because that is the root of all of our major problems right now.

And I Think one of the things is we always have to remember really at the end, I think I mentioned it to somebody I was having a discussion at the back with. At the end of the day, we are actually all human beings. We love technology. Again, we are all here because we love it. But at the end of the day we've got to remember fundamentally both the businesses we work with and our consumers are human beings. So at the end of the day it would be I suppose limiting to think that as human beings that we think that we wouldn't be able to get continually innovate. And I think it's everybody, the gift is there for everybody out there to come up with new innovations to solve new problems that we won't anticipate for today. And that's where always the opportunity is going to come. So I think it's a chance for everybody to get on board and look at problems in the market and how do we actually value add a solution.

You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen, consumers are human beings. Look, let's ask some of our wonderful audience a question. I'm going to grab this catch box thing here. If you happen to have a question, please raise your hand. I'll throw this out to you. You want to point this black thing at you so we can hear you.

Hi, I'm Melanie Moore. I'm the founder and CEO of Warm Token IO.

So we are a new marketing protocol.

And in a way tokenizing mindshare, self sovereign marketing is what we are calling it. And I think there is a. I have a problem with all the ad tech and also all the ad tech moving into blockchain that they are not trying to tackle the real cause of all the attack that had to evolve and it is no one wants to see advertisement anymore. Advertisement is a concept coming out of the 50s, 60s, 70s when TV was on the rise and saying that yeah, we would watch good advertisement. I'm doubting this.

I'm seeing that a lot of teenagers.

We have a social commerce platform used by lots of teenagers. The attention span is shrinking. And what were the ad bloggers of Millennials? They were the first who installed ad bloggers. But teenagers have kind of ad bloggers.

Already pre installed in their head.

They have it in their DNA.

They have the swipe finger. They are detecting brand messages, even brand.

Messages that are coming now across like content through content marketing. And even influencer marketing is having a.

Problem in the future because all these.

Prepaid posts they send in honest in honest content. Especially the teenagers so called Gen Z.

We Just got one minute. Question. Let's let you.

So the question is again, you know, why do we.

Because why do we focus so much on ad tech?

You know, why.

Why don't we focus?

I mean, this.

Give me a chance to answer. Because we've only got a minute. You said said a lot and I think we've actually all challenged exactly what you just said. So first off, people do want to see advertising. In most cases, they want to see advertisement. They want to see. The reason you're hearing this feedback is, and the reason it could be broken to your words is that people are tired of being bombarded with stuff they don't want or clickbait or, you know, stuff that does not relate to them. And when it comes to influencer marketing, influencer marketing is actually an enormous business. You look at Asia, the majority of advertisements and buying is driven through kols, driven through actual influencers. People, including millennials who you just mentioned are actually looking to influencers to drive their buying decisions. We as humans are tired of being served stuff that we don't want. And we want to see things that we do, which is why the conversation here is talking about blockchain and being able to give transparency, be able to understand who's engaging or what people want to engage with, versus just splattering everybody with everything.

Advertising is necessary to discover new innovation as well. It's a very necessary part of our discovery journey as consumers. That sweater you're wearing, I'm sure came from a store that you saw an advertisement once. You can't tell me that you yourself have never been affected by advertising, even in a positive way, or somebody that.

Was affected by advertising that reflects.

And even with influencer marketing, we talk about the next gen Zed, as we say in Canada, or Gen Z here in the States. If we look at, you know, Kylie, Kylie Jenner, who's a Kardashian, maybe not the most popular example, but let's look at the figures. She became a billionaire this year because she started her own cosmetics line that she sold completely direct to consumer, not a single retail partner. That woman is 20 years old. She's worth a billion dollars.

So look, we've run out of time, but I'm just going to quickly weigh in one thing. You've seen the massive growth in artificially intelligent assistants like Google and Alexa. That's because people are giving up their data in return for value. Because those solutions are personalized. They're giving you exactly the answer you want. And if we turn advertising into that experience, giving you exactly the right ad, right product, right time on the right device, then it will become super popular again. And it's just these really hugely awful adverts that we're getting bombarded with that are screwing everything up for everybody. And these bad adverts out there, they're actually getting penalized for having crappy ads. They pay more to advertise them. So there is scoring systems that exist in all major ad tech out there that if you have an ad that's resonating with your audience, you're paying less for it. So it's actually in your best interest to do everything you can as a company to have advertising that is effective rather than pushing your garbage out there because it's always more expensive. That's a perfect footnote to end on. Thank you ever so much. Please give a warm round of applause to our wonderful experts. Thank you, everyone. That was our panel on Driving the Ad Tech development with Blockchain. Give them another round of applause. Next, we're going to have a networking break until 11:10. So make sure you're back at 11:10, because then we're going to talk about the story of success and Exclusive insights from Cointelegraph.com so go ahead, have some fun, chat each other up, enjoy the company, and be back here by 11:10. Thank you. We're chasing lights lights, lights, lights as they move across the floor we live the dream dream, dream, dream we are young and we are bright Together we can last the night Then we'll fall Then we'll rise rise. The sun will rise as we start a brand new day Breathe in alive alive alive alive, alive yeah we are young and we are bright and together we can last the night and then we'll fall and then we'll rise we'll push it to the limit the shift to overdrive. Push the limits to overdrive Push the limits push the limits Push the limits to overdrive Push the limit Push the the limits to overdrive Push the limits push the limits Push the limits to over drive. Here we are young we are bright and together we can last the night and then we'll fall and then we'll rise we're to going Push it to the limits Then shift to overdrive Push the limits push the limits Push the limits to over drive. Sam. Sa. We got we got it. Yeah, we got it we got it. It's all. Yeah, we got it. We got it. Sam sa. Sa. Sa. Sam. I want to hold you tonight. I want to hold you tonight. I want to hold you tonight I want to Kiss you tonight. To what you looking for girl? I hope you. That I want to kiss you tonight Baby. Love you I want to hold you tonight. I want to hold you tonight. I want to hold you tonight I want to kiss you tonight baby. I hold you tonight I want to kiss you tonight baby stay in my bed I can hold you tonight I want to trust you. Sa. Sam. All I say is love in my.

Life.

No one do better Sweetest sound this time remember this time remember Burning like a flame this fire started Burning like a flame this fire starting in my heart. All I need is to swallow my pride I will make it love be my guide this time remember this time remember Burning like a flame this divine fire starting Burning like a flame There a fire started in my heart in my this time remember. Sa.

Burning like a flame in my heart There's a fire burning in my heart.

Sometimes I feel like I'm slowly getting close. Like an athlete. Sa. You like? I'm totally getting close. Hunting down the prize like an athlete hungry for the world I Sa. Ra. Stepping through the fire Walking to the wild. We are warriors. We will never die. Sam. Yes. We are war. Walk into the wild. We are warriors. We will never die.

Show crew to headset. Show crew to headset, please.

Sam. Sa. Sam.

Sa.

Sam. Sa. Every time we kiss it's like a.

Run away to a place where nothing.

And no one can get in our way. Every time we touch it's like a paradise. Come on.

Come a little closer babe I want you right here next to me I have a feeling that this will be a night we will never forget so come a little closer babe Cuz tonight is just you and me. I have a feeling that this will.

Be a night we will never forget. Sam.

Every time we touch I feel so alive. This is the best place that I've ever been in my my life. Every time we kiss it's easier to breath Come on.

We will be starting in five minutes. Please take your seats and get ready for the show. For. The sun will rise Rise, rise, rise as we start a brand new day Breathe in the light Alive, alive, alive yeah we are young and we are bright and together we can last the night and then we'll fall Then we'll will rise we're push it to the limit the shift to overdrive. Push the limit we push the limits to over time Push the L limits Push the limits Push the limits to over drive Push the limits Push the limits to overdrive Push the limits Push the limits Push the limits to over. Sa. And we are bright and together we can last the night and then we'll fall and then we'll rise we're pushing to the limits Then shift to overdrive Push the limits Push the limits Push the limits to overdrive.

Ladies and gentlemen, your general session will resume in five minutes. Please take your seats. General session will resume in five minutes.

It. Yeah, we got it.

We got it.

Hey, hey. We got it. We got it. It. Sam. Welcome back to block show, America's 2018. How are y' all doing out there? Come on, work with me, work with me. How about we do a quick chant again? Here we go. You say block show. Here we go. Louder. Here we go. Here we go. One more time like you mean it. Here we go. Okay. Okay, I'll take that. We'll try again after lunch. You guys are doing great. Thank you. Now, next. You know, I'm gonna. I told a story this morning about a 69 Chevy Impala in a gas tank. And if you missed it, I'm sorry, because I'm not telling it again. But there was another one while I was in Montana and we were driving, we were camping. And this was back in the days when you could go camping on a dirt road where you didn't have to get anybody's permission. Anybody out here remember that? We could just get in a car and drive, Pick a spot that you liked, set up camp. No. No. Okay. Somebody at least. Good. Thank you. Okay. So we were out there on this dirt road. We're about 20 miles from the main road, and we were driving my brother's Chevy Suburban, which we called the Orange because it was. And it was just a beat up old beast. We had gone, picked out a nice camping spot next to the river, set up camp, and decided we needed to go back into town. Well, actually, you know, we were. Pick up some alcohol so we could do some underage drinking. Not that I endorse that because I quit drinking at 21, which is a little backwards, but that's how I did it. And we were on the way back into town when the rear right tire blew. We're on a dirt road. Have you guys ever seen those jacks? They're about this tall, cast iron. It's got a handle that you stick in there that you ratchet up. Anyone ever seen that? Wow. Well, you gotta just work with your imagination then. These jacks were crazy. We got the jack out, we put it underneath the rear bumper. We thought, we're okay, we'll just jack it up. There was no handle. There was no handle. For that jack, there was just a little nub that we could use to try to pick that Suburban up enough to change that tire. So we grabbed a hammer and tried hitting with a sledgehammer. I don't know what this is going to do to the mic, but got it up maybe two clicks. So then I tried jumping on it. Just boom, jump on it, jump on it again, got it up maybe another two clicks. Well, that was enough to barely weight the jack. It wasn't enough to change the tire, so we had to use some creative problem solving. And what we did, we grabbed a shovel that was in the back of the orange and we dug out underneath that tire. It took us about probably 10 or 15 minutes of digging before there was enough room that the tire hung free and we were able to then change it. That presented us with another problem. We got the new tire on there, full size spare, but we're up on the jack. We couldn't pull forward. The jack would have punctured the rear of the vehicle. So we had to think about that again for a few minutes. Decided we're just going to throw it in four wheel drive, throw it in reverse and just whoom, right off the jack backwards. Got everything cleaned up, back on the road, drove into town. It's a little bit of creative problem solving, which is a lot of what they're talking about today when they're doing the panels is how to creatively solve the problems with blockchain. Blockchain is a solution as a technology that can solve these problems that we have in our technology and in our world today. Fascinating stuff. Anybody else out there got any stories they want to share? Anything exciting happen during your break? Okay, I want you guys to all check your pulses real quick. Can you do that for me? Okay. I still got a minute and a half to chew up here. No? Nobody. Okay. Are you guys going to the Jewel party tonight? The nightclub? Cool. That'll be good. Who else is going to go to the Jewel party tonight at 10:30? Who's going to sleep in and show up at 8am tomorrow morning? Fair mix. I guess it depends on our age, right? Anyway, so we're almost ready to bring out Igor Belkin and Victoria Vaughn on the story of success and Exclusive insights from Cointelegraph.com Igor Belkin is the editor in chief at Cointelegraph and Victoria Vaughn is the CEO at Cointelegraph, Cointelegraph Media Group and franchise program creator. Please welcome Igor and please welcome Victoria. Give him a huge round of applause. Thank you. Hi. Everyone, thank you so much for introduction. I swear to God, I will not make you yell blockchain. You can thank me for that later. So Victoria and I will tell you a couple of things about solving problems with blockchain. No, it's different. So we're going to tell you a couple of things about what Cointelegraph is, because surprisingly, even given we're like powering this wonderful event, not everyone knows who we are and what we do, et cetera. And Victoria will tell you about the most interesting part about how you can get featured on our pages if you have a decent product and some money. All right, so there are several questions where you're usually being asked like, who are you? So Cointelegraph was created as something like a little crypto blog some five years ago. And back then in 2013-14, nobody saw it coming that crypto will eventually become that big. There were visionaries, etcetera, who promised that bitcoin and crypto will be that big. But everybody thought that was just crazy. So fast forward five years later, 2018, everybody and their moms too know what bitcoin is. And here we are standing on the stage telling you about what Cointelegraph currently is. So it is your classic regular editorial based media. Our team includes journalists, bloggers, crypto enthusiasts, developers from over 20 countries. We have a team in Japan, we have a team in New York City. By the way, should drop by and see our office. I envy myself every day when I get there. The view is amazing and we have a lot of decent Irish pubs around, so you know what happens on Fridays. We have people of different ethnicities, different cultural backgrounds. And I'm really proud that we probably have the most diverse team on the market. It's not something to boast like, you know, we have like different people, we're so inclusive. But it turns out that blockchain actually unites people no matter where they are from, no matter what language they speak, and no matter what their sexual preferences are, which is kind of a big thing. I think so. So that's question number one. Who are we? We're just guys who are doing stuff. Our passion is to inform and educate. That's it. We get a lot of accusations. Who are you working for? Stop publishing that. This is driving Ethereum price down. I'm sorry, we're not into it. We just report, we just inform. And we don't have any hidden agenda. I have a very bold statement to make. I, as editor in chief at Cointelegraph, deliberately do not own Any crypto. So nobody would ever be able to accuse me of manipulating the market. I just don't care. All I care is that we keep it fair, is that we keep our reporting as good as it might get. And I'm really proud to be surrounded by very honest and passionate editors and news writers and contributors. So, yeah, we love our team. But this is. This is not why you got here. Because she's the smart one here, right? And Victoria will tell you all about how you can promote your product with Cointelegraph. There's one more thing I wanted to say before that. Bear with me two more minutes. Seriously. In Cointelegraph, we have two separate editorial teams. Like, hardly anyone knows that. But we have a big team that is working with core content, like with news, with interviews, etc. Those guys who run around with microphones around the place harassing you and asking you stupid questions, that's our core editorial team. They're amazing guys. Seriously, you should talk to them. They're a blast to talk to. And we also have another editorial team. We call that advertorial. So who these guys are? They are journalists. Professional journalists with incredible resumes. I tell you that when I saw those, I was like, can we hire them like yesterday? So what these guys do is that they take your stories, look at your companies, and turn your dull and boring press releases into something amazing and newsworthy. But this content is being created with strict accordance with our editorial policies. Yeah, we have editorial policies and we'll get them published real soon. So I promised I'll have one thing to say. I lied to you. Two things, final thing. All right, so some insights about our audience. Just like any of your companies, we depend on how market performs. So when Bitcoin was trading at 20k, we were enjoying a healthy 9,10 million unique visitors monthly. Now the market is not experiencing its best days. And in July, everybody's on a vacation. The market is going down. Da da da. We had 3.5 million unique visitors. What I'm really proud of is that we get more than 20% of visitors by direct clicks, which means this is our core audience. This is someone who reads cointelegraph every day. And the whole traffic structure, you can look this up on similar web and see what's going on, but that's it. We have a lot of followers on social media, despite all attempts from Mark Zuckerberg to suppress us. Mark, nice try, but we're not going anywhere. You better fight them for wars instead. And Twitter and Telegram, we have 400,000 followers on Twitter, over 100,000 followers on Telegram within two channels, 55,000 subscribers of Instagram, so you could enjoy freshest pictures of Maria Jones and some of our illustrations there. And 735,000 likes on Facebook, which is the biggest on the market. And here comes the round of applause from you. AZA promised that will not make you scream block show. So we're moving on to the most interesting part. Victoria, fire away.

So, Igor, thank you for the start. Hello everybody. Really nice to see you here. As Igor said, one of our passion is to inform people about the blockchain world. And actually one of our main goals is to provide businesses, cool businesses, with opportunities to tell the world about their great products and of course, reach out to their potential customers. So we work very hard and we also work with many, many different partners and we actually can help different great brands to get listed on cointelegraph and also and many other different medias, classic medias, for example, we work with VentureBeat, with Business Insider, and also of course, we work with different crypto medias as well.

Look at these numbers. I mean, I cannot count that high.

So in general, let's think what marketing tools you can use on the blockchain market to actually promote your brand. In terms of Cointelegraph in general, we use two powerful instruments which are content ads and banner ads. And for example, I have said that we work very hard and over the 12 past months, we have already created more than 400 articles on Cointelegraph for our partners, of course, and over 1,000 articles on websites of our partners. So I really hope that now we understand a lot and would like to share our experience with you so you also understand some really important details.

But before you move on with this section, I wanted to stress that when we mention sponsored articles, there's one important thing we have to tell you about the very process of how we create that kind of content. We're not just the guys who take money from pretty much anyone and publish anything. As I mentioned before, we have a dedicated advertorial team that is working closely with the clients to create the most, the best content out there. And the very important part of this process is to figure out who the client is. So if you are an ICO scammer, no, it's not going to happen. So to some extent, being featured on Cointelegraph proves to the market that your company, it's not 100% guarantee, of course, but that it went under certain scrutiny from our research teams. So not everyone can get in not everyone is welcome. But if you have a viable product, if you are not a scammer, there's nothing to be afraid of. If you want to be heard. Victoria, he's your guy or not the guy. Is that sexist? No. Yes. No. Anyways, go on please.

So now let's think about important detail when you're actually going to use content ads for example. First of all, of course you need to understand your audience. For example, if your product is built to communicate with audience which is already interested in crypto, people who know about the market and who already have crypto wallets, etc. Of course in this case you better work with crypto related media because if you go to some classic media which doesn't have any content about blockchain and crypto, I don't think you want to educate the audience about blockchain, cryptocurrency, wallets, etc. It will cost you very expensive and actually will not have any effect at all. But if you just have a cool blockchain based platform, when your users don't have to know about that, you can also go for working with usual classic media with FinTech audience with it audience. Another very important factors are average number of views of sponsored content and the ctr. For example, in case with Cointelegraph, our sponsored articles on average get around 15k views and 10% CTR. And these numbers are really really important because for example, when you make a choice with whom to work somewhere, a story seem to look cheaper and better. But if you don't know the numbers, you can't start because for example you can spend like 2k for the sponsored article somewhere, but in the end you will get like only 300 views which actually makes the cost of you crazy, right? So another thing is social media. Well, I think everybody already knows how important it is. And many medias, from our experience, they actually do not share sponsored content to their social media at all. And this social media can give you a lot of, a lot of additional effect. To illustrate, on Cointelegraph, our sponsored articles get around 500 social shares. So if you calculate that on average in Facebook account people have around 330 friends and the article has 500 shares, it means that sharing in social media can give you additional 160k views. And here there is one tricky moment about the headline. I think Igor knows it's his pain that all PR people, they want to include the name of the company in the headline. But to be honest, from our experience such news they get much less Attention.

It's actually my favorite part. When PR people and marketing people start teaching us on how we should like write stuff. This is my favorite part. I think this will be interesting for your audience. I'm like, I assume I might know better, but yeah, go ahead Victoria.

Yeah, and we actually took a look at the number and the headline of the unknown company name really reduced the number of clicks and views. But here is a tricky moment because you don't want to lose this 160k like from Facebook and Twitter views, right? So here a strategy can be that you can publish an article on the website without the company headline so you get better views and better clicks. But you can talk with the media and ask when they publish this post in social media, they just add the company name. So like in this case you will be able to get all these views people who will see the name of your company in their social media. One more important thing is search engine optimization. You can be surprised but some medias, they even don't index their sponsored content. So it actually means that like Google and another search engines will even do not know about your article and it reduces the efficiency of your campaign to zero. So now let's think about the article itself. As Igor said, the product really matters. Good product and good sponsored articles work together in synergy. Because when you have a valuable product that really solves some actual problem, it is much easier to create cool content in which people will be interested in. For example, from our cases we have many partners who got up to 50k views on the article, which is 3 times more than average indicators. When they had a good presented and interesting product, people were interested and really wanted to read about it and were very, very engaged. Also of course partnering with major businesses and influencers also will drive interest to your product. And here also I want to mention search engine optimization because I think you know that articles get a lot of traffic from Google News and other news aggregators and they work with search queries. So here please don't forget to use cool trendy keywords because this will help you to reach out to more, more wider audience like to million of people.

But don't go crazy with adding how to buy Bitcoin in every paragraph please. That doesn't work like that.

