A Bank Built for AI, DAOs & Network States?! 🤯 #AI #Fintec

AI, right? What happens when AI needs to use a bank account? All these traditional banks, they can't even comprehend this idea right now. Spoke to me, if you had a billion dollars right now, what would you do? And I thought on that and I said, well, I need to do something in the Bitcoin space. I need to do something in the payment space. This is stuff that I'm actually passionate about. Well, it's funny because I am a technical person. So a lot of people think, well, it must be the technology that attracted you to this. It was actually the politics that brought me into it. I like freedom. And when I learned about Bitcoin, wait a second, we can exist, we can transact without the government being involved. And that drew me into the industry and I haven't looked back. If you look under the hood, you'd be surprised how few banks there are involved in this type of business. And that's why I'm so motivated to build a bank that's going to be the most in favor of this industry possible. I've always been of the mind of being the master of my own domain, running my own business. Even when I was in middle school, I was making websites and fixing computers for people. So that's one side. The other side is I've always had problems with authority. I'm very good at following rules. I can get all the grades and, and be a good young man. I don't like being told what to do. I had started a company about 7 years ago that allows consumers to spend Bitcoin anywhere Visa's accepted. That was a wildly profitable and fast-growing company. And one day I had a bank partner and that bank partner said, hey, we gotta get on a call. They said, you know what, Ken? We can't do this anymore. My business went from 25% month-over-month growth, profitable, to nothing very, very quickly due to the situation happening in the United States at the time. Operation Chokepoint 2.0, the regional banking crisis, FTX collapsing. Went around to every other bank in the United States and not a single one of them would work with us. That really inspired this idea. But then we found Prospero. We found some other locations Where we could build our own bank and really build something special so that I won't get debanked ever again. When I first came here, I didn't know what to expect. Sometimes I'm like, is this going to be a whole bunch of like kind of weirdos, libertarian weirdo type people? And I'm like, no. Well, they're libertarian weirdo type people, but they're my kind of libertarian weirdo type people. We are in Prospera. I love it here. It's really fantastic. While it's very beautiful, what's even better is the community. The people are smart. They're working on really, really interesting things. It's like absolutely wild, innovative stuff's happening. We are on a boat going from Las Verandas to Duna. So at Las Verandas, that is a resort. So if you want to come here on a vacation, you want to check the place out, you go to Las Verandas, you're going to have a great time. Over here at Duna, this is the builder's district, right? These are the entrepreneurs. It's a fantastic place for people who want to get things done. And it's a good time. You never know what an investor is going to ask you. On the spot and in front of a live audience like that.

Give us your pitch.

Now imagine this, you're building in a frontier industry like crypto, and one day out of the blue, due to no fault of your own, you're suddenly debanked. This is what happened to me in 2023. Or imagine this, you're one of the billionaires—

Wait, what happened to you? You were trying to bank with a group, but you were a crypto guy, so they said, we don't take your money?

Yeah, a fast-growing payments company. We worked with crypto. And then one day they said, "Sorry, we can't do this anymore," and they couldn't even tell us why. Can we talk about who they is? Is it? I'd prefer not to name them. Think twice if it's Wells Fargo. Yeah. But imagine you're one of the billions of people around the world that doesn't have access to U.S. dollar bank account. You're unbanked. Or maybe you're one of these people right here who are building the next big thing here in Prospera, but you don't have the financial infrastructure to really meet what you're trying to do. So whether you are Unbanked, underbanked, or debanked— finally, there's a bank for that. We are targeting the fastest-growing market segments that are clamoring for banking options. We're giving them exactly that, a world-class banking experience. But we're not just a bank app. Everything we provide, we also provide via APIs. We've done the heavy lifting of integrating with the global financial ecosystem so you can bring your company, your app, your AI, your DAO, or your network state and build on top of our infrastructure. So we've built, or we're in the process of building, a series of full reserve banks chartered in special economic zones around the world. This gives us an advantage over traditional banks where regulator alignment is what's missing and it is stifling innovation. 2 weeks ago, we got our full bank charter in Prospero.

How long did that take?

It actually took a little bit over a year.

Oh.

Not the— no, no fault of Prosper.

And how much money?

Uh, I want to say $50,000 all in, probably. Oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It's $30 million in the U.S.

Exactly.

And probably 5 years.

So we're on track to be the first bank chartered by a Native American tribe in U.S. history.

Which tribe?

Catawba.

We talked to them. Catawba. They're in South Carolina, right? Exactly.

I hope you'll join us on revolutionizing banking. And banking the unbankable.

So now that we have crypto, do we even need banks?

100%. You want to buy Bitcoin? It's going through a bank. You want to sell Bitcoin? It goes through a bank. All those stablecoins, they're often backed by dollars in a bank. All of the innovation that's happening in crypto, people like to think, oh, there's no bank involved. Banks aren't going anywhere for a while. And what's the dream? Like, you succeed, you take— is it just to take over all the banks? I see us as the next JPMorgan Chase. The largest global bank in the world. And what we're doing is focusing on the areas where there aren't currently banking services. AI, right? What happens when AI needs to use a bank account? All these traditional banks, they can't even comprehend this idea right now.

How will the next JP Morgan of the future look like? Because it won't look like the current JP Morgan.

I think it's really a matter of making sure that you're interoperable with digital assets. I'll give you an example. HSBC. That's the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation. It grew with that special zone to become one of the largest banks in the world. And that's how we see the future for the network bank. I think Prospera is the future and we call it the Hong Kong of the Americas.

Thanks so much for being on Meet the Drapers.

There was no gotchas, nothing like that. I just thought they were very encouraging and they really were truly interested in what we're building.

What I would be looking for primarily is can the team take advantage of the conditions that are here and within this ability in a manner that lets them evolve rapidly. Because whatever we think the right niche is now, it's going to change. I'm a bit biased because I know that the companies here—

Is this the first bank charter?

It is not. I would say this is the most promising.

And banking is a perfect example of how overregulation kills businesses. Like much of the new regulations from 2008 after the financial crisis, Since then, there's 98% fewer bank charters issued. The banks messed up. Let's give them more power.

That was exactly what happened, and that's why Bitcoin was so important to get an alternative.

So here's the good news: when this thing finally airs, 30 million people are now aware of the network bank. By the time it airs, they better have it up and running. The only issue we had with you—just so many issues. How are you going to grab? The market. How are you going to get the world to know about you?

Companies integrating with our APIs are eventually delivering our product to individual end customers. Only takes a handful of relatively successful businesses built on our platform that delivers to millions of people around the world. We're starting being the most boring bank in their eyes possible. There's enough innovation with Prospera. Once we get that integration, then we can start gradually being a little bit more innovative.

So Anna with Unlimited Bio, the good news is, is that the world's in good hands. Yeah, I really loved all 4 of these. I thought they were really amazing. We'll go to the crystal ball. Can we get everybody's energy here? Let's go to the crystal ball. Quiet energy or like loud energy? It's, it's quiet, confident energy. The winner is— all of you are going to the semifinals. I was mind blown. I was not expecting it. Like, I was expecting to hear one name. I thought that he's joking. I was shocked, and also I was like, well, okay, that makes sense. Of course.

Completely blown away at the end when they said everyone gets to be the winner.

This has never been done before. That literally hasn't been done before.