Music
I'm sorry.
Thank you.
good morning guys can you hear me
good morning marine oh my god like this new app makes everything look so weird
have you guys noticed like everything changed like the hands the
the laughing faces the hearts it looks more cartoonish
i don't know what you're talking about
everything changed on my phone i don't know maybe i'm an android and i got this
new update like way later so i think it's a ted world problem jenny i'm sorry
no problem it's just an update i don't think it's a problem but good morning happy friday
let's retweet the room we have an awesome guest how are you doing maureen i'm doing
fabulous about you
wow
that's definitely a step above where
I feel
standing on a Friday
but I'm having my coffee
I just retweeted
the space
and I'm here with you and I'll see
Phil also join us here super early
good morning
good morning Phil
Chemi are you going to hang out
or because I wanted to co-host you.
Yes, like I told you,
I had some kind of last minute situation here.
So I might be in and out,
but you can co-host me.
You know, I definitely have some questions
already for the team.
But, you know, life happens.
So I'm here.
Every time I want to co-host you,
there's always another option
just right next to it,
which says remove from speakers.
It's like tense.
And you're tempted.
You're so tempted.
I'm like, what if I just do this instead of, you know?
It's so nice that I...
I'm just getting used to this new thing, Maureen.
I wish I could, like, explain it to you.
It looks so different.
Take a screenshot and set it in the Kabbalah chat.
gm y'all my app hasn't updated nothing's changed for me either but um that scares me i don't want
to update now it's been like this since they changed the algorithm i noticed the app itself
like the posts everything which is very different but because i didn't make it to the space yesterday
I didn't notice the space had also changed.
So now I'm like, hmm, it looks funny.
It looks cute.
I'm kind of cuter.
But usually when they do this stuff, it breaks for me, guys.
So if you send me a request, Maureen, I didn't get it.
You see, it might be broken.
Definitely broken.
All right, so retweet the room.
We have RealFi coming in just 25 minutes.
We want to get more people in here, bring questions, your listening ears, snack, coffee.
Tea is allowed.
I'm going to have to discuss your decaf options, but we might have to allow it because this new generation likes decaf.
So I don't know.
Imagine having enough delegation that people thank you when you vote for their proposal.
What was that?
I said, imagine having enough delegation that people thank you when you vote for their proposal.
Oh.
I mean, do you make a post telling them that you voted for their proposal?
That's how they know, I guess.
Oh, you mean without you announcing it?
Just reaching out because they know who you are when you vote, I guess.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Like the last couple of weeks, I've seen lots of people that had proposals
and they would make a post and say, hey, you know,
thank X and X whale
for voting for my proposal
blah blah blah
you know
nobody ever thanks you for the 2600
that you put into our room
yeah your delegators
should thank you for voting
on their behalf that will be the most
rewarding thanks
if your delegators think
that you know it's awesome
that you're doing the job for them
I'll feel that to be a little bit
probably a little more rewarding
but yeah you're right
so what are you guys doing this morning
what's new in the Cardano world
bring up this energy
come up here and hang out with us
do some talking
a little banter section
anybody's welcome to come up
and talk about whatever
if there's anything
happening in Cardano that we need to know
this is the time to bring it to our attention, pin it up at the top, let everybody know.
Just some reminders if anything's dropping today, if people need to move their funds for whatever reason,
if you're performing an update, an upgrade, or something that is going to affect your users,
this is a good time to let people know.
Or if you just want to say hi, that's also allowed.
So it is Friday.
What are you up to, Maureen?
I think Maureen is having technical difficulties.
Oh, she just came back.
I'm back!
I'm going to Blockfrost in the meantime.
Please.
I just...
You guys do not understand you are playing with fire,
like nuclear toxic waste fire.
If Blockfrost does not continue to exist,
every app in the ecosystem, something will break.
It will cost teams so much money.
It will cost me so much money to have to migrate all of my infrastructure on dozens of apps that I'm hosting to alternatives.
Can you buy Cien?
Yes, I can hear you, Maureen. You're back.
Sorry, go on, Fio.
No, I'm just pleading, please.
everyone thinks about the cost of funding things
and often they don't think about the cost of not funding things.
Those are equally important.
If something doesn't get funded
and every major team in the ecosystem
has to spend tens of thousands of dollars,
redundantly,
then if there's 20, 30, 40 teams,
depending on BlockFrost,
this is a lot of money.
And it's a lot of money on teams that do not have this money.
So please consider this while voting.
It doesn't just impact me.
It impacts, I guarantee, whatever DAP you use, whatever wallet you use, it impacts everybody.