So another instrument we have is banner ads and this is very classic. I don't want to go deep here, but here you can see some examples of our best performing banners. So you see that in general clear messaging, when you talk about the problem you solve, it works good and also Some creative Designs of games, etc.

Also works. Cool.

So what are important factors to build the successful marketing campaign? In general, you need to combine different goals and be sure that you achieve them. In general, you need to build trust, you need to increase your brand awareness and also beat the lead generation. So from what I said, articles and banners, they will help you with trust and brand awareness and for lead generation they also work. And you can also use media, buying in social media, in different banner networks and different performance networks. So yeah, as we said, we want to work with really cool, interesting businesses, not scam. So if you want to like get more details, let meet at our booth. We will be happy to meet you and thank you very much for the attention.

Thank you. Have a huge round of applause for Igor and Victoria. Thank you, Igor. Thank you, Victoria. Next we have a panel, building Democracy on Blockbuster. Your moderator, Rachel Wolfson, blockchain journalist for Forbes and the Merkle, the Entrepreneur magazine's influential women in blockchain. Please welcome Rachel. Panelist Demetrius Facilitis, lead business and product development at Exis, text expert evaluator at EU Commission. Please welcome Dimitris Johanna Mosca, CEO of Global Situation Room Incorporated. Exis head of White House press advance for President Barack Obama. Please welcome Johanna Mark Blick, head of government and blockchain technology at Digenix. Please welcome Mark Herb Stevens, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, co founder and treasurer at Democracy Earth Foundation. Please welcome Herb and Dmitry Matzkovich, CEO and co founder of Dbrain, listed in the 100 People to Watch in the Chatbot space by Venturebeat. Thank you. Enjoy the panel. Thank you.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining our panel and I hope you all are all enjoying Vegas. This is a great conference so far and there's lots of great people here to meet. So glad to see you all here. Today we're going to be talking about building democracy on the blockchain. So it should be a very interesting discussion. And like they said, I'm Rachel Wolfson, I'm with Forbes and these are our great panelists and I'll let them just briefly introduce themselves before we get started.

Okay. Hi everybody. Great to be here. I'm Dimitris Vasiliadis. I work for Exos, where I lead product and business development using artificial intelligence and blockchain to reinvent the debt collection and loan origination industries. On a second note, CEO, co founder of Giving Streets, a startup that aims at bridging the cashless divide. Started off in London and expanding to the rest of the world. And thirdly, I'm an expert Advisor to the European Commission, evaluating ideas and new technological trends.

Thank you. I'm Johanna Maska, CEO of Global Situation Room. We are a firm consulting firm that works on global good, global trade and global risk. Before that I worked with President Obama. I was his director, Press advance, and traveled with him for eight years to 42 countries.

Hello, my name is Mark Blick. I work for a company called Diginex which is based in Hong Kong with offices in Tokyo, Berlin and Switzerland. We focus on the full ecosystem of blockchain and crypto. But I specifically work with governments and NGOs on public sector work in partnership with companies like Agora to help drive free and fair elections globally. And NGOs like Mekong Club to help combat slavery with migrant workers across across Asia. Hi, my name is Herb Stevens. I'm one of the co founders and directors of the Democracy Earth Foundation. We're a Y Combinator backed nonprofit in California, essentially building software using blockchains to improve democracy globally. Hey, my name is Dmitry. For the past 10 years I was engaged in artificial intelligence for enterprises. I sold several companies there. And in the current company I tried to leverage blockchain to democratize artificial intelligence and to bring as many participants globally as possible.

Okay, great. So let's start off the conversation by telling the audience what democracy on the blockchain means to you.

Yeah, thank you. So I would like to backtrack a little bit and try to define democracy. I'm happy of my Greek heritage in that sense. In the sense that democracy comes from two Greek words, demos, that is public and kratia crassi, that is power, essentially meaning power to the people. So for me, democracy over blockchain is pretty much about reinventing the model of democracy that we have come to know at this point in age where we can actually get everybody to be fully engaged in the proceedings and be fully accountable in the process. So it's not just the electing and the voting part which is very, very fundamental in the entire thing, but it's actually maintaining the engagement and the participation in the nature of the democracy following the election results. And blockchain in that sense can and shall be able to provide and facilitate aspects such as accountability for citizens, communication, the ability to have options and express them freely, but also to be able to decide on things that matter to them. On a final note, for me, democracy, especially for over blockchain, is an opportunity to bring equality and inclusivity for all participants, citizens and groups in that sense.

Following up on a lot of that, I agree. Backing up my Experience is pretty intimate with elections. I worked with President Obama on his first campaign, and I was in the White House on his second campaign. I also worked in state elections. I worked on a gubernatorial in Iowa and with a governor in Kansas. So I come to it with both the experience of elections and then being in that position where then you've been elected and you want to engage your audience and you want to be able to keep going back to your constituency and reading how you're doing. And so I have a perspective that may be unique because I've been in that position of trying to engage audiences when the audiences are like, no, no, you got this. So I'm sure we'll talk about that.

So I think elections look to serve two purposes. The first is to accurately and transparently declare the winner and choose who that person is. And the second and equally critical purpose is to convince the loser. And to the extent that an electoral process is not transparent and independently verifiable, it fails in that purpose. I think that many of the conversations we've had across the world with policymakers, regulators and governments, for the most part, there's a big desire to infuse the sense of trust back into the electoral process, which may have declined in, let's say, the last decade, certainly. So you have in Africa, 38% of voters believe that often or always that their votes are tampered with or excluded. And that sense of loss of trust in the electoral process leads to a declination of voter participation. In the UK in the last three elections, general elections, the voter turnout has been at the lowest point since the 1930s. And then coupled with voter participation, you have a sense of voter apathy. Here in the US in 2016, only 56% of the population that was eligible to vote actually cast its ballot. And apathy in the electoral process doesn't necessarily mean apathy in the political process. So people may not want to go and take part in an election, but that will be manifested in protest groups, which may or may not be healthy for the overall running of the country. So when we look at blockchain and its ability to securely, transparently, auditably, permanently and fairly store votes, and I think we'll come to a lot more of this later, the overall mission is to enfranchise as many people as is humanly possible by allowing them to take advantage of a technology that, for the first time, I think, allows them to do that. Thanks, Mark. I love the very international panel here. Democracy Earth. We were actually founded in Argentina before we came to the United States. We still work around the world a lot more than we do here in the United States. But to answer the question, what does democracy mean to, you know, relative to blockchains? First of all, I think it's very important to understand that the United States is not a democracy. And that might surprise a lot of people. Democracy not once is mentioned in the US Constitution. And what we actually are is a republic. And at the state level we're more of a democracy. But even then, what we've seen historically is a transition from the rule of one, a king, to a rule right now where we still exist, exist at the rule of the 1%. So blockchains to me is actually moving to real democracy, which is ruling by the 100%. And I brought a book today and it just came out. This is by Jason Hanania. Jason ran for US Senate in California in 2016. The book is called Architecture of a Techno Democracy. And essentially what he lays out is how do we get from where we are now to a true democracy? And the bottom line there is accountability. And as an ex auditor with GE for a number of years, for me blockchains are about that. It's the accountability, the four things that you need for a democracy. He describes Jason as coda, communications, Options, decisions and accountability. And I would argue that we don't have those, any of those today without blockchains. So therefore we don't have a democracy. Thanks. Yeah, in our company we think a lot about that issue. And I want to bring like, even like more higher level understanding what is democracy, because we see that democracy is then not any one stakeholder have too much power. So it's not just about like country level, it can happen on like industry level, company level, your neighborhood level. So whenever some entity or some stakeholder gonna accumulate too much power, that power going to be abused. And it happens like everywhere. So democracy is kind of constraints which ensure that minority, those who have less resources, less assets, less control, have the same right, the same inclusion. And there is so many dimensions. And we in particular in our company, we are focused on how to bring that inclusion to global workforce. Because for example, in different regions like Nigeria, etc. People can have less access to the global financial market or global work opportunities. Not just because some like totalitarian regime or any other adversaries, they can have less access just because of lack of technology or lack of communication channels or for example, they unable to receive money for the work. So I think they're like on a high level, democracy is the ability to give that to Distribute that power from majority to minority so everybody have like the same access to resources, to rights, and to like every opportunity possible. Thanks.

Yeah. So I think trust and transparency are two key factors here. How does blockchain enable this and bring that to democracy?

Well, that's the, apparently the reason for being of blockchain. But the question here is how is the implementation of a democracy, of a blockchain is going to be 100% original and saying that, meaning that we've seen other areas of industry prediction predominantly where we set about opening up assets, democratizing access to technology and so on and so forth. And still that resides within the few who control infrastructure, who control services, who control access to finance, and so on and so forth. So the main thing here is how can we get blockchain to truly become a tool for the people and run by the people and reaching to something that might sound a bit radical because we know the technology is not that ready yet, not that mature yet, but going to an environment where things are 100% peer to peer. And I think it was Adam Smith250 years ago in the wealth of the nations who said that there is a magical way in which society appears to prosper when individual interests are being taken care of, where individuals focus on their own interests rather than the interests of the majority of the groups. And this is funnily enough, because we reach a point now talking about blockchains, talking about democracy, democracy, building trust over blockchain, where we've seen in many different parts of the world, Greece being a clear example of that, where people have actually lost the trust to the existing political systems and governments. So I think this also drives the potential for adoption and the opportunity here. The thing is, how big is the resistance to that change is going to be and who is going to be the main force of that resistance?

You raise a couple good points. You know, our. You're right in the sense of each state has their own secretary of state, they have their own method of voting. I saw it. Even, you know, caucus process is entirely different than a primary process. It. It's extraordinarily complicated in America and to the point where you're saying a lot of people have lost trust in it. I don't know that we've ever had a perfect point in our country's history where everyone has trusted that the system has fully worked for them. I mean, women only won voting rights 98 years ago, and at that point, most women's votes were still suppressed. There were poll tests that were put in place. There were all sorts of ways in which to suppress minority votes. And so you have that disenfranchisement that we talked about earlier, because people feel like they won't be heard. So I've started talking to some of my colleagues who may even still remain in government, who are implementing blockchain technologies in some of the government operations, whether at the gsa, which does all of the government services, or health and human services. And a lot of what they like about it is that transparency, the multiple records, those components are ones that could be very promising for elections. And I think what we're seeing is some of the states early adopting small, you know, kind of trials where they can see whether this will have effect such that the voters will trust. And I think, you know, in most instances, you're going to have a Secretary of State who wants to win the trust of the people and they want the people engaged. And so I, I think if it can be built in a way where trust is not lost, you're going to see it more quickly implemented than if something goes wrong at the early stages of one of the trials, whether overseas or in the US and that trust is called into question.

So I think trust is obviously critical in electoral process, and it's where our existing methodologies of conducting voting are failing us. If we have the answer, which is we all think it's blockchain, and we look at the question of why are people losing trust in the electoral process? And you can break that down into the myriad of problems that you have with, let's say, paper ballots, which can be double counted, they can be excluded. I think in the 2005 Egyptian election, international observers witnessed ballot boxes just being taken and discarded on the way to the central polling station. Polling stations themselves. You have the question about the cost of them, the running of them. Are they strategically placed to make sure that this group of people are more likely to vote than that group of people at the security at the polling stations? You also have question of security. You have coercion, you have violence, you have bribery, and you have threats. In Mali, 78% of voters say that they've been often or always offered a bribe at a polling station. In the 2017 Kenyan elections, the government had to spend $53 million on providing security just for the polling stations and also making sure that hospitals and doctors were ready because in previous votes it had been very violent. You can look at electronic voting machines. 31 countries have tried this. Most of Europe have stopped. Only 20 countries are still using them in the US here, they're having to spend $1 billion just to overhaul the existing fleet. These are very hackable. I think just last month a couple of 11 year olds managed to hack into a voting machine in 15 minutes. They're very expensive to run. You're essentially outsourcing operation of your voting procedure to a third party vendor who has proprietary code that, that you don't necessarily have access to the operation of the voting machines on station. You're also probably outsourcing to people who have the technical know how to do so because your average volunteer doesn't have that ability. I heard recently also that on some voting machines the glue is slipping. So when you think you're pressing 1 on the screen, you're actually pressing 4. So in the context of all of this, whether it's votes, paper votes, hanging chats, ballot boxes going missing, people feeling as if they're being excluded, violence at polling stations at the very best, coercion at polling stations. And coercion can be very simple. It can either be, I'm a minority group and there was a majority group that wants me to vote their way, or it can be family and parental pressure. You are a member of this household, you must vote for these people. And then on top of that, electric voting machines, which I don't think have been particularly successful. So that's the question in why is there a loss in trust in the electoral system? And there we then have the answer of blockchain. And we believe that blockchain is able to, and it's not the panacea and it won't solve everything, but it will start to systematically work it through many of those problems that we're currently facing in electoral procedures, which in many cases haven't changed for 100 years. Seems like we're going right down the line here. So I'll chime in trust, obviously trust is so important to democracy, but I would argue, and we're all here because of blockchains, right? The reason blockchains were invented is so you didn't need to trust a third party to come in and say, trust me, I've got this, or trust me, I've got your, your assets. And it goes for governments as well. We're not going to build, build trust when it's in a centralized authority and it's saying trust me. I mean, we saw an announcement recently, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, right, ICE Intercontinental Exchange, we all saw that. I mean, it's laughable that here's the fox showing up at the hen house saying trust me, I've got this. We bring more trust to the markets than anybody. And it's the real reason bitcoin was created is so you don't have to trust these exchanges. I would argue in the next 10 years exchanges go away. Right. Including the crypto exchanges today, including the New York Stock Exchange and including Nasdaq and all these other exchanges. So we see ICE coming and it's good for bitcoin because they're going to create these products that support the price and the trading of bitcoin. But as far as coming to the market saying we're bringing trust to crypto or to democracy. Total thanks. But I'm gonna try to bring not political perspective here because I'm really like not very like best person to speak about that. In our particular use case what we've seen that blockchain definitely like the best use case for blockchain is like trust provider. And what we've seen that whenever you have trust issue usually have a lot of connected costs to every trust issues. So the motivation to eliminate those trust issues like very straightforward. So for example, you need some job like some work being done and you try to find any particular like freelancer whatsoever. You don't believe him, you try to research, make background check, develop some SLA and you're going to spend a lot of bucks for lawyers, etc. Etc. And the more you distrust to each other, the more those costs going to be accumulated. So it's funny but democracy here is like equal less cost because whenever you're going to have authority which is going to control that, like transactions that's going to control that work being done correctly, etc. You're going to have more and more and more costs spending to that structure and vice versa. Like in our particular use case, whenever we try to eliminate every intermediary, every authority which need to control who buy what at what price and how what was done, you're going to eliminate a lot of costs. So in that sense trying to establish democracy, it's like the trend to have less costs and more efficiently. Like it's like the path to more efficient money distribution.

Yeah.

Let's focus a bit on blockchain based voting systems.

Now I know there are a few countries already testing this like Russia and Crypto Valley and even West Virginia. Now it was just announced that they're testing a blockchain based voting system. So where do you guys think that this can actually have the most impact in terms of regions and why?

I'm happy to go first on that. I think this is multi layered and it really depends on the question you're looking to solve for. I tend to think blockchain is a solution to all problems. But if it's a cost perspective, you look at somewhere like the UK, which spent 15% of its $140 billion general election budget on just training volunteers for the polling stations. If it's a security question like we've seen in places in Africa, that has tremendous impact. If it's a logistical question. So last year's India election took one month, nine rounds of security forces going around the country to location to location because they were the only team who were really able to do it. In the 2014 Ukrainian election, it took 15 days from the end of polling to the announcement because of the tabulation process was just that long. If it's a question around technological security, and there have been questions in this country around that, then that's a different question too. So I think the impact is multi layered and it's in many cases places. I think the transparency that it brings to all governments is impactful for all. I think in those places where, I mean, there are many democracies in the world, I think there are 60 which can be categorized as authoritarian democracies. So they realize that there's from an international perspective, an importance of having an election, but they have a vested interest in making sure they get the result that they want. So I think in those situations where you can build trustless mechanism for allowing all members of society to have a vote that won't be coerced, that is economically affordable. To go back to your coda, I heard that the five criteria which should be minimally met for an election, transparency. So everybody should understand right from the beginning to the end what the process is and having come up with a result in has to be independently verifiable and auditable. Needs to be privacy. So each voter's choice has to remain private both during the election and after the election. It needs to have integrity. Only those people eligible to vote should be allowed to do so. And having voted, they shouldn't be open for alteration or exclusion. It should be affordable for both the government, the political parties and the and the participants in the election. And it should be accessible to all. And anybody who's eligible to vote should be given reasonable access to polling stations or on their mobile phones or at home on their computers, whether they're from minority groups, live in rural mountainous regions or disabled. So I think where it can be most impactful is where it impacts most of those points I'll speak on that a little bit. We've worked a lot in Latin America, in Colombia, we're working in Venezuela. I was recently at the Oslo Freedom Forum put on by the Human Rights Foundation. If you haven't been to the Oslo Freedom Forum, I highly recommend is sort of a white knuckle tour through the atrocities going on around the world firsthand. A lot of the stuff they talk about are half of the world that we don't live in democracies. I mean, we're lucky here in the United States. But when we're talking about how blockchains and how democracy can be improved, we have to think about those places where government has basically broken down or they're fighting so much they'd rather kill each other. In Colombia, there were three parties to the election. The new government, the old government, and farc. They all wanted to kill each other. So they needed a third party, independent person that's going to bring that trust and bring that technology to the platform. But let's keep in mind that a lot of the times we're not working with governments to provide the election infrastructure. We're actually working with the people or the groups that are functioning in place of otherwise functioning governments. So that's why. Another reason why blockchains are so important, because you don't have those institutions that are there to provide the defense, democracy and that infrastructure. Right. So it has to be mobile based, it has to be blockchain based, and it has to be something otherwise provided not by the government. Right.

And what about in terms of security vulnerabilities? How does that tie into all of this?

I can talk to that a little bit more. Just quickly, I think. I think as we've seen and as we're going to continue to see that corruption exists at centralized databases, we're moving from a world where we have corruptible databases. And if you're a technologist and you understand databases, there are four basic functions, actions to a database. The acronym is CRUD for another acronym, Create, read, update, and delete. In the blockchain world, you get rid of the update and delete, and you only have create and read. So we're literally moving from a corruptible world to an incorruptible world. So relative to, and I think we've seen it with none of the blockchains being hacked, while most elections and a lot of the centralized databases are being hacked. So in that sense, and to build on top of what Herb just said, that question reminds me of something that a professor of mine told the class, like 20 years ago when we're talking about security of networks and communications. So he said if it's built by humans, it can be broken down by humans. So eventually you can only build that much trust and security into the system. And that's a never ending struggle. Eventually the solution to that and to make it as difficult for it to become yet another corruptible, let's say solution is to decentralize as much as possible. The greater the degree of decentralization, the greater the secure, let's say, result and operation of the platform. Eventually, yeah.

And I would say in terms of security, there's again, it's multifaceted. So even what you were talking about is you can be coerced in person by someone you know. So if you're a blockchain company and you're going in to do an election in a country that you may not be able to trust, and now you've got people being told at home, because they're voting at home to vote for someone, and then the entire thing is called into question because of problems that don't even have to do with your technology, that's going to actually be a risk for your company and for the continuation of blockchain technologies being built into democratic systems. And so I think that when we think about the technology, we need to think farther than the technology in terms of the improvements to the system that we need to make to ensure that privacy and to ensure every person is able to vote and vote once who is eligible. And to that extent, you know, it's funny, in America, I have a six year old and we were taking him to the polls one time and he was like, mommy, why do you vote on school days? And I was like, that's a really good question, Hugh. I mean, it does make it really hard, hard for a lot of people to vote. And so, you know, I think what's necessary is a group of people coming together and looking at the best solutions and applying them in a really strategic fashion so that you can build that trust and have a free and fair election for the people. Right? Okay, great. So I think we have a few minutes actually for a bit of a Q and A.

If anybody has any questions out there, we'll toss you this box.

Go for it. Great throw.

That was a good one. So you were talking a little bit about the Virginia incident. They're doing some testing and voting. So there has actually got a lot of negative PR in terms of some security issues with the company involved with it. Do you think that's Is a technology ready right now for, you know, blockchain enabled voting, or is this just a case of political climate and people getting their opinions of blockchain mixed up in this whole discussion?

