In this episode of the Wholesome Crypto podcast, Rudy interviews Patrick Camuso, a CPA specializing in cryptocurrency taxation. Patrick shares his journey from discovering Bitcoin to founding his own CPA firm, Camuso CPA. He discusses the complexities of crypto taxes, the emotional challenges faced by clients, and the evolving landscape of IRS regulations. The conversation highlights the importance of staying informed in the rapidly changing crypto environment and the need for transparency and support in navigating tax implications. Patrick also reflects on the wholesome moments in his career and the significance of client trust.

Takeaways

• Patrick's journey into crypto began with reading the Bitcoin white paper.

• He recognized the tax implications of crypto early on.

• The emotional aspect of crypto taxation is significant for clients.

• IRS compliance is becoming increasingly stringent.

• The introduction of the 1099 DA will change how crypto taxes are reported.

• Patrick emphasizes the importance of transparency with clients.

• Institutional investment in crypto is a sign of maturity in the market.

• The burden of proof for tax reporting lies with the taxpayer.

• Many individuals are unaware of the complexities of crypto taxes.

• Building a firm requires a different skill set than working in a big four accounting firm.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Patrick Camuso and His Journey

02:59 Discovering Bitcoin: The Initial Encounter

05:55 The Road to Becoming a CPA and Entrepreneur

09:03 Navigating the Complexities of Crypto Taxation

11:45 Emotional Support in Crypto Tax Consulting

14:35 IRS Regulations and the Future of Crypto Taxation

17:22 Understanding the 1099 DA and Its Implications

20:19 The Evolution of Crypto Accounting Standards

22:47 Understanding Cryptocurrency Accounting Challenges

28:48 Navigating IRS Regulations and Compliance

33:54 The Impact of Institutional Investors on Crypto

39:43 Wholesome Moments in the Crypto Journey

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💡 Quantum-Level Security Blockchain Partnership: Get a sneak peek into the future of secure digital interactions with Greg's discussion on partnering with SQE, a leap towards quantum-level security in blockchain technology.

🤝 Community and Opportunity: Greg shares his wholesome crypto stories of artists and individuals finding their place and prosperity within the NFT and crypto communities.

👀 What's Next for Stay Bizze: Stay tuned for the upcoming launch of their MVP and how they're integrating blockchain to revolutionize the way we do business cards.

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💻 A Rollercoaster of Experiences: Relive Nixo's rollercoaster ride through the highs and lows of early Bitcoin trades, hilarious mix-ups with Russian rubles, and the dramatic Mt. Gox saga. It's a blend of mishaps and milestones in the crypto journey!

🔑 The Staking Revolution: Dive into the evolving landscape of Ethereum staking. Nikso's transition from grad school to leading ETH staker communities is a story of passion, persistence, and the power of community in the crypto realm.

🌐 The Power of Decentralization: Get a glimpse into Nixo's vision of a decentralized future. From setting up solo validators to championing staking inclusivity, it's a narrative of tech-driven empowerment and the quest for a more equitable crypto space.

🧭 A Crypto Nomad's Insights: Explore the global impact of crypto through the eyes of a digital nomad. Nixo's experiences offer a unique perspective on how crypto is reshaping economies and communities worldwide.

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🐱 The Origin of 'Cats Will Eat You': Find out the hilarious and unexpected backstory behind Matt's unique moniker. It's a tale that involves a graphic design instructor, a house cat, and a morbidly funny classroom moment!

🔗 17 Years of Daily Art - Preserved on Blockchain: Matt shares his impressive commitment to creating daily art for nearly two decades. Learn how he sees blockchain as a way to immortalize his vast collection and maintain his artistic legacy.

🖌️ The Struggle of an Artist in the Digital Age: Listen to Matt's experiences with various NFT platforms, the challenges of getting recognized, and his thoughts on the current state of the art and crypto community.

💡 Artistic Inspirations & Crypto Community Dynamics: Matt opens up about his influences, from Frida Kahlo to digital glitch artists, and discusses the ups and downs of navigating the crypto space, including dealing with scams and finding genuine connections.

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Hear about Coco's transition from tax expert to a crypto composer, creating music that echoes the ethos of the crypto community. His stories reflect the balance between family, work, and passion, highlighting the power of music in uniting people under the umbrella of technology and finance.

This episode offers a glimpse into the human side of cryptocurrency, showcasing how personal interests and professional skills can intertwine to create something truly inspiring and wholesome in the crypto space. 🎶🌐💼

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Join co-founders Dmitri and Kirill as they share their journey in the crypto space and building Stakewise, a staking protocol that allows users to earn rewards while maintaining liquidity. They discuss the importance of trust and security in attracting users to the protocol along with finding a critical bug that saved staking communities. We also discuss the upcoming Shanghai event and the impact it will have on the liquid staking market. Discover the exciting developments of Stakewise v3, their focus on community and advancing the mission of Ethereum, and their commitment to making staking accessible for everyone. Don't miss this fascinating conversation with the Stakewise team.

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Conley's interest in crypto began in high school, and he started investing in 2016, building a trading bot to go between different centralized exchanges. His father was a significant influence, and they both shared a desire to research and come to conclusions about the brokenness of the current monetary system.

Before creating Prime Protocol, Conley had other ideas, including creating a protocol that would give inverse derivative exposure to price movement to help match up the gamma risk and higher order risks of investing in an LP pool.

Conley believes that the goal of crypto should be to promote decentralization and help society, rather than just making money for individuals. Therefore, when onboarding new team members, he looks for genuine passion for crypto and DeFi, as well as being smart, good at their job, and a fast learner. Short-term thinkers who are only interested in making quick money are not a good fit, as they may leave during bear markets and miss out on building real products.

Conley's team at Prime is currently eight people, which is typical for many DeFi teams, especially at the seed stage. Having too many people on the code base can decrease marginal productivity per engineer, so running lean is effective.

The conversation also touched upon regulatory hostility towards the crypto industry. However, he remains optimistic about the potential of crypto and believes that the industry's goal should be to promote decentralization and help society.

The episode also discussed the recent hack of the wormhole token bridge and how Jump, a decentralized finance protocol, immediately stepped in and recovered the funds. The recovery of the funds was not driven by a for-profit motive, but rather a belief in the potential of crypto and a desire to do the right thing. Conley praised Jump's actions, which demonstrated their character and commitment to the crypto community.

Listen in to this Wholesome Crypto podcast episode with Colton Conley which provided valuable insights into the founder's journey into crypto, his vision for Prime Protocol, and his thoughts on the industry's future. Conley's passion for crypto and DeFi was evident throughout the conversation, and his commitment to promoting decentralization and helping society sets a positive example for the industry.

Links:

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https://twitter.com/prime_protocol

https://twitter.com/ColtonFConley

Listen in on how the founder spends around 3-5 hours a day on EthDaily, not just creating content, but also learning about audio technology. This level of commitment is paying off as the podcast continues to gain in popularity and provides a unique perspective on the crypto world.

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Crypto can be daunting, confusing and overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be. Come join us at WholesomeCrypto and listen to our latest episode with Barney, a former capital markets financial services consultant who got into crypto and has been through the rollercoaster. He'll tell you why he was worried about traditional money, explain the potential of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and why we need a decentralized future. Hear what he has to say about the scams and pump-and-dumps, the bear market, liquidity protocols, and the philanthropic projects that are creating a public good. Tune in and learn why the crypto space needs a more democratic and open fundraising model, and why the art and technical communities have been incredibly welcoming. We'll also explore Vega Protocol, which is close to releasing their mainnet and offering incentives in terms of Vega tokens. Get your questions answered and explore the world of crypto with us!

Listen now to get an insider's perspective on this emerging digital economy!

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https://vega.xyz/

https://www.youtube.com/@wholesomecrypto

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Hey I’m Rudy and this is the wholesome crypto podcast. Here we learn about the lives of our favorite crypto experts, leaders, and entrepreneurs.

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Cryptocurrency has grown exponentially over the past decade and is now a major player in the financial sector. Max Lyman and his brother who started a cryptocurrency mining company in 2018, are prime examples of the advancements crypto has made. Although their mining business did not survive the crash of 2018, Max continued to explore the space, consulting for Ethereum protocols and eventually founding Solon Labs with his co-founder Ben in 2020.

Max was drawn to the Ethereum ecosystem because of its potential to create a system of decentralization that could protect people from corruption and inflation. Decentralization and blockchain technology enable people to be their own custodians and keep their assets in something stable, like US Dollar coin, without having to trust their local currency or any banks. As Max and Ben discussed on a recent podcast, “people are always doing what’s in their best interest. We would hope they act that they do things for the greater good so that everybody wins.”

Max’s goal with Solon Labs is to create a platform that simplifies the process of transacting on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing users to pay transaction fees in whatever asset they are trading and bringing them all into one central location. To do this, Max is developing an operating system for decentralization that will make interacting with decentralized applications more user friendly. This system will include a home screen of applications that represent individual companies or operations, as well as solutions such as bundling transactions together to reduce costs, social recovery instead of seed phrases for wallet creation, and a smart contract wallet with a time lock to protect users from losing their assets in case of a hack.

Max’s motivation for creating this system is rooted in his knowledge of the power of decentralization, but also in his own personal experience. As a student of electrical engineering at Northeastern University, Max was considering dropping out to focus on his business, but found a way to use his engineering mindset to benefit the cryptocurrency industry. And one story that really inspired him was when Bob Moore bought an NFT for someone who accidentally sold theirs and was unable to control his muscles due to a disease. This moment highlighted the positive impact that decentralization can have on people’s lives.

The cryptocurrency space has become increasingly competitive in recent years due to the influx of users. There were 5 million users in 2017, but by 2021 that number had grown to 105 million. This has led to new projects like Solon Labs, which Max and Ben are launching.

Max’s story is a testament to the potential of decentralization, and Solon Labs is his way of bringing that potential to life. As he says, “blockchain technology can create any sort of configuration we can dream of, including restrictions on who can interact or create proposals.” By using his engineering skills and his passion for decentralization, Max is working to make the world a better place, one blockchain-based application at a time.

Links:

https://twitter.com/Crypto__Jesus_

https://twitter.com/solonlabs

This following post was generated using AI via dubb.media 🤖

Transcript

[0:00:16] Rudy: Welcome, Max Lyman, to the wholesome Crypto podcast. Thank you so much for joining me here this morning. Thanks for having so I know that you're working on Stolen Labs. It's going to be an amazing platform to do everything on crypto. But before we get into what it is, what you're doing in the crypto space, I want to know more about where you were in life before ever hearing about cryptocurrencies.

[0:00:46] Max: I really got involved in the crypto space in 2016, but I first found out about crypto in 2013, and I was playing to you as go. I was 13 years old. I was playing to Go on my laptop, actually on my desktop, and some random dude hit me up, and he's like, Yo, I want your skin. Okay, what's a skid through the marketplace? Okay, so before NFTs, there are some cool niche games. Obviously, you could use, like, ingame currency or maybe some, like, the Next Evolution, US. Dollars to purchase in game assets. Right? And Valve kind of really revolutionized this. Before out of teas with the Steam Assets marketplace, where any users can actually own skins, which is just like art for your guns and knives and all these other things. And you could trade them for cash, and then you could actually use that cash to buy games or other things. But it would always stay as, like, Valve in the ecosystem credit. Because, yeah, sure, it was like US. Dollars, but you would have to use it on Steam within their platform. But it was cool.

[0:01:59] Max: It was a lot of fun at the time. So I was just playing. Soon as Ghost, some guy hit me up, and he's like, hey, I'll buy the skid for you. He's like, I'll give you ten bitcoin. I was like, at the time, I had no clue what bitcoin. So I'm 13 years old. I hit up Google. I'm looking up, like, woods bitcoin. I just find a bunch of random things. I still have no clue what bitcoin really is. But I see there's a price attached to it, has value. And I was just like, whatever. You know what? I'll do it. And I made a trade.

[0:02:33] Max: He actually ended just rugged. And then I sold it a few months later for, I think, like $6,000. And I was sold.

[0:02:44] Rudy: I mean, it's natural to be hyped for as a young kid too.

[0:02:49] Max: Oh, yeah. It was like the most money I'd ever seen in my life, and I just couldn't believe it. And obviously today I'd be with it. She'd spend more money. But I like to believe everything happens for you. You're a cooler person if you have to work for things, right? And then in 2016, my older brother I kind of completely forgot about bitcoin for a while. My older brother was like, Yo, I found this cool new thing. It's called bitcoin. I was like, okay, cool, cool. And he's like, I'm going to make a lot of money. I'm like, all right, cool. He's like, you want to make money too? So that's honestly how I really got involved with cryptos back then. He didn't really know anything technical, but he was very much a business guy, my older brother.

[0:03:35] Max: So we started a cryptocurrency money company, and I would just build out, assemble all the computers, nothing too complicated, with like, RX five, et cetera. And then we started moving into a six that we'd get from bitmain and other suppliers. And then we designed like, some of our own CPU, cooling hardware and a few other things, and we had our own warehouse space. And then 2018 happened. In 2018, everything was shit, and everyone wanted to liquidate everything. And the worst for the ASIC miners, because those are created specifically to form applications designed around mining bitcoin. Right. Improving consensus on the bitcoin blockchain. So they were like, absolutely worthless. So we paid probably like, I think it was like $2,000 per miner per ASIC, and they were selling in 2018 for like $50.

[0:04:29] Rudy: So you bought them on the hype and then.

[0:04:33] Max: Well, we bought them directly from the supplier. Not even on the recent yeah, I know, we bought them from BitMate. Once you paid for, like, you would have to pay to expedite the china, so it took a month to get them from china. Then you would have to pay all these custodial fees, and you would have to deal with any letters for seizures from the US. Government, all this other shit. And then when you finally paid the government off, then they would actually let you get your mind. But yeah, dude, these things were like they were definitely even the components on them. Like, if you just literally took a soldering iron and just scrapped it right? Were was worth more than $50, but that was going price for them. Is everyone lost fate in crypto. Like, that was the first real big bull run we ever had. And so much liquidity exited so quickly and just did not want anything to do with it after that.

[0:05:26] Rudy: Wow. At this point, you're really focused on just making a profit mining bitcoin. Is that kind of the extent of your technical knowledge of the cryptocurrency industry and blockchain technology? You just knew that if I mine, I generate bitcoin, and if my electricity expenses were enough to pay off by selling bitcoin, you'd just make money, then you'd be happy. But did you know anything about Aetherium or ICOs at that point?

[0:05:56] Max: No, not really. I saw some bitcoin ICOs, but I wasn't really paying attention to the whole ethereum ecosystem. I honestly didn't even know anything about it. Didn't really know anything about smart contracts. I just understood the blockchain and consensus. I understood consensus technology. And at the time we did a lot of operations where our non ASIC miners would mine alternate blockchains and then convert assets through pools or wherever else into bitcoin, but really I only knew about consensus. And then in the beginning of 2020, during the pandemic, I I got really just bored, and I kind of I kind of really jugged back into crypto, and I decided to give Aetherium, and the Ethereum Ecosystem was shot. And now I'm Aetherium back. Yeah. So I consulted for a little bit. In the Ethereum world, there are some protocols helping them to add value to the government tokens or just create new general valuable utility, and then worked for the government for a little bit, and I started Stolen with them.

[0:07:08] Rudy: Did you complete university or college?

[0:07:13] Max: So actually, I'm in school right now. I go to Northeastern University, and I actually literally just dropped a class. But it's hard to full class load and working full time at the same time.

[0:07:31] Rudy: Yeah, it's not easy.

[0:07:32] Max: And managing people at the same time. Right. It's just like when you factor in all the little details, like the legal structuring of foundations, hiring people onboarding, people, like document structure, getting audits done, coordinating between development partners and maybe 1099 employees, and all this other and then going to all these other events. I don't know.

[0:08:00] Rudy: Yeah, I'm surprised you're managing it all so well, because you look like it's all nonchalant. But I know running a business is not easy, let alone going to school. When I was going to school, I was like, I know. I want my life to be in crypto. I want to drop out because I don't want this, but I know it's nice to have a degree under my belt. That's about it.

[0:08:21] Max: Yeah, I would have dropped out, but honestly, my parents just really wanted me to get a degree, and I only had six classes.

[0:08:29] Rudy: Yeah, just get it over with. You'll be happy. I guess you'll fully regret it. Are you in CS or what are you studying?

[0:08:39] Max: No, it's electrical engineering.

[0:08:41] Rudy: Oh, nice. That's what I did.

[0:08:42] Max: Absolutely.

[0:08:43] Rudy: Will probably never do electrical engineer with an MBA.

[0:08:49] Max: Wow. Yeah, I'm just electrical engineering, and I'll probably never do anything.

[0:08:54] Rudy: Yeah, well, that's the thing. People just want the engineering mindset in their whatever infrastructure company. If you're working its own labs and you tell them you're an engineer, like, okay, great. But everything you learn is because you're working so hard to make a company, and you're going through all this experience of suffering and figuring it out on your own, that's where you're really learning everything.

[0:09:17] Max: That's where you really learn. It's the pain that really keeps you up at night. That's what the memory is.

[0:09:26] Rudy: So then how did you meet your co founder Ben, to start Stolen Labs?