It will be very, very, very, very bad if BlockFrost ceases to exist.
and this is a chance for the community to get a community-owned RPC and indexer,
a public infrastructure indexer.
This is a critical component that Cardano is missing as a chain.
In Ethereum, you can go to thousands of free RPCs,
so your first experience as a developer does not have to be you download a node,
you run db-sync, you wait 60 hours to sync the chain,
and then you can finally start testing Cardano development.
In Ethereum, you just write your app and you plug in an RPC.
Or you have an app already and you just plug in Ethereum
using one of the 1,000 plus free RPCs.
Without an equivalent, the developer experience
is going to be awful.
And I promise new developers will come.
They will see that they need to install DBSync
and they will leave forever.
So yeah, be careful.
I think I definitely could see the importance of BroadFrost.
Sorry, I wanted to say BroadFrost.
Of BlockFrost.
The issue that I personally had with the proposal
was how the funds were allocated.
When I look at the staffing,
it takes at least 80% of the money
and the rest of it goes to infrastructure.
And since I don't know what goes into,
you know, like the work that goes in
to keep this running,
I can't say for sure that it's expensive.
But at the same time,
the proposal doesn't give me much information
in that regard. So I guess it's a bit something I struggled with as a DREP on passing the proposal.
That's totally fair. If you guys want to provide feedback to them and make, you know, make it into
it. And I wish that more DREPs, you know, would act that way instead of being binary, you know,
no, I will not vote for this because, you know, we have alternatives or whatever. Instead of doing
that, you know, you make it into a negotiation, right? You say, well, you know, I like the idea
in general, but there are these specific things that I want clarity on, or, you know, maybe we
can negotiate the price or things like that. That's how governance is supposed to work. And
that's doing a good, being a good steward as a DREP, right? You're considering the best interest
of the chain and you're saying, okay, well, I'm going to negotiate on behalf of the chain
as opposed to just being like, no, never buy.
You know, this is useless.
We have something else.
Can you guys pin up something I pinned at the top regarding this, Marine, please?
It's a funny thing.
I made a post about it this morning, Phil.
I was just like, I keep seeing like people saying like,
we have alternatives.
Alternatives to what?
Like, bring it on.
Like, just tell me exactly what, how are we going to get all the bases covered
if we don't have block for us?
because I feel like nobody addresses that.
They just say, we have alternatives.
And it's like, alternatives to what?
Do you even know what's going to be missing?
And can you like bring it to the conversation, you know?
So I'm with you.
I think that what Maureen said is valid.
I think, you know, valid concerns are, you know, there are plenty of them.
But yeah, we have to be careful, man,
because I feel like we're just falling into this, like, I guess what I, you know,
this perfectionism of like, oh, yeah, no, we're just not going to focus on the proposal itself.
And I see it in a lot of proposals, actually.
Like, people just giving all these reasons why they're not going to vote,
which are completely outside of the scope of what the proposers can actually do.
They're just, you know, they can't fix any.
Oh, no, no, no incentives for D-REPS.
and we shouldn't fund this.
And it's like, what?
So we have to be very careful, guys.
We can find a lot of reasons why we,
it becomes a bias at the end of the day.
We're just not being objective
and we think we are.
But yeah, thank you, Phil and Maureen
for bringing your perspective to Maureen.
I think it's very valid.
I mean, I think...
Sorry, go on.
Yeah, go on, Ben.
I was going to recognize you.
You've been recognized.
You know what?
I've been waiting for that all week and my wife hasn't.
And now you have.
And I'm going to take this recording back to her and ask her to get some pointers from you.
I don't want to come home.
You've been recognized, Ben.
In my opinion, the whole governance, the FUD and the entropy, the energy sucking from all of this.