Well, I'll just say two things. You know, I think there's a of lot, lot of questions about blockchain we were talking earlier about, especially when cryptocurrency is thrown into the equation or they know it has anything to do with cryptocurrency. And there's a lot of like traditional politicians who will be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? And so that has to do with, you know, there's going to be a backlash. Anything new, there's going to be backlash. But I'm going to be excited and eager to follow how that election actually goes because we were talking about it backstage and if it goes well, actually West Virginia could be a really great test bubble because if it works, it's not in a state that would necessarily be seen as the most innovative. So it would be good.

I can comment on that a little bit. As an observer, I've read probably everything that you have. As far as I understand it was a very limited trial looking at overseas military folks who were looking to vote. It was very controlled. I think there's one guy in particular who appears in all the articles questioning the security aspect. I think that's based on the potential security threat that this would have rather than on any knowledge that anything went wrong in this instance. I think again, if you look at what the question is, in 2016 election, there were 19,000 overseas votes that weren't counted. Over half of them were because it was, they were submitted too late. So if we're trying to solve that question of how do you enfranchise people who, I don't know, maybe in a submarine at the time of polling or just maybe far away from a U.S. consulate, how do you solve for that? As far as I'm aware, and this is just based on my online reading, the pilot was successful. Of course there are still questions on security around if you're using mobile devices and then who controls the technology. There's mobile devices and how secure are they? If you've got any articles you can share that show there were specific problems with this case, I'd be very happy to read them because it's very interesting and I agree on your point. It's a wonderful test case and I think they were planning to in stage process continue this rollout across more of West Virginia. I'll make one comment, and that's that we're early. I know we hear that, but what does that mean? I think technically in a lot of ways we're here as far as being able to conduct votes on blockchains and whatnot. But when you look at a lot of the democratic processes in San Francisco, for example, they're using technology that is proprietary. They had a 10 year contract, they've kicked the can down the road three or four years. And so it's just a decision making process and that's going to take a couple of years. Just a city of San Francisco. I mean, if you think about the heart of Silicon Valley and they should be one of the fastest to implement this type of stuff, even there, it's going to take a couple of years just to get through the, let's call it the democratic local process. But I think that again, we're going to see, depending on jurisdiction, faster implementations. We're not really waiting on technology too much, but we're going to see places where democracy is really needed. Probably implemented a lot faster than in the states where they're established and they have low, you know, slow processes.

Okay, I think we're out of time. So thank you everyone for joining us and thank you to our panelists and to Cointelegraph and everyone here. So thanks.

Huge round of applause for the panelists on Building Democracy on Blockchain. Thank you. Next we have Beyond Hype of dapps. Why should we not give up on it? Speaker Alex Melihoff, co founder of Changely, co founder and COO at Oxygen, the number one decentralized crypto repo platform. Please welcome Alex. Good afternoon ladies and gents, thank you for coming. Thank you for attending this amazing blog show. I'm really excited to be a part of it as well. So having said, my name is Alex Melihoff, I'm CEO and co founder of Oxygen. And to kick off a couple words about myself, about my experience, what I have done, how I get to crypto and all this stuff. So I'm sorry. So basically over 14 years, the past 14 years have been doing different entrepreneurial activities and it was since around that time I have graduated as engineering, applied mathematics. So basically it was absolutely different activities. But mostly in all the projects I have been focused on technical and architectural side of things to Cryptofilter. I have come from the fields of fintech, I have built several payment gateways interacting with payment systems. But after we have founded Changeaway, I completely stuck into crypto. I know that, you know what I'm talking about, right? And since 2017 both me and my team, we have been working on Oxygen. So it's a kind of decentralized marketplace based on Ethereum smart contracts for borrowing and lending crypto in decentralized way. So. And basically decentralized applications overall and challenges in face of their developers would be a topic I would like to cover within today's speech. But for the start, let's do a little survey. I know that public on blog show is not general and mostly all of you have certain experience in cryptocurrencies, doing trading and other cool stuff, but would you please to raise your hands if you have ever used any decentralized applications besides crypto wallets or crypto exchanges. 1, 2, 3, 4. Wow. Quite many people. Good for us. It means that quite experienced users gathered in blog show here in this room. But unfortunately the rest of service are telling that it's the opposite situation right now. And according to Vitalik, actually the amount of useful stuff happening in this area is still much lower than market cap of 200 billions. Right? Let me remind you that the most used decentralized application, which is idex at the moment, it's kind of decentralized exchange. It counts just 3,000 users daily. 3,000 users daily. In comparison to Binance with half a million or even more, it's literally nothing, right? The most ridiculous thing that the third most popular decentralized application in the world right now is cryptokitties. Yeah, so. And another, another, another example that's the most kind of significant use case for blockchain technology still remains UC20 tokens. If I would tell you about this couple years ago, I would say man, are you serious? It's so weird. Yeah, but actually this is the reality right now. But I believe that decentralized applications still remaining the most essential way to utilize their blockchain technology in these advantages, right? Obviously decentralized applications, they have a bunch of different advantages like which I put on the slides, you can see it here. From my perspective, these advantages are the main ones actually. First, decentralized applications are obviously secure. It's because of its kind of deterministic nature since all the business logics is coded inside the smart contracts which is the basis for any decentralized application. And actually it can be inspected right before the usage of decentralized application. You can inspect what will cause the results of execution of the application and actually you will always get the expected results. The second important thing that's obviously decentralized applications are transparent and obviously the transparency is one of the main advantages of blockchain technology overall, right? So, and it is very obvious when you use decentralized application that all significant transactions within them are recorded to blockchain it is there available for everyone. You can go through all the his historical perspective of execution of the application, go through all the transactions, look through what happens and for which purpose. And actually this information, this history is available for everyone, like customers, buyers and sellers and everybody even for other industries. And finally, decentralized applications are trustworthy and reliable because there are still no intermediaries. There are kind of. You cannot change the algorithms within the application within ongoing transaction, right? You cannot replace the contract when the transaction is on the contract already. And actually you can interact with decentralized application directly when something went wrong with the website of the application. Actually, you can do things directly with the smart contracts through a kind of blockchain interface like myetherwallets or something similar. So altogether, decentralized application has much common in with vending machine, you see this, some standard item through the transparent wall, you put the coin inside and this machine gives you this item according to predetermined algorithm. And the most important thing that there is no kind of governance inside the machine. This governance doesn't decide whether you deserve this Coke or not. But despite the bunch of advantages, there are still so many kind of challenges which we face when we're developing decentralized applications. Here's the list of much common to my opinion and first, decentralized application obviously they have to interact with the real world to get a kind of data from some data providers for it to make a decision what to do with current circumstances. And actually for example, in Oxygen we have faced kind of the problem to get a market data to our smart contracts. And the main problem is that the APIs of these kind of data providers are not standardized and you cannot get kind of data in some standard view. For example, we tried to get data from cryptocompare and parsing of the string we get as a response from Cryptocampare it costed us around 15 bucks. Obviously yeah, we have solved this problem by doing computation on the side of the but actually the problem still remains and for example there are still kind of limited options for localizing data. Just three up to five well known providers and oracleize it is still among of them. Another problem I would like to pay attention to is kind of the lack of tested out of the box cross chain solutions. So obviously when you develop decentralized application, you would like to interact among different blockchains doing things with different assets like we would like to do in Oxygen and maybe in terms of Oxygen. Yeah, we have also solved this problem but not with using some tested and reliable out of the box cross chain solution. We did it with the some tricky, tricky, tricky way. We decided to build up the infrastructure with kind of atomic swaps and then we were issuing kind of stable coins against the bitcoin. So yeah, I'm sorry for getting you dicked into details but it will make you and give you an impression what's really happening in this field right now. But I'm not talking from the perspective that there are certain problems and we have nothing to do with that. Actually following the kind of positive agenda, we rely on future protocols and we sure that obviously most of these problems we have solved within Oxygen and most of the teams who are developing decentralized application also have some solutions in terms of it. And actually I would like you to go with me with some examples of use cases which are coming up to the market. And what is the most positive thing that I kind of hopeful as well it's that big names are coming to the industry, right? For example IBM and Maersk, they announced the application and revealed it this August. Several weeks ago it would be tradelens which is kind of decentralized application. So basically we can also pay attention to the application by BMW. This is Dovu, which records mileage of leased vehicles to the blockchain. And also many, many other big companies are coming to the market. It is very hopeful actually. For example Walmart or Kodak with some kind of funny solution for photos and so on. Another case is also Oxygen, which we are working on. It's decentralized application for borrowing and lending crypto. And it also utilize the blockchain technology in proper way. It's like the essential thing for crypto assets. To simplify the explanation, I give you an example. For example, you need some asset to borrow for some purpose. Maybe for covering some inventory gap or for going short on Oxygen. We will have a couple of options. The first one is to pick existing order for the markets. The second is to put new order to the funding book of Oxygen. But anyways, when trade will be happening, you will pledge your collateral, like crypto collateral to the smart contract. And those smart contract will be acting as escrow. So it's from my perspective it's rather kind of essential way of utilizing the blockchain technology. The most important thing that actually Oxygen have developed all the technical solution already and we have a bundle of smart contracts which Counts kind of 12 contracts already inspected by Coinspect and reliable web application and actually you can test our solution on the test nets of Cohen and actually Oxygen. Generally it's focused on more sophisticated market participants like OTC desk, crypto funds and for example big miners. But actually the good news that recently our internal team came up with proposal to develop a kind of side version of this platform for retail markets and I will announce today in Nitrogen. It's also decentralized platform but more focused on retail market. So it's actually white label solution from Oxygen and I'm really excited to announce it right now. So actually I'm running out of time. Sorry for the conclusion. I would say that kind of being the user, Being the user you should be patient since decentralized application will sometime disrupt all the industry. Being the investor, you should keep an eye on new mindful projects coming up to the market like the projects I mentioned in my presentation. And I consider my mission as a developer like as providing more convenience user experience to everyone. I'm sorry for being straightforward but it's like get users to that point where he would not say that I don't give a shit about decentralized application. They're boring, difficult to use and so on and so forth. So wow. Thank you, thank you for your time. Thank you for your attention. Keep in touch. Let's catch up somewhere on blog show. Thank you very much. Thank you Alex. Everyone give Alex a huge round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Next. Next we have a panel. Does the blockchain technology really define the future of real estate? Your moderator is Mark Mueller Eberstein, investor, best selling author in 12 languages, former tech leader in Fortune 500 companies including HP and Microsoft. Please welcome Mark Ricky Ng, Chairman and founder of IHT co founder of iClick advisor at McAfee crowd chain at accelerator. Please welcome Ricky Piper Moriadi, CEO of the Crypto Realty Group, one of the top eight influential women making headlines in blockchain by the entrepreneur. Please welcome Piper Luca Berlando COO of Crypto Real Estate, former financial consultant at UHNWI family office. Please welcome Luca and Sheree IP legal and marketing Blockchain advisor Board member of Blockchain Australia. Please welcome Shereen. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Please have a seat. So welcome to our panel on blockchain and real estate. As an investor in both tokens and real estate, I'm extremely excited to have such a high caliber and global representation today here on stage. So what I would like to do is just very quickly go across the Board and I think, I'm not sure how familiar you are with token with tokenization of assets. And I think there's no much, much more real world assets than real estate. Have everybody give a quick introduction why they care and what tokenization really means for them and should mean for you. Okay, thanks everyone here. So I'm Wiki. So I'm the founder of iHouse.com and we have launched our live blockchain real estate project in January and we proposed a fundraising model called ATO Asset Tokenization offering. Just similar to the terms ICO but it is related to the real estate assets. Okay. So we have already launched our ATO projects in Japan, Philippine and also Thailand. So we have also launched the US market the first project in July. We are getting ready to a big launch in US next month. So that in Asia we proposed that the ATO model is to waste money by utility. Right? Yeah. So that's a utility token but in US because of the compliances. So that we will propose to the lighter ATO version in security to issue the security token in US so that we would have a light explore more about this. And personally I'm from a Internet market so that I've been working in Internet company for 12 years. So I was in Yahoo and also I found a company and got this in asset like last year. So that this is my second project that I would like. I truly believe in blockchain and assets liquidity, some kind of that. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Piper Moretti. I am CEO of the Crypto Realty Group. I formed that about a year or so ago after I did my fourth transaction using Bitco to buy real estate. I've now done five and I'm also an advisor. I'm kind of in between. I'm kind of like the boots on the ground, so to speak. I'm in between advising a couple of startups. One is Cprop IO and the other one is Block 66 IO. Cprop is working on end to end transaction processes. As realtors we have all these different sources of information that we have to pull from and you know a typical escrow is 30 to 45 to 60 days. We're hoping to really shorten that by having everything tokenized and on the blockchain. Block 66 in a nutshell is basically going to be able to fund loans within about 48 hours, which is amazing because right now it takes at least 21 days to fund a loan. So that. And I'm. And I'm in between doing that advising Them on the real estate side what we need to see and also educating Realtors on blockchain technology and how this is actually going to help us and not hurt our industry.

So. Hi everyone, I'm Luca. I'm the CEO of Crypto Real Estate. We are a Swiss Switzerland based company. Basically we aim to offer a tokenization of assets and we specialize in real estate. We see ourselves a bit as the bridge between the old and the new world. Real estate is a topic, is an area that has very old fashioned ways and has not always been open to new technologies. And especially in markets like Switzerland, Europe and so on, there is a lot of innovation that we can bring and technology can bring a lot of efficiency and that's where I believe the most our biggest advantages and what the biggest potential is for blockchain technology.

Hi everyone, my name is Cherie and I'm board member of Blockchain Australia. My background guess is in legal and blockchain development. So I worked across two ICOs including Australia's first ICO and I worked across an asset tokenization platform. So really understanding this, getting the legislation correct and making sure that we can pave the way for the future. That's where my interest lies for asset token tokenization on the blockchain.

Thank you. A lot of the traditional real estate investors, they are very familiar with of course investing in a specific property as well as into closed investment funds or even an open investment real estate fund somewhere on a global scale. But why should they think about tokenization as it's just a fad of putting another blockchain thingy out there. Let me take that one. So basically Blockchain offers the ability to have much more transparency than we have right now in the space. Now investors especially in closed funds get information once a year about the investment. So we have building xyz, they have been bought and sold this year. And that's what you get with blockchain. You get the ability to have all this information in basically real time if you want. And with a minimal amount of costs that you have, you have lower due diligence costs because if the data is true and correct, you don't have to take spend as much time on due diligence and it's all there for everybody to check. So that is where the technology and blockchain itself can help and that is the main difference to traditional assets like. Thanks. Okay, let me add on actually I fully agree that transparency is one of the light, very core like features that can be provided by Blockchain and More importantly, is actually is the liquidity. Yeah, because I think for investing in real estate, after you get invested or you invested in some properties the next day, three to five year, you can just sell it or trade by to others. But with the blockchain's help actually it provides a potential secondary market so that we can do the liquidity there and then to translate into exchange. So definitely no matter utility exchange or the security token exchange, that will be something that getting popular in the future. So that I think the liquidity enhancement will actually enable more investors to come to invest and also more projects to raise money in terms of the blockchain area. But Ricky, didn't you think for it to be liquid there needs to be a liquid market? There needs to be maybe a few exchanges where the capital actually is. Do you see traditional exchanges offering that or is there a new opportunity for crypto exchanges? Yeah, of course you can see the fundraising new these days. Actually the institution are coming into the security token exchange by now. So some company are getting USB C USC regarding the security token exchange already. So that after institution join and then after the regulation is ready, I think that will be getting popular in the next phase. So maybe the next six to 12 months. I think some of the security token exchange will be huge. Yeah, interesting. But if so, if I might add, we see more and more traditional exchanges looking into crypto. So for example, in Switzerland, the S X, which is the Swiss exchange, is looking to plans to open up their own crypto exchange for security tokens over the next year. Even I think past few days NASDAQ is looking at doing the same thing in the U.S. so with that, you open up a whole new class of investors that are not yet on in crypto because of regulatory hurdles or just because they don't know what it is and so on. And that is actually something that can provide additional liquidity to the entire market. So what the two of you are saying is we have global exchanges which make it possible for anybody to invest. Now we have US Representative real estate and legal representation from Australia. What do you think about it?

Okay, I think that opens up a whole new world.

So tell us more.

It's going to make it a lot easier, you know, because you know, right now, I mean, it's very centralized as we know. And I do get calls from all over the world, you know, and some of them, you know, are able to buy in bitcoin and some of them aren't. There are, you know, creative ways around that. But I mean, if there were like, you Know, an exchange that, you know, we could all move through and that would open up global real estate pretty much for me. I think it's great because you've got these global exchanges and you can actually put your assets on there. And it doesn't necessarily have to be of any sort, any means. It's literally global. So the real estate, your little portion is going to go into any exchange and it's available, there's liquidity, there's a market. But the interesting thing is the other aspect you need to look at also is legislation. So for us in Australia, we actually have crowdfunding laws and that only allows you to crowdfund up to 5 million and you can only do up to about 10,000 per investment. But the thing is, if you were to apply asset tokenization in Australia generally, that would mean that you'd fall under these crowdfunding laws. So you go look at each of these jurisdictions. Is it viable? Can we actually do it and what would it mean? So let's say for argument's sake, we do tokenize assets and we do put it all on the blockchain. But then governments come by later and say, well, wait a second, we're not really great with this idea. We actually think that you shouldn't be allowed to do this because it is a quite regulated market and how would that impact all your projects that you guys are working on now? So I think these are considerations we need to look at. And obviously legislation needs to work in a way that's actually flexible to allow for innovation, but obviously not to stifle what everyone's doing. So it'll be interesting in the next couple of years to see where that stance is and whether, you know, the global view is more of, yep, we want this to fly, we want this to work or otherwise whether it's going to be, look, we don't really like what you're doing. We're not really sure what's happening here. We're going to legislate in our own manner.

So let me drive down into this a little bit more on the registration because I think you have all a different perspective. From a global side. Traditionally accredited investors can invest into anything that they may do their own due diligence. Now with tokenization, the market is open to to retail investors from nearly on a global scale and governments rightfully so I think think about protection of their population. What have you seen works well. What do you think the directions as governments should take? Start over there, start with Australia.

So for me, I think I'm always for a self regulatory model. So I always think that should let the innovation fly, see what happens and government should only step in when it becomes a consumer protection issue. So if you know there's a lot of scams, fraudulent actors out there, then obviously they should take a stance and they should step in and say wait, this is not right and what's in our best interest to protect the consumers. So that's the angle I think that they should always be looking for and you know, let it happen and see which areas need to actually be regulated, then come in but also work with the actual people in the industry. So that's what we do at Blockchain Australia. We help with our members to advocate on behalf of the governments who are setting the policy. So having that exchange, because it's really interesting to see when you're at this level is that regulators actually don't know everything and they think they know things, but they know some, not all or they don't know anything at all. But when they start having these exchanges, these conversations, then you are able to set the policy right if it is to come in at some point in time.

Absolutely. What I've seen, what we see actually is that regulators coming to the market helps to add a layer of professionalism to the market which is something that is definitely needed and is actually something to wish for. And as Shiri says, actually the only more the most important thing is that we as blockchain companies work together with a regulator and the regulator doesn't impose unnecessary or really too high burdens on us. Because most blockchain companies are still small. They do not have the financial power of big banks or of big real estate consulting companies or anything. And that's where we need to get to work together with the regulation later we so that's the most important part. That is a two way street. It's not top down actually I think this is compensors is actually a happy problem. So because we talked to many real estate owners as well as a company projects and also we talked to many financial institutions, all of them are very interested to get into the blockchain area to raise money to manage to provide the liquidity to to the assets. Okay. So compliance will comes in after the night. The market is getting higher demand and getting more mature. So that I think just like ICO right before, before ICO is like getting hot. So no one care about the compliances right now. Everyone cares about the compliances. I think it will also apply to the real estate market and then I can foresee the next, like 12 to 18 months, many real estate developers will come in and also financial institution will come in. Then their compliances will be becoming a necessity there. But still, it's a happy problem. Yeah.

It'S my job as a realtor to make sure that my clients are protected no matter what. And what we're talking about here, I mean, it's definitely, I'm all for, for regulation to a point, you know, where, you know, everybody is included but yet not constrained. So, you know, it's again, it's kind of like the wild west right now of this whole, you know, thing. And, you know, it's going to help in a way. But, you know, it would be great to be able to work with, you know, companies, you know, that can, you know, we're all talking, you know, we're all making sure that everybody's covered in some way but yet able to invest. And I'm kind of like working on a platform. You know, we mentioned crowdfunding. You know, you can put in as little as $1,000 and still make a return on a certain property. So, I mean, but I want to make sure that even that person is protected.

