Interview with Dash CEO Ryan Taylor | Cointelegraph

Hello, Ryan. It is a pleasure to sit down with you. Thank you for joining us here at cointelegraph. First, I'd like to know what, when they hear your name, when they hear Dash and they hear Ryan, what do you think people should know about you?

Well, that's a very interesting question. First of all, thanks for having me. So I think when people think of me and what to know about me, it's that I got into digital currency and I got into DASH for, I think, the right reasons. And I really believe in the technology. I really want to see it be successful.

What's driving you to want this success for the industry?

Very early on, there are a lot of skeptics of the technology. And I can look at the technology and other people can look at the technology as this space grows and grows and recognize that offers tremendous value to society. And it offers tremendous value, particularly to people who are the most disaffected by society. People that live in countries that with low degrees of financial freedom, with very poor quality financial systems, including the currencies that they use, as well as the ability to open up entirely new marketplaces that couldn't exist with higher cost transaction methods. And so, as I look at the technology and the potential that is there, it's very clear that this will have a tremendous impact on the world. And so how can we, you know, make it usable and bring it to the people that are most disaffected by the current set of technologies and the current environment that they're in? And so I think that there aren't many opportunities in life where you have the right skill set, the right passion, the right opportunity to truly change the world. And I think that the world of cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets is one of those rare opportunities. And so I think that there's a lot of people that are here for the wrong reasons, which is they see money being made and they believe that they can carve out their piece. But I think that the community at DASH and the people that are working at DASH are truly passionate about the mission behind all of this and what can be done with the technology, what kind of improvements to society, what kind of gains in efficiency can be had.

So when they see and they hear the name Ryan from Dash, it is the. The one that's changing the world for the better through cryptocurrencies.

Look, I'm one guy, right? There is an entire team at Dash and there are a lot of other people working on other projects. The truth is, nobody knows which of these projects at this point is going to be successful. We have a belief at DASH that there are certain things that are needed to bring to the market before this can truly expand out to the masses.

And that's a very interesting point, and I'm going to get deeper into that with you. Because it's not just the payments, right? It's payments, it's acceptance, it's product, it's brand knowledge, it's product industry knowledge. What do you think are the major barriers to adoption for the majority of public to have cryptocurrency in the everyday life?

Well, I think that there are some adoption factors that apply to any new payment methodology, and then there are some that are specific to cryptocurrency. So for dash, we're focused a lot on the ones that are applicable to any new payment method because we really don't think that the first generation cryptocurrencies nailed those and they could be done in a much better way. I think that the first generation cryptocurrencies were designed by computer scientists and cryptographers and people that understand the tech, but they didn't necessarily understand the payment space. And so by taking payments industry best practices and applying them, we think that we can have much greater impact.

Do you think that taking some of the old payment industry's best practices could actually be a barrier to entry, to moving ahead? Are you guys looking at this as a new template and saying this is what our barriers to entry were, these were our roadblocks, and Dodd Frank, for example, et cetera, that, you know, were industry barriers. How are you approaching it?

So I think that these adoption factors are pretty universal across time and across technology. And for a consumer, those adoption factors are, number one, usability, number two, security, and number three, a switching incentive. You need to address at least two out of those three better than an alternative technology for a given market in order for a switch to occur. And when you evaluate against those three criteria and you evaluate first generation cryptocurrencies, they fail on all three. On the security front, which is the one that most people say, well, Bitcoin is incredibly secure. Well, it's incredibly secure for the recipient. Once it is in a. Once a transaction is in a block. But there's a couple of ifs there. One is for the consumer, it's not very secure at all. Once you pay for something, there's no recourse if they fail to deliver the goods or services. That is not a secure transaction. Like I said, it provides security for the merchant, but that's where security is Almost less important on the switching incentives, the consumer actually has to pay to use this technology that is competing with a credit card that will pay them with cash back or rewards. There isn't much of an incentive for consumers to adopt it. And then on usability, if you've ever sat someone down with no instructions whatsoever as to how to use a cryptocurrency, how to acquire it, how to use it, and how to use it to pay for something, there are a lot of barriers along the way, and there's a lot of points at which people fall out of that process and throw up their hands and say, I can't figure this out. And so if you improve on all three of those, you should see a higher conversion rate of consumers that get attracted to it, that actually make it through that process and actually have the incentives to try it and switch. And so we're working on all three on the consumer side, on the merchant side, there's a whole different set of adoption factors that are important, including ease of integration, including the security for them, the ability to participate in programs, the ability to attract new consumers. How do you actually bring a new consumer that otherwise wouldn't transact with you?

Are you helping in your plan with the B2, B2C play? Are you helping those businesses with a pool, a suite, a variety of services for them?