but like I just take a step back from it and I feel like look the treasury is getting spent one
way or the other it's either getting spent because the value is decreasing relatively or it's going
to get spent um on whatever gets voted on and so I just think we have to have a much more aggressive
this is personal opinion I'm not wearing the hat of any project by the way we have to get aggressive
but obviously we need to get pragmatic and we need experts in the room to try and solve some of the
kind of commercial marketing problems Kodana has got I agree with Phil that the developer experience
is critical um and I think that because we have all been waiting for so long it's really easy to
kind of if it's not a scarcity mindset it's it's a risk mitigating mindset right and and that's
rational I'm not like of course we should be mitigating risks but this game is like you have
to compete you've got to get out there right like and how we do that is is the most important
question and uh i think people are very focused on like the the number on the screen getting spent
i'm not justifying any specific proposal but i want to i want to go out and like conquer and
see could i do really well and for that we've got to get a war chest and we've got to be able
to actually use it uh appropriately you know so that's my two cents
quick correction ben uh we don't use scent here we only use lovelaces two lovelaces
that's right it wasn't that like light us like rebrand to lovelaces
i think rebrand from lido maybe yeah
what that's that doesn't sound good james i don't know that was like something that was
i don't know they've been working on it we're gonna have to ask light i want to see him next time
it's uh you know rebranding is always a problem right if you do something and you have to rebrand
like your Roy
rebranding to second five
and then completely shutting it down
well
well rebranding is
tricky, sometimes it's absolutely
necessary, but when it's done
when it's not necessary, it can become
a problem and you can
you know, it can hurt you
more than help you
so yeah, rebrand
be careful
I definitely know
some companies in my country that have
rebranded and that did not go well and there is also like government agencies we had this government
the government provides electricity right so it used to be some name with calm in it
and then they rebranded it to a new and then they brought it to some other name and then back to a
and it's a shit company obviously because electricity always gets cut but we have that
a lot with government agencies i don't know why it's stupid it's stupid it's not about the name
guys just make it work come on ah anyways um i see i see ben put his uh discord for
real fight he's here for business but john's gonna uh join in about 10 minutes i think i dm'd
and said him no um but for anyone that doesn't know i'm not part of io anymore so um i was like
five and a half years at io which is for me personally you know uh the amount that i learned
it was a personal transformation you know so i've of course got gratitude for that journey but
it was crazy coming out of five and a half years where like the that whole time you you've been
really focused on you know playing your role and to do that you have to well you try you try and
round yourself off right to be to be the best cult that you can to be able to work with all
the different teams so I kind of went through like a mini death you know like an ego death
where like I wasn't part of IO anymore and I came home I was like oh what am I going to do right
and then I was pitching RealFi about bootstrapping the community with state pool operators and
making the argument that I think it's a really good idea to give the community a stake in RealFi
but to do it through state pool operators and in that sense help especially single pool operators
offer something extra to their delegators right so that you're really helping secure the
decentralization of the network um is one part of it um and you know single pool operators haven't
got a lot of love um recently you know so that's where like this kind of proposal came from i'm
just setting up moving you interrupt me any moment jenny i'm giving you the context i'm giving you
the context of john's going to join the call when he's here i think it'll be great to hear what he's
got but i'm giving you the prior context of having worked five and a half years in
irish kane and kadana foundation before that you know um and i think i'm really excited about real
five um they are trying very hard to be uh boring and compliant and regulatory um uh and follow the
regulations you know um but there is like a lot of alpha there's a lot of value in um real five i'm
excited about that i'm gonna let john articulate uh so that i don't get the fame the framing wrong
but it's a stablecoin infrastructure and RWAs, and it's really exciting.
And so to come back to the point, and you interrupt me at any time,
but so I put this proposal forward to John and the team,
and they've just been like super receptive.
Do you know it was really, really refreshing to be like,
oh, wow, like people really want these ideas,
and they're going to move really quickly on them.
We have like a Miro board workshop with the Stateful operators to help co-create this kind of campaign.
So, you know, it's their community as much as ours.
And one of the ideas is about a Stateful operator page, right, to raise the profiles.
And like the marketing teams on it and turning it around within like 24 hours, I'm on a call with the website designers.
So like the pace is just so much quicker.
Anyway, I'll stop there, but I'm just trying to give you a flavor.
team are you like part of the the team i'm part of real part of the real fight team um yeah
awesome like like long term you know i i just basically pitched this like hey like let's
bootstrap the community i've got a really good idea of how we could do it i was inspired by the
ispo model so i just jumped in really i haven't you know people like you're part of the team i'm
part of team discord i'm part of team i've got a real fire email you know um do they want to marry
me and walk me down the aisle i don't know you know so we'll see but um but that's what i've
been doing for like three weeks right and we've gone from zero and discord to like um over 700
now and over 600 verified wallets what they care about right i don't know if anybody nobody probably
who reads my Twitter articles, maybe Phil does, Phil reads my ex-articles.
And I talked about numbers being before strategy and you need an axis around which ideas and
suggestions and proposals can kind of orientate, right?
So the real fire, what matters is TVL and staking ratio around 70%.
And those are the two numbers that are important.