So I want to nail this down a little bit more. So for the people in the room and on the video here, what would be a recommendation for the jurisdiction? Shopping, potentially for both, or doing an ico, being an investor and which legislation to invest into?

I feel like everyone's looking at me. Not a bias or anything, but I'll just speak generally. So, obviously it looks at what you're doing as a platform and what you're trying to achieve. So, for example, for asset tokenization, you need a jurisdiction that can work for your platform. You need a jurisdiction that can work for the customers you're thinking of serving. And it depends on, are you going to do asset tokenization purely just on the blockchain, or are you going to do it as a security token where you're falling into legislation? So if you're falling into legislation, what's obviously going to happen is you need to find that piece of security legislation that fits what you're trying to achieve. And I think this is not really known to everyone, but not all security securities are defined the same across each different country you're in. And everyone just assumes, oh, it's a security. It's how he tests it doesn't actually work like that. Each country has their own definition of a security. So then you need to shop for those specifics. So there's not really one size fits all it depends on how your platforms work. And as Ricky and Luca, they have very different platforms doing different things, so they might not be choosing the same jurisdictions, not shopping in the same place, because they're targeting slightly different areas. So it really comes down to what are you aiming to achieve? What does your platform do? And then you look at. Okay, which would be the best favorable jurisdiction for us to look at.

Absolutely. As Shiri says, we are based in Switzerland and we are also under Swiss jurisdiction. And that's a conscious decision that we have made to stay in Switzerland and not go somewhere else for two reasons. One, it is a good jurisdiction to be in. It's very open to crypto and blockchain companies. But on the other hand, it also has a certain reputation that we want to keep, especially in an area where of investments, asset tokens, security tokens, where trust is still something that is rather new. Having that Swiss reputation, having the Swiss name in our case, for example, is something very valuable. So that's in our case. But again, as Shiri said, it depends on the project. Not everybody needs to have that reputation, that added value. And there are other places as well.

Yeah, this is a really interesting time right now where I'm coming from, because, you know, the big question in real estate is, okay, what is blockchain actually going to do? Is it going to be. If we've got two roads to go down, is it. Is it going to, you know, supersede all the, like, say, California, that's where I'm from, all the California rules and regulations that we try so hard to, you know, protect the consumer with, or is it going to be like Bitcoin, you know, where they just kind of supersede all the banking regulations? You know, it doesn't matter. We're going to do our own thing over here. I believe that, you know, ICOs that kind of. That are just worried about doing cross border, you know, that's all we care about. Cross border.

Cross border.

I think that they're going to be opening themselves up to a whole lot of lawsuits because again, it's up to me to make sure that my buyers and my sellers don't get screwed.

So.

And, you know, it's almost like, you know, I kind of liken it to, you know, somebody that's doing, that's selling their. Their house, like, you know, for sale by owner. It's like, well, that's great and everything, and you can do whatever you want to do, but if you don't have this one little thing disclosed that you might have Missed. You're going to get sued. So that's my concern.

I think for discussing about this topic. Let's put it in a more visionary thinking. So that. Because I think blockchain or say asset tokenization is also kind of like sharing economy, right. So that whenever a sharing economy is coming up, for example, just like Airbnb or Uber or WeWork or whatsoever, so that compensates and jurisdiction or other legal stuff will be also raised up so that this kind of new business model, or say new economy model is just kind of. The society is going. So I think after, I believe in the market. So if the market demand is there so that the rules will be there and the legal system will be there and then so that finally everyone will get used to the new economy. So that. I think it's just a progress of that. Yeah, I mean, looking outside and as a visionary is great. But I think Piper, you mentioned there is some legal issues that are impacting today, right? Yes. Sorry, give me a second. Piper had an example, I think from California, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

This is a good one. A few years ago, before I even got involved in the whole crypto space, there was a crypto to crypto transaction that was done in Orange County. It was for a large sum of money. It was about a $10 million crypto to crypto transaction. What happened was they just transferred the money outside of escrow, but the city came in and said, well, we need to have this on record in fiat government backed money. So. And obviously, you know, they wanted their taxes on the $10 million. So what happened was the buyer and the seller exchanged $1 and said, There you go, there's your sales price. And the city said, no, no, no, no, no. And they took them to court the parties. The buyer, you know, said, okay, fine, you know, we'll go to court over this. Because he had the money and the time, I guess, and they dragged it out and they finally settled for maybe half of what he owed on the, on the transfer taxes on that. So there, there really isn't anything in place yet. You know, I mean, California is kind of, you know, dipping their toe in the water, you know, by introducing some legislation. You know, we're going to put the, you know, stock traders information, you know, up on the blockchain. But, you know, once this becomes, you know, once California finally gets on the, on the bandwagon, you know, this, these types of transactions will be so much easier to deal.

Luca, I think you wanted to jump in there. No, absolutely. We have seen in Switzerland that the finma, which is the Swiss sec, has changed quite a bit since especially the beginning of the year in their openness towards working with companies, especially in the security token part. And that is definitely a shift that similar to California's Piper just said something that we welcome and that we've seen. So the problems are starting to get solved slowly but eventually, hopefully. So with the whole ICO craziness of the last 12 months, I would say 90% of those were outright scams and probably 90% of the rest were well meaning but not very well thought through would be my guess. How does an investor that tries to combine blockchain internationalization, exchanges and real estate think about doing their own due diligence for the projects? What would be the key top tier three guidance you would give them? Well, actually, I think yeah, this question is interesting. So before answering the question, I think let's look back to the startups nowadays. I think even the startups we are having many different kind of difficulties so that regarding operation, for example, pr, technology, whatever. So this is the same actually compared to ICO companies. Right. So that's for the projects that we are working with in the real estate field, we are doing the same thing. We also need to do due diligence. We also need to make sure the project is good in terms of the future development value in terms of the operation difficulties, in terms of the team structure, so that we need to due diligence on the projects. And after the traditional due diligence way, we also would like to put more third party in the loop like for those professionals, for example, like financial institution, I bank or compliance, legal firm whatsoever, so that we need to get third party on in this platform, on this ecosystem. So that after all of this we consider for example the exchange and how to issue the token and then provide them the liquidity with this exchange hub so that we need to do a whole process there. So I can answer this question. It's a really difficult job, but still we are here because we find that it is a huge market and then it's going to disrupt the real estate market in terms of the transaction and also the fundraising and liquidity so that even just 1%, we think that's happy enough. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean everything that you just said, and I mean mine's. My answer is short and sweet. Don't believe all the PR that you read. You know, I mean, everybody wants to be the first, the first, you know, and there's, there's one startup out there that that's very hot. And heavy, we know with, with the pr. But I know as an insider, you know, some of it's maybe stretching it a little bit. But, you know, I would, I would definitely just, you know, educate and, you know, see who is actually behind the ICO and what their track record.

I think from our side, what we see especially in real estate, because it's a, as I was telling Piper earlier, it's an all boys club. Having a mix between the technology and the real estate expertise, something quite important because you can be the best technology guy in the world or girl, but if you don't have the connections in that space, you won't get very far. And same way, if you have the best connections but don't have any technological knowledge, you won't be able to innovate as much as you want. So having that mix is something quite important.

Yeah, I completely agree with that as well. For me, if, you know, the best advice I can give everyone is if you're looking to invest in anything, make sure you know who the team are and have a look at their efforts prior to doing an ico. So if they're not a legitimate company and out of the blue they started up and started raising funds, no one who's in that industry knows anything to do with that industry, then obviously that's telling you something. But if they had a company established couple years and they've attempted to do this through seed funding and you know, just through family and friends and they've got themselves enough capital, built a solid technology platform. So I'm really, really big on the platforms. For me, it's all about where's your technology at, where's your platform at and what is your milestones. And if an ICO happens to help them along the way, then you know, that's great. But a lot of ICOs are just coming left, right and center and there's no technology, someone's starting to get there, but it's just worrying some because they're not in the industry, the tech's not there, it's like, what is this really all about? So those are the main signs I'd say to look for.

Well, that sounds as very sound advice. And that's what accredited investors do when they do due diligence. But you mentioned earlier the $1,000 investor. So how should they go about doing due diligence in that kind of thoroughness at an international market? Are there international advisors, other communities that they can count on that you would recommend?

I'd say for them who don't have that Knowledge, do as much research as you can. Have a look at things that you can easily search online. Just where's that company based? What are the regulations around what you can and can't do in that company, in that jurisdiction? Sorry. And, you know, have a look at the communities in there. So obviously there's a lot of inflated communities paid for communities, Telegram channels, etc. So they're not always your best means, but you can get enough of an informed idea. I think if you're able to do some little bit of background research, there's always going to be a legal entity that's registered somewhere in the world. So have a look at that and what's being said there, that should give you some sort of indication. If not, you're able to do more than that. So just have a look at the groundwork and see where it's at. Basically, it's probably the best way to do.

So. There's really nobody out there that would be the real estate blockchain guru. I should follow on Twitter if there are.

They should be on this panel.

There are some companies, for example, one in Switzerland that are taking a very serious approach on reviewing ICO projects without taking any, you know, promotional payments or anything like that. And it's something that we very like much welcome because it takes away the doubt of, wait, has it been reviewed, being paid for? Is it like real what's going on? So I think similar to all other things that we said today, it comes with time, but we are starting to see there's positive signs in that. And definitely having this objective point of view helps. And we just now have to hope and that the community embraces this, again, professionalism in the field. So I want to take. Sorry, go ahead.

I was just going to say really quickly, a really good resource, if you're interested, is ibrea, the International Blockchain Real Estate Association. They have their own website, but I would also follow them on LinkedIn because, you know, they've got their finger on the pulse with this. They don't necessarily advise, but they've got a lot of, like a wealth of information that you could actually, like, learn from.

I think for the credit investors or the institution investors, actually, they. They definitely know what they are buying. Okay. For the retail investors, I think our job is that. To help them to get the transparency, to provide their full disclosure on what that we loan. Yeah, but of course that you'll be also with. Yeah. So that we shouldn't, like having said that to them is like, oh, they say guarantee or they Say because nothing is guaranteed. Okay. So that we need to do the full risk disclosure to let them to load what exactly they're investing, what exactly they are buying. So that I think that's the platforms, like our job to do this. Yeah. Thank you very much. For me, so I want to be very egoistic right now. Is it for me, Mark Buller Everstein, as real estate person and interested in blockchain technology, hopefully speaking for a couple of people in the room here as well, what are the one or two things I should take out of this panel today as your advice? Let me start. I think the most important thing from a real estate perspective is that blockchain is a technology that is not here to take away your job, but it's actually, that's gonna help everybody and it's gonna make things safer and more transparent, which is awesome for consumers. That is something that you really should take home. And it going to come, it might take a year, might take maybe two, three, five years, but it's something that we'll see more and more.

Yeah, it's definitely coming. And you know, I'm trying to, like I said, educate Realtors as much as possible. You know, there are a lot of companies out there that do want to get rid of the middleman and that's, that's totally fine. But blockchain, what, you know, what a lot of realtors don't understand anyway, it is going to mitigate things like title fraud. You know, it's going to make the transaction go so much smoother and easier and faster. You know, we're going to cut down escrow times, you know, from, from 30 to 45 days to hopefully a couple of weeks because everybody's going to be, everything's going to be verified. There are a lot of positives that go along with this. So that's my take.

My suggestion is first of all, get involved in the blockchain fundraising as soon as possible. Because when you get involved, you know what is happening. Okay, first statement. The second is find some trustful third party to help. Because I see many real estate companies are having their blockchain team themselves, which means they are interested in this, but they would like to do it in house. But for my light, from outsider or for my third party suggestion, I would suggest to have more investigation for the third parties because we wish so many people every day so that we will get what they want, what they did, and then suggest what they can do in the future.

And for me, you know, when it comes to real estate or any industry, it's always good just to be involved and, you know, don't have to do anything, even if it's just reading or staying on top of the news. So when and if it does come, you're ready for it. And if you have a business model which could adopt it and it could do well for you, staying ahead of the game is so much better than being ignorant and not even participating at all. So seeing what's coming ahead and having a look at, is this going to impact my business and change in any way, or is it something I should just be aware of and just keep staying on top of it? That's probably the best advice there is.

Thank you very much. So, for me, this was very educational. We have a few minutes for questions for the audience as well. So are there any questions out here? It's hard to see anybody. Okay, over there. Here we go. One, two, three, catch. Oh, good. Very close to your mouth, apparently. Do any of you have experience with potential investors to have a sense of the interest at the consumer level in tokenized real estate? So from our side, we've seen a lot of interest, especially from consumers, retail consumers in the Middle east, in South America and Asia. Our project is based on Swiss commercial real estate, so we're only offering it on based on real estate in Switzerland, and that's especially where people from these regions suddenly would get access to it. So that's where we saw the most interest from. Any other questions? Okay, here. One, two, three.

Ups.

Good. Very close, please.

Hi, I'm an investor and landlord. My question is how blockchain can eliminate the need of real estate agents and brokers. Yeah, yeah, I get this question all the time, the dis. Mediation thing, you know, I'm going to steal from a colleague of mine. He's actually the founder of Iberia, the international blockchain real estate association. His name is Ragnar. I would totally follow him on social media. He said it best. I don't think that we're going to go away completely, but our roles are going to change. We're going to become more like project managers, and that's totally fine with me. It's going to shorten everything, you know, and we're already seeing it right now, you know, with Zillow and Trulia and, you know, realtor.com and all that. I mean, people are finding their own houses and it's kind of cutting down that time. But I mean, Yeah, I mean, 10 years from now, I don't know. We'll see.

I think we have time for one More question. Was somebody up here? Is that correct? Yeah. Can you come closer please? One second. One, two, three hops. Here we go. And very close to your mouth please. Is there a mic? Yes, there's a mic in there. Perfect. Now turn more. Yep. No, circle right here. Perfect. I that's embarrassing. Camera. What did it besides a white paper? Because you always see everyone wants a white paper and they think it's the business case and everything else other than the white paper. What do you see that is actually missing from these ICOs or businesses, blockchain businesses.

For me it definitely be any sort of compliance reporting, due diligence post ICOs. There's not been any type of reporting there that we can follow up because in traditional IPO world what you're seeing is all these requirements that are required of them to do so because the laws there, legislation there. But in this area it's still kind of like a gray area. Less so cowboy days than a couple years back. But I think it's still not there. So especially with the real estate market, if we are doing all these innovative things, that side needs to come and like you said LUCA earlier, it's like it's going to take some time, might not be overnight, but seeing that develop and seeing that come forward in a, you know, compliance framework of some sort. Not saying it has to be regulation, but seeing that come forward I think would be one of the fundamental changes to how we approach these type of things in the future.

Thank you very much. I think like to also answer this question because that's actually why we are doing real estate blockchain because I think ICO is quite hard for a retail investors to understand and also like it's very high risk and that's why we would suggest I proposed ATO and also we will propose the retail investors to invest in real estate related project because at least there's some assets that that it's developing or that is involved assets there so that the risk is much lower. And then for the retail investors they are more easy to understand what is going on so that, yeah, that's more safe for them. Thank you very very much. This was at least very enlightening for me. I hope you enjoyed it as well and looking forward for the rest of the event. Thank you very much. Thank you to all of our panelists for does the blockchain technology really and the future of real estate. Now we're gonna have a lunch break now. Please be back by 2:45pm so you can hear a special speech by celebrity speaker Bobby Lee, co founder of btcc, former vice president of technology for Walmart's E Commercial business in China. Go ahead, have a nice time, do some networking, eat some food and be back here at 2:45. Thank you. Hello, berlin. Now start to think about what this new world blockchain is bringing and how we're going to operate into it. But we must now take responsibility ourselves. Who else will stand up for this? Who else but us? It's up to us now to reinvigorate this new world with the world of trust. The crypto world is absolutely and definitely in a bubble. I don't think there's very many people who would deny that it might pop tomorrow, but more importantly, it will pop. All of that happens, some of them for good purposes, some of it for bad purposes. But the judge of good and bad is actually should be you, should be us, the people.

And I believe that if we look at what we want to create for our children every day and we dream those big dreams together, it's still within our reach.

Decentralization is a giant, giant wave. You know, 50 years from now, they're going to be riding in history books. It's a revolution. You're in the middle of a revolution. If we don't bring a hundred million people or a billion people into crypto, this revolution is just gonna die off. Now we can create a platform in which all of us can see who has what. That is the blockchain. That's the magic of the blockchain.

Sam.

It. Sam, We have a problem. There's too much, too much disinformation. There are a lot of people getting burned. You don't have an industry. It's over. Let's change the world.

There were a lot of people who said, said to us, good luck with that. He's not going to be the next president of the United States. Bring big dreams after you're successful. All those same people say, oh, I always knew you were going to be a success.

But what we're really missing in this world is freedom of money. Today, it's actually all about control. This, this is a bad investment. Me holding it is a bad investment. But with cryptocurrency, with bitcoin, we're not trusting any person, we're not trusting any government. My definition is freedom of money is when you have the freedom to do whatever you want with your own money. The crypto world went through three waves of innovation. You had the anarchists who came and said, we're going to blow up the world. Then you had the libertarians who came and said, we're going to save the world. And now you have the tourists, the speculators who came in and said, where is the money? You know, like, I want to own the world. It's going to get bigger and bigger. Crypto is here to stay. That's the amazing part. It really is here to stay. So I'm a strong believer that in the future, 10 years, you will have state issued cryptocurrencies from major economies. People have given me $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and I'm like, okay, that's interesting. So I sold it and donated the money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, had I kept it, I'd buy a house by now. But that's a different. Sam. Sa. Hello, berlin. Now start to think about what this new world of blockchain is bringing and how we're going to operate into it. But we must now take responsibility ourselves. Who else will stand up for this? Who else but us? It's up to us now to reinvigorate this new world with the world of trust. The crypto world is absolutely and definitely in a bubble. I don't think there's very many people who would deny that it might pop tomorrow, but more importantly, it will pop. All of that happens, some of them for good purposes, some of them for bad purposes. But the judge of good and bad is actually should be you, should be us, the people.

And I believe that if we look at what we want to create for our children every day and we dream those big dreams together, it's still within our reach.

Decentralization is a giant wave. You know, 50 years from now, they're going to be writing in history books. It's a revolution. You're in the middle of a revolution. If we don't bring 100 million people or a billion people into crypto, this revolution is just gonna die off. Now we can create a platform in which all of us can see who has what. That is the blockchain. That's the magic of the blockchain. We have a problem. There's too much. Too much disinformation. There are a lot of people getting burned. You don't have an industry. It's over. Let's change the world.

There were a lot of people who said to us, good luck with that. He's not going to be the next president of the United States. Dream big dreams after you're successful. All those same people say, oh, I always knew you were going to be a success.

It.

Sam.

But what we're really missing in this world is freedom of money. Today it's actually all about control. This is a bad investment. Me holding it is a bad investment. But with cryptocurrency currency, with Bitcoin, we're not trusting any person, we're not trusting any government. My definition is freedom of money is when you have the freedom to do whatever you want with your own money. The crypto world went through three waves of innovation. You had the anarchists who came and said, we're going to blow up the world. Then you had the libertarians that came and said, we're going to save the world. And now you have the tourists, the speculators who came in and said, where is the money? You know, like, I want to own the world. It's going to get bigger and bigger. Crypto is here to stay. That's the amazing part. It really is here to stay. So I'm a strong believer that in the future, 10 years, you will have state issued cryptocurrencies from major economies. People had given me $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and I'm like, okay, that's interesting. So I sold it and donated the money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, had I kept it, I'd buy a house by now, but that's a different story. Sam. Sa. Hello, berlin. Now start to think about what this new world of blockchain is bringing and how we're going to operate into it. But we must now take responsibility ourselves. Who else will stand up for this? Who else but us? It's up to us now to reinvigorate this new world with the world of trust. The crypto world is absolutely and definitely in a bubble. I don't think there's very many people who would deny that it might pop tomorrow, but more importantly, it will pop. All of that happens, some of it for good purposes, some for bad purposes. But the judge of good and bad is actually should be you, should be us, the people.

And I believe that if we look at what we want to create for our children every day, and we dream those big dreams together, it's still within our reach.

Decentralization is a giant wave. You know, 50 years from now, they're going to be writing in history books, it's a revolution. You're in the middle of a revolution. You're. If we don't bring 100 million people or a billion people into crypto, this revolution is just going to die off. Now we can create a platform in which all of us can see who has what? That is the blockchain. That's the magic of the blockchain. We have a problem. There's too much, too much disinformation. There are a lot of people getting burned. You don't have an industry. It's over. Let's change the world.

There were a lot of people who said to us, good luck with that. He's not going to be the next president of the United States.

States.