[0:09:32] Max: So I worked at a military contractor called Viking Detection in Burlington, Mass. And while I was there, Ben was actually an intern originally. And I first met Ben when he was 15, maybe he was 16. I think it was 15. They were actually willing to pay for his college tuition, if you would say, work at so instead, I was like that. He was completely self taught, programmer. I kind of got him into the whole crypto world, sent him some white papers. He was hooked, and he taught himself solidity. And then I was like, hey, Ben, let's go. Let's leave. Let's start this. And he left. We started Stalin, and then he dropped out of high school.

[0:10:21] Rudy: Oh, wow. Dropped out of high school. Congrats, Ben.

[0:10:25] Max: Yeah.

[0:10:29] Rudy: I guess you said you kind of influenced Ben into the crypto ecosystem, but what really triggered you to owe them the money? And what about ethereum? Really triggered you to say, this is here to stay. This is something where I can build the future in and obviously your entire career paths. What really gave that? What was that moment where you were like, this is why I need to stay here.

[0:10:55] Max: So the money definitely brought me into the space in the first place. But what's kept me here has absolutely been the technology. I have never lost faith. And for me, for the first time in history, this is an actual system where we can rely on decentralization. We have all these proposed economic structures and systems like communism, socialism, blah, blah, blah, capitalism, whatever it is, right? But there's always corruption somewhere in every system. You can never trust the individual. Human beings are naturally selfish. And it's the idea of, hey, for the first time, we can actually design a system around the idea that people will always likely do what's in their best interest, always assume the worst case scenario. And that's why I love decentralization. Because for over a billion people all over the world who deal with insane levels of corruption, inflation, my favorite example to give is Nigeria, because over 200 million people live there. And the government said a snake ate $2 billion in taxpayer money. Obviously just happened. And a monkey stole another 1 billion. During COVID when people were protesting over SARS, which is kind of like their equivalent of police brutality, they would just freeze people's bank accounts, and they were just fucked, right?

[0:12:20] Max: Like, the average GDP per capita, there is only a few thousand dollars. You freeze their bank account, you have access to no money. Your inflation is 80% over a period of eight years. You can't even make money fast enough to keep up with the rate of inflation. And then your government free to sell your money, and you can't even afford to feed your families, right? So at the end of the day, this, for the first time in history, creates an alternate route for these people where they don't have to trust their governments. They can be their own custodians. They don't need to trust any bank. And on top of that, they can keep all their assets in something stable, like US. Dollar coin. They don't need to even trust their local currency, nor should they have to people should always do what's in their best interests. They should. People should do what's in their best interest. And systems should be designed to enable people to actually do what's in their best interest and not have these overhead restrictions just because of the area of the world they're located.

[0:13:19] Rudy: Exactly.

[0:13:20] Max: That's why I love decentralization and blockchain.

[0:13:23] Rudy: Exactly. That's like one thing I've learned about being in the blockchain industry is, like you said, people are always doing what's in their best interest. We would hope they act that they do things for the greater good so that everybody wins. But yeah, people are people. They're going to do what's best for themselves. And that's when the game theory comes in play where acting in your own best interest actually benefits everybody anyways. That's the incentive is to act in your own best interest and any interest that you have. That way everyone has a piece in the pie where they can actually win. So if you're an Ethereum for just money, you're going to promote Aetherium or any other cryptocurrency that you love to do well because you're invested in it, or for building a project in it, you want that to do well, you're going to build the best project you can. So people get onboarded and they talk well about your company. It's always like, in your own best interest, that's better for everyone else.

[0:14:18] Max: It's so cool to me too, that you can just create anything you can define by code. Yeah, I have this decentralized consensus layer, which means no matter what, I can run anything on top of this computer that no one can control, no one can shut down, no one can filter my content, right? So hey, anything I deploy on this is going to run indefinitely, right? No one will be able to screw around with it. It will do exactly what I have defined it to do. That might not be exactly what I have wished for it to do, but it'll do exactly what I defined it to do. Defined by code. But you can create all sorts of restrictions. If I wanted to create a community that was gated by, let's say, how often you trade, right, I could air job and NFP to everyone and enable that access and make a sold out token. Or I could create the structure of it down and make it so hey, I only want x people with y certain things in common to be able to interact or create proposals in the first place. Maybe as a way to filter out proposal content, right? Or they need to have at least y amount of our governance tokens. It's just like these are all very simple things and they're just editing small little features in current existing systems. But when people like to say words like dow, they think, oh, it's blah blah blah, decentralized organization, whatever. No, they don't really understand that you can really create any sort of configuration you could possibly dream of.

[0:15:54] Max: You can make it so every single person that holds has to 100% agree to everything. You can make it so only one person could ever create a proposal. You can make it so anyone can create a proposal, right? You can make it so everyone in the world is airdropped one share and it's diluted every day. You can do whatever you want.

[0:16:12] Rudy: It's a beautiful thing.

[0:16:14] Max: It is.

[0:16:15] Rudy: And I'm glad you're taking that. I'm glad you're seeing that creativity because it is as creative as you can get. There is no limit, and I'm glad you're experiencing that. And I wanted to go back a little bit on how you're referencing Nigeria as a country that you can't trust your own government to let you keep your funds no matter what. And especially when I explain cryptocurrencies and bitcoin and ethereum and blockchain to people in the States, it's kind of like, why my money is safe, my money is stable. Like, what do I need an unstable, volatile asset for? I don't really understand. And it's like, well, if you travel to different countries or just read about different countries and seeing the struggles they have with controlling their own money and transferring money even between each other.

[0:17:07] Max: For.

[0:17:08] Rudy: Us, we have like, venmo and PayPal and so many different ways to send dollars to each other. They don't have all those other options and let alone the inflation rates that's going on over there too. So it's like, yeah, it's hard to convince someone you should move your dollars somewhere else because you just want to have ownership of your own assets. But why can the bank gets FDIC insured? I don't have to worry about saving it somewhere. I have to worry about any private keys or ledgers or this and that. But this is the future. It's hard to explain to people in the States you're right. Why it's so important.

[0:17:44] Max: That's why it's very interesting to see. Like, there was a study by Nance published in Q three of 2017, or actually, maybe it was Q two of 2017, it doesn't matter. We had 5 million users of cryptocurrency and Q three of 2021. We added 105,000,000 users cryptocurrency. Now, the total market cap of the the crypto space went up, I don't know, like a 2.8 X from the all ten nine in 2017 versus 2021. But the number of users went up a 51 X.

[0:18:18] Rudy: Right.

[0:18:19] Max: So that should tell you right, the average GDP per capita of the crypto space has gone down dramatically. And to me, I think it's a really cool thing because it kind of goes to show that back in 2017, it was really your niche wealthy person who was kind of just trading crypto because it was this exciting new technology. But today we have people that are using the Blockchain fundamentally because it is a better financial system for them, even though they are forced to hold volatile assets than their existing financial system.

[0:18:56] Rudy: And while discovering all this at the same time, are you generating the idea of building Solen Labs or is this in line with it in parallel?

[0:19:10] Max: Yeah. So for us, we are the ultimate fantasy. Decentralization, we love the ethereum blockchain, we love all these things. But at the end of the day, the whole process of even downloading a MetaMask and connecting your wallet and 24 words each phrase, et cetera, et cetera, is a huge area to entry, obviously largely on the user friendliness side. But also there's a significant financial barrier to entry associated with decentralization. When you have an average transaction cost of a few dollars to 50 plus dollars, depending on the complexity of the transaction, or even on the L two s of few dollars, right. That's still a huge barrier when your average GP per capita for the majority of the world is only a few thousand dollars. Right? So, yes, decentralization is really important. And when we're talking about this group of now, you know, 105 plus billion people, the vast majority of them aren't transacting, they're storing their wealth. And the reason why is they would transact more often if they could. They would probably use it as facilitation for payment to every vendor, right? But they don't because of transaction fees. They do it one time, they group all their money, as much money as they can together, they send it in and they do that, let's say, once every few months, but they can't use it daily as a form of payment yet. So I'm a huge fan of technology that really pushes us forward in the direction of making it more friendly to use ethereum in the ethereum ecosystem much more simplified and also reducing the financial barrier entry associated with decentralization.

[0:20:45] Max: So that's really where Solen fits in. And Ben, my co founder, he came up with the idea to implement what's quite similar to account abstraction before the consensus layer of a transaction. And the way it works is it allows a smart contract to act as a top level count and a top level account is something like a wallet. And since it's also a smart contract, we can define all this by cut. So we can change the way transactions are executed. So users still have to sign in order to give approval, but a signature is free. Instead, the transaction is actually executed itself by a third party. In this third party, we like to call them bundlers, but they're really professional arbitrage trader. They're market makers. And market makers know how to most efficiently execute transactions in any economy. That's their job. Individuals are naturally inefficient. If I'm an individual, I'm going to hop on you, shop on your trade, get whatever that price is, whatever it is, I'm good with it. This way we can take change the way transactions are actually executed. And since the party that executes is the one that actually pays a gas fee, right?

[0:21:56] Max: They're the ones that are directly interacting with the smart contracts, et cetera. We can simplify the whole process of transacting on the ethereum, blockchain down into pressing a single button, into no longer having to hold the theorem in your wallet. You can just pay the fee in whatever acid you're trading, us, dollar, coin, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, doesn't matter. And bringing them all into one central location for users. So that's really how Solen came to be. We wanted to create a product that was going to be a theorem in one location, but a shit is uneasier for people to use and a shit's on cheaper for people to use.

[0:22:36] Rudy: So now I want to understand more of the technical aspect of Son Labs. So I as an individual, I guess I'm not going to break it down. So all of our listeners also understand exactly what's going on. So I, as individuals, log on to someone labs, connect my MetaMask wallet and I want so here, I'll walk you through the process.

[0:22:58] Max: I kind of just started with the technical background, like how all of this is possible, how are we reducing the cost, but still being a protocol on the theory, right? We're not an L. Two. We're not scaling the solution. We're a protocol on ethereum. We're also a protocol on L two. S, like arbitrary and optimism, zoo, K, sink, et cetera. We're not alive yet. We will be probably the end of this year Q one of next year. But anyway, what this process really looks like is the idea is to create the same level of user friendliness of Android or iOS, right, where you have a bunch of applications. When I unlock my iPhone, I am filled with a home screen of applications. These applications represent individual companies or operations that I want to execute. I have the applications that I personally want to interact with on my home screen. We're creating the same thing. Basically, we're creating the operating system for decentralization.

[0:23:55] Max: Where you'll have a home screen, we'll be an app on your phone, will also be on a web browser. But anyway, you'll have a home screen. This home screen will have applications and these applications will represent the major D apps. So you'll have a unispot app balancer bank or Openc, looks rare, whatever you want, you personally as an individual. And the benefit to interacting with these applications through our interface is not only is it a lot more user friendly, like by being represented as an application, but also when you're interacting with these applications through our interface, you get to use our smart contracts. So the whole process that was just explaining to you where bundlers execute transactions instead of users, what that process looks like on Solid versus just going through the protocol. I'll give you an example as uni swap is if I want to trade on a unisop today via. Let's say I'm like MetaMask for coinbase wallet, right? I go to Uniswap.org, I click launch. I'm now in their decentralized Exchange. Then I have to connect my wallet to the MetaMask or Coinbase wallet. The next thing I do is select the assets I want to swap. Let's say I'm swapping shiba in utoken for US dollar coin. I first select Shiva new Token type in the quantity. Then I select US dollar coin.

[0:25:10] Max: The second box will automatically populate with the amount of US dollar Coin I'll receive for swapping. I then press the button below. This first transaction will approve a token transfer from the Shiva and U Token smart contract. Then I have to do another one to interact with Unisop smart contract with their liquidity pool. And then finally I submit a transaction where I pay another fee in Ethereum to swap my Sheba in utoken for US dollar Coin. And now I've received US dollar coin. It's a complicated process. There's a lot of steps nowhere near user friendly. But Uniswap is the largest D five protocol because they are the most user friendly. That process is the most user friendly state. They didn't invest the decentralized Exchange bank or did, but Unisop made it the most user friendly. So what that process looks like and so on it said is I click the Uniswap application while it's already automatically connected. I then select whatever asset I want to swap. She didn't need token. I type in the quantity, it'll automatically then I select my next asset, US dollar Coin.

[0:26:19] Max: It'll automatically populate with the quantity unless I want to do a limit order. I can also do a limit order if I want. And then I edit the US dollar coin field anyway. And then I press swap and that's it. That's the whole process. And I just pay a fee in either US dollar Coin or Sheba in you token. I don't even need to hold the theory. And the transaction is cheaper because we bundled together transactions to reduce costs.

[0:26:43] Rudy: So then there has to be though a liquidity or our provider that would allow you to swap Shiba in you for whatever gas prices they need to pay for, right? I understand it's gas.

[0:26:57] Max: So the way it works is we're still going through Unisoft smart contracts, but we're also going through our smart contracts, right? So we're still using Unisop source of liquidity. When users select the Unisoft application, they're not using our liquidity pools, they're really using Unisop. They're using unisoft smart contracts. We've just changed the interface to make more sense because of all the steps we've eliminated. You're still interacting with Unison smart contracts. So when you use that Unisoft application and you submit an order, the bundler only has permission to execute it through Unisoft smart contracts. So you're getting uniswaps prices. But the actual transaction fee itself is cheaper because we're bundling together transactions with bundlers, these professional market makers. Because if I were to, let's say, send $10 to you versus sending a million dollars to you, I'd pay the same fee, right?

[0:27:53] Rudy: Yes.

[0:27:55] Max: So if we took all these like orders and bundled them together and executed them together, we're saving up fees and we're then distributing that across users, and then we can also execute a coincidence of wants as well. So we'll also have our own Exchange application. And the difference between our Exchange application and the uniswap one is on the uniswap one, ships are more user friendly than normal uniswap, but it is normal uniswap. It's just easier for people to use. And it's cheaper for people to use. Still, normally uniswap, our bundlers are forced to execute the transactions of unisop smart contracts. But on our Exchange application, our bundlers are free to execute it anywhere on the ethereum blockchain. They decide how they want to execute it so they can shop thousands of different decentralized exchanges to not only save you money on the cost of the transaction fee, but also get you the best price for the asset itself by shopping through all these liquidity sources. And they can also execute a coincidence salons. So if you're working with a pair that has a high enough trading volume, you could execute a coincidence once, which be, for example, if you had one e, then you want to swap for 1400 US dollar coin and I want to swap 1400 US dollar coin for 180. It'd be a coincidence salons and a transfer is a much cheaper, gas efficient, agency wise trade than a more complicated smart contract interaction like a swap through liquidity pool. So it's all about how can we make markets more efficient.

[0:29:19] Rudy: So then I guess you have bundlers signing up and ready to use your platform. So as a person, how do I become a bundler if I wanted to do that?

[0:29:30] Max: So anyone can become a bundler, but at the end of the day, technically users select bundlers. We'll have a default bundler to make it more user friendly, which will be like a professional market maker, like a winter. But anyone can be a bundler. And users can technically select their own bundlers. But at the end of the day, users only can select the bundlers that have the best returns. And since bundlers are professional arbitrage traders, right, they're only executing these transactions when they can make money. And that also means they can make a shit ton of money on some of these ARB opportunities between the users requested output and the market value they can get for their input. Right? So they're actually incentivized to share their profit with the user since the user selects the arbitrator they want to work with. So at the end of the day, there will probably be only be six that actually make money out of maybe hundreds. It'll be the ones that get the best returns for users.

[0:30:23] Rudy: Makes sense.

[0:30:24] Max: Yeah.

[0:30:24] Rudy: You're definitely making it so that everyone. Acts in their own best interest, but also in the greater good of the whole ecosystem.

[0:30:32] Max: Exactly. It's all about how you organize these things. Right. And we're really excited because you know what? At the end of the day, right. I gave you Unisoft as an example, but that's still a complicated example. It's a very niche audience that even swaps on unison. There's a lot of volume, but not many people at the end of the day. So yes, it makes the process of interacting with the blockchain period a lot more simple. But even at step one, which is where we lose most users, the wallet creation process needs to be a lot more simple. Right. So that's why we've implemented social recovery instead of using Seapraces. So the normal wall creation process systems for, you know, download a mask or front based wallet equivalent, you're given twelve to 24 words and then you have to confirm them in back order. You're asked to write them down. If you lose that piece of paper and you lose access, you're screwed.

[0:31:22] Max: And you lose all your money, you pass away. Your family doesn't know where it is, they're screwed. They lose all your money. Right. Not a very efficient system. It takes a while to set up. It's painting ass. It's kind of scary.

[0:31:33] Rudy: Definitely scary, yeah.

[0:31:35] Max: So instead we've implemented social recovery. So what that process looks like and so on. Instead is you download the app and then you just create a username and password and then you're prompted to further secure your account. So if you want to further secure your account, then you select what's known as guardian addresses. And guardian addresses searches other wallet addresses you trust, friends, family addresses you own. Anyway, those addresses can initiate what's known as the social recovery process. So let's say you lose access to your wallet. You don't have any words or receivers or anything. You don't need to know any of that. You lose access to your wallet, you call up mom, you call up dad, say, hey guys, I lost access. Do you just mind initiating the recovery process real quick? They just, they just click a button. Okay, yeah, no problem. Boom. You just regained access to your wallet.