And the first couple of weeks, like the emphasis with the team is they only want legitimate,
verified activity you know they don't want vanity metrics and so i think there's a really interesting
kind of a community launch program that's kind of emerging out of this spo accelerator program
which effectively is like it's on chain and it's verifiable right so we can look at which of the
stakeholders are in the program how many of their delegators actually claim points that have accrued
right so that's a verification on chain you can then look at like okay uh how many of the estate
pool operators delegators actually complete the quest and the testnet activity and actions right
i think like if they get 10 uh then they get some some swag and like that kind of thing right so
it's really interesting to me this isn't like a vanity metric ambassador program stuff i've
complained about them in the past where it's like you're just you're just rewarding output not real
performance but if it's on chain and you can verify it and really it's about the activity
um then i think that's really interesting to be able to build something like that so
i'm not saying it's a product yet but i'm saying it's something that other people may be able to
use if we were to write it up you know i'm waffling so yeah jenny
no i mean this is cool i can't wait to like get into the whole conversation i was totally going
to ask you something very different unrelated but because you're here um and i'm dealing with
all these changes on my twitter space right now that i'm trying to navigate do you remember when
you were hosting like some of the first twitter spaces that ever existed and you were this girl
that was on the when twitter actually had a spaces department you work with this girl and she was
like helping and we were like trying to make the whole experience better.
Dude, I remember those days.
It was just so.
You're right.
Yeah.
We were trying to get like, was it, we're trying to get verified.
We're trying to get, and she had, she was part of the verification process,
but then she moved from there to this like pioneering these X spaces.
It was like, do you remember Clubhouse?
Do you remember Clubhouse was a big thing?
You know, this kind of audio conversation.
and now it's become part and parcel i mean like the whole world's changing that's like
what i think everyone has to kind of get right i remember those times and you know there's like a
nostalgia there's like a currency right like you almost want to get back into like building something
that's exciting can we build cool shit can we like stop arguing can we get like really excited about
the the tech and the use case um i'm just probably not for this i'm riding this it's a really big
rabbit hole but i'm basically writing a five-part sub-sex series maybe it's an e-zine or something
i don't know but it's about how the intelligence revolution is going to be decentralized and oh
john o'connor is here so should we invite john up hey john see if we can invite him the speaker
but uh while we're over john to come up the point is that we need to have like a vision and
understand where we're going with the with the ecosystem and if you look at things like eigenlayer
or near they're very good at pivoting um the narrative on what they're for and i think that's
something that kadana could really benefit from uh john if you can hear me you need to request to
be speaker or jenny yeah i don't have a co-host and i think that marines haven't issued something
then to me i that's all twitter space changed for me today so that's weird last time um yes
There was a conversation about something else and I was talked to the entire space about in Cardano
over coffee about real fi and how excited I was for it. For the defy opportunity that it presents,
especially to a lot of people that don't care about or engage with the sort of day trading
or meme coin or degenerate gambling type DeFi activity.
Like me, and I got excited, Phil, but then I realized I'm in the U.S.,
so I need to ask those questions too and understand what that means
to me in the future as well.
Yes, so one of the big things is U.S., you won't be able to mint directly.
Now, this is something that's relatively common. It's the same with Athena, for instance. But it doesn't impact secondary markets. And so, you know, it's sort of similar to USDC in that you can't mint USDC with Circle unless you are a KYC private client of Circle.
and you can't redeem it with Circle.
But you can get it on Coinbase
or you can get it on a DEX.
And so as far as...
I thought only that part.
For some reason, I thought it was the app itself
that I couldn't use.
Yeah.
Yeah, so for instance,
you would be able to go on SundaySwap or MinSwap
and buy USDR.
And then you should be able to stake it in a vault.
Although that I'm not certain about.
one of the things, for instance, like GED, GED had the same restriction.
GED, you cannot use the GED app from the U.S.
But the Artifacts Labs team published an application called OpenGED,
which just interacts with the smart contracts directly.
And you can use this application anywhere.
And you have similar websites for Athena and so forth.
So workarounds.
I like it.
I see John is finally here.
Yeah, sorry guys.
You were correct in saying that Spacer still has some problems.
I was joining and I was just hearing like a DJ loop of Ben talking.
It kept saying, John O'Connor has joined, John O'Connor has joined.
But thank you very much for having me everyone.
And also thank you Phil.
Yeah, that is completely correct.
Ultimately, we have to face off to institutions.
We have to KYC those institutions.
And that sort of prohibits us from working directly with US counterparties.
But Phil's completely right.
It's the same setup as Circle or Athena.
So I just have one question I need to get out of the way.
Is Cameroon in or out?
Cameroon's in, actually.
that's funny
so i i feel like they uh so and without meaning anything bad it's uh you have you guys have to
stay compliant right um it's like instead of banking the unbanked
uh we are on banking the bank if u.s is not involved it's a lot of people right
Yeah, look, when you're dealing with real world assets, you have to have fund structures,
you need to have regulatory regimes, you need to have all of these things. So when it comes
towards us holding assets, we have to be compliant. And we have our Cayman fund structure
and our Cayman foundation. We have obligations and responsibilities that go with that.