Well, we don't seek to operate the services directly. We seek to be the network. But we do want to bring an ecosystem of services to bear, whether those are compliance or exchanges, so that you can move in and out to fiat currency or other services like loyalty rewards offers, things that help drive consumer demand. And so we're working on all of those components. However, as a decentralized network, we don't necessarily seek to operate those ourselves in order to spur some of these things into existence. We may create reference implementations of some of these things potentially on our blockchain in order to, you know, have a first version of each of these services. But it's much better to have an ecosystem of competing services.

Your goal basically is to bring this to replace the credit card, to replace the banking industry in a general sense. What is your specific goal with dash, and what would you love to accomplish when I talk to you in about two years?

I know that the prevailing mantra in the cryptocurrency space is that cryptocurrency will replace banks, will replace the existing financial services system, will replace credit cards. And your mantra, in some places it may, and in other places it definitely won't. No payment method ever goes to the graveyard?

Absolutely.

We are still using the barter system.

We'Re still using checks.

We're still using checks. And there are some things that checks do really well that digital currency can't. So they will continue to exist. The question in my mind is where does cryptocurrency play best? What are the use cases that its unique attributes do better than any other payment method? Or what are the use cases where no other payment method serves that cryptocurrency can? What are the entirely new business models? What are the entirely new use cases?

So that passion, is that what drove you to leave the normal Wall street world? If you can just. Why would you leave such a great area, such a great industry at that time, right, for this unknown wild west?

Well, there were a lot of reasons, both personally philosophically as well as just practically opportunity based that I saw at the time. And look, there were pioneers way before I took that leap that were quitting their jobs and joining cryptocurrency space, launching businesses within cryptocurrency, launching coins. Coins.

You made your money on Wall Street. You made millionaire billionaire, zillionaire, thousandaire.

Well, I was working at a hedge fund and had been for a number of years. And prior to that I was a consultant at McKinsey for seven years, focused on financial services. So I had a comfortable position with.

Most people it look to achieve in life. This is where you were at that point.

Yeah. And so a lot of people thought it was very crazy that I'm both from my professional life as well as my personal life that I'm leaving an environment like that to go to a cryptocurrency startup that could afford to pay no more than, you know, $700 a month. And.

And you are well into the cushy, well off world of the McKinsey's, let's just say.

So I wasn't hurting, but I really did believe that this, when I evaluate the technology, I'm looking at it and saying this has the ability to revolutionize a lot of the payment space, not all of it. I'm not looking at it through rose colored glasses, but there is a real practical set of use cases here that it can carve out much bigger than a niche, but an actual substantial portion of the financial system eventually. And I want to be a part of that. I was looking for projects. Dash was very attractive to me because they were really doing a lot of innovative things. They were the first to market with the concept of a masternode and incentivizing more than just mining they were the first to introduce a Treasury system. And as I got more and more involved in Dash and in the community and working with the founder Evan Duffield, I realized that there were many more things that could be done with the masternode concept. You're essentially creating a private network run by these masternodes and a lot of those services can be consumer facing that solve a lot of these issues that were barriers for the cryptocurrencies that exist.

Did your founder, the co founder, your founders and co founders really pull you in? And we don't know a lot about your founders and the co founders. Could you what, tell me about them as well?

Yeah. So Evan Duffield basically, basically started DASH over a weekend. He forked Bitcoin's code base and made some changes to it.

Cryptographer by heart?

No. Well, he's a programmer by heart and has worked in a number of different industries and had been programming since he was 15 years old. He got the bug and saw that there were a lot of copycats of Bitcoin at the time. Most cryptocurrencies weren't doing anything really innovative. They were changing the output or they were changing the mining algorithm, but they weren't fundamentally playing with. Yeah, they weren't really challenging what a cryptocurrency could be. And he tried to get involved in that space and make suggestions. And what he found was he couldn't even get in touch with the main programmers that were responsible for integrating the code. They just weren't willing to talk, talk to community members like him. And maybe that was a capacity issue, maybe that was a lack of structure around it, but the fact remained he couldn't see his influence in the main project. So he decided to launch his own, mostly as an experiment to start, and it gained traction. He quit his job in order to focus on it and there were a number of others who were early investors in the COIN who quit their jobs as well and said, I'm going to make this and I like the team and I'm going to turn this into something. So there were far braver people than me earlier in the process that really took it forward to the point where I felt comfortable making that plunge.

Were you holding any coin before that decision, before you decided to make the giant plunge?

Had, yeah. So I got involved with Dash as far back as the spring of 2014, so very, very early on, and I liked what was happening and so I bought a small amount back then.

Were you in the community with it also? You were heavy into the Dash community or you were just playing around with.

I mostly was a reader at that point and over the summer switched to an active participant. I moved to Arizona in the summer of 2014 and the founder, Evan Duffield.

Happened to be there just randomly at asu.