[0:32:22] Rudy: How do you regain access? Is it just you get the recovery code?

[0:32:26] Max: The majority of guardians have to initiate the recovery process.

[0:32:29] Rudy: But how does that actually work? Do I get like the recovery phrase, the 24 seat phrase, does it pop up for them and just give it back to me?

[0:32:36] Max: Or is it so I would comment, but I'm not the technical person. Right on. The CEO and Ben can tell you exactly how it works, but there's like plenty of papers about social media. It's all like open source work at this point. We created some of our own contracts, but we're not making the social recovery process itself different. Safe processes, whatever is normal. But the really cool thing that Ben also implemented was obviously people get hacked in the space all the time, right. When people lose control over the wallets, they usually lose 100% of their assets. So Ben came up with this idea that every wallet that's created there's also a smart contract wallet called the bulk created with it. And this smart contract wallet has a well, the wallet, it sounds also a smart contract wallet, but another smart contract wallet, this wallet has a time lock, and we haven't decided if we want the users to decide if we're going to have the default one. But for this example, let's say it's three days. So the users have this wealth that come with their wealth that they're prompted to store the majority of their wealth in whatever they don't want to be liquid. Right? Whatever. I'm not using back and forth, back and forth volume.

[0:33:50] Max: So 95% of your wealth or 90 plus percent of your wealth should really be in there, stored in there. Let's say the time off for this is three days. So malicious party takes over my wallet. Somehow they drain everything in there instantly. They then try to drain what's in my fault. They initiate a transaction to drain what's in my fault, but it's going to take three days. But it's going to take three days for that transaction to actually go through. So in those three days, I can initiate the social recovery process, regain control of the wallet and cancel the transaction and create a new wallet and save the majority of my assets.

[0:34:32] Rudy: It's interesting because I'm wondering if there's going to be a battle for that wallet after you get that social recovery.

[0:34:38] Max: Oh, I'm sure there will be. I was thinking about that recently. I haven't asked Ben exactly how that's going to work. I'm sure Ben but yeah, in theory, right, the malicious party and you could just be going head to head for like weeks or months whenever they want to quit. But at the same time, you got to keep in mind most of these malicious actors are bots, and they're not going to be interacting with separate smart contracts. Right. It's only going to be the few individual malicious actors. No one's creating a custom bot for our interface, at least at this point in time. It could be in the future, obviously. But anyway, at this point in time, any malicious accurate that's going to be at the level where they're going to know how to drain your spark contract. Well, it's going to be an individual, and then I guess it'd be a battle of attrition. If you make your time periods as long, like, let's say a week, you only got to check on that once a week, see if they fought you back. But I don't know, to be honest with you, I definitely got to ask about that.

[0:35:42] Rudy: That's a good way. Yeah. I'm curious to see how it's going to work because I think you're also bringing new ideas of how to use, I guess, what innovation is using current technology with a little bit of a spin and creating a whole new path and flow of how to use an entire ecosystem. So that's exciting, and I'm excited for you guys.

[0:36:02] Max: It's all about how we structure these things.

[0:36:03] Rudy: Exactly. Now, as CEO and working someone labs, going to school and also making your own money somehow, how do you take time for yourself to just step away from crypto or just relax? Or do you even do that because you're so obsessed you don't even care? What do you do for your own mental health?

[0:36:28] Max: Actually, unfortunately, my little brother also goes to Narcissist, and he's a good friend of mine. Next week, I'm friends with all my clues. But anyway, we work out every other day. I wake up every day at 630. We work out every other day at 630. And he's like a five minute walk away. He'll come to my place, where King? And then on the weekends, college kid. I've got like, two other friends. We'll usually do, like, barbecue or something. Maybe we'll go out to Fenway. Because you got to take some time to yourself always, because if you don't, you're going to go crazy.

[0:37:09] Rudy: It's hard, man. It's a 24/7 industry. You can always go on your Twitter or Discord and just find a message to respond to. So how many more do you have? Six more classes up. So you graduated by next year, hopefully.

[0:37:26] Max: Actually, I have four classes.

[0:37:29] Rudy: Okay.

[0:37:31] Max: So I'll be graduated in sprint.

[0:37:33] Rudy: Awesome. That's exciting. I'm excited for you. So then hopefully by that time, solar Labs will be fully launched working. But do you have any roadmap plan of where to take it after this first step? Are you ready for the next steps already, or are you just like, let's get through this phase.

[0:38:02] Max: It's very much like, let's get this product to market. But we do kind of have the next phase in mind. And that's it. We plan on launching the product first and then really refining the product based on any analytics and user data we can pull for, like, probably a few months, I would say, at least. And then once we feel like we have an extremely high retention rate, then we'll finally deploy our Dow and do our public.

[0:38:30] Rudy: Got you. Nice. Yeah, it's a pretty popular move nowadays too, of how to actually start the Dow.

[0:38:41] Max: Yeah, you might think you know people, but at the end of the day, I might think I've created the world's most user friendly web three products, but it might not be.

[0:38:50] Rudy: Yeah, this industry moves so fast, tomorrow someone come out, just launch this thing out of nowhere.

[0:38:56] Max: Exactly.

[0:38:58] Rudy: Well, speaking about that, being in the industry for a few years now, what crypto pet peeve do you have?

[0:39:09] Max: So I kind of have become very involved in the crypto, Twitter, NFP search just because the normal crypto chat space mainly on Telegrams and things like that. Those people sometimes really get to me. Like, no one ever really gets to me, but I'm just like, bro, like, why are you talking like this? I don't really want to be in this chat right now. Well, like, NFC Twitter is all like, good vibes and GMs and Sunshine and Rainbows, which some people don't like that shit. At least everyone's nice, everyone's not a good vibe, everyone's excited about the space. But then you get into these crypto chats with Bitcoin Maxis and it's just like, if you don't believe in bitcoin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, bro, I don't need this shit. My life.

[0:39:57] Rudy: Yeah, it's so sad because, like, I love bitcoin as bitcoin, but there's then Maxis in every industry is Bitcoin Maxis, ETH Maxis, Cardano Maxis, like Salona Maxis. Any Maxi in my mind is like, just stop. You don't have to be so extreme. Extremism is what's turning this world upside down. Most people are on the same page where we're just trying to figure out this technology work with different blockchains because, yeah, obviously we think Ethereum is going to be the number one or bitcoin number one or whatever is going to be number one. But there's always going to be multiple blockchains. Human beings are not very good at agreeing on one protocol or agreeing on one blockchain. We're going to disagree and think, what's.

[0:40:41] Max: Better is yeah, even if it has one user, there will always be some.

[0:40:48] Rudy: It's like, how do we work together to make it most efficient for everybody? Because you can do that if we work together. But that's a tough part because extreme people are always the loudest. That's good.

[0:41:02] Max: But you know what? At the same time, right, we have to design a system so people will always do them. Extreme people will always want to do extreme. This is what it is, society.

[0:41:13] Rudy: Exactly. Yeah. So your hoodie has an address on it. So is this the community that you're representing and loving?

[0:41:22] Max: So this is the smart contract address for the Adidas nathan for their Minting contract. And then they partnered with this is she Money's logo. He's a famous crypto pump. This subordinate yacht club, punk's comics, and then obviously the Adidas logo.

[0:41:41] Rudy: Nice going off that route. I want to know also, what is your favorite wholesome crypto moment? Being in so many communities, bringing companies together, this industry, there's got to be some moment in your life where you're like, that felt good to be a part of or witness.

[0:41:58] Max: So I was in this discord one time for Deadheads, and this was an NFT project, which at the time really blew up. Didn't last very like the height didn't last very long, but it was pretty big. This was July or June of 2021. So this was very early on to the end of people. One of the very first people projects. It's like two months after 40, and I was in this discord, and Gary B had discovered it. I was a moderator in this court. I had known these guys from the last project. They did artificial intelligence art, and that's where I found them. And then I was like, hey, you guys should make a disco, blah, blah. And then they did another NFT project, and I volunteered too. Crush blew up. Gary Vee got involved, blah, blah, blah. People were pouring in. And there was this one guy who popped into the chat and was just like, hey, guys, I accidentally just sold my entity.

[0:42:53] Max: He sold it for like, 0.5 at the time. It was unrebaled at the time, the floor was zero five. So he fat fingered it. And I was like, well, he could have maybe sold it to himself. Maybe he's trying to you always have to assume the worst case scenario. There are all sorts of greasy. There was this one guy, this guy Bob, bob A. Moore. And he was like, you know what? I even talked to him about it. You know what? Yeah, he could have been a malicious whatever. It doesn't matter. But you know what? At the end of the day, I understand how bad that dude must feel if obviously there actually happened.

[0:43:35] Max: And then after this guy Bob, by the way, he bought him one, and he just sent it to him, no questions asked. And then the guy after was like, hey, I think it's multiple sclerosis or something. And he absolutely just figured it because of his disease, right? It's hard for him to control his muscles. So that was just like a really cool moment. It's been really cool to be in web three in general. Like, I've seen all sorts of cool moments. I've seen, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars since one items recovered. Scammers people are great. You see really cool things in this.

[0:44:11] Rudy: I know. I wish we talked more about that, right? Like, we see tons of scammers. The scammers are making headlines. But then I think one recent one that I saw that was kind of wholesome was the issue where bit boy was suing the YouTuber. I forgot his name. I know exactly what you're saying. He was suing a YouTuber for calling bit boy out.

[0:44:37] Max: I saw the guy's thread about the.

[0:44:39] Rudy: Lawsuit, his response, and then Kobe came in on nowhere, like, all right, here's my to help pay for your lawsuit. And then bit boy retracted his lawsuit because he even said because Kobe is giving him money now that he has support. That's like a system where the community really came in to support someone who's just using his platform to show what he's recognizing. That's what's happening in ecosystem, that someone's doing some kind of, I guess, trying just to make money in the ecosystem. I guess what bitcoin was doing is working for his advertisers.

[0:45:19] Max: Yeah, it's transparency, right? They're pushing this ethos, this envelope of decentralization. Exactly. It's cool that we do. Yeah. Twitter is obviously a centralized platform, right. But it's a good way to express free speech at the end of the day, at least for now. Maybe Lens one day will make it, if they ever want to make it free to tweet or the tweet equivalent. But it's just so cool to see people really speaking out, to have transparency, to be able to follow all these transactions along the Internet, like things like what Zack XBT does, for example. People like that amaze me.

[0:45:55] Rudy: Yeah. And that's the beautiful thing about this ecosystem, is that bad actors are shown, but also a lot of good actors are shown, too. We have good people in this world that really want to create a community just to better everyone's lives and not be so malicious. But it's just hard to break away from bad news because good news doesn't bring as many likes. Well, thank you again, Max, for being on the show. I'm super excited for you. I'm super excited for you and Ben to create So on labs and launch it. I'm in the Boston area, so we'll definitely see more of each other. But thanks again, man.

[0:46:34] Max: Thanks for having me ready. Have a great day, too. Bye.

I hope you're enjoying the WholesomeCrypto podcast! I put a lot of time and effort into creating it, and I'm so grateful for your support. If you're enjoying the content and want to help me keep it going, there are a few ways you can do that.

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We explore the potential of blockchain technology to benefit communities, the steps necessary to bring ancient technologies into the blockchain, and the importance of using your money to empower yourself and others. Sage shares her personal story of transitioning from a comfortable consulting job to a journey of immense dedication and passion, as well as her mission to create economic systems that truly empower people. Sage's mission is not to become financially wealthy. Rather, she is intent on creating economic systems that empower people. She believes that if we all direct our resources towards this goal, the human species will make it through to the other side.

To that end, she is currently working on a project to verify the origins of food and ensure its quality, in addition to creating a legal infrastructure that will best support her end goals. Join us on this exciting exploration of blockchain technology, ancient teachings, and more!

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Transcript

[0:00:00] Sage: I realized that I was never going to feel legitimate enough or ready enough to put up a bitcoin grant for a new project, and I just needed to tear out the band aid and do it. I just knew that get coin on 15 was the right time. There was never going to be a better time. I was never going to feel more ready, and that nature couldn't wait on me to feel cozy about it.

[0:00:22] Rudy: I'm Rudy Dogum, and this is wholesome crypto. Here I speak with crypto experts, influencers, and entrepreneurs to find out what personally led them to the path of cryptocurrency. Welcome stage to the Wholesome Crypto Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me tonight.

[0:00:38] Sage: Hey, Rudy.

[0:00:40] Rudy: So good to have you on, and I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you're busy moving and busy with co founding Resign network, and thank you for being a builder. But before we get into all the building phase and what your life is like in crypto, I want to know a bit about sage before ever even hearing about anything crypto or bitcoin.

[0:01:03] Sage: Oh, sage before crypto. Well, that's most of my life. Wouldn't you like to know? Okay, Rudy, what phase of life would you like to know about?

[0:01:12] Rudy: Let's see. I guess give me one year before you heard about bitcoin.

[0:01:17] Sage: Oh, I probably heard about bitcoin in college. Okay, let's just backtrack to college, then. Tell about that era. So I grew up in a really small town in North Carolina and was like, wow, nature is beautiful, but the world must be so big. I should really go see what's out there. So I was just curious and followed my nose and went to school in Southern California, studied geomicrobiology and molecular biology, and did a bunch of fun stuff looking at weird microbes that grow in the salt and sea, which is near Death Valley, California. In my early years, I would say I was largely fascinated by microbes and spent a lot of time in labs, a lot of time storing things, pouring things, weighing things, autoclaving things, sterilizing things with ethanol, spray bottles, counting cells on plates. I spent a lot of my life in a lab age like, 18 to 25.

[0:02:25] Rudy: Was that something you wanted to do as a kid? I want to be in a lab and figuring out no.

[0:02:31] Sage: I've always loved being outside. So for me, there was, like, this pull in this multi directional pole where I was, like, wanting to understand how nature works, to get under the hood and understand the micro level, how are all these things interplaying? And wanting to zoom in and really getting to do that in a laboratory, but then finding myself confined to kind of a prison of a laboratory. Right. I left graduate school because of that.

[0:03:05] Rudy: That's a tough move. It's like you invest so much time into something that you're like, I got to go.

[0:03:09] Sage: It's not easy my ecosystems of study changed a bit over the years. I went from in high school, I was assisting with studying caves in Eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and then in California was studying these weird extremophilic mud volcanoes in the salt and sea. And then in graduate school, I was studying species interactions in Pinot Noir up at Oregon State, which was super fun. It was a really good time, but I was like, wow, if I do a really good job pipetting these tiny amounts of liquids, I can get a full time job pipetting tiny amounts of liquid forever for EJ Gallo, and I can live in Modesto, California. Wait, this master's degree is setting me up to be a director of a laboratory for a large conglomerate winery. And how did I end up here? And, oh, my God, this is not at all the life I wanted. I want to be connected to nature, not living in one of the most, like, desolate, sad places, which is California, sadly, I have a whole love affair with California and a lot of grief for the West Coast, watching it lose water and burn slowly. But my move away from science fund me into a whole spiritual awakening process that somehow spit me out into web three. And I'm not sure exactly how that happened.

[0:04:44] Rudy: I guess was there somebody who, like, said, hey, Sage, there's this thing called ethereum or this decentralized world. You have to get into it. Do you have, like, a friend or a peer?

[0:04:54] Sage: There was no one trying to get me into it. I think, if anything, maybe the opposite. I had a friend who I had met during this phase in my life, like, 2019, early 2020. He was a lover and a partner who I met, and he was from the San Francisco Bay Area. And I had gone to school in SoCal, but I never, like, lived lived like a techie part of the Bay Area. I had lived in Napa doing wine stuff in Sonoma. But I moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area and got to know a bunch of really interesting folks who are, like, interested in consciousness and authentic relating. Also blockchain technology, some of them, although the people who I met who are interested in blockchain technology didn't really lead with it. And there's one person in particular who ended up becoming a good friend of mine. The winter of was the first winter of COVID and I was working a pretty straightforward, like, SAS tech sales job. I was living in Portland, Oregon. I had a roommate who was a friend via this network I had met in the Bay Area, and he and I were, like, hanging out a bunch. I was trying to understand who he was and what he was doing, and I would glance at his double monitors and be like, what's going on over there? And don't worry about it. And come to find out, he's like, with maker dow.

[0:06:26] Sage: He's like, deep with Maker dow and totally wasn't pushing crypto on me. If anything, he had already seen a lot and was skeptical of crypto and was trying to save me from crypto or something.

[0:06:40] Rudy: Don't go through the headache.

[0:06:42] Sage: He wasn't trying to pill me. And I was just deeply curious, and I was like, what are you doing? And then in meditation, I started hearing the word ethereum more frequently, and I was like, well, that's a sign that I should be leaning into this. I should be curious about it. Basically just having one person that I knew from my real life who was a roommate of mine, who I trusted, who was somehow, like, deep in the space, kind of as, like, a proof of concept to me. That crypto was real. Got me curious enough to buy some ethereum to start just really silly things on the Internet, to start reading and falling down some rabbit holes. I did end up in the fall of 2021, which was only last year. Wow, it feels like so long ago.

[0:07:34] Rudy: You mentioned it.

[0:07:37] Sage: Super curious about a particular fork that had really cool branding.

[0:07:44] Rudy: We got the marketing got you.