Dream big dreams after you're successful. All those same people say, oh, I always knew you were going to be a success.

It. Sam. But what we're really missing in this world is freedom of money. Today, it's actually all about control. This is a bad investment. Me holding it is a bad investment. But with cryptocurrency, with bitcoin, we're not trusting any person, we're not trusting any government. My definition is freedom of money is when you have the freedom to do whatever you want with your own money. The crypto world went through three waves of innovation. You had the anarchist who came and said, we're going to blow up the world that you had. The libertarians came and said, we're going to save the world. And now you have the tourists, the speculators who came in and said, where is the money? You know, like, I want to own the world. It's going to get bigger and bigger. Crypto is here to stay. That's the amazing part. It really is here to stay. So I'm a strong believer that in the future 10 years, you will have state issued cryptocurrencies from major economies. People have given me $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and I'm like, okay, that's interesting. So I sold it and donated the money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, had I kept it, I'd buy a house by now. But that's a different story. Sam. Hello, berlin. Now start to think about what this new world of blockchain is bringing and how we're going to operate into it. But we must now take responsibility ourselves. Who else will stand up for this? Who else but us? It's up to us now to reinvigorate this new world with the world of trust. The crypto world is absolutely and definitely in a bubble. I don't think there's very many people who would deny that it might pop tomorrow, but more importantly, it will pop. All of that happens, some of it for good purposes, some of it for bad purposes. But the judge of good and bad is actually should be you, should be us. The People.

And I've always, I believe that if we look at what we want to create for our children every day, and we dream those big dreams together, it's still within our reach.

Decentralization is a giant wave. You know, 50 years from now, they're going to be writing in history books. It's a revolution. You're in the middle of a revolution. If we don't bring 100 million people or a billion people into crypto, this revolution is just going to die off. Now we can create a platform in which all of us can see who has what. That is the blockchain. That's the magic of the blockchain. We have a problem. There's too much, too much disinformation. There are a lot of people getting burned. You don't have an industry. It's over. Sa.

Human connection is valuable, probably the most valuable thing that we have. Conferences like this put us together in rooms of tribes of people. It's likely that you and I, every single person in this room, would have a great conversation if we talked to each other.

SA. Now, let's change the world.

There were a lot of people who said to us, good luck with that. He's not going to be the next president of the United States. Dream big, dream. After you're successful. All those same people say, oh, I always knew you were going to be a success.

But what we're really missing in this world is freedom of money. Today, it's actually all about control. This is a bad investment. Me holding it is a bad investment. But with cryptocurrency, with bitcoin, we're not trusting any person, we're not trusting any government. My definition is freedom of money is when you have the freedom to do whatever you want with your own money. The crypto world went through three waves of innovation. You had the anarchists who came and said, we're going to blow up the world. Then you had the libertarians who came and said, we're going to save the world. And now you have the tourists, the speculators who came in and said, where is the money? You know, like, I want to own the world. It's going to get bigger and bigger. Crypto is here to stay. That's the amazing part. It really is here to stay. So I'm a strong believer that in the future, 10 years, you will have state issued cryptocurrencies from major economies. People have given me $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and I'm like, okay, that's interesting. So I sold it in doge donated other money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, had I kept it, I'd buy a house by now. But that's a different story. Sam. Hello, berlin. Now start to think about what this new world of blockchain is bringing and how we're going to operate into it. But we must now take responsibility ourselves. Who else will stand up for this? Who else but us? It's up to us now to reinvigorate this new world with the world of trust. The crypto world is absolutely and definitely going to bubble. I don't think there's very many people who would deny that it might pop tomorrow, but more importantly, it will pop. All of that happens, some of for good purposes, some for bad purposes. But the judge of good and bad is actually should be you, should be us, the people.

And I believe that if we look at what we want to create for our children, children every day, and we dream those big dreams together, it's still within our reach.

Decentralization is a giant wave. You know, 50 years from now, they're going to be riding in history books. It's a revolution. You're in the middle of a revolution. If we don't bring 100 million people or a billion people into crypto, this revolution is just going to die off. Now we can create a platform in which all of us can see who has what. That is the blockchain. That's the magic of the blockchain. Sam. We have a problem. There's too much, too much disinformation. There are a lot of people getting burned. You don't have an industry. It's over. We can change the world. Let's change the world.

There were a lot of people who said to us, good luck with that. He's not going to be the next president of the United States. Bring big dreams after you're successful. All those same people say, oh, I always knew you were going to be a success. Sa.

Sam. But what we're really missing in this world is freedom of money. Today, it's actually all about control. This is a bad investment. Me holding it is a bad investment. But with cryptocurrency, with bitcoin, we're not trusting any person, we're not trusting any government. My definition is freedom of money is when you have the freedom to do whatever you want with your own money. The crypto world went through three waves of innovation. You had the anarchists who came and said, we're going to blow up the world. Then you had the libertarians that came and said, we're going to save the world. And now you have the tourists, the speculators who came in and said, where is the money? I want to own the world. It's going to get bigger and bigger. Crypto is here to stay. That's the amazing part. It really is here to stay. So I'm a strong believer that in the future, 10 years, you will have state issued cryptocurrencies from major economies. People have given me $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and I'm like, okay, that's interesting. So I sold it and donated the money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, had I kept it, I bought a house by now, but that's a different story. Sam, Two, two. Hello. One, 2, 2. 1, 2. 1, 2, 1, 2. Handheld mic for recording. But we must now take responsibility ourselves. Who else will stand up for this? Who else but us? It's up to us now to reinvigorate this new world with the world of trust. The crypto world is absolutely and definitely in a bubble. I don't think there's very many people who would deny that it might pop tomorrow. But more importantly, it will pop. All of that happens, some of it for good purposes, some of it for bad purposes. But the judge of good and bad is actually should be you. Should be us, the people.

And I believe that if we look at what we want to create for our children every day and we dream those big dreams together, it's still within our reach.

Decentralization is a giant wave. You know, 50 years from now, they're gonna be riding in history books. It's a revolution. You're in the middle of a revolution. If we don't bring a hundred million people or a billion people into crypto, this revolution is just gonna die off. Now we can create a platform in which all of us can see who has what. That is the blockchain. That's amazing. Magic of the blockchain. We have a problem. There's too much. Too much disinformation. There are a lot of people getting burned. You don't have an industry. It's over. Sa. Blockchain is not only about the technology, innovation. It's also about people's mind change. Earlier. The blockchain industry is super small, but right now, it's a $300 billion industry. Develop a human connection before you try to do business.

Human connection is valuable, probably the most valuable thing that we have. Conferences like this put us together in rooms of tribes of people. It's likely that you and I, every single person in this room would have a great conversation if we talked to each other.

Let's change the world.

There were a lot of people who said to us, good luck with that. He's not going to be the next president of the United States. Big dreams after you're successful. All those same people say, oh, I always knew you were going to be a success.

It. Sam. But what we're really missing in this world is freedom of money. Today it's actually all about control. This is a bad investment. Me holding it is a bad investment. But with cryptocurrency, with bitcoin, we're not trusting any person, we're not trusting any government. My definition is freedom of money is when you have the freedom to do whatever you want with your own money. The crypto world went through three waves of innovation. You had the anarchists who came and said, we're going to blow up the world. Then you had the libertarians that came and said, we're going to save the world. And now you have the tourists, the speculators who came in and said, where is the money? You know, like, I want to own the world. It's going to get bigger and bigger. Crypto is here to stay. That's the, the amazing part. It really is here to stay. So I'm a strong believer that in the future 10 years, you will have state issued cryptocurrencies from major economies. People have given me $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and I'm like, okay, that's interesting. So I sold it and donated the money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, had I kept it, I'd buy a house by now. But that's a different story. It's. Sam. Hello, berlin. Now start to think about what this new world of blockchain is bringing and how we're going to operate into it. But we must now take responsibility ourselves. Who else will stand up for this? Who else but us? It's up to us now to reinvigorate this new world with the world of trust. The crypto world is absolutely and definitely in a bubble. I don't think there's very many people who would deny that it might pop tomorrow. But more importantly, it will pop. All of that happens. Some of it for good purposes, some of it for bad purposes. But the judge of good and bad is actually should be you, should be us, the people.

And I believe that if we look at what we want to create for our children every day, and we dream those big dreams together, it's still within.

Our reach, decentralization is a giant wave. You know, 50 years from now, they're going to be riding in history books. It's a revolution. You're in the middle of a revolution. If we don't bring 100 million people or a billion people into crypto, this revolution is just going to die off. Now we can create a platform in which all of us can see who has what. That is the blockchain. That's the magic of the blockchain. Sam, It. Sam, We have a problem. There's too much, too much disinformation. There are a lot of people getting burned. You don't have an industry. It's over. Let's change the world.

There were a lot of people who said to us, good luck with that. He's not going to be the next president of the United States. Dream big dreams after you're successful. All those same people say, oh, I always knew you were going to be a success.

But what we're really missing in this world is freedom of money. Today, it's actually all about control. This is a bad investment. Me holding it is a bad investment. But with cryptocurrency, with bitcoin, we're not trusting any person, we're not trusting any government. My definition is freedom of money is when you have the freedom to do whatever you want with your own money. The crypto world went through three waves of innovation. You had the anarchists who came and said, we're going to blow up the world. Then you had the libertarians who came and said, we're going to save the world. And now you have the tourists, the speculators who came in and said, where is the money? You know, like, I want to own the world. It's going to get bigger and bigger. Crypto is here to stay. That's the amazing part. It really is here to stay. So I'm a strong believer that in the future 10 years, you will have state issued cryptocurrencies from major economies. People have given me $20,000 worth of Bitcoin and I'm like, okay, that's interesting. So I sold it and donated the money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, had I kept it, I'd buy a house by now. But that's a different. Sam. Sa. Hello, berlin. Now start to think about what this new world of blockchain is bringing and how are we going to operate into it. But we must now take responsibility ourselves. Who else will stand up for this? Who else but us? It's up to us now to reinvigorate this new world with the world of trust, The crypto world is absolutely and definitely in a bubble. I don't think there's very many people who would deny that it might pop tomorrow, but more importantly, it will pop. All of that happens, some of it for good purposes, some of them for bad purposes. But the judge of good and bad is actually should be you. Should be us, the people.

And I believe that if we look at what we want to create for our children every day and we dream those big dreams together, it's still within our reach.

Decentralization is a giant wave. You know, 50 years from now, they're to going to be writing in history books. It's a revolution. You're in the middle of a revolution. If we don't bring 100 million people or a billion people into crypto, this revolution is just going to die off. Now we can create a platform in which all of us can see who has what. That is the blockchain. That's the magic of the blockchain.

Sam.

It.

Sam.

We have a problem. There's too much. Too much disinformation. There are a lot of people getting burned. You don't have an industry. It's over. Let's change the world. Sa. Sa. It. Sa. We got it, we got it. We got it.

We got it.

Sa. We got it, we got it. Sa. Sam. Sa. Sam. Sa. Sam. Sa. Sa. I'm trying it's time for me to open my. I want to kiss you tonight baby tonight I want to catch you tonight I'm stay in the house. You tonight. I want to kiss you tonight baby. I can hold you tonight I want to kiss you tonight baby. Sa.

Ladies and gentlemen, your program will resume momentarily. Please take your seats. And as a courtesy to your fellow attendees, please remember to silence all mobile devices.

Saving in my life no one do.

Better Sweetest sound this time remember this.