On the other side of it, you have regulation happening in the US, the Clarity Bill, Genius Act, and similar ones in Europe over Mika, etc., which also make it harder for people to go and have access to products like this.
So ultimately, we have to sit where we have to sit.
But, you know, there is a large portion of the world who can interact directly with us,
directly through our DAPT.
And as Phil said, crypto has a certain structure and there's ways in which DEXs ultimately
operate.
So anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that we have to do what we have to do, but
we still believe that our product will be useful to a lot of people.
Jenny with the hand up.
Yes, I just wanted to say since it's already like 10
and we're getting started with the interview,
there's like 40 some people in the room and only 10 retweets.
So if you can please check the bubble at the bottom, right?
You should find a little share button, something.
I don't know exactly how it looks on your end,
but sharing this space makes this space available to more people.
and it's one way you can support the show
it's free and it's accessible
it's right there and we can get more people in here
to participate in the conversation
so yeah thank you
I appreciate it
Chad would you like
to do a mid-roll?
Mid-roll is for the middle
no I want it now
Jenny it's my show
thank you for tuning in to cardano over coffee everybody this is your decentralized morning show
coming to you live every monday through friday at 9 30 eastern standard time and we like to talk
about what's being built on the blockchain so if you have a business that's being built on cardano
midnight what have you click the cup go to our calendar link and sign up for a spot and you can
come on the show and talk about your business.
You can also be a person that offers questions as a listener.
Feel free to request and come up if you have questions for our guests at any time or drop
them in the comments bubble at the bottom.
We like to remind our listeners to stake to a stake pool, delegate to a DREP, and please
do not keep your funds on central exchanges.
Once again, thank you for tuning in
And we're going to get into it with the real fight team
That was fantastic radio voice
Can I just say
I mean, that's really special
I love that, thank you
It sounded like you were on an airplane
I don't know, like you were like
Fasten your seatbelts
Thank you
And when you go to the toilet
Flush the toilet, guys
Don't be nasty
Do they say that to you guys there, Jenny?
No.
No, they don't.
I would say something like that.
Because of the whole central exchange thing.
And so we don't draw it out any longer than it has to be.
If I would talk on the plane, I would make sure to mention that.
They don't mention it often enough.
Okay, so my hand stayed up.
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to.
Now I realize my new app makes me undo my hand up.
So, all right, let's get in with the guest.
Thank you.
Yes, let's get in.
Banter is over.
So I did welcome to you guys.
I see someone else joined.
I'm guessing it's Ryan is part of the team.
John, is he?
Ryan is not part of the team.
Not yet, at least, Ryan.
okay okay just making sure so ben is in the list now okay he's run away and left you here alone
it's just us now uh so i looked at your website and i think the first thing that caught my attention
was that you guys are,
your USDR is in direct,
like you're anchored in direct lending,
but you're stabilized by treasuries.
So I don't know.
I want to understand,
can you break down for me,
like what percentage of your reserves
is direct lending into re-economies?
Can we do a breakdown of the product first
before we dive into the USDR, Maureen?
Sorry, my bad.
Sure.
Yeah.
So let me start, I suppose, by talking about what the product is.
You're right.
It's a good place to start.
So ultimately, RealFi has a number of different tokens.
The first token is USDR, which is a stable coin,
which is backed by as liquid assets as you'll see in the portfolio.
So typically, this is Treasury bills as well as CLO ETFs, which are deeply traded ETFs, which are very easy to liquidate within a short period of time.
So this is really the liquid portion of the book.
And this is important because there is no lock up right on a stable coin dollar, right?
So if people want to redeem back to USDC, we have to be able to honor that.
And as a result, we need to make sure we've got very, very liquid assets against that.
And then we have our second product, which is staked USDR.
If you've got USDR through your Lace app or through our DAP, you can click the stake button, and then you get given SUSDR.
Alternatively, on a DEX, you could buy SUSDR directly.
You don't need to go through the staking model.
So staked USDR similarly also has a number of liquid assets.
These are once again collateralized loan obligations, ETFs, but then you also have some of the direct lending, which is the work that we've been doing for the last few years.
At the moment, this is predominantly emerging market direct lending.
This is lending towards fintechs that do impactful lending.