[0:07:46] Sage: Yeah, the marketing got me, like, literally zero regrets. Good people, crazy times, really. Now that I know what I know now, like, a pretty functional dow because I've been now in other dowels that are less functional than the first dow I was in. And I'm like, okay. They kind of knew how working groups work. They knew how to help people collaborate in a decentralized manner. Like, wow, we really did the fucking thing. And even though the whole idea of an own part of bullshit, which I don't really do big mouse, I'm just here, I'm just like, e building something really cool on ETH. You seem values aligned. This is a good time. I'm entertained. I was just, like, so curious. And I was, like, a community manager and a product manager, and I helped design a DAP, and I got to collaborate with people across three different time zones, creating visuals and blender for adapt. And it was like the wildest, weirdest, fun time.

[0:08:49] Rudy: Was tech always something you're into, though, too, or this is like this whole rabbit hole wormhole of blockchain, and now you're spending so much time in a lab and now you're spending so much time on a computer.

[0:08:59] Sage: I bet I know it's an analogous thing, right? It's like I really enjoy going down rabbit holes and learning a lot about something. I like understanding how systems work. So anything that allows my curiosity, anything where I can just keep digging and pulling back layers keeps me really engaged. But honestly, if anything, I've been really skeptical of technology for most of my life. As a young kid, I remember reading Brave New World, maybe something like 9th or 10th grade. I remember reading Brave New World. We had some sort of ten page or 15 page essay assignment. And it was one of the first long format assignments I had ever gotten. And I just dug into this topic of ethical technology. And I don't know, I guess at a young age I just felt something like I didn't know it at the time, but it was a lie for me. I was like, technology, the ethical use of technology. This is really important. I didn't know how relevant those questions would be now, but of course they're extremely relevant. Ethical implementation, that makes sense.

[0:10:09] Rudy: That's a good big topic of discussion now, right? Like how we use our technology. Times like this where it's such easy times to use technology against other countries, like spying on each other, data privacy, pretty much blocking access to certain viewership and kind of also feeding you with information that makes you think in a certain way. That's a huge debate. You're right. What's the ethical way to use technology? And it seems like blockchain is a good way to actually break into that barrier.

[0:10:35] Sage: I think it's so interesting how all at once blockchain is really complicated and it's really simple.

[0:10:43] Rudy: It makes sense. But the tech behind it is definitely complicated.

[0:10:46] Sage: It's like, okay, we decided we would just create this never ending Russian nesting doll system of data referencing other data and through the chain of reference, everything is legitimized. Okay, cool. That in itself is so simple. And then somehow, humans, in our social complexity, we've created this world now where there's, like, all these chains. Some are interoperable, some really aren't. And now we've got, like, interoperability failures, which I think is like, if, you know, about Molokai? Do I feel like the creation of all these chains is a manifestation of Molok completely because we're diffusing our energy based on these egotistical sort of rabbit holes that all of us are subject to. Right. None of us aren't tempted by these things. At some point in time, right into the ego ask like, how can I leverage myself? How can I put myself forward? How can I propel me into the world? And we have a real opportunity here to use technology for communal benefit. I'm really curious about how we're going to do that because I just see things like, oh my gosh, it's like finance and polka dot and polygon and this and that. And everyone wants to help everyone, kind of.

[0:12:24] Sage: But it's really like expanding their ecosystem based on their VC checks that are getting written. And in the end, it's not people wanting to help people, it's people wanting to spread immunification of an idea of a particular blockchain. And what I'm bullish on are blockchains that don't have an internal incentive other than to support people. Like blockchains that don't have a VC incentive. But literally their only incentive is to support communities, supporting communities.

[0:13:05] Rudy: It's hard to take away the money aspect of it all too, because obviously anyone in the blockchain industry does want to become financially wealthy. No one's going into, like, Aetherium or Bitcoin or Salona thinking. I mean, I'm thinking a lot about the tech is amazing. I want the tech to help out the people. And people have their ownership in favor of privacy, but that doesn't happen unless the value of that token or cryptocurrency goes up. If it's going down, everyone just kind of like, all right, it's no value. Even if you just make an exact replica of Ethereum's code base something else. And if it doesn't have any value into it and monetarily, it's just not going to work because money moves people. It's hard to start, like, a whole new blockchain. Or like, what you're saying that people start a new blockchain, having a VC backing and market it very heavily, saying that we want to help support other people, get a huge community going, and they might be on that mission genuinely and actually, but not maliciously. But I always think back, like, what if we put all that attention and focus into a theorem or into Bitcoin even? What happens if you all just work together instead of having 10,000 different chains that do almost identical stuff?

[0:14:10] Sage: So this is the point in the conversation where I need to ask you, Rudy, do you know about Cosmos?

[0:14:16] Rudy: I do know about Cosmos, but not super familiar. But tell me more and educate me and the fans.

[0:14:22] Sage: Okay, well, do you want to start by telling me what you do know about Cosmos?

[0:14:26] Rudy: Oh, then the cryptocurrency itself. And, like, it's interoperability aspect of trying to combine chains, but not in detail.

[0:14:35] Sage: But interoperability is the heart of it, which is why I bring this up. I'm not here to show anything, and I'm not selling for anyone, so I'll just say that. But I've been learning about cosmos. I don't understand it at a deep level or like a technical level, but what I do know is that it was founded with the intention to empower communities. It was founded with the intention for every network that spun up on the Cosmos SDK to be interoperable with every other network. Right. It's a playground where people can create what they need to create, run their own servers, and get to play with all of their friends. And it's just pretty cool. It's simple in a way, also complex. I've had a lot of, I don't know, questions or concerns around, like, who's maintaining this thing? It's not a centralized source of power. Who's maintaining it? And this is what I learned from Gregory LandWay of Region Network is essentially like, people who are running servers just step in when they need to. It really is this mycelial network of, like, okay, if your servers go down or this or that or whatever, or like, you need help. Other communities who use the Cosmos SDK communicate and help each other so you can be support to your localized community and also to the wider Cosmos community.

[0:16:13] Sage: And you can interoperate your currencies. There's no gas feed, there's no cost for transaction between these currencies. And that ethos really speaks to me. I feel like the way that the Cosmos developers think about community from the ground level just makes a lot of sense. Because in the end, we're moving towards decentralization in a lot of ways, right? Like our electricity sources, our water sources, our food sources, like all of these things. Whatever version of life we're in right now where people live in suburbia and drive gasoline cars, whatever version of reality we're in right now is going to come to an end and we're going to see a new reality. And I'm bullish on the technologies that are inherently supportive of true decentralization. I want to see a world where there are solar farms running nodes in these sort of like, various bioregional zones, and we're farming together, running our nodes together, raising children together, all of it. And I see the Cosmos ecosystem as being a very supportive ecosystem to the real spirit of decentralization.

[0:17:37] Rudy: Well, so I like how you bring it into the whole greater ecosystem of a global idea where everyone is working together for the greater good. That is the ultimate goal for what blockchain and cryptocurrency is doing, is recognizing, understanding. This is becoming a global economy. It's no longer such a base on per state or per country role. Every country is almost thriving off each other to survive. Without Mexico, America wouldn't have so many of its fruits and vegetables. And without China, America wouldn't have their laptops and all of our furniture. Pretty much without America, other countries wouldn't have their services and financial services. It is like a whole ecosystem that we're all in together. I'm glad that the industry that we're in is actually working towards that. Yeah. So as you're developing and growing in this industry, how did you get into the resign network? How did you get into co founding?

[0:18:29] Sage: That's a good question. Yeah. So I'll rewind to February, which 2022 has been the year that feels like it's three years long. So much has happened in one year. So way back in February, this is my first Web Three conference. I feel like a season veteran now, but like, February, east Denver was my first. I didn't know what I was doing. I had a love for Colorado earlier in my twenty s. I had taught skiing out there, and I had friends that lived in Boulder and just went and crashed with my friends in Boulder and went to East Denver. Did a hackathon project with some interesting folks around Dal governance. Sort of understanding which frameworks for Dow governance were correlated with the highest contributor sentiment. So I was doing kind of like the qualitative part of that study and tossing out a lot of survey cards with QR codes, trying to get busy people to answer a survey. Those five questions long, but I had a lot of fun at East Denver. Had the pleasure of meeting Kevin O'Very briefly there, and started to get curious about Bitcoin and just, like, fundraising, alternative forms of fundraising as a whole at that point. Also, at East Denver 2022, an organization picked me up as a consultant to start a Dow for them, and I was pretty excited about it.

[0:20:02] Sage: It was supposed to be a project that would benefit the public and carbon offsetting and power individuals to offset their personal footprints. The long and the short of it is that that particular project did not move forward due to things that are completely out of my hands. Some partnership agreements did not work, and the Dow did not happen. The company still exists, but the Dow, to my knowledge, still does not exist.

[0:20:31] Rudy: Yeah, it's not easy constructing a Dow.

[0:20:33] Sage: So after that experience, I found myself in Europe for Sello Connect in Barcelona in April, meeting some folks. And around that time, April into May, I was just reflecting on everything my background in science, the care I have for the environment, everything that I had learned about carbon credits and the monitoring, reporting, and verification process, also known as MRV. I was just sort of mulling all of that over, and I was like, there's really got to be a better way for us to help land speak for itself. I was really feeling, like, the power of nature moving through me, in particular through a couple of medicine ceremonies. In a way, I felt like nature gave me the green light to move forward with a system that would account for her on economic ledgers. Because I know for a lot of people, there's this idea that commodification of nature is inherently extractive. And that was something that I was still really grappling with, struggling with not knowing what I thought about it, not knowing where I stood. I don't think that putting nature on a balance sheet means that nature will inherently become a part of an extractive economic model. I think our system of consciousness, like, as a human species, our OS, is getting upgraded from extractive economy into regenerative economy. And I do think that our Earth's natural assets need to be accounted for because they've been left off of accounting mechanisms for so long. That truly understanding where our forests are, where our healthy soils are, where our clean waters are. We have a lot of interest in understanding where the health of nature still resides, where regeneration potential resides, and how we can incentivize individuals of means to invest their wealth in ROI that is, feeding themselves and feeding their children food, water that won't give them cancer. We're shifting into a paradigm where that is the ROI. The ROI is not percentage yield, return on dollars. Dollars are collapsing.

[0:23:07] Sage: Spoiler alert. The US. Dollar is failing. Right. The new paradigm that we can invest in is, like, actual clean food and water. And I truly hope that I can communicate that to the right people. And that Resign Network can empower scientists to develop methodologies that will create the protection mechanism for these ecosystems via ecoredit pathways.

[0:23:33] Rudy: That's amazing. You hit the nail right in the head. Like, we are not regenerating our Earth as we're using it. We're not, like, replanting as much as we're extracting. And now in the news, I'm hearing about the forever chemicals in the water, and it's literally every single source of water on Earth has these forever chemicals that just cannot be destroyed or killed. And we're all ingesting it every day. That, to me, is kind of nuts and how much damage we can do and how much we're not, like, giving back. And what you're working on now incentivizing people to actually invest in something that's going to give you an ROI on your own health and well being and your futures health and wellbeing is incredibly needed. How far along are you in the stage of building this network out? And I guess, how can some people hop on and get on board with it? Anyone listening that's interested?

[0:24:23] Sage: So Resign Network, it almost feels like it's still in the womb in a way. Yeah, it's like a little baby that's still in the womb. It's about to be birth.

[0:24:32] Rudy: It's always going to feel like that. That's always your baby.

[0:24:36] Sage: Yeah. So I started thinking about all this stuff around April. It's now October when Bitcoin Round 15 came around and I was working full time like an Ecosystem Partnership account Relations Manager person, I realized that I was never going to feel legitimate enough or ready enough to put up a Git Coin grant for a new project. And I just needed to tear off the Band Aid and do it. I just knew that Gitcoin Round 15 was the right time. There was never going to be a better time. I was never going to feel more ready. And that nature couldn't wait on me to feel cozy about it. I was just never going to feel cozy, but saying, like, I can lead a movement. Give me money. Like, what the fuck? Who is ever ready for that moment? So I did that. And I'm really glad I did. We still got to do all of our paperwork to get everything in order, because right now, as a founder, one of the major things I have to mull over is like, what is the legal infrastructure that's going to best empower me to accomplish my end goals?

[0:25:45] Sage: How do I not get tripwired by legal infrastructure so that I can do what I set out to do? And so I'm talking with a few different folks who are helping me sort that out. I'm hoping to collect more information than Lisbon next week from other founders just to feel into this. And I feel like resign network most likely will be a Swiss.org. And we'll also have like a Delaware LLC Arm, something like that, where we can both have international presence and governance and also have an Arm that can receive charitable donations from corporations in America because that's really instrumental for fundraising. That's a bit about the background, but what we're doing and why. I gave this talk at Sustainability Blockchain Summit a week ago, a week ago in Columbia, giving a talk apparently. And what I talked about was empowering working groups that already exist to do what they are already doing at a faster pace with just higher quality collaboration and working with a couple of core working groups as beta tests. Finding out what they need for scientific collaboration and then building the user interface, building the framework that can actually allow people to work much faster and could allow us to onboard scientists really quickly. Because right now if I say, okay, the knowledge base is on Notion, the communications hub is on Discord, the repos are on GitHub. That makes sense to me because I've had a year and a half to rock this. But it doesn't make sense to a soil science PhD who wants to give us 2 hours of their time on the weekends, who has immense knowledge but like zero familiarity with what we're swimming in. I really feel like compiling the right Legos together in a single user interface for scientific collaboration, for the creation of these methodologies is really going to be the thing that moves the solid. It's going to be like move slow to go fast. We're going to move slow, slow, slow, with a lot of intentionality and with a lot of community feedback at first.

[0:28:02] Sage: And then when we know what Lego pieces need to be in place and how we can put those in place, build it and send people on their way, it's going to be amazing. I'm extremely excited for this.

[0:28:16] Rudy: The whole recipe or the DSAI world, like decentralized science is so fascinating to me and is so ready for disruption. I think we met at DSI Boston and all those talks about, yeah, we need to actually collaborate in science worldwide too. We have so many findings and there's so many barriers for scientists to share their own research and also fear of sharing your research because you don't want anyone stealing it either, or like stealing it and developing something that's commoditized. So it's like a lot of barriers and red tape. And then also fear of losing your own research and not being paid properly, sometimes working really hard along at the lab. It's so skewed and it's definitely controlled by corporations now at a high sense. Of course, everyone's looking for that high dollar value, but it's nice to empower the people who are really putting their time and effort and trying to understand and research what is good, what is helpful, what is beneficial for us as a society, as a civilization, and sharing that, distributing and having that network effect of resi. And I'm glad you're starting this now because you are probably one of the first group of people doing this type of work, and it's exciting for the future. I'm pretty pumped for you for that.

[0:29:35] Sage: Thank you. I'll be the first to say that really and truly, I did not get into crypto for money. I know that's going to sound like bullshit. I know no one will ever believe me, but I left a very comfortable consulting position. Or I didn't leave, but I elected not to renew a contract consulting for a very cozy AG tech company around the time that I fell down that rabbit hole with the om fork. And it wasn't even the idea of the gains through the ome fork that got me. It was the ethos of building community and creating spaces where people could trust their money. And I know in many ways the outcome ended up being the opposite of that. I can acknowledge that without going down that rabbit hole. But really, this feeling of like, we do not trust governmental currencies as they are. You can hold this currency, you can fake it, you can stake and chill, you can be in meditative repose, trusting that your money is safe, et cetera. Like the money that you need to have for your money, for your family, for your well being. Like not excess, but just your squirrel. It's winter. Like your nut storage, you can put it somewhere that's safer than the US dollar.

[0:30:52] Sage: I really like that ethos, to be honest. And Rudy, to this day, I can say, had I stayed in web two AG tech SAS stuff, would I be making more money? Would I not be paying health care out my own pocket? I'm absolutely losing money being in web three. Absolutely losing money. I don't know how else to say it.

[0:31:15] Rudy: It's the truth.

[0:31:16] Sage: It's the truth. I'm losing money in web three. My first attempt at investments were a loss, I think, because I kind of got in on the Euphoria highs of spring 2021 was about the time I found crypto. So I bought high, and that's okay. What I'm trying to say is I'm still here. I'm glad I'm here. I am in this for the creation of economic systems that empower people. But I'm not in it for the end goal of getting rich, because it's not what any of this is about anymore. We would all be fucking lucky to get vegetables for our lifetime. We would be lucky if we could all have housing that really feels safe, food that really is clean, water that really is clean. Like, that is what I want for humanity. And I think we've gotten just so out of whack where parts of the world are living in this crazy level of luxury, and most of the human experience by percentage is like, a lot of suffering. I don't think we need to be in that level of suffering. And I think that we're about to see a lot more suffering, like with climate tragedies, with climate chaos, climate change. But I really do think that we have enough time that if people who are ready to wake up, wake up now and take their millions of dollars and can redirect it into systems that regenerate land, that we can make it through like the human species can make it through to the other side of this.

[0:33:04] Sage: But only if we help enough people wake up now and put their money where their mouth is. Literally. Because you can't eat money. You can't eat money. At the end of the day, you can try, but it's not going to go down easy.

[0:33:20] Rudy: It's pretty nuts to think like, as a civilization, we have the technology and we have the power to live a comfortable life, all of us together.