I got involved in dash, not realizing that was where he was. And later on I found out, oh, this, this guy's in Arizona. I had family in Arizona and had personal reasons to move there. And so I moved there in the summer and I just reached out to him and I said, hey, would you want to grab a drink somewhere?

Is that why you guys, you're working with Arizona and the institution in Arizona State?

There are a lot of reasons we're working with Arizona State. One is certainly proximity. It helps being physically there and physically able to go and meet with the dean or the director of the program that we sponsor, meet with some of the students that we are providing scholarships for, for, et cetera. And so it benefits us being physically right there.

Were they in blockchain and crypto before you engage them? Was there a pool, a community bubbling, just waiting?

Oh, definitely. Especially among the student population. There were several groups that coexisted, focused on bitcoin or blockchain or cryptocurrency groups, and they eventually coalesced into a larger organization.

Did that add to your, you think, add to the swing at a certain time? Can you see the parallels to the price of DASH going up to that gelling of the relationships on the colleges on the college level?

Well, I think there were a lot of things happening all at the same time, so it's really tough to draw those correlations. What I can tell you is that Arizona State University is a top research institution in the United States. It's been voted three years in a row, the most innovative college by US News and World Report. And that's the only three years that they've had it. And they beat out Stanford and MIT at the number two, number three spot. So it is a place where new technologies are actually applied to society. And so that was something that was very attractive to us about it. And they're open to and looking at new technologies. And so when we sat down with them and explained what we were working on and how we might partner on research, on scholarships, on some of these other things, the partnership was very natural and went very quickly.

Are you going to replicate that with other universities, with maybe some of your partners and your ecosystem?

We're in talks with several other organizations, including non academic research groups.

Should an academic or non academic. Should they reach out to you.

Absolutely. So we co sponsor research with other groups and we're looking into some options there.

What's the. Do you have an initiative to fund those groups?

Well, DASH has a Treasury system, and so it really is up to the masternodes to vote on those proposals and determine what gets funded. Now we've brought.

How do you get a masternode in the long run? How would you scale getting a masternode?

Yeah, so anyone is free to download our software, run a full node on the DASH network. Similar to Bitcoin, though that is a volunteerism type of activity. You run a full copy of the blockchain and relay messages around the network. But that is altruistic. You're donating your server and your connectivity in order to become a masternode. A prerequisite is proof of ownership of 1000 dash. Now, right now, that's between 250 and $300,000. It's a significant sum. But if you sign a message out to the network with the private keys that are associated with that thousand dash, that enables you to upgrade your full node on the network to a masternode. Masternodes have special rights and privileges voting, as I understand, they do get to vote on proposals. So they have an influence over how our treasury allocation is given out and to what projects. They also get paid. So they're paid to run that infrastructure.

Not just from the bounty.

This is a.

This is the full bounty protocol.

So it's a lot like the protocol.

I don't know if that was a separate scenario.

Protocol is just a set of rules. And the set of rules for Bitcoin, say 100% of traffic, transaction fees, and 100% of new coins that are created are all given to miners. And so they heavily incentivize miners and don't incentivize other activities on the network. In the case of dash, we recognize that that should be split and there is more than one need to running a healthy network. So 45% of our block reward and 50% of our transaction fees go towards mining. The same allocation goes towards masternodes, and then the last 10% goes towards what we term Treasury. This is anything else. This is legal work. This is software development, this is marketing. This is all of the functions that you would need to run like it were a business. And so Dash Core Group is one of just many entities that receive proposal funding and utilize that for our operations. And we basically act a lot like a business arm for the network, doing business development, integrations, these types of things. There Are other entities that sit alongside of us, other groups that create wallets, that offer a different set of services than ours do other people out there doing marketing, other people out there doing business development. And so this is all happening in parallel. And no one organization truly controls Dash.

And it seems that you've taken on more than just payments, obviously, a payments company. What do you see? How do you see yourself in this sector akin to a different sector in the financial services industry right now? You're not blockchain, you're not Ethereum. Right. You sit alone in your entire world. What is that akin to, again, in an alternate. In basic financial industries, you have having a masternode and being able to vote on different services. Correct me if I'm wrong, just like your board in a certain respect?

Well, I think it has some aspects of a board because they weigh in on specific decisions, but in many senses, they have attributes of a shareholder, they own a portion of it, and so they have a vested interest in doing things that are good, that result in a good outcome for the network. It's almost like shareholders that have much more granular and frequent voting rights and get to weigh in on the strategy itself. And so it's some hybrid of those two things that result. And so I think it is unique in not just cryptocurrency, but in financial services in general. And I think that part of that is due to the technology. It would be impractical to hold a shareholder vote every single month if you were running a public company. The level of organization, the audit requirements and everything in order to hold a vote means that they only get to weigh in about once a year and on a very limited set of decisions. And this technology may enable a far more granular and frequent interaction with the people that are holding these assets to have input. And it might be a much healthier governance model.