Typically, this is working capital finance for small businesses.
it's mostly companies that we've lent to before, which have a really good amount of equity in the
business that perform very well across time. And as I say, are also driving essentially growth,
job opportunities, et cetera, in a lot of markets. So that's kind of how you should think about the
product. USDR, highly liquid asset, normal stablecoin. SUSDR, still important to have a good
amount of liquidity in there, but also having some of this direct lending, which in our
view, you know, is impactful, drives very strong returns, and ultimately makes the product
quite exciting. The final token we have is RFG, which is our governance token, which
will be issued later on in the year, probably closer towards December, which also acts as
an incentive to do various things. So we can offer people RFG in order to be able to hold
usdr to be able to create liquidity around pairs and it's also something which i think you know
spos can we're giving away to spos in in order to do a variety of things and also offering us
incentives you know for the testnet etc thank you very much that was very well explained uh
Jenny, did you have a question?
Is my hand up?
No, sorry.
No.
Okay.
So I wanted to, so you said that it's mostly borrowers you've learned to before
who have like strong equity and good track records.
So what I have, okay, two things.
what is the historical default actually looking like?
And who is verifying all of those?
Is it you or is there someone else?
And the second thing I'm curious is that
when you talk about past performance across a few years,
does it mean that you have like a...
a, how do I phrase this? Let's say you have like a real emerging market credit shock,
right? Or maybe like a currency crisis. How does that look like? Do you understand what I'm asking?
I absolutely do. These are great questions. These are the kind of questions which I think
you get asked in diligence. So let's, I suppose, talk about what happens when things go wrong.
So this is what you typically call a lost waterfall, right?
So who loses money first and who loses money last?
And how does that work?
So the order at which these things would happen would be starting off with a first lost tranche.
So this is capital that we're raising at the moment and trying to close out at the moment,
which would basically mean that before anyone else loses anything,
this part of the portfolio, this particular group of people would lose money first. And this
ultimately acts as cover to everyone else, anyone holding SUSDR and USDR. So we haven't quite closed
this, but I'm hoping that we'll be able to talk about it soon. But ultimately, this will give a
lot of confidence to people that they can participate and they have a good amount of
coverage in case anything goes wrong. After that, you have the protocol buffer. So the protocol
itself will build up a stability fund ultimately from you know performance of the protocol which
basically gets filled up and acts as a small insurance pot in case things go wrong so this
would be the second place in which losses would then go towards and then thirdly what you'd have
is people who are stakes as usdr holders if you had um you know big losses then it would be these
people who would be hit next and then finally the normal usdr holders so that's the order in which
things go wrong um one of the things that's really important to us is transparency so uh you'll be
able to see all of the assets on the transparency portal it should be very easy for people to
independently model out the risks of this uh we think it's a you know a really nice risk adjusted
return. But this isn't something for, you know, just us to be able to go and say, other people
will be able to go and verify this. And then when it comes towards the verification, how do you know
we actually hold the assets? Well, a large amount of the assets we're holding are actually tokenized,
tokenized T-bills, and then tokenized CLO ETFs. The ones which aren't on-chain, the more direct
lending stuff that we're doing, the way in which you know that's real is by the fund auditor. So
So we have a fund auditor who looks at all of our Cayman books, and they'll publish at
the end of each month what the NAV is.
So this is what the net asset value is of our assets.
And this is basically a regulated function.
These are people who do this for thousands and hundreds of thousands of other funds.
And they'll be able to say each month that this is what that fund is holding, and this
is the value of it.
In addition to that, we have actual auditors, financial auditors at the end of each year
who will go and check absolutely everything and then go and publish an audit report.
So we have multiple different levels of controls, of transparency, of audit,
but we'll push all of that information into our transparency portal
for everyone to be able to go and look at it.
Oh, that's reassuring.
So if I'm...
I keep seeing Jenny's hand up.
I don't know if anyone sees it.
I just raised my hand, but just go with your question,
and I'll jump in there when you're ready.
I saw it when we started talking earlier, and then you said,
no, you don't have your hand up.
It's weird.
Okay, so what was I asking?
Uh-huh.
So you said monthly valuations from, like, an outside auditor,
and you have, like, a full annual audit.
I think that's a very, that's good, I think.
So the other question I have is that,
does it also show like the default rates?
Like maybe, and also like how many borrowers are paying back,
like the ones that are falling behind.
And like, if you get monthly reports,
are they public for everyone or just for the token homes?
No, I think we're going to make it public to everyone, right? I don't think there's really any need to sort of gatekeep this. I think the thing you have to remember is that the direct lending is actually a contract between our fund and a fintech.
that fintech is then doing additional loans but the good thing about this is that you know even
if let's say uh some more loans default than have historically happened to that fintech the fintech
itself has a balance sheet it also has equity so our job isn't to just look at the underlying
loans and performance it's also to underwrite that fintech because they're the ones who are
on the hook to repay.