[0:33:30] Sage: But humans are humans, but it's not our reality. And the question is why? How have we self organized in this way such that there's so much disparity between the comfort of the elite and the discomfort of the poor? I'm not here to chill some ideal of a world in which everyone's experience of life is the same. I don't believe that will ever exist or is like Dharma. Everyone has their unique dharma. Everyone has their unique path. I'm not here to change that for anyone. But I do think that people with deep pockets, I think they don't know how close they are to losing their nice organic food supply. And do they even know what the fuck is in their organic label of food from Whole Foods? Because all of the systems that rich people have helped corrupt are corrupting them and getting organic labels put on bullshit food. And there's very little food to this day that is truly clean and safe. You can be sure of what's in it.

[0:34:37] Rudy: And yeah, I have no idea what's in those organic labels either. I just have to trust it, I guess. But I don't like trusting me. I want to verify that it's good.

[0:34:46] Sage: Which is where blockchain comes into place. I remember learning about file coin ages ago because, yeah, when I first went down the crypto rabbit hole I had been with before, I was consulting for the AG tech company. I was with an IoT company, and I just remember hearing about supply chain traceability with file coin and getting extremely excited about that. And honestly, I still am. There's always going to be some layer of trust that is involved when a human squats down and harvests a bunch of kale, right? That action, I guess, can be captured on the camera, but there can be soil sensors verifying the quality of the soil, the soil health. You can basically take a bunch of kale, you can bag it, you can put a sensor on it or put a sensor on the shipment or something, and then you can verify on chain or off chain that things are what they are. I don't think we'll ever completely circumnavigate the human problem of corruption. I think desperate people do crazy things. I don't even want to call them crazy things. Like, people in desperate situations do desperate things. Right. The better we can empower technology to, like, serve how humans already work and how things move, how things flow, I think we have a pretty good shot at verifying how things originate and where things move through, how food is delivered to your doorstep and where it came from.

[0:36:21] Rudy: Yeah, it's crucial to have that, hopefully eventually, sooner than later. I also want to know you have your hands in crypto now, pretty deep in your traveling to different conferences over the world, working on this project. What does Sage do to keep her own mental health in check and just kind of phase out of crypto if you need to? Some people just love diving. What do you do for fun? Your hobbies and also mental health checks.

[0:36:45] Sage: Deep down, if I didn't feel this immense spiritual calling to do this, I would not be doing this. So the things I do in my free time, I love yoga. I don't do nearly enough of it. I have to calm myself out on that. But back in 2018, 2019, I started formal Yogic path, although I guess it informally started around age 18 or so, maybe earlier. But yeah, I study yoga. I study contract yoga, which is like a very slow, breath based form of yoga where you hold poses for a really long time. And that is a deep technology. So I'm bullish on ancient technologies and rediscovering them. So, like, literally holding your body or resting your body in a given position that allows specific channels of energy to move spinal fluid, to move all the blood flow, all of it, we can have an effect on our consciousness in the way we utilize our bodies, for sure. Like, yoga has proven that to me. And I think, if anything, this podcast being interviewed right now is a good reminder for me to really double down on my daily yoga practice and not let it totally fall to the wayside in all of this. Because if I lose my yoga practice, it will be the end of me. I have to keep it up.

[0:38:11] Rudy: It's wild that you say that, because my wife, she has a yoga wellness business, yoga hub, and I didn't do any yoga before I met her. I wasn't into it, didn't really know anything. I was very much like the engineer mindset. Like, oh, you don't need that. You're just laying down and sleeping. Until I started practicing with her and doing and learning more about the actual ancient teachings of how it's supposed to be helpful and why it's helpful physically and mentally. So I got into meditation. Now I got into doing yoga more routinely. Not as much as I should be of course, but it helps a lot. And it's funny because I was the one to teach her about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. She's like, well, this is great because that's needed in this yoga industry pretty heavily. So now we're discussing ideas on how to incorporate yoga and blockchain.

[0:38:57] Sage: The yoga of blockchain.

[0:38:59] Rudy: Yes, because it's all about the ancient information that we lose that thankfully, that blockchain can keep and record. But yeah. So anyone out there definitely meditate and definitely practice yoga because it is, like you said, being in tune with your body, understanding why it's acting a certain way, learning how to not necessarily just control it, but acknowledge why it's happening and find a path to release or guide into a better method of acting.

[0:39:25] Sage: Yeah, our body contains a lot of knowledge. Like I learned about Permaculture. This fall, I take a permaculture design course and we talk about zones. And it's funny because in some ways, zones are kind of like similar to the word layer that is used in three. But your zone zero is kind of your personal domain. And like, your zone zero is considered, like your personal well being, like your state of being. And only once you're like zone zero and your zero are okay, you can look at your zone one, your house and the things immediately growing outside your house and your zone two, your herb garden, and you can expand your horizons. So I feel that a lot of us tending our zone zero, our way of holding ourselves enough, myself included. I am calling myself out. Like, I truly had something like a mental breakdown in Gr 15. Working full time for Bitcoin, which is doing a grants round, is already an 80 hours week job. And then starting a project, trying to be on Twitter Spaces to launch it and promote it and all of that. I truly overdid it and broke myself in September. That's another piece of information for me. I'm learning how to take care of myself.

[0:40:53] Rudy: It's a practice. It really is. I don't call it a practice for like, you practice at it, you try again and try and practice and get better. It's not easy. I'm thankful that you share that because I think a lot of the crypto world doesn't talk about how difficult it is sometimes. It's a young industry where a lot of times you just have to give your time with no reward until something does happen. It's funny because sometimes people are working during the bear markets and then during, like, a bull market, the coin exploded in price, whatever it was, but it took five years of nothing to get somewhere and actually become worth something. I had Kevin Owaki on the show, too, and he's like, he just failed and failed project after project until Coin came about.

[0:41:34] Sage: I'm glad you had Kevin.

[0:41:36] Rudy: It was good. And that's the thing that you're working on, your project, launching during a bear.

[0:41:41] Sage: Market during the middle of it.

[0:41:43] Rudy: That's a good time, because the bull market does come back. That's like, oh, this is legit. You're not just something that came out of nowhere. You're someone that's been around for a while, and you're an entrepreneur. It's not supposed to be easy unless you had someone who just invested millions and millions of dollars into you, which I hope you get.

[0:41:57] Sage: No. We got some conversations going with some truly values aligned organizations in the Web Three space, and I don't feel like I'm out here alone. I don't feel like I'm going to need to scurry off to some venture capital that I don't trust in order to be okay. I deeply trust that everything is working out, and I also trust that knowing me and knowing this project, I would put it in hibernation mode and go get another job before I would take the wrong check from the wrong person just to keep it alive or whatever. You know what I mean?

[0:42:33] Rudy: I love that. Yeah. That brings me to my final question. What is your most memorable wholesome crypto moment? Something in the crypto industry that just made you feel good and proud to be in it, or something you witnessed in the crypto industry, it made you really happy?

[0:42:47] Sage: Okay. The most wholesome moment that's coming to mind. Yeah, this feels true. So back, like, the third week of September, gr 15 was just wrapping up, and I was starting to come back to life after pulling crazy hours for, like, two or three weeks or something on end. And I was in Western Massachusetts, which is where I moved now, and I was working on my process of moving here. And the region network team happened to be having their company annual off site retreat. They're like week long retreat, this beautiful, ideally, summer camp location in Western Massachusetts, and they invited me to come and hang out. Even though at that time I was formally employed by Gitcoin, I was a member of the Git coin team. I was not a member of the region network team. They invited me to come and be present with them and to share with them how they could donate to Bitcoin grants rounds. And there was a little interactive workshop thing workspace we did the following morning where they learned how to use Bitcoin grants for many of their community members. They hadn't donated yet and needed some guidance. I don't know, just that moment of feeling welcomed into that community just did something to me that was so powerful, it shook me to my core. And they invited me to eat dinner with them in the JFK airport on the way to Medicine for Cosmos, and I had to excuse myself to go sob in the bathroom because I couldn't believe how welcomed I felt. For the first time in all of my adventures in Web Three, I truly felt welcomed and acknowledged and, like, treated well.

[0:44:43] Sage: Treated like a human and just have to give a lot of love to Region Network, to Gregory LandWay, Will Dal, Sarah Bassendell, all the people that have been truly welcoming to me.

[0:44:56] Rudy: I love that. That's so beautiful because it's like you see it and you experience it and you're like, oh, it's possible for this to exist and you just want to give it to other people now, too. Just hearing your story makes me want to be more like that, too. So thank you for sharing.

[0:45:11] Sage: Thank you for listening.

[0:45:13] Rudy: Thank you, Sage. I had such a great time talking with you. I'm super excited for the Resign network. I'm super excited for you as a person, and I'm going to keep watching what you're building and yeah. Thank you.

[0:45:25] Sage: Thank you. Yeah. Please feel free to follow me at resign network and my personal is at renegade region. It's been a real pleasure connecting with you as well, Rudy. Thank you for hanging in there with me with some of these more nuanced topics of economic regeneration, economic collapse, food systems, all that stuff. The things I hold dear to my heart are not for the faint of heart. Thank you.

[0:45:51] Rudy: Thank you.

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[0:00:00] Jack: And it's an image of my life changing injury that out of all the scans of a spinal cord in the world, this one definitely had a lot of impact. Unfortunately, not so good, but it's caused a lot of challenges in my life and for my family, although I will say those challenges have gotten me to a point where, you know, I'm a stronger person and so is everyone else around me.

[0:00:22] Rudy: I'm Rudy Dogum, and this is wholesome crypto. Here I speak with crypto experts, influencers, and entrepreneurs to find out what personally led them to the path of cryptocurrency. Welcome Jack Calvin to the wholesome Crypto podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[0:00:38] Jack: Hey, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

[0:00:40] Rudy: Yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time. And, yeah, I know you're working on a few projects now. I know you're part of the DS tire world and the Spinal Cord NFT project. That's something you're creating and working on. And before we go into everything about that, I'll have to learn a little bit more about Jack and what he was doing before even hearing about cryptocurrencies.

[0:00:59] Jack: Sure. Cryptocurrencies obviously knew in everyone's life to some degree, but I personally was not involved in crypto until maybe 2017. Just joining the hype of that bull run, getting in on some bitcoin and small amounts, nothing crazy. I was a college student at the time and was working through that. I was newly injured, which I'll get into that story in a bit. And that's the inspiration for my project, spinal Cord NFT. Around that time, I was just getting started, going deep into things like physical therapy and then also medical research, which I would be a participant in in one form or another, and also doing a little bit of fundraising for nonprofits. It would be another two or three years till I finished college, which was right at the beginning of the pandemic. So it's been a rocky few years, to say the least. And since then, having eventually finished school, crypto offered me a way to make some sort of a living, make some sort of a network without relying on larger institutions who were not willing to take a gamble on me at that time, at a time of extreme world change. Right, yeah.

[0:02:12] Rudy: They weren't taking anybody in at all for anything other than COVID. If you had some of those injuries, it was tough to get in.

[0:02:18] Jack: Exactly, yeah. A unique situation on top of a unique situation. From there. I saw opportunity in the crypto space. I really liked some of the ethos of personal sovereignty ownership. I thought a lot of the stuff that I learned about during that time, especially around 2020, was projects like Ocean Protocol that were offering marketplace for data and just for data science in general. Obviously, there was some financial incentive to get involved, but also a lot of curiosity and a lot of passion of course.

[0:02:51] Rudy: And when you first heard about it, what was that platform you heard? Was it from a friend or just the Internet?

[0:02:57] Jack: Yeah, I had a friend who was early in the crypto movement who said to me, hey, give this a shot. He gave me some pointers. My good friend, I won't name him, but works for a big analytics firm in crypto space. It's been kind of cool seeing his journey. I'm obviously on my own path here as well, but I'm applying crypto in my own way, which I think there's a lot of use cases, and I think we need to rely on those solid use cases at least, because we've obviously seen that some projects can fall apart, but others will stand the test.

[0:03:30] Rudy: Absolutely.

[0:03:31] Jack: Yeah.

[0:03:31] Rudy: It's tough because when you first hear about cryptocurrencies, it's like, what do you think of it? It's just like money, I guess. I could move money between people. That's awesome. But did you get into it before the NFT and D Five summer, I guess? Is that when you first started learning about it?

[0:03:49] Jack: I was watching from the sidelines. I had invested in a few projects already, but hadn't figured out staking, hadn't figured out exactly how I would land in the NFT space at all. But that's also where I saw my chance to say if this can be a combination of especially NFT digital art, which I make my own art on my side. On the side. Seeing that people could take ownership of digital art and Monetize, it was pretty powerful.

[0:04:15] Rudy: I was like, what kind of art do you make on the side?

[0:04:18] Jack: Let's see. I produce music, I do photography, I make collage, I paint.

[0:04:24] Rudy: Interesting.

[0:04:25] Jack: Yeah. My collage projects involve old comic books. Usually not very good condition comic books. I cut them up and I can send you all a whole bunch of them after this call.

[0:04:37] Rudy: That's awesome. And I guess it's something that you're, like, more passionate about and driven into. Were you always into tech at all? Like new age tech.

[0:04:45] Jack: Yeah, I was a geography student and I studied GIS, which is geospatial data, software analytics, stuff like that. That's kind of my first dabbling in the tech space. I also enjoy the modern technologies for the community of people with my condition. So that was another big interest of mine, still is and will be. And there's a lot of exciting news to share on that front as well. But yeah, I would say technology is definitely a big interest, and with tech comes good design. I was an artist before, but I would say after I got injured, I doubled down because it's therapeutic, it's pleasant, it's a way to express yourself.

[0:05:23] Rudy: Yeah. And it's definitely an amazing way to spend time with your mind. Some people hate it. Some people just hate being alone with their head, with their mind. And I'm like, it's the best part. I love being alone with my mind. It's where I get to actually talk to myself a little bit without so much noise around me.

[0:05:38] Jack: Yeah, good to get into that flow state.

[0:05:40] Rudy: So, yeah, the science world is definitely something you're familiar with and interested in. And I know we met at the DSAI Boston event, but I also have to learn how you got into DSAI and what you're doing at DSAI World.

[0:05:52] Jack: Sure. DSAI World I got involved with in probably November of last year, I met Josh, the founder, and that was when my NFT project was in its infancy. It was just a concept. He kind of gave me some insight on what it would take to build this kind of project and then offered to post the launch of it on his platform, DCI World. Right. It took a while to reconnect with him after that winter, but I then began trials in Boston, where I was a participant in a study for medical device. Also was just exploring. Okay, I see that DSI is a thing first. Getting that through your head, you see. Okay, now there's all the possibilities beyond that. Right. I suppose what I was doing was a form of decentralized science. Not necessarily how other people are approaching it, but my own, which is cool. So as I was pulling all the pieces together for my NFT project, I saw that he was building the platform and the dashboard. So in tandem, we kind of agreed, okay, we're going to launch this NFT project together, but there's a whole lot of tasks on the platform ends that I could help with.

[0:07:01] Jack: It's been really great working with them. With Josh, we've got a core team of seven who are a number of us are either scientists or just scientists, science enthusiasts, all kind of building the project in our own way, sometimes without solid structure, but I think it's produced.

[0:07:18] Rudy: A pretty it's a start up.

[0:07:20] Jack: Yeah. It's an amoeba of going in different shapes and directions, and it's been exciting. It gave me the chance to go to DSAI Boston, which was an exciting event held at MIT. That's where we met. Yeah, it's been cool. I built out the interactive web map where any project that's listed, we pin it to a map where you can search the globe and see what's happening in the world of decentralized science.

[0:07:43] Rudy: It's such an amazing industry. Like, going to that event was just eye opening. Like, okay, there's a whole other decentralized world I didn't even know needed decentralization. I mean, after going there, it makes complete sense, and I'm like, wow, I didn't know the science world was so essentialized and so difficult to share among other scientists without, like, paywalls, like, literal pay walls to share your research and information. I'm like, the science is supposed to be free. It's supposed to be educated, not supposed to be. But most times, scientists enjoy just sharing what they learn without anything you'd hope.

[0:08:13] Jack: That if you discover something that the world gets to know about it, you don't do the research to hide it.

[0:08:20] Rudy: Exactly. But that's when money comes into play. So it's a tough battle.

[0:08:24] Jack: I thought, to speak on it. The CSI Boston event, there's a ton that I got to learn myself. And some of the projects that are doing object based, blockchain based publishing, I thought some of those were the coolest. I thought to myself, this is a problem that people obviously you can fund science, but I think the publishing and collaborating and peer reviewing on the blockchain is really interesting.

[0:08:46] Rudy: Absolutely. And it's such a perfect application. Oh, yeah, that makes complete sense. Obviously this is where it should have been placed a long time ago, but I'm glad it's happening and I hope we have a summer of DSI summer instead of like D Five. But that would be great.

[0:09:00] Jack: Cool.

[0:09:01] Rudy: So you're in this space and you're also working on Spinal Cord NFT, which is I'll let you go into details about it, but I love to learn, I guess, or hear your story of how that all happened and where were you in life before your injury and then how the injury happened and the thought process in getting into Spinal Cord NFT.