DASH has been out of the media lately, and two things I'd love to talk to you about. Why is that? And being removed from the exchange, how has that impacted you and how are you guys recovering from that?

Are you referring to the jfsa? Is that what you're referring to? Okay, so I'll cover both of those. First, I don't think we've been absent from the media. I can tell you that, if anything, my allocation of time towards the media has been going up, as has a number of other team members. And there's a lot more projects that are engaging with public relations firms and so on. And so I think it's just a more competitive environment. I think secondly, there's a little less interest in general when you look at trends like Google searches for terms like bitcoin, it has been declining. There's still a great deal of interest in the media though. And so I think that there's a lot happening there. And I can tell you that the level of media that is interested has been becoming more mainstream in our project that, you know, I did my first national television interview last month and there's far more interest and callbacks from larger media outlets. So I think that it's just changing. It's just changing. On the second one on the Japan fsa, what happened there? The background is that they put some pressure on the exchanges operating in Japan to remove privacy centric coins.

Can you walk me through when you finish with this? Explain the layman. They need to know what is a privacy coin? And, and how is that different?

Sure, maybe I should start with that. So a privacy coin is a coin that incorporates some type of privacy feature to the benefit of end users. And there's a lot of different varieties of that that range from complete obfuscation of any information about the transaction, who sent it, who it went to, how much it was for, all the way over, to complete transparency where you can see every transaction on the blockchain and follow it through from coin to coin, know the amounts, et cetera, and there are degrees in between that. Dash's first real consumer facing feature that we deployed was a feature called Private Send. And Private Send is simply a way to obscure your balances and introduce uncertainty into where a transaction came from.

Okay, so you know where I'm going with this?

Yeah.

Why? The people that would use that probably fit a certain mold, but wouldn't always?

Yes.

Did the media. Did you find that a certain group of folks, did you find that crypto anarchists, did you find that anyone took advantage of that feature that you offered?

There's a philosophical position that we've taken that people have a right to privacy. And so let's start with the why. Why is this important? Well, it's really important for companies to, to have financial privacy for competitive reasons. It's also important for individuals for safety reasons. If I send you a transaction, you should not see that I just received $100,000 back in change. That puts my physical safety at risk.

Do you think that that led to just that very small 1%, right. 1% percent of overall transactions? Do you think that that led to 90% of the negative impact, the negative media that was associated with it?

Well, I think that People have not gone deep onto the reasons why and they haven't gotten deep on the technology itself to understand that there are differences. There are differences between a coin that you can't even analyze and one that introduces some degree of uncertainty into the transaction, but can nonetheless be analyzed risk scored. You can see that they use this technology and you can evaluate your risk as, you know, a financial services provider, say an exchange or something like that.

So even having that little bit of risk is better than the companies out there that have raised money and that still haven't put. You have actual data to say if this is a negative or a positive integration.

Let me give you an example of why the nuances matter. Dash's protocol is identical to Bitcoin's, not similar. It is identical in terms of what gets recorded to the blockchain. You can create identical private send transactions and the same transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. And both of those are valid transactions that would get, you know, that can be mined into a block. And so at a rule set level, they are identical. The only thing that we've introduced is made that more convenient for the users and safer. They don't have to turn their coins over to someone else to put perform these types of transactions. And in so doing, we've not changed the protocol itself or the rules that dictate what gets recorded to the blockchain. And so it can be analyzed the exact same way that it can with Bitcoin transactions. You can see when these transactions occur, they actually happen pretty infrequently. Less than 1% of all transactions on our network are private send. And so there is no legal reason why that should be treated any differently. Now, I suspect what happened was that the FSA looked at a list of coins that were supposedly privacy centric. We don't call ourselves that. We say that we have a privacy feature and we're user experience centric and we're providing tools and use cases that people will find valuable. Private send just happened to be the first of many services that we've deployed to our network.

So if I walk out here right now, how would I use one Dash, period. We're in Wall Street, New York City, right? The home of fintech in a certain respect. How would I use it walking right down the street in a coffee shop? And how would I use that private feature in the balance of my day on a Friday in New York and New York City?

I think this talks to the use cases. What are various digital currencies really good at for Dash we have two things that I think are really important. The first is really fast transactions. These are, we call them instant send. They're nearly instantaneous transactions and lock in between one and two seconds, as fast or faster than credit card authorization. That makes these transactions viable at the point of sale without risk to the merchant. The second is that it's incredibly inexpensive to use. Typical transaction is under a penny. Instant transactions are something like 2 cents. And so I think that the question isn't can you use it everywhere? The question is what are some of the good use cases for a technology like that?

And also where can I use it? Yeah, right now, who are your cryptocurrency friends? Who are your crypto friendly community groups that I can transact with?