And that's great because it's another line of defense
between the people who are participating in RealFi
and ultimately what's going on
with those individual borrowers.
So even if, let's say, they had a bad quarter
or even a bad year,
by having enough equity in existence for these fintechs,
that also gives us protection
because it means that we still get paid back
no matter what,
or at least, you know, within a large number of circumstances.
So that's really our job to make sure that when we're underwriting these fintechs,
that even if the credit book is amazing and the loans they're doing are super, super, super performing,
very low defaults, we're still not going to lend to them unless they as a business are in a solid enough position
with enough equity, with enough everything, right?
So it's even if you have the historical default rate, by the way, was 2% over the book, over all the loans that we've done historically.
I think we achieved 16, 17% return across the years that we've been doing this and very, very, very low defaults on the book.
But even if that increased, you know, we have to make sure that our underwriting is good enough that that's not going to impact on people getting on us getting our money back.
And as I say, the way in which that happens is by making sure you're lending to fintechs
who have a very strong equity position in that business already.
So yeah, the real underlying part on the individual loans, we're not going to surface that because
frankly it's too much detail.
We do ourselves track that.
But yes, an increase in the default rate does not necessarily mean that you're going to
have any trouble when it comes towards RealFi's assets or RealFi's portfolio.
Thank you for that. Jenny, you can go now.
Thank you. So let me just bring my hand down before I forget.
So, okay. In an attempt to kind of make this easier to follow,
because that's what we're trying to do here in Cordon or Coffee,
trying to make sure that, you know, we reach more people.
And when you have new products and complex products like this,
that has so many new concepts.
Let me just break it down a few little questions.
So can you walk us through $1 from the beginning to the end
when it enters RealFi, becomes USDR, gets staked,
reaches real-world asset, produces income,
and eventually returns to the user?
Can you help us kind of like understand how that process goes?
Yeah, that's a great idea.
And I'm going to apologize to anyone that I lost there in those explanations.
It's always like that.
We're in tech.
Yeah.
You know, when people start asking me about, you know, how do you underwrite credit and
et cetera, I think, you know, you're kind of going to answer seriously about it.
But I also appreciate maybe we've jumped too far too quickly.
This is a great way to get into it.
So someone gives us a USDC, right?
Well, let's say 100 USDC.
we have our minting contract on cardano which receives that 100 usdc and then mint 100 usdr
against that which then goes back to that institution uh who went and minted it now
we have in realfi 100 usdc now on our balance sheet so what we do is we go and buy and this is
approximately right because as i say it depends on the ratio of how many people are holding usdr
to how many people are holding SUSDR,
which really determines our portfolio composition.
But for the purposes of this,
let's just say that we immediately take that $100
and we buy $20 worth of Ondo, right?
A tokenized T-bill provider.
Then we'll go and buy maybe $50 worth
of Janus Hansen CLO ETFs.
These are tokenized CLO ETFs.
And then with the remaining 30, let's say, I can't remember what I said before, but let's say it's going to be around $30 of USDC.
We'll actually off-ramp that and go and lend that out directly to these fintechs that we've been talking about before.
So they then go and get those $30.
And now we have a credit agreement, right, or a loan contract between us and those fintech lenders.
Those fintech lenders will go and lend this out into the real economy.
As that principal gets repaid, and as that interest gets repaid,
it goes back into the foundation.
This is now dollars, essentially, that we have.
And we go and mint more USDR against that increase in NAV that we have.
And then essentially what we're doing is we're returning that value back into the pockets of those people who are holding staked USDR.
So just to run through this again, just to be crystal clear, $100 come in of USCC.
We meant $100 of USDR.
This person then stakes their USDR.
So they now have staked USDR, which means that they have a claim against the assets which we are going and purchasing.
And when we talked about those assets, that was $20 worth of tokenized T-bills, maybe $50 worth of tokenized CLO ETFs, and the remainder being the direct lending that we're doing to the fintechs.
So hopefully that makes sense.
It does.
So when you say staked, let's just kind of like talk about that part.
Are we talking about stake as we are used to here in Cardano,
stake into a stake pool, stake it to, what exactly does that mean?
And does that tie it into the program that you have now
going on with stake pool operators?
Yeah, so that's a really, really good question.
So it's not actually the same thing, right?
Because typically when we're talking about staking,
we're really referring to the fact, right?
like in Cardano, that it's some form of security function for the protocol, right? That you are
putting your resources, be it ADA or whatever, for any other network. And through this sort of
staking mechanism, you're somehow basically providing the security for the network of the
whole. That's not really what's happening here. What's really happening is you're locking up
your USDR. And that money then is going into getting a bunch of different assets, right?