Time remember Burning like a flame. Ladies and gentlemen, please come into the main stage and have your seats so you can be here for our celebrity speaker, Bobby Lee, My guide. All right, let's go, let's go. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to block show, America's 2018. How was your lunch? Awesome. Great. Cool. How energized are you? A little bit. Do you guys remember what we did this morning? Yeah. Let's do. Okay, divide you guys in half. We'll make it really quick because Bobby's back there waiting to come out. But I want him to have an energized audience. Okay. I'm going to say 1, 2, 3. You say let's go. 1, 2, 3, let's go. And then all time together. 1, 2, 3, block show. Can we do that? Great. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. They won. You guys want to try again? Let's do it one more time. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. All together. 1, 2, 3, block show. Now we have Bobby Lee with the celebrity speech. He is the co founder of btcc, former vice president of technology for Walmart's e commerce business in China. Please welcome Bobby. Good afternoon. How's everyone doing? They say if I speak well, crypto prices will go up today. Keep talking. Yeah. Is that a good thing? Have prices been going down too much lately? Yeah. All right, so let me find my clicker right here. So how was lunch? Good lunch. Who's here in Vegas for the first time? Oh, some new people here. That's great. Okay, so I'm here to talk about freedom of money. We live in a free society, especially America, a free country. Not all of us have this pleasure to live in a free country. But what I've realized over the last few years in crypto is that bitcoin truly represents freedom of money. And without freedom of money, we're really not free. And this is a new concept that people don't realize very much, essentially. Well, let's see if this works essentially in today, all of finance, it's all about control people's money. As long as you have money in bank accounts, you have stocks with brokerages, you hold your gold in bank vaults. It turns out that for the vast majority of your assets, it's all under someone else's control. And for the first time in human society, in, you know, whatever, four, three, 4,000 of years of society, just the last 10 years, we really finally have control back of our own assets. And here's what I mean by that. The financial institutions have all the control over all your money and all your assets. Whether it's banks, whether it's online payment systems like PayPal, WeChat, Pay, Alipay, and credit cards and even the digital versions of them. Whether it's reward programs, gift cards, think about gift cards. Some of you have gift cards. I have a Best Buy gift card in my wallet. And this is really a symbol of control because the value in here is purely determined by what Best Buy wants to honor it or not. So whether it's your airline, Mile hotel, reward points, all these digital so called coupons are all controlled by the companies and the regulators and they're disguised as good for you, and they have absolute control over your money. Which is why, you know, when, you know, recently we've seen in Turkey a crisis with the currency. I don't think they had a queuing up at the ATMs, but certainly five years ago in Cyprus, there was a instance where they tried to do a haircut on people's bank account. And people literally went out and queued up in front of the ATMs to get their money out. Because when your money is with banks, when things go well, no problem, they give you some measly interest rate. But when the shit hits the fan, so to speak, you know, there's a mad rush to get your money out. How many of you have seen controls on your money and bank accounts? I recently, you know, in Las Vegas, I came here, I gamble a little bit and I realized that my bank only allows me to withdraw $500 a day through the ATM. If you try to raise a limit. I call my bank to raise a limit, the most they'll do is $1,000. And they just won't let you withdraw more for my own good, right? So they disguise it as for my own good. And then when I travel to out of state, they even block my ATM cards. Like, hey, you're not supposed to be here. You're in California, you're in Nevada. Why are you traveling around so fast? So I don't know if that's happened to some of you. It turns out that even with cash, what you think of cash, the banks have control. So some people think, oh, I get the cash out now I have control of my own money. Not so fast. If any of you are from India, you remember two years ago they just declared the banknotes no longer valid. They just barely gave 24 hours notice. The 5001000 rupee note on the bottom right hand corner, it was declared invalid and you had to, you know, however many days to return it. And it's not just countries like India, but even European countries, anyone from the uk, from British people, they cancelled your five pound note, did you know that? The old version, that's not the plastic kind, the paper kind, they just canceled it and they're going to do the same with a ten pound note. So of course historically we saw this happen with, you know, post war Germany, all the old deutsche marks were all wiped out. And of course hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, now we're seeing it in Turkey, I should update my slides. And of course India very recently as well. So they control, you might have the paper money, but the value of it is purely controlled by the central Bank. And here's the teaser, the brain teaser. Is there fiat money banknote that will actually never depreciate in value? What do you think? Is there such a thing? Any Europeans here? I love Europe because the ecb, the European Central bank, got it right. I was in Europe earlier this year and I found a banknote that actually is a holy grail of banknotes. It will never depreciate in value. Now, I'm not Talking about the $500 bank, the euro, right? Any of you have the €500 euro that has a lot of value, but that even, that is depreciating. Every year they even think about eliminating the 500, your euro banknote. But the one that will not depreciate is this one. It's also purple in color. It's the zero euro banknote. And I have one, I got mine in Monaco because this is a true note, because it really does say what this will go to, which is zero. So if you have a chance, you can buy one of these and at least you know it's not going to go below zero euros, you know, so our future, I talk about freedom of money, but our future is about having that freedom back in our control. Of course, we know we're in the digital age, the age of the Internet, you know, Iot, artificial intelligence, all the buzzwords. But what's really passionate, what I'm really passionate about is cryptocurrency, digital assets, okay? For the first 20 years of the Internet revolution, it's been about communications, about applications, and most recently about mobile apps, and eventually about AI, Internet of things and all that. But what's happened in the background, you know, in this crypto industry in the last 10 years is the emergence of digital assets, the invention of digital assets. And for the first time, what we're saying is that mathematics we can trust. In math. We don't have to lay our trust in banking systems, in countries, in central banks, in paper money or plastic money. We don't have to trust dead people on pieces of paper that hold your value for you. And different countries in the world are going through this crisis, whether it's Germany, India, whether it's Zimbabwe, now most recently in Turkey, and hopefully, knock on wood, it won't happen in the United States or China or Europe. But we just don't know because in the end, if someone screws up, it could all go down. Now we're trusting mathematics. What we're saying here is the algorithms, the fact that simple equations like one plus one equals two, I believe that Mathematics will hold up for much, much longer, forever, if you will, than any single country or government, than any single central bank or any single regulator or printing of banknotes or even digital money. And what this means is that with the notion of private keys in crypto, cryptography and encryption and hashes and all that is now the information in the private keys and that's the ownership. So by holding private keys, by owning your Bitcoin, you hold the private keys now you have full ownership of your digital assets without resorting to anyone else. And this is the insight, this is the breakthrough of crypto. So, you know, I'm a little bit conservative. It's not about the trading, it's not about the speculation or the tokens. For me, the bitcoin revolution, the crypto revolution, has been about the first freedom of money. Having that freedom to control that information myself. Sure, we could still lose it, but at least now I have a choice. We have a choice to get stuck on this slide. Okay, so this is what freedom of money is. So when I say freedom of money, it's like freedom of speech. Freedom of speech allows us to say what we want to say, freedom of ownership. And freedom of money is the notion that for the first time, I can actually own large amounts of assets. In the old days, the only things I can really own are the things I can carry with me. The jacket, the watch, you know, whatever is in my wallet. But most of everything else is held by third party custodians and institutions. But with crypto, whether it's a USB drive or a brain wallet, I can memorize it, I can truly own the assets and I can truly own the money. Because my bank card, whether it's a credit card, you know, or whether it's a Wells Fargo bank account, the money in here, I nominally own it, but when things go bad, they won't let me withdraw more than $500 a day. Right. Or when the bank is closed on Sunday, things like that. So we've had freedom of money since 2009. We're in the 10th year now. This is quite amazing, imagining being in the 10th year of the invention of the computer or the invention of the Internet, very, very early. That's why you don't see the impact yet. And of course, bitcoin is a true representation of freedom of money. We know some of the features having limits of 21 million. And again, it's only with bitcoin, for the first time, with a digital asset, we can have an upper cap on the limit. Okay, this is not to be taken lightly at all. It's based on information and math. We talked about how we can have a true trust, information and math forever. And of course it's borderless and global. And this is really significant. I'm giving a speech in Las Vegas, we're speaking English. But this concept of freedom of money, the concept of digital private keys is applicable anywhere in the world, across all geographic country boundaries, across all languages and culture barriers, even across age groups, right? I joke about I have three dogs at home. I joke that I can even give my dogs each a bitcoin account and they can start saving for retirement. But the reality is that in the traditional human society with banking, you know, they have rules about who could get bank accounts. You have to be over 18 and so, and so, and so. So this is truly global and borderless. And it's not identity based. This is the killer. Many people don't realize that, you know, bankers and traditional people like they, oh, they dis Bitcoin because of the pseudo anonymous aspect. It's not tied to identity. But I say it's a good thing because you know who really wants identity. Think about how you got here. You most likely took an airplane. These days in society, even airplanes, your tickets are tied to your identity. But as soon as someone is, as soon as something of value is tied to your identity, you've lost all control over it. If I hand you a piece of chocolate, once you take it, it's yours. You could eat it, you could keep it, you could throw it away, it's truly yours. But if I hand you an airline ticket, it's not really yours. Because if the name was wrong, you might not be able to fly. Or if you're on the no fly list, then you might not be able to fly. So airlines do all these crazy things, they can bump you off the seat and all that stuff. So the point is, anything that's tied to your identity is not really yours. So we have to wake up to that fact. That's why bitcoin is something that's truly yours. And for the same reason it cannot be tied to your identity. Because as long as something is tied to your identity, there has to be a third party person to verify and to agree that you are who you are. That's what I mean by no third party control. Okay, for bitcoin, okay, let's continue. So with information, now we're talking about private keys and public keys, okay? And this is really freedom. Just like you can send me money on the upper left corner if you Scan that QR code. That's my Bitcoin address. Starts with 193h, ends in EZ ES. So feel free to take out your wallets and just send Bitcoin to the address. But it's actually a communal address because I've also revealed to you my private key for that account. And it's my way to share. In fact, I'm going to share with you $100. Who would like that? Would you like $100, anyone? Yeah. So why don't you stop clapping and scan that bottom right hand QR code. So in there you'll find $100 right there. So truly, with information, we can give money. And I'm giving you real life example. You can receive money and give money to anyone in the world through the means of digital communication. So whether it's fundraising, whether it's natural disasters, Red Cross, you can fundraise by having QR codes. We can send Bitcoin all over the world in whatever currencies they want, or you can send money out and share it with the rest of the world as well, just like I've done over here. Okay, so anyone got the money yet? Anyone here? Any techies here? Yes. No? You got it? Yeah, maybe. Okay, you gotta hurry. Okay, so once I click, it's gone. Well, it's not cooperating. All right, come on. Okay, there's a password. Okay, there you go. So Bitcoin is money in the cloud, and it's the ultimate hard currency. I was born, I grew up in Africa, in West Africa, Ivory Coast. People don't believe that. Actually, it's true. I'm the first Chinese, African American. So in Africa, money was hard to come by. And there's always a flight to hard, hard currencies like the US dollar and so on. And even in China, where I live now, there's a currency movement. Chinese renminbi is losing value. So there's a flight to the US dollar. But even better than the US dollar is actually Bitcoin. I know it's been going down last few weeks, but if you think long and hard about this, Bitcoin really is the ultimate hard currency. Because it's at no one's mercy in terms of the control of the currency. Not about the value, but the control of the currency. Okay, so it's just information. This is the amazing part, right? For the first time, your digital assets cannot be confiscated. Now, information can be copied, but cannot be confiscated. Does that make sense? Because once you know it, you can know it. Now, you could choose to Forget it. Or you might make the mistake of forgetting it, but no one can pry it away from you. Whether, maybe if you lose a USB drive, you can have a backup of it for the first time in society. Because in the past, if you talk to your grandparents, whatever country you're from, your parents and grandparents, they've seen episodes where things were confiscated from them. Whether it's gold bars, whether it's books and so on and so forth. But for digital assets, for the first time, you and your children and grandchildren can have real assets identity, it's used for fraud. We have pyramid schemes, hacking, security risks, ICO regulation, taxation issues, corruption and graft, speculative trading, market crashes, and of course it competes with government crypto. So for a variety of reasons, for dozens and dozens of reasons, governments are all against the success of crypto. And I don't blame them because this is the true competition for their government backed money. I think a generation from now, our kids, when they grow up, the notion of government issued money, it's gonna seem ludicrous. Okay, so we will see a coming war on freedom and it's gonna start with war on cash. So when people and governments and companies take away your ability to use cash, when they forced you to use money that's locked up in other institutions, that's a dangerous sign. They, they're stripping away your power. So for example, if Best Buy no longer takes cash, they only allow allow you to use their gift cards. That's a bad sign. Or if Best Buy, if you work for Best Buy, they only allow you to take your salary in Best Buy gift cards. That's also a bad sign. So the global pattern is to suppress Bitcoin by regulating exchanges, banning banks from transfer money, controlling ICO token issuance, of course, requiring proof of funds when you send money, and KYC compliance and limiting transfers. And the scariest story about this is that in China, people still do OTC transactions, buying and selling Bitcoins. What they're doing now is that when they suspect you're trading crypto, the banks will freeze your bank account. So if you had $10,000 being sent to your bank account, they suspect it's a crypto transaction. They'll freeze the whole account without due process. And it's really, really scary. This puts a whole chill on banking transactions. And it's bad. But I smile because what they're doing is precisely what's gonna kill them, right? When they do things like freezing your bank accounts without due process, it'll encourage more and more people to use crypto and Trust banks less and less. Okay, so a lot of FUD being created. All right. Finally, governments worldwide will do more and more to suppress Bitcoin. We know that already. But the great news is bitcoin and crypto was designed to survive with the decentralized aspect. So why do prices keep going up? Very popular question. That was a few months ago, last year. But why do prices keep going down? Now, that's the more relevant question. But the reality is it's. Bitcoin's value does not come from the acceptance or endorsement or regulation by governments. Rather, it comes from the failures, limitations, and inconveniences of the competition, which is the fiat money system. Okay, so how many of you trade crypto here? Anyone? Make mistakes and lose money? Yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna share with you, just for fun, how to hold invest in bitcoin. The top mistakes. Okay, so some mistakes to avoid. Okay. So if you have the guts, hold through this down market. Are you ready? So by applause, we're gonna see how many of you have made these mistakes. Are you guys ready? Top four mistakes for crypto. Number one, indecisiveness to make the investment to buy Bitcoin in the first place. Any of you? Yeah. So now is always a good time. Okay. It's only $6,000. When I come back next time in a few years, there will be much more. And number two is not buying enough. Have you made that mistake? Not buying enough? Oh, that's the biggest mistake I've made. Okay. And number three is selling after just a small gain, maybe like 100%, 200% gain, and you sell and it's like, oh, my gosh, shouldn't have sold back then when it was $200. Okay. And then, of course, selling after panic, crash. And this is a mistake. If you haven't made that yet, you might risk making it now. In this down market, it's very easy to make this mistake. Okay, all right, so I'm out of time. Freedom of money. So real freedom requires real control of your own money. And the concept is that as society matures, I hope all of us can go out and spread the gospel that we as free members of society, when we appoint our own governments, we really want to retain the freedom of control because we're mature professionals, mature citizens. We deserve the right to have the freedom of our own money in our own control. Okay, thank you very much. Please add me on. Please follow me on Twitter. Let's have a huge round of applause for Bobby Lee. Thank you, Bobby. Next we have a Panel Law is the How Proper Regulatory Development Can Lead Us to the Blockchain Future. Your moderator is Naeem Aslam, CMA at ThinkMarket, columnist at Forbes, guest lecturer at the London School of Economics. Please welcome Naim. Next we have Julian Ziegelman, angel investor, founding partner at TMT Blockchain Fund, multiple super lawyer award winner. Please welcome, welcome Julian. Cal Evans, founder of Gresham International, board member of the British Blockchain Association. Please welcome Cal. Gianluca Masani Rosati, founder and CEO of Escriba, best selling author, tax accounting expert. Please welcome Gianluca. Andrew Rosso, attorney, adjunct law professor, media consultant for abc, Fox and NBC. Please welcome Andrew and Leslie Katz, shareholder, Greenberg Targaryen LLP Multiple Tech and Business award winner. Please welcome Leslie. Thank you. Please be seated. Good afternoon. This is the first time for me in Vegas. I'm very excited. So we're going to keep it short, right? So we can enjoy all of us. But let me start with a brief intro about myself. I work as a chief market analyst. I come from a traditional hedge fund background as a hedge fund trader for bank of New York Mellon. I write for Forbes and also a regular guest with a tier one media such as cnbc. So starting with an intro, Gillian, please briefly describe yourself. What do you do, how you are involved in this space and most importantly, how enthusiastic are you about the space? Absolutely. Well, one thing I don't do is I don't wear a suit. And I almost put to shame here by such a good looking crowd. I should have come with the shoes, right? Exactly. So I first got into the space in 2014 and actually was very, very endearing and not coincidental that one of the first speeches I heard about the crypto space in 2014 was actually by Bobby Lee at Litecoin. And I think he was just launching that whole, that whole cryptocurrency movement at that time. I got into cryptocurrency as a practicing attorney, which I did for about 15 years. And I transitioned to being a venture capitalist and a general partner at TMT Blockchain Fund, which is a second fund from our family of funds that invest in blockchain technologies. And our first fund trades on the London Stock Exchange. And I'm very enthusiastic about the space. And by space I mean blockchain technology. As a technology which has many facets, cryptocurrencies is just one of them, which as we all know, is not doing that great. Hi guys. So I started life as an attorney. I practiced in the uk, helping corporations become compliant internationally I then worked in the United States, New York and California doing the same thing in the tech world. The minute I heard about cryptocurrencies, I fell in love with it. Any of you want to hear the story of how I was drunkenly at a party and fell over somebody's mining rig in their garage? I'd be more than happy to share it with you. Fell in love with it instantly and focused my work around it. Really proud of what kind of I and the team at Gresham have achieved now. We're one of the few firms that are recognized by the SEC as a compliance firm. We work with the bank of England, the European Parliament, the Government of Estonia, government of the Dubai. I personally write for the guys at Cointelegraph, Crypto, Slate and some other publications as well. Although there's some great authors on this panel as well. So really excited about the space. Love where we are. I always take the approach of its realistic solutions for new problems that we're facing. And yeah, really taking, taking a lead in things. Thank you. Hello. Hi everybody and welcome for being here today. I'm Gianluca Massin Rosati. I've been an entrepreneur for the last 15 years and I've written some books regarding taxes and especially how to save money on taxes, of course, 100% legally. I've got several companies in several industries, traditional industries, and one, the most important one is an accountancy firm in Italy with more than 30 accountants and 10,000 customers. Last year I founded Scriba. That is an AI and a protocol that writes accounts into the blockchain. So the aim is to bring transparency and accountability to this space because I think that is something that we lack here and we are trying to work with regulators. We have institution like European Parliament or United nations to change for the better this world. Hi everybody. My name is Andrew Rosso. I'm a full time practicing attorney. I consider myself a millennial attorney. I'm 28. I grew up with this technology. I'm passionate about it. And specifically with this space being the blockchain area, how law technology affects our generation, how it affects how we use social media and communicate and most of all our business ventures. This path has taken me to write for the local bar associations. I work with several media networks like ABC and Fox. I write for Forbes and a bunch of other cryptocurrency publications like Blockchain magazine and Grit Daily. And. And I appreciate the opportunity to be here and I look forward to a wonderful discussion with my fellow panel members.

Hi, I'm Leslie Katz.

I'm also currently a full time attorney.

But in a prior iteration I was a politician. So I have a passion for the intersection of technology and policy and really put forward a lot of legislation with respect to respect to advancing the technology industry. So I really started getting into blockchain a few years ago.

A client came to me wanting to.

Do an ICO and as I started digging into it, just got so excited.

About it really being the intersection of.

Everything I'm passionate about, emerging technologies, being creative, being able to do social, have social impact, policy. And as a lawyer, I have to confess many of our days are not all that interesting. But being in the blockchain space is fascinating with so many different issues coming.

Up and really all the creative challenges that we have.

I met a firm, Greenberg TRG, where we have over 2,000 attorneys worldwide, about.

38 offices, and we now have over.

80 attorneys that are part of our blockchain task force. So I'm one of the original founders of the task force and part of.

Our sort of executive leadership for that group.

But I often joke that my role is as a concierge for our clients and I can go to my colleague who is a former FinCEN enforcer or somebody who used to work at the SEC and get some good insights as we help our clients navigate some of my the issues I've worked on. I joke. I've been at the beginning, the middle and the end where we've helped launch ICOs. I did a reverse ICO where another firm had launched them and made a few mistakes so we had to fix it and others that are coming in at the very end. So even those that unfortunately have been subject to investigation from the sec.

So it's been exciting to see all.

The different aspects in the industry and.

Looking forward to being part of the panel. Thank you. The SEC subject is really interesting because I do speak at the European headquarters talking about the blockchain and the observative form. And this is the topic which is always there that, okay, the SEC is too strict or the Europeans are going to take the lead in terms of arbitrage of this jurisdiction. So Carl, let me start with you because given that you have done something on that, do you think there is a real arbitrage of jurisdiction? Like for companies, we could be seeing so many entrepreneurs sitting here and then they are confused, as always, where they're going to go with respect to their ico, should they go to do their ICO within states or whether they should go over somewhere in Europe and what different Jurisdiction they should choose. Yeah, great question. And I've heard you speaking at the European Parliament, by the way. I advise anybody to listen to it. It's fantastic. The situation is this, guys. The question that we're always asked is what's the best jurisdiction to conduct your ICO from your post cryptocurrency operations, or perhaps even your blockchain activities, funds, etc. And the answer I always give is this. If somebody ever recommends one jurisdiction to you, I want you to walk out the room because it's not the right answer. The actual answer to that question is multi layered. It depends on a number of things. How much money you want to raise, who you want to own the company, whether you've already got any seed investment, whether you want to register as a security. We've now seen an evolution from the days of, oh, you should just pick this jurisdiction and then fundamentally run everything from there to go back to the arbitrage point, I think that's huge. Last week we saw information come out of the European Parliament where they were talking about putting caps on the amount of money that ICOs can raise. Many people are seeing this as a step backwards, but actually it's quite an organic step. The European structure and the US structure are actually inherently similar. It's almost like a federalized nature. There's a top layer protocol of governing bodies and jurisdiction that's written, that's then filtered down onto state level with various bodies looking after it. What that effectively means is this. It doesn't really matter what happens at a state level. So to a degree, it doesn't matter what the state of California does, or the country of Malta does, or even Estonia. What matters is what happens at that federal level. Because these guys can come in, they can pull the rug out and they can take everything away. Now, what we've typically seen historically with legislation is that it starts at the top and it works its way down. But in this instance, we're actually seeing the smaller bodies taking the lead and creating things and it's actually working its way up. And that is what is creating the indecision, that is what is fueling the arbitrage. Because everybody is almost taking a wait and see approach and they're keen to find out what's happening in different jurisdictions. And this is inherently driven by the public opinion and the government opinion of what is happening in that particular jurisdiction. Take the us, take the eu. They are driven by wanting to be financial hubs. But then, of course, nobody's looking at the other horses in the, the Race. There are countries in Asia and the Middle east that are pioneering crypto legislation that's already being pushed through. There are also others banning it as well. So let me ask you this, Leslie. Maybe perhaps if you wanted to weigh in here. Of course US is the biggest market when it comes to stock market or the normal derivative market. Right. Is it possible that everyone is just in a wait and see game and then once the SEC says yes, this arbitrage of jurisdiction would end right there and everyone would think, look, US is the biggest market, we're just gonna go and we're gonna raise money out of there. Do you think there is a possibility of that? What are your views on it?

I think it's gotten too far to come back to that.

I think so much is happening all around the world. I often feel like the US Needs.

To figure this out sooner rather than later. We're really fall too far behind and a lot of the talent and creativity is just going to migrate away and.

It'Ll be hard to bring it back.

That being said, certainly most people view.

A large share of the investors are.

In the US or they're going to want to figure out how to comply and get funding from the US But.

I think if you look at a.

Lot of the countries, and Cal just.

Mentioned several others, they follow fairly similar regulatory scheme. So eventually I think they'll be the.

US will figure it out. Hopefully for all of us there'll be a little bit more clarity coming down the pike. I guess I'm the optimist. I think it will happen probably sooner rather than later. And I've spoken to some of the.

Folks in the decision making roles and they get it.

They're now realizing that they've got to start doing something.

They can't just sort of sit back.

And try to figure it out. And you're seeing government, at least in the US move faster than it usually does. But do I think it'll all come to the U.S. i would doubt it at this juncture. There's just so much happening all around the world now. But there might be a little bit more coalescing as to where more will be happening or which specific jurisdictions it'll happen in.

I completely concur. Because even within Europe, are there any people who are actually holding ICOs in Europe or they have registered their ICOs in Europe? Not many people. Even within Europe you have smaller economies like Malta, Gibraltar taking the lead. Right. But the bigger countries such as France, Germany, we do not hear anything from these guys. Right. An example of that would be ecb. Right, ecb. We all know European Central bank pretty much does what the Germany wants to do. Now, Germany has taken a seat back. Germany hasn't said that. Okay, hey, all of you guys come here and let's start doing the ICO here. But the smaller countries like Gibraltar and Malta, they're doing a lot of thing. So, Angie, what are your views? What do you think that your thoughts around this? You know, I think when it comes to this space, I think you have an entirely new. And again, I'm going to bring in the millennial aspect to it. You have an entirely new background and demographic of people that are coming into this with different mindsets, different ideas, different styles of where they see this space going. And I think it's very hard in a lot of ways to kind of pinpoint where it's going, because whether you're in the technology sector or in real estate or whatever market you're in, there's always going to be a kind of an alternative pathway and a better location, a better market for you to be in. If I can just jump in on it, because I think it's also important to distinguish the ICO process, right, which has also changed drastically if you look at the past two years, and drastically in terms of legal structure, financial terms, the way the deals are done, the profile of the investors and the underlying business. Because I think a lot of people pay a lot of attention to legal mechanics, which is important. But when you really dig into the depth of it, the underlying infrastructure, the banks, the venture capital funds, the brokers, the market makers, etc. They're pretty much jurisdiction agnostic. Because if you think about it, you still have to deal with your end user and investor. And what a lot of folks heading into this process doesn't realize that it's not an automatic pass. So you could be a Maltese company, and Malta has beautiful legislation on distributed ledger technologies, and so does Gibraltar, and so did Singapore. But what happens then is you may have a user in United States or Canada, Australia, you may be working with a cryptocurrency exchange that is licensed in one jurisdiction but not licensed in another. And that's when I think, as Leslie was saying and my colleagues were saying, it becomes a very multi jurisdictional issue. And some folks realize that jurisdiction does not matter because if their biggest market is only the U.S. they have to be compliant in the U.S. and oftentimes they come back and work through a U.S. company. And sometimes they say no to an ICO because it just doesn't work for Their business. So, Julian, you're an angel investor. I'm actually a GP with a fundamental. Used to be, yeah. But I still angel invest as well. Right. So let's say that if there is a country like Liechtenstein or smaller country like Malta, they come up with the legislation and you are an investor. Right. So I'm investing into it. But then there is a country within the European Union or like the SEC over in the, in the, in the U.S. they say, you know what ABC country, because it's a small country, we gotta stop them. And this legislation is no longer in play and you have invested a lot of money in that particular firm. So what would you do? So it's a great question, A very good hypothetical which would have never happened because we would not have invested in that kind of company in that type of jurisdiction. So one of the things we do, which I think, which is to me, we're coming from a traditional venture capital background before the blockchain world. The past four years are just insanely. It's like going to Disneyland because some things happen that could have never happened before, like my colleagues were saying. So, for example, legal due diligence in a lot of the token sale deals is non existent. A lot of the deals are still like a handshake. And you know, you stare in the founder's eyes and you say, okay, I believe you. And now we don't do a lot of those deals. But I personally have done it right, because my risk profile and the check size is smaller, you know, and the fund is a different story. But jurisdictional risks and legal risks are a big, big factor when traditional funds look at a deal for that exact reason. So I think this is. Let me bring Gianluca, because you are one of those people who went out there in the bear market and you've been able to raise sufficient capital for your ico. Was this a challenge for you that what sort of a jurisdiction you picked even though your entire ICO is all about regulation and transparency? Yes, of course. What we are doing is in the same direction the regulators. So we are building a protocol and AI to bring transparency. So we will collaborate with the regulator. Something that I, that I'm seeing that is happening. And also so for us it's the same. We decided to choose a jurisdiction like Isle of Man. This is a small island close to uk. There is out of the eu. So the rules are quite straightforward and speaking with regulators is quite easy. And it was almost quite easy to incorporate the company and issue the tokens and run the ico. And at the same time, we have a sister company in the UK with that one, we are running the business. So the structure will have two companies. One company, tradesmany, that is a narrow man and it's outside the eu, so can just follow the rules there and it's quite easy to raise money there. And one other company in the UK that is an European country with a passport to trade with all the countries in Europe and of course in the rest of the world, and it works for us. Great. Angie, you specifically work on the cybersecurity side, right? And the hacks and everything around that is a major, major issue. Hence the all regulators are very sensitive to this. What do you think? What should be the stance around that? You know, I think it starts with just being smart. And it's as basic as the common sense for any business organization or even personal home security is make sure you're protected. You know, whether you're opening emails, clicking links. You know, it's the idea of not always believing what you read or see. You know, you have to ask the proper questions. You have to, you have to look at it as if it were a stock or something that's going to affect your financial future, your family's financial future. And I think in an age where you have all these different types of data breaches, people don't always expect it to happen to them. They see these stories on the news or to colleagues, but everyone believes that they are doing to an extent, at least a bare minimal amount of what's required. So when it comes to, you know, clients I've seen or other organizations that we advise, we always suggest having a data incident response policy, whether it's software, whether it's client data, and bringing in the cryptocurrency and digital assets, whether you're, you know, making a will or signing a contract, make sure your assets are protected. Because if you don't know what you have, how can you understand the ramifications of when something does happen? What do you do? I think when it comes to ICOs and regulations, price stability is one of the key factor. Right. Because whether you've done the ICO and it's all successful, you wanted to go and list the tokens and stuff. What are your views? Should the regulators, I mean, how far we are on this curve? So I want to talk about the US experience because I think a lot of the questions are being asked. You know, it's been two years, right. When 2018, the early ICOs started, if you don't count the outliers earlier. The wave started in 2016. And the theme is still that the regulators have not spoken. But to me, the regulators have spoken a long time ago. And in the US it's pretty clear that with very few exceptions, and this is not legal advice, I don't practice law anymore. But with very few exceptions, if you're selling a token before the network is live and your token passes a Howie test, it's a security. And for the past 75 years or longer, the SEC has come up with rules for everything. So you're talking about price stability. That's, I think, the thing that blows away the next frontier, which is a lesson, lack of compliant crypto exchanges. If you look at traditional securities markets in the US There are rules for everything. Insider trading, legal market making, daily volumes, price stability. If you're a public company and your stock jumps up or down by 20% without any perceived reasons, you are going to get a call, a friendly call from the SEC saying, hey, what's going on? Have you looked at Bloomberg Terminal this morning? The same is slowly happening right now in terms of enforcement, but will happen to the token market. And so I think one of the challenges for larger projects thinking about tokens and why larger raises have largely liquid tokens is because nobody wants to jump into the fire first and list with understanding that most likely 99 times out of 100, they're going to break the law in the U.S. but that's my opinion. Yeah, I think that's actually just to touch on that. A really good point, because what we speak about this jurisdictionally agnostic principle, and then we're kind of surprised when the regulators aren't jumping in and doing anything on the secondary market because the situation is this for the I, I'm pretty sure for the first time in human history, we have a completely agnostic secondary market in a tradable commodity, which means that the laws within your country country are kind of null and void to a degree. Because if you look, for example, let's take the US And Russia, there is no such law as insider trading in the Russian Federation. So if I'm not placing a trade within the United States, why would I not just go and place a trade on the exact same exchange in the Russian Federation? Leslie? I agree and I think one point.