So the main use cases for Dash, number one, you can buy gift cards with it at a discount. And so you can right now purchase Amazon gift cards at about a 15% discount and you can use those to transact on Amazon. We've got a number of other gift cards coming which we'll talk about. You can earn rewards with- so you can shop@rewards.com they have 7,000 merchants integrated everything from Macy's to hotels.com, you can get 5% cash back on hotels.com just as an example. Right. There are lots of different merchants involved and you can receive your benefits in the form of Dash. And coming this fall, you will actually be able to get gift cards at around 1,000 of those merchants with that dash that you've accumulated or by transferring your dash to rewards.com to make a purchase of those gift cards.

US and Europe and worldwide gift cards are available.

They have worldwide merchants. So some of those brands are international. You can use it for money transmission to friends or family overseas. So if you are an expat here and living abroad, it is a very cost effective way to get money back to family and friends.

How's the user experience with that barrier to entry compared to a Western Union or Moneygram or.

It's quite easy and just using a service like Uphold as an example. Uphold is a lot like Coinbase. You basically sign up for account, connect a debit card or a bank account to to your account, do a transfer and you can send Dash to anyone, anywhere for a fraction of a penny.

And if I don't have Dash when I receive a notification in my email saying you have just received five.

You can sign up for an account with Uphold as well and do bank transfers to your own bank and a number of countries around the world.

Sounds like a PayPal esque architecture.

Yeah, almost. You're able to do these types of international transfers very cost effectively and easily. And there are no barriers in terms of, you know, certain countries don't allow incoming or outgoing PayPal transactions or don't allow transactions between specific countries and things like that. So instead of multiple hops that you might have to go through today in terms of transferring money around, you can go anywhere. It's a peer to peer technology from anyone to anyone in the world.

How are you navigating the legal climate in the United States with securities, utilities? How are you navigating that entire landscape? And how are you also positioning your colleagues, your partners to do so?

Well, both Evan Duffield and myself have a background in financial services. We have certain licenses.

You mind took those licenses. You mind telling what those may be.

Like, you know, series 63 and you know, series 70. We have a number of these different qualifications. I have an mba, worked on Wall street for many years. So we're familiar with what the rules of the road were and we designed DASH to be compliant with those rules. This truly is a peer to peer technology. We never held an ico. There is no giant pool of money sitting anywhere that, you know, generated your own control over. Everything that we do is authorized by the network. All the funding we receive is authorized by the network. And, and so we have done extensive research into this and created the legal arguments for why we are not a security. I feel very comfortable with the legal argument that is there. And the SEC this week came out with some rulings on Bitcoin and Ethereum. I think if Ethereum is not a security, very clearly we are not. And so I believe that we will get a green light eventually from the SEC that we also fall in that same category. So I think we're in very good shape now. Where the regulation comes in, though, is for our partners. So the exchanges, the brokerage services, the merchants, the entry and exit points to the network. And for those people, they do have a need to meet compliance requirements.

Do you think the compliance will get you in better favor with Japan so they clearly understand where you are?

Well, we have compliance services that offer analysis on our blockchain, and there are actually several of them at this point. And so I believe that exchanges and businesses should have no problem acquiring the services that they require from their regulator. And so I think that we will see a reversal, at least a partial reversal on what the JFSA came out with once they understand better the technology. I think literally what they did was they looked at A list of coins with privacy features and said we encourage you to remove those from your exchange. And I don't think they've gone any deeper than that. I think when we are able to better educate, there will be a differentiation between, oh, okay, I understand that this is more similar to that than it is to this.

What kind of time frame you think? I know this is a wild one to even guess because it's not in your hands, right?

Yeah.

If we looked at all of the fact that kind of pulled a few down, what do you think it would take to coincheck Japan to get in better graces with them where you continue to be the leader?

Well, I think that first of all, Japan has never been a big market for us. We haven't had any of the major exchanges with DASH in the first place. So it's not like we got removed. So this did not have any type of immediate impact. We certainly don't want that to be a precedent. And so we at this point need to go build those relationships so that we can do the education. And I believe that any rational person evaluating the actual technology will come around to our argument. So I'm not terribly worried about it. I think it is a matter of time and effort and that requires participation on both sides. So we'll see. I don't think these things move quickly. So, you know, we'll work on it over the course of this year and see where we're at. But I think we'll manage to win over any skeptics or just ill informed. The biggest markets for dash, number one is the United States. Number two is actually Venezuela. Hyperinflation there has driven a lot of people to our solution. We have a couple hundred merchants in the capital city that accept DASH as a form of payment. There are a couple brokerage services that service DASH in Venezuela. And so I think that there is a growing and very strong community there that's developed.

And the legal challenges though right now with Venezuela, the United States, how are you dealing with that in more of the business sense and politically, how are you? That's a very challenging time right now.