[0:09:19] Jack: Absolutely. So my back story, the year was 2017. I was a student at Appleach and State University in North Carolina. It's a medium sized state school in the mountains. It's beautiful. Tons of outdoor recreation opportunities. I was studying GIS at the time. It was the week before midterms and it was a Tuesday afternoon. I got out of the lab and had been working and doing homework, preparing for tests, and I just needed to destress. So I went for a ride on a mountain bike, which was something I did frequently. I was wearing my helmet, which is always a good thing. So you can let your friends wear your helmet. I still have my head, which is great. I went down a trail. There was an imperfection on the trail.

[0:10:02] Jack: It was not the craziest thing I've done in the world going down it, but apparently it didn't work out for me. I lost control for a second. I tumbled and I broke my Csix vertebrae on that tumble and I was instantly paralyzed from the chest down. And I was flown to Johnson City Medical in a helicopter from there, and I spent the next ten days in the ICU there and then traveled to Boston where I spent the rest of my time in hospital, which was spaulding rehab in Charlestown. I came back here because my family is based in New England. We were going to have a hard time setting up shop and getting myself back on track from a distance in the Southeast. That was, I guess, the beginning of my story.

[0:10:46] Rudy: Were you with anybody?

[0:10:48] Jack: I was not, no. But I was on a pretty public green way. So someone came to help me. Basically, immediately I was conscious and I remained calm. It was shocking, but I had experience in outdoor rescue before, and I feel like somehow my own training had kicked. In the next few years after that, I would be doing a lot of PT. I would do clinical trials. I got involved with the Christopher Reeve Foundation, which funds medical research, spinal cord injury. And there's a lot of different cool, promising George, whether it's medicine or medical devices coming along. And I would say that's how I got further into the science world. And not something I studied, but something I was forced into, essentially. There's the connection to the science world. It was until probably the summer two things happened, the summer of 2000 and 22,021. I was going in for follow up exams to take a look at my injury. And they said, can you get us the original medical scams from the day you got hurt?

[0:11:51] Jack: And I said, yeah, I can get those. What is odd to me, though, is that no one ever showed them to me when I got hurt.

[0:11:57] Rudy: That's ridiculous.

[0:11:59] Jack: Yeah. I don't know how that slipped through the cracks. There were a lot of reasons that my eyes were opened to the medical system in general, that being one of them. I called the medical center and they sent me a disk and I uploaded onto my computer and there's many dozens of scans that were taken, whether they were X rays, Cat scans, MRIs, and it's just fascinating to look at, honestly. And it's an image of my life changing injury that out of all the scans of a spinal cord in the world, this one definitely had a lot of impact. Unfortunately, not so good. But it's caused a lot of challenges in my life and for my family. Although I will say those challenges have gotten me to a point where I'm a stronger person and so is everyone else around me.

[0:12:43] Rudy: Yeah. And it's really incredible how you were able to take your injury and go with it. You've said, this is my new life and I'm going to use every power that I have to either help create more research for your specific types of injury, spinal cord injuries. You're incorporating a new technology and a new type of working to help distribute what you have gone through. I'm sure it's not easy, it's demotivating to have that injury, but you just took it and straded with it. So thank you for doing that and thank you for helping others that are in that position.

[0:13:14] Jack: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for the acknowledgment. Yeah.

[0:13:17] Rudy: I'd love to learn more about, again, the Spinal Cord and Ft project. And I know you're actually selling those MRIs of yours online, so it's pretty cool. But yeah, let me know a little bit more about the project is doing and how you're building it.

[0:13:31] Jack: Yeah. So I would call it a Web three experiment. It's just me working on the project. It's getting my hands dirty learning how this kind of digital system works. Right. Obviously, I had fundraising for the Reef Foundation, also turned my ears towards fundraising through blockchain or building a dow. I don't know that I was ready or even am currently ready to build a dow myself, but this was my application and saying, okay, these are these artifacts that came out of my injury, these digital files of my Cascans, MRIs, et cetera. And can we create or at least consider this digital art enough to sell so that art funds research and kind of wanted to make it automated so that people can trust that when they buy it, that the address in the code is delivering to the good cause. That was a big part of our project, or my project the first many months, was just figuring out how the software and how solidity works. Working with Josh and saying, how do we actually launch a product like this? And it's been a cool experiment. And yeah, building an NFT project is hard, especially as one person. And as you were saying how to keep your mental in check while you're doing that, I really just thought of it as an experiment so that if the experiment fails, it's a learning experience either way. And I can pivot, right?

[0:14:55] Rudy: Exactly. That's like a solid advice to anyone building anything, any entrepreneur. You're going to fail eventually or somehow. But it's the learning that you take from those failings is what really helps you succeed and grow. And you're putting your words to play like you are learning and growing with what you're doing and experimenting and keep pushing out, I guess, what you've developed in that space. Yeah. Learning stability is not easy. JavaScript, I know the basics, but getting into it, launching something, that's incredible.

[0:15:23] Jack: Yeah. Thank you. One of the angles that I like to take with this project is that for a lot of medical problems or catastrophic diagnosis that people face, they might turn to Go fund me for assistance in either like, research or even just medical bills. I'm fortunate enough to never have had to do something like that. But I was thinking, what if you can build this NFT project of somehow your medical data, your medical imagery? It helps to have imagery because people resonate with that and people can collect it and they're open. See, it's cool. So if we could create an alternative to a Go fund me where you could basically sponsor my experience or take an artifact from that experience and I can share it with others and then also deliver funds to a cause. And recipient of my funds is the Inspire Lab, which I can share with you about. The Inspire Lab is part of Spalding Rehab hospital they're set up in Cambridge, which is, I think, more of their outpatient division of the hospital. They've gotten a number of locations throughout Massachusetts. I was the person to basically call them and say, hey, if you guys have a digital wallet, I'll donate to it. And that got them interested quick, right? So I spoke with the people at their giving office and asked them to set up their wallet, which they were already in the process of doing, but no one had ever come forward to do anything about it. They got it set up.

[0:16:53] Jack: I donated, and I'm proud to say I was the first to give cryptocurrency to any mass general hospital that's well.

[0:17:01] Rudy: For such a huge hospital, you'd think they're on. I know they heard of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin stuff, but you would think someone in the tech team knows how to create digital wallet and is ready to accept donations. But it's fine. It takes a phone call. It's just a simple phone call from somebody and say, hey, I can donate with crypto. Can you accept that?

[0:17:20] Jack: Yeah.

[0:17:20] Rudy: What a start.

[0:17:21] Jack: They've been excited and happy to work with me. Everything has been easy, and we can even post their wallet address and information description that you put out on this podcast. But I chose that lab, specifically the Inspire Lab, because that's where I had done clinical trials before. The people there are working on some really great things, and I'm almost certain they're working on some things in the future that I'll benefit from. So it was just the right place, the right time, and a team that I really believed in. And that gives me a little bit of choice as far as if you donate to this kind of cause, it's not then governed by another group of people. I got to decide which lab gets to use the funds.

[0:18:02] Rudy: I went to a specific lab. That's really cool. That's awesome.

[0:18:06] Jack: And I'll speak on some of the barriers of, say, a lot of the research in any medical or patient community might be funded through a nonprofit, and nonprofits for medical causes have all sorts of their own problems as far as managing the money. Not that I've had any poor experiences. I'm just saying it gives patients some autonomy.

[0:18:30] Rudy: Absolutely.

[0:18:31] Jack: Really important.

[0:18:32] Rudy: Absolutely. What are you excited that they're working on whatever clinical trials that you're allowed to talk about?

[0:18:38] Jack: Yes, there are some things I can't disclose, but there's plenty I can. I tested a medical device that applies electric stimulation to the site of injury to regrow nerve connections, and that was a non invasive device developed by a company based out of Switzerland. And the second iteration of their product will be an internal. There's a lot of projects that call themselves brain computer interfaces. I would call this a spine computer interface, but essentially it's an implant into your spinal cord that they have high resolution channels of electricity targeted at muscle groups. And what they're trying to do is activate those muscles and time it with video, and they're able to use AI to synchronize the simulation, stuff like that.

[0:19:26] Rudy: That's amazing.

[0:19:26] Jack: Yeah, very exciting stuff. I can give you some links that will be the future iteration of the product I tested. I expect that to be available in the next five years.

[0:19:36] Rudy: Probably the simulation for nerve growth. And that's just the site of the injury. And I guess in your case, when you broke your vertebrae, is it the nerves what's causing the paralysis? Or is it I'm not medically literate very well, so I need some help understanding that too.

[0:19:52] Jack: Yeah. There's a number of ways that it can affect you and it really is dependent on your injury. I've seen so many different outcomes based on different how you get hurt is a big factor. What your injury looks like is a big factor. Right. I'm fortunate to have an incomplete injury, and a majority of spinal cord injuries are incomplete, meaning there is some either sensory or motor connection spared. Although just because it's incomplete doesn't mean life is easy. I would say for a lot of the incomplete, it's more of rather than the nerves being destroyed and the spinal cord being severed. It's like your spinal cord goes through like a rapid degradation where a lot of, like, I guess you call it gray matter or scar tissue is a better way to describe it, where throughout the connections from your brain to your limbs, electricity is going through, but not nearly enough for anything to activate. When I'm using a nerve excitation device, the idea is kind of to up the amount of electricity in the system and break down some of that nerve tissue, or at least that scar tissue, and also just promote the growth of new nerve cells which grow slowly and you don't make a lot of new ones. It's just that extra excitation and to hopefully get some activation or changes.

[0:21:12] Rudy: It's still experimental, so it sounds like there's a long process on understanding its full effects and how well it works. But did you see any progress so far?

[0:21:20] Jack: I have issues with my fine motor control in my hands that I would say improved sweet. With the external device. I also had some autonomic function change, which one being that I didn't sweat below my injury before testing this product, and now I do, which is pretty interesting for whatever reason.

[0:21:39] Rudy: That's what we expected.

[0:21:41] Jack: Yeah. They reactivated and it was distinct. During the trial time, I was having dreams where I was sweating and I'd wake up and I was actually sweating. And after a few years of not, we notice, well, that's wild.

[0:21:55] Rudy: I didn't know that can happen. But that's pretty interesting that it started happening again.

[0:21:58] Jack: Totally unexpected.

[0:22:00] Rudy: Yeah. You don't know the results are going to hold, right? It is results. So it's good.

[0:22:04] Jack: Right.

[0:22:05] Rudy: So now when someone purchases one of your spinal cord NFTs, this goes into helping fund research, such as this type of research, because I know the NFT marketplace is nuts. Like, people are trying to sell whatever they can to make some money really quick. But if people start reselling your NFTs, do the royalties go? Is there like, royalty that go into the research again? So if it's worth millions of dollars sweet.

[0:22:30] Jack: That's coded in as well. So that the same wallet address receives initial sales and royalties. I'm taking no cut of it. PCI World receives a small cut of the initial minting because they helped with coding and launching and services like that. But yeah, this is a completely altruistic project and again, an experiment, my own learning process.

[0:22:52] Rudy: So now that you've been in the crypto space for a bit, I want to know what is your crypto pet peeve?

[0:22:58] Jack: My pet peeve? Let's see. I'm interested.

[0:23:02] Rudy: It's possible.

[0:23:03] Jack: So many yeah, there's a lot I would like to see some stability in the space. I think legitimacy. And I know where we can be, like, anti institutional, although I think there's a lot of room for institutions to be part of the crypto space and not necessarily institutionalizing it, but kind of getting all the mess out of the way, especially this year, what we saw with Terra luna, different exchanges and controversies and shady dealings. Because I think you know best. You've seen a lot of great wholesome activity happening on the blockchain and people using this for good, and I think there's a ton of opportunity for that. And it would be nice that the general public wasn't necessarily thinking crypto was a scam based on the activity of a few. Right? Yeah, I guess. It doesn't bother me. I am a little interested when people are like maximalists in one versus another. And I'm always curious. I think a lot of ideology and tribalism happens in the crypto space, which maybe it might be we're more secular society and people are like their religions, so they like their chains. I don't know.

[0:24:12] Rudy: That's how I feel it too, man. Because we're all human at the end of the day, and that's just how humans behave and act as they like to be in a part of a tribe, trying to push their own agenda, whatever suits them best. If I had 1000 bitcoin, I'd probably be more towards a bitcoin max just because or at least my emotional state would be. I want bitcoin to succeed because it's where most of my stack is, or mostly in ethereum, so I want that to increase. Or if I had like 100,000 cardano, I definitely want cardano to succeed because that's just where my stack is. It's hard to just keep yourself in a space where you're not biased towards anything. You're kind of just let the best technology win.

[0:24:51] Jack: Sure. Any project succeeding is probably going to help the system no matter what. I'm pretty diversified myself.

[0:24:59] Rudy: Yeah, we don't know what's going to happen. The road is crazy over the past few years. So I guess I like to also learn if anyone else that's listening and also might be dealing with any sort of injury or working in the medical space and kind of tell me what you're doing, what's the best way to reach out to you and hear from you and I guess learn from your.

[0:25:18] Jack: Sure. Do you mean in the crypto space in general, or like the disability space?

[0:25:24] Rudy: I guess all the above.

[0:25:25] Jack: I mean, for someone newly injured, I'm not always one to give advice, but I would maybe say shorten your expectation of time and goals and horizons because when you're hurt, you're weakened and it takes a long time to figure yourself out after something like that. And the best thing to do is just stay active, keep your mind active and get involved. It's hard to speak on specific situations, but you'll really see how resilient you are. It's crazy. As far as the crypto space, I would encourage people to use it for positive causes like this. It's been really cool to plug into the DSI space, which in some ways, science is one thing. And then I think biotech and medical tech are kind of the more specific. But even big players in the DSI world, or DSI space, rather. I would encourage people to see what there is out there and start getting involved with these dows. And if you have a specific medical cause, I almost feel like there could be a consulting firm or something like that. And I know there's numbers of them building right now as we speak. See what there is out there. You don't need to rely on a nonprofit to get research done necessarily. And your community is powerful.

[0:26:42] Rudy: That's amazing. And you're right, community is a huge thing, especially in the crypto space, because it's what launched it, it's what created it, it's what started it, and it's what's growing. It's the community. And lots of IFT projects are so successful because of a good, strong community. I'm excited to keep watching you build your community. One of my last final questions I could ask her one is what is your favorite wholesome crypto moment? Something that happened in the space that just made you feel good or proud to be part of crypto?

[0:27:12] Jack: Most recently, the Git coin round for the DSI space was really cool learning about quadratic funding, seeing all these open source projects get funding, the amount that they were able to match through their matching treasury. Are you familiar with quadratic funding?

[0:27:28] Rudy: I am. I had Kevin Oakie on the show, so he explained it to me a little bit too.

[0:27:32] Jack: Yeah, I'm no expert myself, but for anyone listening, there's extra matching based on the number of participants, not just the dollars that you generate or donate. Yeah, it was cool to see a lot of public good and science projects get a lot of good capital to move forward and build. I really like their platform.

[0:27:50] Rudy: Yeah, it's. Super useful, and it truly does help small projects gain a substantial funding amount just to start working on their project. Because like you said, there's a project out there that has ten $1 contributions. You'll end up having more than one person who contributes $10 just because of the amount of interest there is in that project. So it doesn't base you off, like, oh, only small amounts are being projected or put into your project, because maybe your community isn't, like, wealthy, but if you had one wealthy billionaire who wants to invest in you or VC, it's hard to get up at quadratic funding. So it's pretty interesting how they do. It's nice. It's helpful and kind of fare towards everyone's situation. So before we end off, I wanted to know if there's anything you want to leave our audience with or any exciting upcoming projects that you have in mind or where they can find you.

[0:28:40] Jack: Well, they can find me just out here building. If anyone wants to reach me. My name is Jack CalBY. You can find me on Twitter. I'm easy to reach and happy to get involved. It was really great meeting you and your brother at DSI Boston. It was exciting to finally be in person as something long pandemic. But if you guys want to check out my project, it's spinal cordnft.com. You can also check out the platform we launched on, and that's DSI World. DSI World. And we're doing a lot of cool things over there, so check it out and get involved in whatever way you want.

[0:29:17] Rudy: I'm tough I put all those links in the notes, so I want to click them and check them out again. Thank you so much, Jack. Thank you so much for sharing your story and contributing in a positive, public good way and using the crypto ecosystem that not only benefits you, but also everyone around you and the industry in the world in itself.

[0:29:37] Jack: Sure. Hey, great being on here. Really appreciate it. A pleasure. 

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Transcript

[0:00:00] Daren: Look, you can pay all your bills with one click. You can bleep out your groceries, pay your rent. You can get paid faster from your employer. Look how awesome this is, guys. What could possibly go wrong?

[0:00:10] Daren: I'm Marie Dougham and this is Wholesome Crypto. Here I speak with crypto experts, influencers, and entrepreneurs to find out what personally led them to the path of cryptocurrency. Welcome, Darren, to the Wholesome Crypto podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[0:00:26] Daren: Hey, thanks Rudy, and good seeing you again after catching you in Boston there the other week.

[0:00:31] Daren: Yeah, it was nice meeting you at the Boston Blockchain Week. And yeah, I know that you're the founder of Solo Financial, pretty much providing concierge services to anyone who wants to walk in and buy bitcoin over the counter or get stuck with a wallet, get educated, and also purchase crypto in person. Kind of a traditional way that we don't do so much in the digital world. So thank you for working and building and adopting people into the industry.