That sort of glossed over, but just.

Sort of going back to we're talking about, I just want to make, we're talking about blockchain, and that's distinct from ICOs. And as we, you know, just going back a few moments ago, when we.

Were talking about adoption, we're seeing all the big players adopting blockchain. They may not be doing their own.

Ico, but pretty much, you know, it's a who's who of, you know, the.

Fortune 100 companies that are all in the blockchain space in some capacity. So then going back to your question.

About the secondary market, you know, it.

Really, you know, I agree with everything.

The others just said.

It's, you know, I think it really is agnostic.

Also.

I think the sec, we don't really necessarily want them to come out with new rules and new guidelines, but just guidance on how to conform and be.

Allowed to move forward.

You know, one of the problems as we look at regulations, you don't want it overly regulated in a way that creates a whole new construct.

So I think what the folks at.

The sec, the CFTC and other regulatory.

Bodies are doing is they're coming out.

With speeches, they're coming out with statements, they're coming out with a variety of different things that kind of dance around it. And, you know, from the enforcement side.

What we're seeing quite a bit of.

Is after they've started, for the companies.

That have received the subpoenas, they're trying.

To come up with guidelines for those.

Companies to be compliant.

Do they return money just to their.

US Investors or the US and their.

Foreign investors, do they register as a security, even if they came out with having been registered? So they're looking at all these guidelines in the form of examples as opposed to actually coming up with very hard and fast regulations.

But in terms of the secondary market.

I think that's we're going to see that play out on a more global basis.

Jayluke, your project, it's about working very much in line with what regulators want, because regulators want more transparency. So I believe that when you were at the European Parliament and then you did your presentation, what was the view? Do you think that that is going to continue and are we going to see more projects in this line and how did they receive that? Do you think the projects like these would bring more transparency? Sure. We are working very close to the European Parliament, and I met a member of the European Parliament a couple months ago. Yeah, a couple of months ago. And let him see what our AI and our protocol does. And of course, he started to understand immediately how our technology can improve the system and solve a lot of problems that they have in tracking the funds, for example, because the European government gives to European companies billions each year, but they lost this money. They don't know where this money is being spent. So as soon as the SEC saw our technology, he understood immediately that using this protocol they can solve this problem. And this problem could be applied also to ICOs, for example, because if we, all the companies that run ICOs is willing to adhere to this protocol and record all the transaction in the same place, all the regulators can see what they are doing with the money. And I think that one of the most important concern that the regulator have as in this moment is about the transparency and the way in which the money is being spent. So they are concerned about the loss of the money for the investors also because this market is not regulated. So the most part of the investors are common people, they are not professionals. And in this way the regulator wants not to lose money. So it's important. And regarding transparency, I think that one step forward will be done as soon as we will have wallet with a KYC and KYB process. So as soon as we have a wallet that has a name and a surname, in this way we can solve also the transparency problem that we have in this space. Thank you. So a very quick one before we open up the floor because I really want more questions to come from the audience to you. What's the best jurisdiction? Because right now it's more about the security tokens. So starting from perhaps from Leslie, what would be the best jurisdiction of your choice for security tokens?

Well, I agree with Cal that it's going to depend on the fact pattern before you pick a jurisdiction. You know, I think if you're going to come to the United States though, there is a pretty clear path on what you need to do to be compliant. And you often say to people it's not, you know, people get scared about having to do what you need to.

File to be compliant.

It might take a little bit longer than things were doing in 2017 where people just coming out with their ICOs. But the guidelines are there, doing a private placement memo or other things along those lines to lead up to being.

Compliant in the US it's not as onerous as people think it is.

It's going to save you a lot of time later. So even if you want to launch.

In the US There is a clear.

Path there and it saves you a lot of time and trouble later on. You can also go into different jurisdictions. You're seeing a lot of companies do some things in the US Others elsewhere.

We're going to see some hybrids. But could I pick one jurisdiction at this point?

Not necessarily. It really would probably depend on the company founders and all of that.

I suppose, Karlie, you're not going to pick any. Actually, I think the more important question now is where are you going to base your business from after your ICO is concluded? And how are you going to manage the orchestration of the funds that you raised in your ico, get them back into the company? Because the question now is not so much that we get asked, how do you raise money in the United States? That playbook has actually been laid out. The question is, if we choose to go for option B and not do it in the United States, how do we get money back into the United States? How do you then? Well, I'll send you my hourly rate and then we can have a conversation about that. And if I may real quick, you know, I think when it comes down to it, it's a case by case basis, and we're all learning this together and we're watching everyone make their move, good and bad. And, you know, I think it's just the answer is it depends. It depends on every step taken along the way and whether it's Mount Gox or whatever breach, whatever project, again, good or bad that comes our way. How people respond, how the consumers respond, how the SEC and these regulators are responding is something we all need to take into consideration when we are looking to invest or even write on this stuff. Thank you. So we really have a splendid pool of talents sitting here. I think I'm going to open the floor to the audience so have the chance to ask any questions. We have lawyers, we have entrepreneurs, and we have a specialist sitting in cybersecurity as well. So anyone has any questions? So I think I have to throw this. Can I just do one quick caveat?

We haven't even touched on some other areas, but as the area is maturing, we're starting to see other issues come up.

And as you mentioned, cybersecurity.

Recently, everyone had to implement gdpr, and.

So many companies didn't even realize, certainly.

Those in the US and elsewhere, that they would need to be compliant with the GDPR requirements, even if they thought.

They were based elsewhere.

And then you have trade secrets, which is now going to become huge. So there's all sorts of other ancillary.

Issues that can lead to a whole other panel. Thank you.

I just shouted. Oh, there's a microphone.

Yes.

Okay, I'm gonna be throwing this to someone else right after that. My quick question is to Karl. You touched a point very important about the second step, which is the exchanges and this market right today, even Though regulations were talking about crowdfunding and how important it is to protect the investor. We live in a world that high frequency trading is there, there. So inside information today can be easily, in nanoseconds, be passed in front. If you have a powerful computer. We're talking about the market that also doesn't close. So we have 24 hours trading. If it's news in China, we don't wait until 9am New York Times for the market to open. So the news are equal to everyone. If you're already awake in China or if it's 2 o' clock in the morning and you got to see that on telegram, not even a press release or something, you get pretty much inside information. Not only that, but all the arbitrage between the exchanges. So why are the regulators of most countries not really focusing on protecting the market that already exists?

That is a great country. That is a great question that. Thank you for that. You're very articulate. I always explain to people, and I think everybody on this stage will agree with me, there is a common misconception that we are going forward in time in terms of law and in terms of how we're interacting each other with cryptocurrencies. It's actually the opposite. We are going back in time. Think about it. What used to happen is we used to rely on gold, physical pieces of gold. Now a moment ago we were talking about what we were doing is we're transacting money. Money doesn't mean anything. Money is literally translates to an iou. And when we used to deal in just gold, there were so few laws around it because it was so much easier to maintain. If I have the gold in my hand, I know what I'm doing. If I tell you this gold is worth this much, it's worth this much. If it's worth this much in India and this much in London, in fact. And that was how the East India Traded Company became one of the largest companies on the planet because they arbitraged what gold was worth in the Middle east compared to what what it was worth in the North Americas. So what we are doing is we are going back in time and the laws for this have existed for literally before any of us were born, before this building was built and Vegas was even a big thing. So what we. So to go back to your question, the reason they're not doing anything is because actually they know to create regulation around this. They've tried it time and time and time and time again through history, and it's almost impossible. Because everybody has to be uniform and the world can't even agree on whether they should ban plastic straws or not. You know, they're not going to start agreeing on what they're going to do in terms of, you know, commodities trading. Thank you. We got 30 seconds for one more question, perhaps. Yes, please. I, I have another. I have a question. This is Jordan French. It's, it's really for the Hope all panel. First, appreciate you all being here, especially as attorneys. I want to pick up on Wall Street Journal's report in January regarding the raft of subpoenas that were sent out. We really even heard a lot about those subpoenas that went out from their Office of Enforcement to a number of entities that ICO'd. If, you know, can all of you update us on, you know, what you think is going through SEC enforcement's head right now and, or where they are in the timeline given where we all last left off publicly was those subpoenas. Guys, briefly, please. Well, if I could just jump very briefly. So I think it's important for those folks who don't, you know, don't have first knowledge with the process. A subpoena is really an informational request. So when a company got a subpoena, it doesn't mean that the SEC necessarily accused it of any wrong doing and simply means that the SEC had a request which the company does have to comply for to provide more information. My understanding, just from talking to a lot of people in the industry, talking to lawyers, talking to companies that had ICOs, is that the number is very large and there are two buckets. There is a bucket of the SEC believing that there was actual fraud and the bucket of SEC believing that, hey, guys, you really sold securities, you should not have done it. Nobody knew any better at the time. How can we fix this situation? How big each bucket is, I don't know because a lot of that stuff is confidential settlement negotiations, et cetera. But I'm sure Leslie will have a good update on that as well. I'll just.

Oh, I was just going to say that's absolutely right. One of the things to note that.

Most of the subpoenas that went out initially were voluntary.

To your point, they weren't necessarily opening up investigations. The SEC themselves even have said we'll.

Never be able to keep pace with.

The industry's understanding of this technology, but.

We'Re trying to get a handle on it.

So I think a lot of the subpoenas were just initially kind of fact finding. I mean, they picked out a few Those that were involved in fraud and those are the easy cases.

I think a lot of others they're.

Looking at advisors, are looking at lawyers, accountants and others that might have given advice that led some of these companies astray. And I know they are interested in some of that. But I think what they're going to try and do is come up with some more uniform guidelines and come out with some resolution for the companies that have received the subpoenas probably in the not too distant future. But I think it's really kind of.

Getting a handle on it and then.

Just figuring out how to create bring those that weren't involved in the fraudulent activities that might have just been misinformed or misguided, figure out how they're going.

To get into compliance.

Is it becoming broker dealers, Registering returning funds? All of the above. They've got a whole menu of options.