So the traction that has been gained in Venezuela is really a grassroots effort. It's been locals who have driven a lot of that adoption. They have used the DASH treasury system to put up proposals to host conferences. They've actually opened a DASH office there to provide end users with onboarding and customer service so they can come in, have their questions answered, come in, get a wallet, set up, learn in small group setting how to actually Use it. And so this is a set of passionate people who really believe in DASH going out and educating their countrymen. Right. And so I think that it is an incredible story that is playing out in Venezuela now. We've, you know, as an organization, realized that DASH core group can also help support there.

You find that that's a challenge because of the political climate and showing as.

Much support as we're not actually selling anything. I'm not going and selling a product, I'm not selling a service. I'm not, as an organization operating my network. It is end users that operate the network. There is no law against going anywhere and educating people about a technology. There's no law about helping them to integrate into that technology. This is open source technology. Anyone is free to download and use it. And so there is no law to be broken here.

There's a deeper philosophical statement underlying in what you're saying and how you're giving access to tools that could end up liberating certain.

Exactly. So this is where there's not only not a conflict of interest, but there's actually an alignment of interest there around helping a people that are living under a very oppressive regime that confiscates property, that violates civil liberties, that is destroying what was a healthy economy and providing the people with tools to combat that. I don't know anyone on the planet who's heartless enough to say that that is a bad thing. And so I would not worry that someone would come along and be concerned with what we're doing there.

Actually, I kind of would say the opposite, because you're giving them something that is, they can't take away. You can't take away education, you can take away your property, you can take away the food, you can take away the treat, you can take away a lot. But once you're educated, that's probably the most deadly weapon that anyone looking to take a group of folks and keep them underprivileged.

Yeah, well, education is the best protection against weapons. Right. You know, it is. You know, you can term it a weapon, but I mean, it is because of this type of oppression that in the first place that these people need to be armed with the information, armed with technologies that can help them, because the tools that are being provided to them are destructive. And, you know, I hate to say it, but the leader of that country is a truck driver. He doesn't understand economics.

Does this fall under more of your social cause personally, or. Or is this. Is it in alignment with it?

It's within my personal goals. I would love to see DASH be adopted first in some of the poorest and most financially oppressed markets in the world so that as DASH grows, we bring those people up with us and that would be the best possible outcome.

Is that your main social cause? Would you classify that under the umbrella as a social cause? A charity, A. A charitable cause or a charity?

I don't think it is a charity. I think that these are the markets that are most amenable to the solutions in the first place. Here in the United States, you have a lot of good options for transacting. You have dollars in your pocket, you have credit cards, you have bank transfers. And all of them work pretty well. They're reliable, they're relatively low cost, certainly to you. And there's nothing fundamentally broken there where you're like, I have to switch to something else because this is becoming unusable. That's the situation there. And so I think that we can prove our use case in countries like this and we can gain our first real adoption in countries like this most easily with the least amount of effort. That's just a good business decision.

I look forward to seeing the case.

Study on it as a side benefit. You are helping these people that can benefit from it the most. And so I don't think there's any type of conflict in my mind as to where this is going to help the most. That doesn't mean there aren't opportunities elsewhere that we won't pursue.

What are you pursuing in Social cause besides this initiative? What would you consider under the umbrella of social cause?

Well, it's not. Again, not a project that's being run by DASH Core Group, but there's a project called Kuva Cash that just announced at moneyconf in Dublin this week. They demoed their product for the first time. It is aimed at the Zimbabwe market and it is powered by Dash. And so it is a electronic money transfer network that will operate in the.

Country compared to M Pesa.

Well, so the main difference is they're actually setting up key kiosks and bodegas and business entities throughout the cities with the ability to get in and out of physical cash.

It sounds like that physical where they walked along the routes of the people to make sure that there were physical establishments set up for fiat.

And this is a much lower cost option. So typical transaction is something like $5, typical transaction fee is something like $0.50. And mobile network operators throughout Africa are the primary operators of these types of networks. MPESA is a fantastic example of it. They are making a fortune off of their financial services. And so there is a lot of excess margin there that they are, that could be saved through the use of digital currency. And so when you're talking about this size of transaction and the, in addition, all the financial restrictions that these people face, they can't withdraw all their money from a bank account. They go queue up at 6 o' clock in the morning and they're not allowed to withdraw any more than a certain amount. Every day is a complete waste of human resources, it's a waste of time and it's just inefficient. And so if we can improve the efficiency and reduce the cost for these people, that has tremendous impact on their lives. You save me 50 cents, it isn't going to change my life. You save someone in Zimbabwe 50 cents on every transaction, that is life changing for that individual. And so I believe really strongly that this is another project that's going to have a great deal of financial, a great deal of social impact. Now, there's other ways to have social impact too. In the United States, we have a project going with a payment gateway called Alt 36. They're focusing on digital payments for the cannabis industry. This is an industry that is all cash. Cash handling costs are 15 to 25% in the industry. And there is risks associated with that amount of cash. There's physical risk that it could burn. There is risk of robbery, violence and other types of attacks that can.