[0:00:58] Daren: Yeah, you bet. That's the model is what you said it's as human powered. The bitcoin exchange is just all too many online exchanges where a person would have to have the wherewithal to know that they want bitcoins and know how to find a reputable site, know how to onboard themselves, set up wallets, buy crypto, secure, manage, and store it all on their own. And that's a lot to ask even for an intelligent person. We take away all those hurdles by helping people do it with our in person desk advisor.

[0:01:28] Daren: It's definitely needed. It's hard for me even to keep up with what's going on digitally to keep any crypto safe. So thank you for that. But before we dive deep into what you're doing now and what you're building now, I would love to learn a little bit about what Darren was doing before every hearing about bitcoin have an.

[0:01:44] Daren: Engineering background so that I didn't party enough in college. I just kind of studied 4 hours a night. It teaches you a lot of discipline. It teaches you even a little bit of computer programming, team problem solving and critical thinking. It taught me a lot. And I really only stuck with engineering for a couple of years though, because it was socially debilitating to be an engineer. So I switched to a sales role almost two years later after college and then in real estate sales for many years and investing. And then it wasn't until 2013 that my friend here in Portland, Maine said, hey, look at what I got going. And I go to his apartment and he's got this laptop with something called a butterfly mining rig. Plugged in a USB cord to his laptop and the thing is piping hot and it's blowing off heat and it's doing something and I'm like, what the hell? What is this, man? And he's like a month bitcoins. And I'm like, Why? Why would you do that? And you're going to burn out your laptop.

[0:02:55] Daren: And he shows me this USB stick and he's like, see, that's the wallet on the USB stick. And I mine the bitcoins and it goes on to the USB stick and it's worth money. And I was like, are you making any money? He's like, well, a little bit. And so I was actually curious, but I just kind of shrugged it off and forgot about it for three years.

[0:03:15] Daren: But were you always into tech before all this?

[0:03:19] Daren: Yeah, I love tech. I like Nicola Tesla. I like modern technology. I like Vin Tech. Yeah, I was interested anyway.

[0:03:27] Daren: When you first hear about Bitcoin, it just doesn't click immediately. Some people clicked immediately for me. Didn't click immediately. I just first loved it because it was new and it was technology. So I'm like, oh, great. New technology. Great. I'm going to dive into it. But very fortunate for your friend, hopefully still making off well with crypto or bitcoin.

[0:03:45] Daren: He mined that story, that USB stick that he had. I think he mined like one bitcoin on it at the time, but he lost it. He lost the sticks anyhow. Yeah, that's the least of the sad stories. I got some other much more sadder stories. Stuff from other friends.

[0:04:05] Daren: Yeah, it's tough. So this friend was your first intro to Bitcoin 2013.

[0:04:11] Daren: I just blew it off. And then in 2016, I was starting to see some really anomalistic stuff going on in the global economic markets. And I was like, man, I was like, screw this. And I went on Coinbase, and I got started in 2016 with bitcoins.

[0:04:30] Daren: Did you have an investor trader mindset before this? Were you dabbling a mega stock market and then this was make money faster, or not really.

[0:04:39] Daren: I hadn't been managing my own stocks or anything. It was more of a long term play. I was like, all right, I'm going to go in the biggest way that I could at that time, which was not very much, but we'll dive into that a little bit here.

[0:04:50] Daren: Yeah, and that makes sense because it's like, fun. You put a couple of bucks in and see what happens. Put the money in that you can't afford to lose. So as you're starting to learn and dabble into crypto and Bitcoin, it was still purely just speculative financial tool for you. Was the technology at all really interesting? You like, I guess in 2016, it's kind of when the ICO craze was happening too, with the theorem, it was starting to develop. How was that whole entire industry just shaping around for you?

[0:05:18] Daren: Once I actually started studying it in 16, I was like, oh, wow, okay. This money is outside of the legacy financial system. Okay? There's a big difference there. Nobody can throttle you, censor you, resist you. Wow. It's an open market money, so the market is deciding what it's worth in real time. Wow, that's a game changer. Nobody's in charge, everybody can use it. I just started going down the rabbit hole and you just keep having revelation after revelation. That's how it goes. There was no turning back, and I really started to rethink, what can I.

[0:05:50] Daren: Do with this at this point? Were you working anywhere? Were you an entrepreneur, building your own business?

[0:05:56] Daren: I was still in real estate sales, commercial real estate, and making some bucks there. But this actually caught my attention and what later happened, moving into as you know, the timing was pretty good in 2016, moving into 2017, that started to completely open my mind into really forming a business around this stuff, and eventually I did. But there's more to the story there.

[0:06:22] Daren: Yeah, and I want to get into that. As you were seeing cryptocurrencies and bitcoin going up, you're like, okay, there's an industry shaping and I need to get involved into it somehow. And there's plenty of different roads to take. And it's funny that you chose a road that's brick and mortar for this industry. Why necessarily that path? What kind of gave you the urge to start OTC bitcoin trading?

[0:06:43] Daren: So that aspect of it was really driven by almost a demographic of where I live up here in Maine. Like, we're one of the oldest states in the nation, so I just know from being in this market in real estate, like, there's an older population, they're not technologically savvy. There is a lot of wealth concentration, if you can believe it. It seems like it's just a bunch of poor old people, but not the case at all. In fact, there's quite a bit of wealth concentration in this state. When I was speaking about bitcoin with friends, family, clients of our parents generation, they were all interested, but I could just tell that they're going to be clueless when it comes to finding their own way to make an investment and properly handling it. And so I said, all right, I think I can charge a modest fee. I call it almost like an information arbitrage fee. I charge 5% over spot price at our exchange, and for that, the customer gets an enormous education and sort of direction on how to secure, manage and invest their crypto. And I spotted that early. I said, yeah, this population would definitely benefit from that, and not just in Maine, really, anybody in that generation who happens to find us and call in is going to derive value from that. That's proven to be the case. There is a market there for that.

[0:08:03] Daren: And bitcoin, especially the rule, is not your key, is not your crypto. So having someone manage and work with you on purchasing bitcoin, it's kind of what reassurances and advice do you give your clients to make them feel secure and safe with their holdings and make them feel like it is theirs, or hopefully it is still theirs.

[0:08:25] Daren: One of the things we do is we set people up with wallets. And so just depending on their background and their intentions and whether it's a long term hold or whether they're going to do something else with their crypto or invest it, we kind of decide at the consult time. But what we often do is set them up with like a multi signature wallet where they take the majority of the keys, two of them, and we retain one of them as like a cosigner or a collaborative custody member. So we are not a custodian in that arrangement. It's a very important distinction. We are definitely not ever taking custody. In fact, that's our whole point is we're advocating for self custody. We have found that this collaborative custody is like a perfect balance. At the end of the day, they have the majority of the keys and they can move the money at will. But if they need our help, we have viewing and third key privileges to their wallet so we can make subsequent deposits, we can help them recover a key if they lose one. There's a lot of synergy to the collaborative custody model. Yeah, there are other times when people say, look, this is a small amount, I don't need to make a big hoop a lot about this. And we just direct them to download any number of free wallets on the app store and put in several hundred bucks worth. It fine. But in larger amounts, we do suggest, like, this collaborative custody environment.

[0:09:52] Daren: That's important because has there ever been someone that might have lost their key and you're just like, oh, thank goodness that I have this collaborative custody with you and I just saved you all your money?

[0:10:02] Daren: Unfortunately, we've had one client pass away and indeed the heirs were able to locate the backup key card that we had sent the client home with whatever, year and a half, two years ago. And with our help, yes, they recovered the funds just fine. So that was awesome. We've had others just lose their login credentials, so we've had to also invoke the backup key card. In that regard, it was the easiest way to just sweep funds to a new wallet and start a new it works and it's something we're going to refine and have a more formal product offering. It's just been kind of an informal approach we've taken, but now it's really something that we want to perfect and just have like a hosted wallet service offering.

[0:10:46] Daren: Yeah, there's a lot to this industry, too, especially since it's relatively new. Regulations aren't very clear what was a difficult challenge you had to overcome in order to actually start this operation.

[0:10:57] Daren: So we launched January 2018, and at the time it was not an insane regulatory environment. It was like fairly straightforward. It was money transmitter licenses based on your state. Then obviously, Finsen, everybody's at the money service business has a register. Finsen and have an AML program. Those are the two major hurdles to launch and those were surmountable. But moving forward here, fast forward four and a half years, we are entering what I call sort of an untenable regulatory environment and we can definitely unpack that some more. I would like to because I think people really need to understand that it's totally out of control what's coming down the pipe as far as regulators feel they have for jurisdiction. Every three letter and four letter agency is raising their hand and saying oh no, we have jurisdiction over you. You got to do this, this and that times four or five agencies. And if you were to attempt to comply with all that you should just close your business immediately because a it violates every ethos of cryptocurrency which is freedom enabling technology, having no resistance and censorship and centralized control of the money. The list goes on and on. Many of your listeners know the tenets of crypto and what regulators want to do is nullify all of those benefits. At any rate, that's what it's come to today. So what we've done at my firm is just take a very conservative approach.

[0:12:36] Daren: We just deal with layer one bitcoin sales and so we're not doing crazy things like crypto custody, crypto, trading on clients behalf, leverage gambling, just anything that's going to trigger all manner of different regulators coming out of the woodwork. The SEC, they think everything is security. We're being cognizant of basically everything that they're tagging of security including a dog barking, you drinking a soda. These are all securities. So we stay away from all these types of things that we know they are calling security. So we're just taking a conservative approach for now so that we don't get unduly burdened with just insane amounts of regulations which I cringe when I see a lot of our competitors introducing new service lines that are I think they're unwittingly exposing themselves to massive regulatory burdens. I don't even think they have fully realized what they're signing up for.

[0:13:36] Daren: Yeah, that's tough. When you founded the company it was by yourself or did you have a partner with you?

[0:13:42] Daren: I had a silent partner but I was tasked with really doing all the work. So it was, it was kind of a heavy lift man. And I'll touch upon how I capitalize the company later on but yeah, it was a heavy lift doing it but I was able to continue doing real estate sales and continue earning income as I was launching Lux Solo. This is kind of an important point for any would be founders that might be listening. I never had this need to just extract income out of the company in the first early one or two years. That was very important. Not need to derive income from it because you can't. I mean every dollar of profit you make you got to just leave in the company and reinvest that was very important to not have to draw that out and deplete the company in the first year.

[0:14:30] Daren: It's really tough because, especially for an entrepreneur who's just on your business, you focus on that. You don't have any other side gigs or jobs or any other stream income. It's really hard to launch something and have it become successful.

[0:14:42] Daren: And honestly, if I knew how hard it was going to be looking back at both launching luxolo while simultaneously preserving my phase out career, I wouldn't have done it if I knew how bad it was going to be. It was very tough, and it's just a major drain on your mojo to work that hard and not pull a paycheck from the new entity. I can see why others take the approach of, well, let's develop a term sheet and go out to venture capitalists and take on a million or $2 and staff up so that the founder doesn't have to kind of kill themselves with the workload.

[0:15:19] Daren: I'm understanding that hopefully you're paying yourself now.

[0:15:23] Daren: Partner burned has come into the company as of about 18 months ago, and he is an operating partner with me. So together we run the company, we pay ourselves, and we own 100% of the company. So that is one of the benefits of not doing the venture backed model. You don't have to give up control of the company and in the worst cases, sort of become an employee of your own company if you give up too much control. Right?

[0:15:51] Daren: Yeah. It's pretty funny. Right. You're an entrepreneur because you don't want to work for a company, but then you can just easily set yourself up into a company and just end up in the same boat.

[0:16:00] Daren: Yeah. A lot of founders unwittingly. They sign the term sheets that are floated, and a lot of them contain clauses that if they don't meet certain benchmarks of dilution and the transfer of control and to a chairman of the board, and you can easily get kind of back seated at your own company. So I didn't want to do any of that. What's been really important is not having to answer to anybody. This industry, man, it twists and turns by the day, and you think your cheese is here and it gets moved next week and you got to go change course to get the cheese again. To have to explain these movements to a board or to an investor, it would have been exasperating, honestly. Whereas now, on a daily basis, my partner and I can say, hey, that thing we were doing, that's definitely downtrending. Let's kind of pull the plug on that and redirect over this way. And we don't have to explain it or justify it to anybody. We just know it's the right thing to do. So that's very important to be nimble.

[0:16:58] Daren: Exactly. And speaking of the industry, I wanted to know a little bit more about what is your crypto pet peeve.

[0:17:06] Daren: Yeah, I probably get several of them. I'd say my biggest pet peeve is this push for crypto custody. I just cringe when I hear the word custody, because it's really a concept that was born out of wall street in 1940, which at the time was needed. There was just a bunch of investors running around without much. Sophistication and they had cash and they said, I want to buy some forward stock. Here's my cash. The only option was to custody your cash with an investment firm so that they could go buy the stock on your behalf. Right. So it made sense. What was that 80 years ago? Because it was necessary. Now with the advent when satoshi invented bitcoin and wallets, it completely invalidated and made unnecessary that entire model. That the whole point is self custody. And if you need a little assistance, you can engage in collaborative custody. But I'd say in rare cases, you need to custody your damn bitcoins with a large firm.

[0:18:12] Daren: Now you have to request a withdrawal from XYZ exchange and they can often grant your request. But in the case of celsius or some of these others man request denied. You can't have your bitcoins because actually they weren't on a wallet. They were on a ledger that was like tantamount to just an internal excel spreadsheet there at the company. And god knows where they put your actual bitcoins that you posted with them a year ago. Right. Those are gone. These are the things that happen with custodians, even if regulated, is completely inappropriate to custody. Bitcoins, if you're just simply a long term holder, if that's your goal, there's no need for it. The only time you would want to custody them is if you're posting them for collateral for like a legitimate crypto loan or if you're needing to trade your bitcoin. So during the time that you're trading your cryptos, sure, you need to put them in custody with the exchange, make the trade and yank them back out. Man everybody knows you want to limit your exposure to custodial. That's my pet peeve. I strongly disagree. But every day in the headlines we see some new firm is offering crypto custody.

[0:19:28] Daren: I guess it's hot because when you talk about the real big institutional money, all of their vernacular and knowledge base and infrastructure is just queued up to custody. I guess when you talk about large institutions, but then again, you don't have to. I'm pretty sure MicroStrategy who owns what do they own 125,000 bitcoins now? I don't think they use a custodial solution. I think they have them in collaborative custody. Wallets is my belief that makes sense.

[0:19:57] Daren: For them because the company itself invests in it.

[0:20:00] Daren: The CEO is pretty attuned with the ethos of bitcoin and why we want to depend on third party performance, particularly when you have billions at stake.

[0:20:10] Daren: Yeah, it's tough because exchanges, they want to make it as easy as possible for people to onboard and buy bitcoin, feel like they have it or own it and hold it. We're in a weird spot of adoption where we need exchanges, we need coinbase, finance, those we don't need. But in terms of adoption term, we still do need them. It's actually really hard for people to quickly attain bitcoin, ethereum, whatever, cryptocurrency by mining. It's a slow, long process, and you cannot just trust someone off the street like, oh, you got bitcoin, I got cash, let's do the trade outside. You can't just trade like that. Big trust issue. If there was a way to share money from peer to peer anonymously, that'd be great. But that's why you have bitcoin. That's the whole purpose of it, is to do that cash. You can't really do that anymore. Venmo, PayPal, they're all KYC, and we're in a weird spot. We're in a weird spot where we have to get that adoption put our KYC. The long term goal of bitcoin or any cryptocurrency or blockchain is to transition into a fully decentralized and anonymous network where nobody has to know anyone's identity that they don't want to reveal.

[0:21:26] Daren: Yeah, I'm glad you bring up privacy. I totally agree. I mean, we are taught, and in fact, the regulators that regulate, like firms like mine, teach us that financial privacy is bad because it equals suspicious activity. Completely incorrect definition. Financial privacy is simply a choice that should absolutely lie in the consumer's hands. And in fact, I would go a step further. There's lots of authors that have written about this. I mean, one of the cornerstones to a truly free society is financial privacy. The most free societies have the opportunity for financial privacy. The most constrained societies, including communist nations, have zero financial privacy, where your whole life is on a public ledger and you can be throttled and censored and resisted at the press of a button. So I totally agree. We got to move towards that. Yeah, this KYC does need to take place at the exchange. People do get a little lazy, and like you said, if they use finance or gemini or coinbase, it's all too easy to just leave your purchased coins up there because it's like, seemingly safe and convenient. But we beat the drum every day.

[0:22:45] Daren: That's not the best practice. Pull them down to your wallet. That's in your control with your keys. Therefore it's your crypto, and then you know you're in control. It's a long learning curve. It's a totally different paradigm. Teaching all these people that the pitfalls of third party performance, and they don't know until it hits, like celsius or going back to 2013, I believe it was, was that when the cypress bank failed in greece? And on Friday, you know, you had deposits, and on Monday they're like, sorry, no withdrawals allowed. And everybody was, like, completely just astonished that something like that could even happen. Well, in the case of the canadian trucker convoy. If you were a trucker or even a person waving and cheering them on, your bank account was summarily frozen by one of the popular Canadian banks. I mean, they literally served as the in that instance, they served as the judge, jury, and executioner in one swoop. I mean, an egregious violation of so many laws, you all in one fell swoop. But this is the sort of state of affairs that things have come to. Communism has become cool.