That will probably be spread about. Sure. Thank you. Just quickly, thanks for your question, Jordan. I was actually interviewed for that Wall Street Journal piece and we speak with the SEC quite frequently. And I just want to make clear that the SEC are always very vocal that they are not the bad guys. You can literally email them at fintechec.gov and ask them any question you want about your project about, you know, regulations, and they will try and come back to you with a realistic answer to help steer you. So thank you. Thank you so much. Please put your hands together for the wonderful panel. Thank you. Thank you to our panel. For law is the key how proper regulatory development can lead us to the blockchain future. Thank you. And now we have E Commerce Major Weekly addressing the issues from buying.com perspective. Joshua Dahany, Chief Strategy Officer@buying.com Please welcome. Joshua. Is this mic on? Oh, now it's on. All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Joshua Jahani. That's me. Photoshopped like crazy. And we're going to talk about E Commerce and major E commerce weaknesses. Now, when you talk about weaknesses, we're essentially going to be talking about problems. And I can't sit here and just talk about problems to you for 15 minutes. However long the speech is, I have to talk to you about the solution. So when I talk about how we're going to solve some of these weaknesses and some of these problems, I'm going to be speaking within the lens of the use case of buying.com so I'm the chief strategy officer of buying.com buying.com is an e commerce platform. We have some booths over there if you want to learn more about us. But mostly What I want to talk about today or at this moment is why E commerce has weaknesses and how we even begin to define those weaknesses within the eyes of the consumers, the suppliers, the vendors, and the various players within the ecosystem. When you think about E commerce, you don't often think about it being a industry ripe with issues. It's very easy for me to make the point that healthcare is broken. If you've ever tried to go to the doctor in the United States of America, you know that it's extremely painful. You're never able to get anything done. God forbid if you have health insurance. It's extremely, extremely cumbersome. But in E commerce, really, because of Amazon, because of large players, because of Alibaba, we've been privy to what's generally a nice customer experience. But that's provided at a tremendous loss for the company. And that becomes the first major weakness of new entrants to the e commerce market is this first major weakness is that it is incredibly expensive to actually provide a profitable, effective e commerce business solution. Unless you're Amazon, which has billions and billions of dollars to play with. And as a public equity stock doesn't even trade on EBITDA or profit, it just trades on revenue. So I got to figure out how to use this clicker. Next slide please, for ladies and gentlemen in the back. Thank you very much. So the first piece is how prevalent is this problem in E commerce? The E commerce market is $3 trillion today and it's going to grow to $4.5 trillion by 2021. Which means that the level of occurrence that these weaknesses that we're going to talk about for E commerce is extremely, extremely high. Because when you start talking about trillion dollar markets and this isn't like this is what the market is right now. This isn't what we think it is. This is, this isn't what it could be. This is the amount of money that's spent in E commerce today because as retail dies, we see more and more people moving on to digital conversion funnel platforms, digital commerce platforms, et cetera. And this market is only going to keep growing. And for the most part, new entrants into this market are having trouble. Enter essentially the buying.com solution, or rather enter the blockchain solution that buying.com is leveraging. Next slide please. To help disrupt this. Next slide please. So the two major problems that exist in E commerce right now because of its fragmented state is one, it is difficult to get low cost goods. If I sign into Alibaba right now and I try to Order whatever it is, some kind of widget, I'm going to have to order 10,000 in order to get the low cost that Alibaba offers me. And the reason that they're going to do that is obviously because as far as economies of scale go, thank you very much, we're not going to talk about Farron. But while they get that figured out, as far as economies of scale go, I don't need 10,000 widgets. I need one widget. So I'm going to have to pay a premium because of essentially the cost that it takes to distribute these widgets back. One slide, please. So the first step to solving this major weakness of essentially high cost goods for a retail consumer is aggregating orders from retail consumers like you and me and hitting minimum order quantities with large suppliers like Alibaba, like Amazon Wholesale, etc. So think about that for a second. So the first step to addressing this major weakness of E commerce, which is essentially high cost, is that you need to be able to take advantage of the basic economies of scale that have existed inside the E commerce industry for decades. You could even make the argument centuries and aggregate those orders in one consolidated platform. So that's the solution and that's how it meets the problem. And that's essentially what we're building inside buying.com now if you try to aggregate orders, Alibaba I'm sure has thought about this. I'm sure Jack Ma and the folks at Alibaba at some point sat down and they said, you know, if we could really aggregate orders, we could allow more consumers to come onto our platform and purchase from us. But the fact is that without a solution like blockchain, aggregating all of that data in a transparent, trust driven way becomes incredibly, incredibly expensive. And so for buying.com and for the people that are working with us as our partners, etc. Is that we are taking advantage of blockchain to mitigate that problem. So it's a classic use case of blockchain by hitting those minimum order quantity pieces. Now you say, hold on. Okay, so Joshua, I'm sold minimum order quantities. That makes sense. If I can get cheaper goods, then I could distribute those goods with a higher cost supply chain network, et cetera. But just me aggregating goods is not going to be sufficient enough for me to break in as a new entrant to the E commerce space. Now notice I'm using new entrant, which is Michael Porter's five forces, etc. I have to be able to get that product to the consumer. How am I gonna do that? How am I gonna aggregate all of these widgets that I just got for a really good cost? Because we use blockchain to aggregate the, the orders from all of us, us direct to consumer purchasers at this point and then get those to the people who want these, the people who want these widgets in New York City and Las Vegas, in California, etc. And that is where blockchain is a true native use case. Is that what we found out? That what our customers are asking us to do and essentially what we're building right now and is part of our MVP launching in September, is that we can allow people to tokenize latent space in their garage, in their home, in their living room, in maybe the living room or the room of someone that they want to leave. So you don't want them to stay at your house anymore, maybe the guest bedroom so that people won't stay and bother you. I live in New York City, so people are always coming and, and staying in my guest bedroom and it gets really annoying. So you can tokenize that latent space the exact same way that Uber Lyft, Airbnb, Outdoorsy. Has anyone heard about this company Outdoorsy, which allows you to rent out your rv, essentially these assets that we all own in our lives that have a tremendous amount of latent space and they're not used. So if you can tokenize that space, essentially applying certain parameters like square footage, certain parameters like location, all of a sudden I can say to the world, okay, fine, I got the cheap goods on Alibaba or whoever the supplier is, but now I'm storing these goods inside of my two bedroom apartment. So no one's going to come visit me in New York City inside of my, maybe it's a semi professional or micro professional warehouse in New Jersey, in California, et cetera. And then all of a sudden you've taken some native use cases of blockchain, applied them to getting buyers the lowest cost goods possible, and then applied a very natural business model that we've all seen with Uber, Airbnb, etc. Into allowing people to utilize this latent space. And that's essentially the vision is in supporting new entrants into the e commerce market. We're going to give them two things that they cannot get. A from any other company and B from any other technology. If you tried to build this 10 years ago, you have to build 100 different APIs and it would be extremely expensive and by the time even someone used your API, it would be out of date. You'd have to redo it and it would be crazy. We're going to give buyers and then therefore sellers middlemen in the E commerce value chain selling fast moving consumer goods. So these are non regulated consumer goods. We're going to give them low cost access and then we're going to give them a way to communicate that that low cost access good is available for distribution in a local network. And that's essentially what this slide is saying, is that there's E commerce storefronts for all retailers. We have a decentralized hyperlocal micro distribution and storage system. And then we have this direct to consumer pricing. We talked about that. And then E commerce on demand. Because now we're going to be able to say, hey, if you're storing whatever it is, you're storing paper towels, right? And you've got all of these paper towels, people know where those are. And because of the basic transparency of the way blockchain works. Next slide please. People are going to be able to go to those places much more quickly. So it's acid lite. It leverages this unused latent capacity. It creates a delivery network through the buy token. So we have our buy token and the buy token is needed to essentially gain access to this platform and essentially take advantage of these use cases that I'm talking about as a person who wants to buy and sell low cost goods to consumers, as this middle person, middle man, middle woman, between the warehouse and between the end consumer peer to peer last mile delivery and then faster build out of the global network. Because as business has taught us, acquiring fragmented markets with low barriers to entry is extremely expensive. It's extremely expensive because essentially you have to be first to market. So you have to acquire as much market share as possible. This is what Travis Kalanick did with Uber. Said he knew fundamentally there was no reason someone was going to use Uber and not Lyft. So what did he do? He broke all the laws. He went gung ho directly into those regions. He said, screw the laws, I'll just deal with it, I'll pay for the lawyers. But Uber has to be first to market here. Created a lot of PR problems for the guy. So, you know, that's something he's had to deal with and obviously he's dealing with right now in addition to the board at Uber. But that's the basic vision. Next slide please. As you look at some of these specifics of how people are going to be staking nodes, there's not enough time to get into how Technical. Our solution is. But as I said, we do have a booth here. So we're here. So if you're interested in the technology, definitely come talk to us. And we have a ton of information about this on our website because we really are thought leaders in the technology space around staking nodes and around how the buy token is going to work. But essentially you have your master node, your node A, micro distribution, delivery nodes, and then you essentially have your node B and node C. Next slide, please. There's something important I want to show you about. I made this point already with regards to Win, Win win, which is essentially just somewhat of a business buzzword. But the consumer has this app. So our app is launching in the store. MVP is going to be ready in September and then the app will be launching shortly thereafter. And then they're able to browse products. This is for the consumer. They're able to get access to low cost goods, but then also people who want to deliver the goods are able to get access to where the goods are, essentially leveraging latent warehouse capability by people in the E commerce ecosystem. Next slide, please. And then the problems we solve. Next slide, please. So data transparency, yes or no. Does blockchain solve that? Yes. I hope we all were aware of this, right? That's the biggest value add of blockchain. That's just a native technology. The sharing economy. So this gets into sharing economy, about sharing my warehousing or my storage space with other people who are delivering the goods that I'm storing using the buy token. Next slide, please. Chargebacks. And then E commerce on demand. I don't know if I would describe it as a weakness for E commerce, but certainly one of the needs in E commerce is faster E commerce and Amazon is providing this. They're working very hard. This is why they're investing in drones, et cetera. But to invest in drones, to invest in autonomous vehicles, Uber would argue that they're in this space. Uber would say we're in the transportation space. Taxi is just the first use case. So there's a lot of big players coming at this space. We don't see ourselves as competing with an Amazon or an Uber or anything like that. But we essentially have these features of Genesis and ideeliver that allows people to utilize this infrastructure and do what we call it fmcg, fast moving consumer goods so they can be ordered off the buying.com app. Does anyone here use Postmates? Similar to Postmates. Imagine Postmates with a larger ecosystem. And then Postmates people are essentially like freelancers. They can be employees. That's fine. Doesn't matter. Next slide please. Next slide please. We are an ERC20 token right now. We are going to fork off of Stellar and that's essentially for two basic reasons. Number one, Stellar was initially created for the banking industry and so it's very fast. And because of the speed of transaction, It'll essentially allow buying.com to scale much more rapidly. These check marks are essentially a competitive analysis between what Bitcoin uses with proof of work, the proof of stake model that's mostly used by Ethereum, et cetera, et cetera, and then the Stellar consensus protocols at the bottom which essentially has all of the green check marks. That's what this slide is supposed to say. So we've really thought about it and we've done the technology due diligence. Next slide please. We made the point about how it's low cost. We're talking about our traction which is about the completed MVP, the immediate growth opportunities. The business. Buying.com has about $4 million of assets already and it has positive revenue. We've grown through acquisition and then we have an extensive partner network with dropshipper.com and other E commerce players. Next slide please. Next slide please. We talked a lot about the roadmap. Next slide please. I want to show you the team. Next slide please. So this is us. You can see me. I'm the chief strategy officer with Gene Gabriel has exited over 10 different technology companies. Raghu Balla, one of the sharpest technology minds in the industry today is our CEO. So definitely come talk to us at our booth if you want to talk about this more. We're really interested in solving these problems and thank you very much for your time. Thank you Joshua. Everyone. Give him a huge round of applause. That was E Commerce Major weaknesses addressing the issues from buying.com perspective. Next. We have existing stablecoin models on a spectrum of decentralization and self sufficiency. Dmitry Sanchenko, founder of Ferron Stablecoin ex Goldman Stocks Financial Institutions Group please welcome Dmitry. Hi everyone. I'm really happy to be here. Now hold on. One second. Now before we get into stablecoins, let me just talk a little bit about what makes for good money. Now the classical answer to that question is that money needs to satisfy three key criteria. It needs to perform as a medium of exchange, as a store of value and as a unit of account. So how do existing cryptocurrencies measure up to that in terms of medium of exchange? We're basically talking about the ability to transact and existing protocols deliver that functionality, albeit imperfect. Basically, the issue here is scalability, but the good news is that the next generation of cryptocurrencies is promising to solve that problem. The situation is quite similar with respect to store value. Again, we already can securely store and retrieve our cryptocurrencies, and certain practical improvements are on the way. However, now we come to the question of the unit of account. It is linked directly to price stability. And here, arguably, cryptocurrencies are at their worst. We are entering the domain of monetary policy, and by definition, every cryptocurrency has one. The problem is that these policies are very basic and they obviously are failing at what they should be doing. So this is where stablecoins come in. Now, what is the function of stablecoins and why are they a big deal? Now, their first and primary use is as a transaction currency. Now, given price stability, a vendor no longer has to change their price tags twice a day or more. Generally, parties can enter into a long term contractual relationship without the fear that at any point in time, due to a swing in the reference price of their contract, value will be redistributed among them. And a contract that was profitable before will become unprofitable in a matter of weeks, if not overnight. Now, moving on from the question of commercial transactions, stablecoins will also form a basis for for the future decentralized financial industry. Again, we're talking about a stable reference currency, starting from the concept from other context of a lending contract and all the way to a complex financial derivative. What we don't want is to contend with a huge chunk of risk which at any point in time can swing value from one counterparty to another. Generally speaking, what we're trying to do is create a stable monetary base for the whole of the crypto economy. Now, the fiat equivalent of that row actually stands at US$40 trillion globally. Now, obviously I'm not saying cryptocurrency or stablecoin valuations will approach that number at any point in time, but whichever way you look at it, the opportunity is huge. So how do stablecoins work? There are three general categories of models. First, we have mechanisms that rely on fiat collateral. Now, how does that work? Basically, you take a bunch of fiat currency, you place it in escrow with a conventional financial institution, then what you do is you issue stablecoins in the same amount. And at the same time you institute a policy which says that anyone holding that stablecoin can go and claim a portion of that collateral at a fixed exchange rate. Now here, stability is basically based on the opportunity for direct arbitrage. This is absolutely the simplest way to deliver stability. But on the flip side, you're completely dependent on the institution that holds your collateral. Next, we have models that use crypto collateral. Now, on the surface, they look similar to the first model I just described. Basically, again, as I said, they use collateral and they do rely on arbitrage in order to achieve stability. But there is a key difference. Now, the asset that you're using as collateral is not the same asset that is your reference point for stability. Instead, what you have is one or several crypto assets which are in themselves volatile. Now, what that means for the mechanism is that in order for your monetary policy to function, you need to know how much your collateral is worth at any point in time. And this is where price feeds come in. Now, there are two types of price feeds. One is Oracle based, which is simply a centralized mechanism which takes information from a trusted source and delivers it into your blockchain. Now, the advantage of it is that the information will likely be accurate. On the flip side, if that centralized mechanism is compromised, stabilization is over. Your other option is a decentralized price feed, which basically takes a bunch of people and then economically incentivizes them to tell the truth about what they perceive the price level to be at various points in time. Now, superficially, it sounds like a simple thing to do. In reality, it is a hugely complicated game theoretic problem. And personally, I'm not aware of a fully fledged implemented game solution. Now, finally, we move into the domain of shelling point mechanisms. Shelling points, also known as focal points, are a very interesting idea. Now, to give you an example, say you put two people into separate rooms and give them both an identical sheet of paper on which you have a simple drawing of two lines intersecting, basically a cross. And then you give these people a task of guessing, or rather choosing, without communicating with each other, the same point on that sheet of paper. Now, the theory goes that most of the time people will choose the point where lines intersect because that is the uniquely identifiable point on that sheet of paper. Now, Schelling point models basically revolve around the idea that you can have price stability as the focal point of the system. Now, how does that work? Firstly, let me give you a tiny piece of theory which says that a change in price of your coin can be neutralized by a corresponding proportional change in coin supply. So in simple terms, say your price falls by 10%, and if you then shrink your money Supply again by 10%, coin price will eventually revert to the original level. Now, there are a number of ways to implement this mechanism. Probably the simplest one would be to have a dual coin system where you have a stable coin and a volatile coin, and then you pair them with some sort of a smart contract which receives price information from a price feed and then offers users to exchange stablecoin for volatile coin or the other way around in appropriate amounts. And thus it can either shrink or expand money supply. Now the critical thing here is that users will only engage in those trades if they believe that everybody else is going to do so. And that is the only way the system will work. And perhaps intuitively you can see how we're getting to the point where stability is becoming that very focal point I mentioned before. So everybody needs to believe in it, and that's the only way the system will perform. Now, it's a hugely, hugely elegant solution in my view. However, the problem here is that again, it's extremely difficult to implement. And you have the problem that if a chunk of your users, for any reason whatsoever, cease to believe in the system and start misbehaving again, stabilization is over. Now let's look at these models on the scale of decentralization and self sufficiency. First of all, we all know why decentralization is a desirable trait. Self sufficiency, on the other hand, is also hugely important for stablecoins. What do we mean by that? First of all, it's a question of using assets that you do not generate and thus do not control. These assets can either misbehave or they can fail. Also, it's a question of using price information from outside of your system. And again, that information can be compromised. And even if it is not, you are fundamentally playing second fiddle to some external asset which has its own volatility parameters and a set of its own problems, whatever they may be. So let's have a look at the chart. Into the bottom left corner. There we have mechanisms with fiat collateral. And here the question is very simple. You are effectively hostage to the institution that holds your money. So there is no self sufficiency or decentralization to speak of. Then we move into the center where we have four models. Each of these models has two components. One is a price feed and the other is an element which actually delivers stability. Now, price feeds are by definition not self sufficient because you are dealing with external information. But as you remember, they can either be decentralized or centralized. Now, oracles are your centralized solution and your crowds based feeds are decentralized. Then Reverting to the elements that actually provide stability. We have crypto collateral, which, if selected appropriately, can be decentralized, but it will always not, it will never rather be self sufficient, because again, you're dealing with external essence. And finally, you have shelling point solutions which are both decentralized and self sufficient, since all of the assets that these models employ are internally generated. Now this brings us to the Ferrum stabilization protocol on which we work. Actually, this is the first time we speak about it in a public forum. It is a model that, as far as we know, does not have a counterpoint in economic theory or practice. It involves a single internally generated asset and it does not rely in any way on price signals. So how does that work? Let's first look at demand for money. It can be split into two portions. One is speculative and the other is transactional. Now, transactional demand is basically coins you use every day, and we are not particularly concerned with them in this context. Now, speculative demand for money is what drives price volatility. It is coins that people use or hold in order to make a profit. Now, as things currently stand, these speculative coins are usually distributed across a huge number of consumer wallets, or they are held with crypto exchanges. Now, what we do is we introduce into that system a central bank which offers users a range of deposits with various maturities. Now, these deposits always pay a positive and critically riskless interest rate. Now what does that mean? If you are holding speculative coins and you are not at this point in time trying to actively sell them, then there's absolutely no reason for you not to place them on deposit and earn a riskless rate of return. Now, on a systemic level, what that means is that the central bank effectively hovers up the excess speculative liquidity from the system and places it into a single structure. Now, imagine there is a negative price event. So people basically want to sell their coin because they expect price to fall. Now what's going to happen? Before, you could just go and sell your coin, but now first you have to pull your deposit from the central bank. So essentially, central bank is receiving a signal which says that a certain person is willing to forego a riskless rate of return in order to receive their coin and do something else with it. Now, when those signals become numerous on a systemic level, it almost invariably means that the price expectation for the coin is falling. Now what does the central bank do? It does a very simple thing. It dramatically raises interest rates for a very short period of time in order to entice people to keep their coins on deposit or to attract more outside coins into the central bank. Now the consequence of that is that those coins are no longer going to hit the crypto exchanges and are no longer going to be offered for sale. Thus your price pressure is alleviated. So in very simple terms, where essentially the central bank essentially pays people not to sell their coins. And the critical thing is that it does it at the right time, in the right amount, and without in the long run printing too much money. Now just to briefly show you what that looks like on the chart. So above we have interest rates and below we have deposit flows. So let's say you have some negative event and people start pulling money from the central bank, it causes a spike in interest rates as I described. And on the right hand side you have the opposite situation where money is flowing into the central bank and it depresses interest rates. Now just to show you a similar snapshot from our testnet, again it's the very same situation. We are stress testing our central bank with significant random volatility which creates small spikes in the interest rate and a single discrete negative event where 1% of the whole money supply is withdrawn in one go in a very short period of time and causes a massive spike in rates beyond anything you would have ever seen in a fiat context, but for a very short period of time, which in turn disincentivizes people from pulling their money. Now the way to look at this perhaps is that we turn price volatility into interest rate volatility, which is in itself significantly less harmful for the economy. Now finally, let me just say a couple of words about what we're trying to do in general. We are trying to build a protocol which ultimately can become a basis for fully self sovereign money. Now again, that means we are not going to use external information. So currency pegs are out, we do not want to use external assets, so collateral is out. Hopefully we can avoid a governance layer because it carries with itself a lot of separate baggage. And finally, we're trying to build a protocol which is equitable in that owning a large chunk of the money supply does not confer on you any extraordinary economic advantages. So basically, this is us. Thank you very much. I'll take your questions if you have any. There is. Oh yeah, right. I used to work on the Wall street for several years and every time I see that there are attempts to somehow show technology or show mechanism for, I don't want to use the word pegging, but something that you do when there is a known technology, known algorithm, what happens in certain situations there are going to be people who would try to use it for the arbitrage opportunities and meaning that as long as you have more money than they, they do you, you're good. But as soon as they just start attacking you over and over again trying to arbitrage those spikes, what are you gonna do then? What is your idea? When you don't have just a natural forces working against you, what have the market participants who deliberately attack you and trying to exploit your known system? Thank you. Absolutely. It's a. Just keep it for the moment. I think you'll need to pass it on. It's a reasonable question. The question of attacks on this protocol from an economic perspective is a topic which can take a lot to explain. I will try and squeeze it into a short period of time. Basically, the protocol can fail in two ways. It can fail either to stabilize or it can print too much money in the long run. Now these are your essential attacks. The first point in terms of failing to stabilize can only occur if people cannot interact with the central bank, which is a question of the fundamental blockchain protocol rather than our economic model. So if we choose the right protocol, that scenario is basically out. Now there's the question of printing too much money, which is, by the way, the only consequence of the attack that you're describing. Now that is completely within the purview of the central bank. But let's look at it this way. When somebody attacks this protocol, and anybody can do that, no matter how much money you have, you can unilaterally provoke a higher interest rate. Obviously, if you have a huge chunk, the interest rate will shoot up. Now what happens then is first of all, everybody who is keeping deposits with the central bank is going to benefit from your attack, so they're going to earn the same rate as you. Moreover, there's a feature in this mechanism which says that as soon as your money starts affecting the interest rate, you cease to benefit from that increase. So essentially, when your deposit that you have withdrawn enters a zone where it starts pushing interest rates up, it keeps on earning the last interest rate that it saw before it entered that period of time. So essentially there are a number of features, and I'm truly running out of time, which work to ensure that these attacks are absolutely not profitable on a personal level. And in terms of simply aiming to destroy the system, it is hugely, hugely expensive beyond what it takes to do a 51% attack on a classic proof of work protocol. Thank you. One more. If anybody, I think we're good. Any More questions. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Dmitri Sinchenko. That was existing stablecoin models on a spectrum of decentralization and self sufficiency. Give it up for Dimitri. Next we have a panel providing freedom and transparency to mass media. Our moderator is Martine Paris, tech reporter for the fintech Times and blockchain gamer. The panelists will be Rachel Wolfson, blockchain journalist for Forbes and the Merkle, the Entrepreneur magazine's influential woman in blockchain. Welcome, Rachel. And then Jordan French, angel, angel investor, multimedia tech journalist and on the editorial staff@thestreet.com welcome, Jordan Christopher Green, founder of alternative media television and bitcoin rich media personality, featured on cnn, Fox News and Russia Today. Welcome, Christopher Avica Samatovic, media tech expert, co founder of the Further software and media house company, co founder of Blockchain. Guys, welcome Avica. RJ Smith, founder and CEO, CTO of Redpin, member board of directors at Messy Labs Global. Welcome, R.J. thank you, everyone.

Thank you. Hi, everyone, my name is Martine Paris. I'm a tech reporter at the fintech Times, blockchain gamer and Geekazine. And today we are talking about freedom and transparency in mass media. Panelists, tell me, what does that mean to you?

Rachel? Yeah, I mean, I think that in.

This industry you've really got to be selective about what you write about. And for me, the transparency there is.

I mean, I cover topics I'm interested.

In and I'm very passionate about the fact that I don't cover ICOs. I'm not interested in them, but I will cover topics that I'm interested in. And.

Yeah, I think. Yeah, I'm sorry, I actually meant to begin with RJ because RJ tell us a little bit about what you do and. Sure. I'm the CEO of a company called Redpen. We process and organize and summarize news and social media to capture what the world thinks about the news. And we really want to highlight reputation and bias in doing that. And so we think freeing information on the Internet starts with bringing accountability to the information and the flow of information. So where does content get created? Who are the people who are distributing that content? What's their reputations, what's their bias? And how do we hold them accountable? We think that technology like blockchain can change the way accountability on the Internet is actually going to move forward. I've said for years, when you come out to Las Vegas, what happens in Vegas stays on Facebook. The reality now with blockchain is when you store information on a Ledger, it's going to be there forever. And so we think that brings a level of accountability that's going to change the Internet. Great. Yeah.

So the reason why I said I wanted to start with RJ is because on our panel today we have traditional journalists. Rachel Scrum, Forbes and Jordan's from the street.

But Jordan also has an alternative media.

Venture as well as the rest of the guys on the panel. And so I think what we'll do.

Is we'll go backwards on the panel.

For this question because Vita, you have thoughts on this as well in terms of how blockchain is going to democratize.

News and free information? Yeah, my experience in building a global blockchain company like back in the days was game credits and similar and trying to define how critically important flow of information is between the company itself by bringing the vision out. Because what blockchain also brought, it brought a very narrow distinction between who is the audience, who is the community, communities in this case, direct investors. And in that sense the importance of articulating the right message. Definitely reputation management becomes crucial point in bringing the information out.

Tell us a little bit about your company.

So my two at the moment, my company is a blockchain guys. We are consulting company. We have a lot of experience in trying to define how the new economies will be built and where is this new space. And we are challenged by new frontiers and we love to be always on the front line. So it's basically consulting company. We try to to help people find themselves in the blockchain either by adoption, integration or building something new.

Great. And Christopher Green, so you have amtv as well as bitcoin. Rich, you're coming at this from somebody who's been in journalism for a while.

Can you tell us a little bit.

About your thoughts on how blockchain is going to revolutionize the news business and free information?

Yeah, well, I think it's revolutionizing things now. I've been in business for over 10 years and I started my platform AMTV Alternative Media Television from a bedroom. We've since grown it organically, virally, without spending a single dollar. These are two dollar bills by the way, in marketing ever. So it's completely organic. I am living proof of a voice that literally came out of nowhere as a result of the beauty of the Internet. Now things have changed so much. What you see and read online is now being dictated to the viewer. Let me give you an example. I put out over 10,000 videos over the last decade. We reached over 100 million views around the world. I have over 500,000 subscribers that tune in on a daily basis. We are not allowed to monetize any of our content because they do not like, a lot of the times, the color of our speech. We are not allowed by Facebook, Google to advertise cryptocurrency or blockchain videos because they've banned it. But at the same time, and we'll get into this, Facebook might very well buy Coinbase. There's speculation this is actually happening. If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg, for example, he's spending billions of dollars in blockchain tech, while at the same time they're censoring alternative voices. I also am the founder and creator of BitcoinRich.com, which is an online platform. It's an educational platform that evangelizes this technology to the world, which I really think is misunderstood. And I just don't think people get it. And so they need to learn about it. And my primary interest isn't making money, although I am an investor and those are some fringe benefits. It's great to participate in this revolution, but I'm a big believer in free speech. Everybody should have a voice in this country, should be able to speak without restriction. If you don't like my speech or his speech or her speech, that's a good thing. That's what free press is. I don't want to take up too much time, but there's an argument where people will say things like, these are private companies. No, they're not. They're front companies for the, uh. I've interviewed these people like Eric Schmidt, former chairman, board of directors of Alphabet. What does he do now? He is the chairman of the Department of Defense Innovation Board, working on top secret.