How are you mitigating that risk? How is DASH mitigating the cannabis industry? These merchants? Right. How are you mitigating the risk in those companies?

When you have physical cash? Obviously this risk exists now. You can deal with that risk in a number of different ways. You can increase the physical security around it. You can transport that physical cash to a more secure location more frequently so that you're holding, on average, less. But ultimately, all of those solutions cost a great deal of money. If you can get the consumer to switch to digital currency, they can come in, transact with you. They can even pay ahead of time or order online, which is not a possibility today. And that incoming digital cash can be held securely and can be set up in a way where it can't be robbed. And you can use that to then pay your suppliers.

The cannabis industry needs help. They have tons of cash. As you mentioned on deck, I've watched folks within a certain group physically harmed and I know who these folks are personally, so I'm waiting. I haven't undertaken the task of looking at the overall architecture, but what is DASH doing to help the cannabis industry and the challenge of dealing with the federal government and local governments in the banking industry.

I believe that there is a extraordinarily strong use case here for digital currency, but I don't think it's been executed very well off of the attempts that have been tried so far. They're just trying to do payment and there's much more to a transaction than the payment itself. And this is what alt36 is doing particularly well. They are building an ecosystem of services that they bring to bear and integrate directly into the cannabis Point of sale systems. So they include tax reporting, the ability to calculate your short term and long term capital gains on cryptocurrency holdings, sales tax calculation and submission, the ability to onboard your vendors and pay those through the system. Loyalty rewards offers for the consumer side, integrating new business models like the ability to use one of these dispensary search apps. It's one thing to simply find a dispensary, but to be able to browse their inventory, make a purchase, either have it delivered or have it waiting for you at a pickup window and be able to pay for that from the comfort of your home, not having to walk around with hundreds of dollars of cash. All of these things are a benefit to the consumer too. And so it's a lot more than just the payment. It's about consumer engagement, it's about introducing new business models and new ways of transacting. And so these are the things that Alt 36 is bringing to the cannabis industry. Dash is the perfect digital currency for it. And it's the reason we were selected is because we have instant transactions and very low fees. The ability to send a payment at a point of sale and two seconds later be able to walk out with the product. That's not possible with other digital currencies. So it's a combination of all of these different capabilities coming together that I think are finally going to make it possible for the consumer to really benefit from this, for the merchants to truly benefit from it, and not have to be reconciling between two different financial systems where their payments are coming from. This is integrated directly into their point of sale systems that they're already using. And so that's one aspect of it. The other is focusing on the business to business market. These transfers to growers or to manufacturers of edible products or things of that nature are very onerous right now and dangerous right now. Most of those transactions, particularly transactions between dispensaries, they actually trade products amongst themselves is done with duffel bags of Cash, it is insane. And so we're providing greater safety there, greater speed. Another issue people don't realize beyond the cash handling costs is the cash cycle time. A lot of these local credit unions are some of the only ones willing to service the dispensaries or growers. And they know this and have a great deal of concern around risk as well. And so when they receive a deposit of cash from a dispensary, they have a 30 day waiting period. Many of them, before that cash is credited to their account, while they do checks, while they do reporting, while they do a lot of different things. And only then do they allow them access to their funds. That eats up 1/12 of their annual revenue right there in cash holdings in 30 days.

Not having access to your account. Can we walk through how do you mitigate that challenge?

So with Dash, the transaction is instant. They get immediate use of that digital cash that they can use to pay a supplier. They can pay employees with it. They can use a service like Bitwage to actually pay employees on a W2.

You know, so you'll leverage multiple services at that point.

Yep.

Where they can just leverage that deposit essentially.

Exactly. Instant access to that. And so the cash cycle time goes way, way down. And so there's a number of different benefits. Ultimately, all of this provides much greater transparency over what's happening with the dispensaries. There's a great deal of underreporting that's taking place. So there's, I think, benefits to the states themselves. There's huge benefits to the dispensaries, there's huge benefits to the consumer. And in terms of a better user experience, in terms of lower costs. And so the entire ecosystem is just made more efficient by digital payments. Digital payments just aren't available to them in any other form.

Right, I'm definitely aware of that. I'm glad you guys are approaching that. Who would you say is your top two or three competitors and why are they failing at even trumping you? No pun intended.

You know, I don't try to position other projects as necessarily directly competing or, you know, opine on whether they're failing or not. They all have their own unique strategies. I would say that Dash, being a payments focused use case, I would say that it is most similar to Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin. And as far as the competitive, because they're also low cost networks, they are accepted many places similar in number to Dash. And so.

And Dash is accepted in about how many places right now?