[0:23:58] Daren: And so China has got the digital yuan, which is their central bank digital currency. They got other communist nations looking at that and saying, cool, man. All right, we want to control our people to that extent as well. Can we outsource? Can you license that software as a service to us? Give us a digital CBDC of our own so that we can control our people right down to can they take the bus to work that day? Oh, they've been a bad boy disable that today. It's a really important time to have discernment and just people say, oh, well, none of these crazy things you're talking about, Darren, would ever happen in the United States. Come on, come on. This is a free country. I disagree. What we have now is a Congress who has failed to enact any meaningful sort of legislation, statutory law regarding cryptos. And so in lieu of that, you have regulators running around making up their own rules. They are literally drawing up their own opinions, rulings letters. They have all these different names for them.

[0:25:00] Daren: But I find it alarming, and I don't think it's even lawful what they're doing. They're literally writing their own interpretations of the 1940 Custody Act, an 80 year old law, and going around with a mallet whacking people on the head with these opinion letters. And so time out. Is what they're doing even in accordance with statutory law? No, I don't think it is. So we're seeing kind of this regulators gone rogue in the US. Which is dangerous to democracy because you're not able to operate in a game when the rules are being changed constantly, both as a business and a consumer. And it's even more alarming that these regulators are operating what I believe is just regardless of what statutory law grants them the privilege to do.

[0:25:51] Daren: Yeah, and it's funny that you say that. You would never think that happens in America. This whole scenario reminds me of like a Black Mirror episode where everything is like a rating.

[0:25:59] Daren: Yeah, right.

[0:26:00] Daren: But you're right. We're told the money is ours. We have pretty free transition of money. You can exchange money pretty easily through lots of different means without worry that someone's going to take you or someone's going to stop us. I can use Venmo or even Facebook, Pay, or even like there's tons of ways to transact between American citizens. That's not the case in every country. Some countries do have their banking payment exchanges and transfers. But it's not that easy. Some countries are still dependent on cash. We're in a digital age. It's time to get rid of cash, I think, like what? Over 95% of the dollars are digital. They're not even cash anymore.

[0:26:36] Daren: Right.

[0:26:36] Daren: It's time for people to realize things can happen to any country. We're seeing it happen to more and more countries. Communist countries are encouraging digital currencies. It is a perfect way to control your people. Digital currency is having control over minting it yourself, having ownership and what goes on with the smart contract, that's ultimate control. And it can happen with any country. It's probably very incentivizing for countries to do that. Why wouldn't you want to have that?

[0:27:01] Daren: Yeah. And if you don't pay your taxes for your convenience, they'll just garnish it right out of your wages, right? For you, it's just a lot easier that way, isn't it? Have you ever seen the movie Ready Player One? It's that you're inside this game as your primary activity during the day and if you accrue debt in the game, then in real life you have to go to these quote unquote loyalty centers and burn off your debts by being a slave at their headquarters there. I'm laughing to sort of add humor to this dark overtone, but I think this is literally you're going to see that happening in China. That's where it's going to start with the digital Yuan CBDC. They haven't flipped the switch, so it's still a honeypot trap right now. It's still being sold and billed as oh, look, this is just convenient. Look, you can pay all your bills with one click. You can bleep out your groceries, pay your rent, you can get paid faster from your employer. Look how awesome this is, guys. What could possibly go wrong? Well, they haven't flipped the switch yet with any of the nasty social controls. But once the critical mass of users is they will flip that switch and it will become excruciatingly apparent what's possible there.

[0:28:14] Daren: The silly thing is we already have that possibility with the current blockchain and cryptocurrency industry we have now. There's no need to keep adding and reinventing the wheel. Yes, it's good to advance and keep innovating, but there's a reason like money controls everything and the government controls money. They control everything in the sum of it all. It still depends on the people. The people have all to say. If we all agree that we want to use bitcoin or ethereum or whatever, that's money you took power away from the government, it is hard. Most people in the world just want to live their freaking lives and do what they want to go to their work and come home and cook a dinner and just not have to deal with shit from so many different places and entities. There's enough crap to deal with in a day. The last thing you want to do is just. Add more crap. That's why education on this is so important is that this is a time where you can actually take ownership and have less to deal with from people that you don't have to deal with anymore because they own your assets on your money. It's finally yours.

[0:29:13] Daren: I will say that is one silver lining. We're talking about the dark clouds here. But I mean, the one silver lining is that layer one bitcoin transactions and translation to english, that's me having a wallet, sending Rudy's some bitcoin on his wallet. That action right there is sacrosanct like that cannot be messed with by any regulator, government, et cetera. It cannot be throttled censored turned off as long as we can still have access, I should say to zero knowledge wallets we can transact. And so that is awesome. Although it sounds like a very base level, very crude level of functionality, it's what's necessary to have a free economy. And it is possible. And I really want to go down to have you been down to bitcoin beach in el salvador?

[0:30:02] Daren: I have not.

[0:30:03] Daren: No, neither have I, but one of my peer companies has and even did a project down there. And I am dying to see, because if you and your listeners aren't aware, bitcoin beach in El Salvador is a place where every retailer accepts crypto. You can pay your rent, you could pay travel, you can pay accommodations, you can completely live on bitcoin. So think about that. Those people don't care what the BTC USD ratio is, right? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I got a soda and it's 200 satoshi. I got a hotel room and it's 2000 satoshi. Whatever their price is, it's quoted in bitcoin. They don't care what the stupid dollar ratio is that day. That's a whole other discussion. I mean, I don't believe the prices you see on crypto. There's some extremely serious left pocket to right pocket trading going on at all of the major exchanges, and it's dramatically skewing the price. I don't tend to look at that price much.

[0:31:08] Daren: That's a whole other discussion. The other thing I want to mention was, if we can learn what president bukelli is doing in el Salvador and in bitcoin beach specifically, let's replicate that in our own local communities. Wherever you wherever your listeners live, do that indoctrinate who you buy your farm products from, who you buy your kids bicycle from, who you pay rent to. If we can start using bitcoin, that's all that's needed to escape the trap. It's that simple. But it just takes a critical mass, and we are certainly not there yet.

[0:31:40] Daren: Yeah, and that's a great thing to say because it does start locally. If you just go to your barber shop, whatever, just do take crypto. And they'll ask now, or ask questions like, I don't really know how it works sort of conversation. And that's one more person that starts looking into it. Obviously don't be pushy, folks. It is a tough subject to fully understand, but educate and share and learn and it'll grow naturally. That's how it's been going for the past since 2009. So 13 years. It's pretty impressive. And that's the key to just constantly educating with your business. I'm sure people come in, just want to learn more, like what the hell is Bitcoin? And even for like Aetherium such other currencies, are there other currencies available for you?

[0:32:20] Daren: Yeah, we'll sell customers anything, but I will yeah, I guess it's no secret. I would say like 99 and a half percent of our sales orders are for BTC. So the market speaks pretty loud and we're doing many millions of dollars of sales every month. So there's a real critical mass there. Interested in bitcoin. Back to the education. Another thing we'll be rolling out is there is a demand for it. And so, for example, we're going to be designing continuing education credit programs for both attorneys and real estate brokers because everybody has ongoing requirements for continuing ed. For a very modest fee, you can take probably what will be an online course with our firm and earn yourself three credit hours of continuing ed for taking a blockchain and bitcoin course from us. And that seems to be a real need. We arrived at that just here in this local Portland, Maine. We found ourselves doing just presentations at local law firms, accounting firms, real estate brokerages who just said, hey, can you come in and do a lunch and learn and just give us a clue, just get us started, wet our appetite. And we constantly do those, I call them dog and pony shows. We're doing a circuit of those and it got us thinking like, wow, there is a real curiosity and a hunger for this. Let's turn it into something that people can actually purchase as legitimate education.

[0:33:43] Daren: Yeah, it's the key. Start with education and then that's all you got to keep doing to keep educating people.

[0:33:48] Daren: Yeah, and one other thing we might do. I'm looking at my office space here. We're on kind of the main road coming in here in Portland, Maine. And I think we're going to start like the main blockchain learning center, something named similar to that, where the doors open to the public. There's a coffee machine, there's all these wallets, there's books, there's demonstrations, there's videos, there's NFTs, all this stuff where people can just walk in. Maybe we'll get school field trips where kids can come in for a 25 minutes presentation and play with some bitcoins on our little sample iPads over here. And we have these little ballet wallets which are these metal cards that you can store your Bitcoins on, where it's a bearer instrument and it's a little more drives at home. Anyway, we have all these ways that people can learn and the idea is to just blow the COVID off it and just have it open to everybody. Just walk in and check it out. I know we really enjoy this stuff. We're selling freedom. That's really what it is. There's a certain type of customer profile that comes in here and they're honest to goodness people. They've done well in life with their businesses and their investments, and they see what's coming. They see this specter of communism, like, sweeping the world, and they want to hedge against it.

[0:35:10] Daren: And so we are selling them freedom one bitcoin at a time.

[0:35:14] Daren: It's really important to feel ownership over anything, even more than just money, but even just your privacy, your health records. I think especially these web two companies, these large conglomerates like Google, Apple, Facebook, Meadow, whatever, Amazon, it's definitely taught us a lesson that our data is not ours, and you are always paying with as much data as possible. TikTok that's a great example too. All the teens in the world are on this, and from a young age, my face even now going on YouTube has just taken our faces and it's just weird. It's weird to think that, yeah, without.

[0:35:49] Daren: Your consent, I'll add to sort of the dire circumstance that you started to paint. I mean, all of the data that gets aggregated on these platforms we use. Their whole business model is to maximally exploit you as much as possible without your consent before they get caught by any updated legislation or regulations. Is that a sustainable business model? To sort of reap people of their data as much as possible, as many times as possible? I don't think it is. And I think that's why we're seeing a big tech slide right now. Like, if you look at the top ten, whatever, nasdaq tech companies, they've slid a lot and for good reason. These are unsustainable practices. And I think smart money knows that the jigs coming to an end. You can't just continue like this for much longer. People are wise to the jig. Yeah.

[0:36:43] Daren: For me, it just can't come soon enough to have the full adoption of cryptocurrencies. I'm doing my best to keep it going.

[0:36:50] Daren: I'm with you. We have to build an ecosystem, right? Like, for example, we're not ready to pull the plug on the legacy financial system yet because they've perfected all these things like mortgages for homes, auto loans, lines of credit, debit cards. They've had so many decades to sort of I'll say the word perfect loosely, but they've made it so easy and seamless for consumers that it's hard to let go of those systems, even though they do have extraordinary hidden costs and risks that we aren't properly considering. I envision banks going away because they don't add any more value anymore. I envision a totally decentralized system of many cryptos that are in use for different use cases. And I envision, like, financial service companies basically taking the place of banks where firms like mine can walk in here and get a mortgage and auto loan, a line of credit against your crypto. You can do many of the functions you've become accustomed to doing with a local or national bank, but through a fin surf. I think that's my sniff on which way it's going. I don't know if you have thought about this, but I think about this a lot from what I am directly seeing in both my peers and with my customers. That's the direction we're moving.

[0:38:06] Daren: Yeah, it's a good point because I wanted to learn more about also any concerns that you have in the industry that are coming up.

[0:38:13] Daren: I would just summarize by saying beware of just like rogue regulation. I think we all need to just decide do we stand for what crypto stands for and what the ethos of Satoshi's white Paper calls for, which is financial freedom, or do we genuflect on one knee and just big regulators to tell us what to do? Which that sounds meek and pathetic, but that's frankly what most people in my industry are doing at the moment, which in my mind just close your doors because that violates every senate of what this movement is all about. You got to work within the confines of what's legal and permissible. It just, it's crossed the line, I would say the last twelve months. It's crossed the line where it's like not clear that what's being asked of us is actually even legitimate.

[0:39:03] Daren: Yeah, it's tough because we look to regulations to protect us. That's like what they were meant to do is to protect the common person from bad actors or things that they FDIC. Insurance is great. Like if my bank account gets hacked somehow and I lose money, like great, the bank, the government can actually fund me back what I've lost. Those things are great in crypto. If you lose your money, you lost your money, it's never come back. But it's also the sense of ownership. That's what you get for owning something. If you drop your phone on the floor and it cracks, that's your fault. But if someone steals your phone, you're not going to get that back either. We're just kind of tough and it's not your fault necessarily.

[0:39:43] Daren: I kind of like natural consequences, like you were just describing. I'm a parent. I don't know if you are, but they say you got to let your kids experience natural consequences. Oh, you're a fussy eater and you're not going to eat dinner, go to bed hungry. See how many times that works for you? You dropped your cell phone in the puddle because you're being careless. You don't get a new one. Too bad. So natural consequences are probably part of growing up. And so maybe we adults need to grow up a tiny bit, too, and not rely on the FDIC, for example, which, by the way, they have 99 years to pay you back if the bank loses your funds and they're FDIC insured, which makes you think that it's very protected. They have up to 99 years to make you whole. That's a little known fact.

[0:40:32] Daren: But I don't know that a lot.

[0:40:34] Daren: Of the guardrails that you think are in place that are just so ironclad and are going to be such a high hurdle for the crypto industry to meet are not that important or practical.

[0:40:43] Daren: Learning the natural causes method is not the same as everyone else. It's a different method of learning as we all do. We all hope to teach each other the best and help each other grow as a community. So it's like, why not? Decentralization so much in strong community is everyone to win. That's like what a lot of cryptocurrency does is it provides some type of game theory where it incentivizes all actors in the industry to do good, because any good can ultimately benefit you, since humans are typically looking out for themselves. But if you can look out for yourself at the same time help others, that's a win win.

[0:41:17] Daren: Yeah, I like where you're going with that. I would almost kind of transition this discussion to, like, this is kind of a spiritual movement. And I don't mean anything religiously denominated. I just mean, like, on a higher level. This is us humans kind of awakening to our own sovereignty and our own manifestation of our own ideas and creations. And we don't need keepers. We don't need playground proctors telling us every movement that we ought to make. We're past that. Maybe we needed that in 1940, and I think we were a less evolved species at that time. I think we're different people these days.

[0:41:57] Daren: Yeah. And then the Internet makes it easier, but also makes it a lot harder with misinformation online to be easier, but also more chaotic at the same time. But that's what happens when you grow and you evolve. It's not supposed to be smooth.

[0:42:08] Daren: So there's a lot of disinformation. I think it's like an information world war right now, and it's testing everybody's discernment. And that keeps coming up for me. Like, I have to discern what's right, what's not right, what's disinformation.

[0:42:26] Daren: Yeah. I want to know. You're running your business. You're in the crypto, old 24/7, hard to just keep your head straight sometimes, and you have a family. What does Darren do outside of crypto, outside of just, like, running his business? How do you keep your own mental health?

[0:42:43] Daren: I incorporate traveling with this profession. So going to conferences, going to meet up out of state, just traveling a lot is an important thing for me. Rudy and then just staying fit, cycling, yoga, sailing, just getting out in nature and grounding yourself, getting away from 5G in urban centers and doing the digital detox in nature is a super important thing for me, actually. A guru told me, actually putting your bare feet in soil is a very important thing for humans to do. So to ground yourself. So that's a lot of the things I do in my spare time just kind of transitioning to what is the spiritual meaning of what I'm doing, both personally and professionally. Spend a lot of time kind of honing that.

[0:43:27] Daren: That's amazing. Me and my fiance started just leaving our phones at home, going for walks together. Just leave it at home or go out to dinner, just leave your home. Don't look at it. Even if you just have in your pocket, you don't look at it versus leaving it at home. It's a different feeling. Not having it on you is a different mental clarity.

[0:43:47] Daren: It's almost like it casts a spell on you and it's just this. Even the best of us, it's addictive to look at that little screen.

[0:43:57] Daren: One of my last questions, like, to ask everyone is, what is your favorite wholesome crypto moment? Something in the crypto industry that you're happy to see, you're happy to be part of, made you feel good.

[0:44:08] Daren: That's easy. I'll try to make it real quick, but this harkens. Back to our earlier chat. So I bought ten bitcoins in 2016, and everybody can look up the price. They were pretty cheap back then, and by the time they ran up in value significantly by Christmas 2017, I said, wow, that's a good balance. I got a decision. I can either hoddle these and probably be in a pretty darn good position for the rest of my life in the coming years, or I can start a business and spread bitcoins to many, many other people. And it didn't take me long. I obviously invested all of that into starting my business. Well, since then, we've grown to have thousands of customers and many millions of dollars in sales, and there's no looking back. Man, I'm so glad.

[0:44:57] Daren: No regrets. Amazing. I'm so happy for you, because that's a big risk. I don't know if I would have done that if I had that.

[0:45:03] Daren: It was a huge risk. It was jumping off a cliff and hoping you had a hang glider on your back versus free fall.

[0:45:10] Daren: You're fixing it while you're flying. That's the thing, right? Thank you, Darren, so much for joining me on this show. And thank you so much for educating and teaching people about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It's needed. I'm happy or successful, I hope the most success for you. And yeah. Thank you again.

[0:45:29] Daren: Thank you, Rudy. Great chatting with you today. All right, have a great evening.

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