It's in the thousands at this Point. We have a few point of sale systems in Europe that are currently live or integrating with close to 2000. Caracas has around 200 physical points of sale. And then you have the online merchants we have into the high hundreds or low thousands, number of electronic e commerce type of locations that accept it. And then you have the remittance market. We don't really know how big that is. The metrics that I tend to focus on are transactions. And I try to focus on real use cases, not simply speculators that are moving money between exchanges. I'm looking for actual use.

Do you see yourself more as payments? You talk a lot about that and you're probably one of the first organizations that is so focused on on the entire economy. And maybe it's because of the way you so eloquently put it that you're teaching, you're educating, you're providing all of these resources. But how much is payments? How much of the time in the core team is dedicated to just payments? How much is dedicated to like you said, B2B.

Yeah. So I don't see a conflict between B2B and payments. They can be and are one of the same things.

What I mean by that, so you understand is there's a lot that has to go into the payments world, then you have to chase the payment guys. What stage are you in right now?

I mean we would be crazy to go merchant by merchant, door to door trying to sign them up. So business partners are really important to us. We do view ourselves as a payment centric digital currency and network. It's really two products in one. Right. And we are designing the entire coin around that use case in parallel. We're going out and building business relationships with channel partners that do have access to point of sale systems, et cetera. And so when you integrate into a single point of sale system and pick up 1,000 locations or 10,000 locations, that's far more scalable. You're going to reach market faster than trying to get merchants to download a completely separate tool and try to use it alongside their existing systems.

Let me ask a better question. I'm sorry to rephrase it in a certain way. Is the company focused right now on product service development or building out or scaling right now with your partners?

So I think that we are obviously focused a lot on the product. Our evolution product is coming out later this year and will make usability for merchants, developers and consumers far easier in many ways. We're pre product in that sense, but we know that there are already good use cases for digital currency, that we don't need to wait for that product to be ready in order to start to pursue and build out our ecosystem. Cannabis is a perfect example. What's happening in Venezuela is a perfect example. It is clear that we can build markets in the absence of the evolution functionality. And so we are doing both in parallel. I would say there is. I don't know that I could break down a percentage, but there's a good deal of resources going behind each one of them. The developers themselves are primarily focused on product development. So, you know, around half of our staff as developers alone, so, you know, we are putting a great deal of resources towards the product at this point and where it makes sense.

You mentioned the United States, Venezuela, and what was the third area that your major market?

So the third market is a close tie between China and Russia. Both are large cryptocurrency markets. China is a larger market, but we have a stronger community in Russia, and that makes them basically on par with one another. And, you know, then. Then you get into Europe and, you know, a large contingency there. I think they're just smaller countries, but there is a concentration in Europe as well.

Are there any parts of this planet right now that you'd love to have them reach out to you to work together with you, no matter what level it is? Are there any groups within the states or outside as well that you'd love to speak with and build out further with Dash?

Yeah, we're going to be making a big shift into the Latin America markets, and there will be more information coming on this on the next quarterly call that we hold, we hold a quarterly call to be transparent about what we're working on, our finances as an organization, all of those types of things. So we report out and allow the community the opportunity to ask question and answers of us on any category relevant to the business. So on that next quarterly call, we'll be rolling out a lot more information on what our strategy will be. What are the markets we'll be focused on both geographically as well as from a industry standpoint. And I think that the groups that we want to talk to right now are going to be the fiat access points, points throughout Latin America, because those are going to be critical infrastructure for a lot of the services that we'll be rolling out there. And so we definitely want to start to build relationships there. We're already doing that and just hired a Latin America manager as well as a country manager for Venezuela. There'll be more country managers coming in that region and we'll be putting forward the argument to the community why that is going to be a focus area for us. And we'll be putting forward the argument as to what specific markets and opportunities we're going to be going after there. I think it'll be well received. I think this is us really taking our strategy to the next level beyond what are the opportunistic opportunities that we can go after as opposed to how can we proactively shape the cryptocurrency environment and the DASH ecosystem? And that's the shift that we've really been going through ever since we brought a full time business development lead on at the beginning of the year. So our business development lead is Bradley Zastrow. He came to us From American Express, 17 years of experience in business development. And so he's really helping us to, to put the time and resources into shaping that whole strategy, the research behind it and the rationale. And it's been an interesting experience to go through. So we'll have some more to say on that soon.

With an American Express experience behind that, I can only imagine these guys are the, arguably the leaders in the payments world in fintech, so. Well, I really appreciate the time and thank you for sitting down. Absolutely. Been very informative. Very, very informative and quite frankly, frankly, a little geeky. From my soul.

I love geeking out on this stuff.

So pleasure not to bore everybody else in the room. Everybody's sleeping right now, but I could talk fintech for another five hours and really get into some of the challenges that we're facing and that we will face. So I look forward to a follow up conversation with you. All right, all right, take care.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate you. Yeah, Cointelegraph, like Subscribe and Hodl.