And then when you unstake, there's a one-week cool-down period.
What that one week's really doing is making sure we can go and move around some money
to make sure we've got more liquidity in case you want to exit the system.
So you stake, you get your SUSDR, which is a fungible token that you can go and do cool
stuff in DeFi with.
Ultimately, you're getting exposure to this portfolio of assets.
And when you unstake, one week later, you're going back into USDR.
and we're using that time to change the assets that we're holding
in order to make sure they're more liquid.
Awesome. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that for people.
And we can get into the stake pool operation situation
that you guys are going on right now.
You have a program, but I do see KB with the hand up
and I don't want to hoard the mic, so I'll come back to you.
Hi, KB.
Hey, guys.
Hey, I've got a question about like the, I understand the working capital issue, like especially across Africa. So I live in Zambia and run a impact focused honey business here.
um what so i understand you'll lend to fintechs or third parties that then lend on to businesses
like mine um what is the incentive for those fintechs to reduce their rates that they're
lending at um is there like a mandate from real fi for them to lend at certain rates um just so
that it's, you know, one of the challenges is that interest rates are very high across Africa
because the risk can be high in, you know, the views of traditional finance. But yeah,
that's really my question is really about how do we reduce those rates for working capital and
other types of lending that go through the fintechs? Yeah, it's a really good question. So
I think what I'll start off by saying is that we try to only work with fintechs where
we're comfortable with what they're doing, right? So don't get me wrong, there are some
really great financial opportunities that you sometimes see in this space in terms of fintechs
that are really, really operating very, very profitably, but aren't really doing the kind
of lending that we like or believe in. So we basically just pass on pass on those right.
Another way to put it is that sometimes the highest risk lending if you've got a very
well set up fintech can be very lucrative. But it basically into the you know exploitative
lending areas also not interesting for us. So we try to work and we spend a lot of time
looking for and finding fintechs that that sit in the middle ground right they're doing lending that
we believe creates economic value that isn't creating over indebtedness ideally not doing
any kind of lending which is basically just supporting you know consumer indebtedness
you know lending to people who are just taking on more debt right so yeah we try to stay away
from that kind of stuff. Then when it comes towards the actual rates, ultimately we don't
have control of the rates and that's a good thing, right? Our job isn't to go and tell
the fintechs that if you take our money, you have to go and do things this way. What we'd
much rather do is just find the fintechs that align with what we're trying to do and work
with them. I think things get really messy once you have edicts coming from capital providers
on how the actual business can run
because that's when things start going wrong.
So it's a bit of a cop-out answer.
We don't tell FinTechs exactly how they should be doing things,
but we do try to find ones that we believe,
yeah, we believe kind of match with what we're trying to achieve.
Maybe as a more positive spin on what you're saying,
if we can grow RealFi to a sufficient size and scale,
then ultimately more capital will drive down rates.
you know you're based in Zambia so you'll probably understand this but you know almost all of the
finance in this space is coming from DFIs right large development financial institutions that
basically are the first capital into all of this kind of lending stuff it's not really being done
from a private sector yeah from a private sector lens our hope is with RealFi that we can crowd
capital into this market without having to rely on the usual TFI names that are normally
involved in this space. And if we grow large enough, I have no doubt that within the specific
places which we're providing capital, that rates will start to come down because there'll be more
capital available, which is incredibly scarce at the moment, as I'm sure you're aware.
Perfect. Yeah, I think moving it as a market is way better than mandating rates. So cool.
So, John, I have another question.
Thanks for the question, KB.
That was a great question.
My other question is also around, you know, operating here in Africa.
You said that Cameroon is in, which is nice.
But now my question is, how does a Cameroonian get USTR?
Like, do I need to have crypto?
Yeah, I think that the, you know, remember, look, this is a global product, right?
So the way in which you get USDR from an actual technical standpoint, right,
means that we need to be given USDC or USDT or another stable.
Then, you know, the way in which retail, permitted retail gets access to it
is through a DEX or through a SEX.
So from a how do people get into it,
there needs to be some onboarding mechanism for anyone to be able to go from their local currency
into crypto. And, you know, if you're talking about Africa and literally every African country
now, you have a variety of local exchanges and ways to be able to go from your local currency
into crypto. But that's the starting point. Of course, you can see a world, right, where you
wrap all of this experience together, where you've got like an app where you can immediately onboard
from mobile money directly into the app and then it just swaps directly into usdr that could be
bundled together um but the sort of technical process of this is through crypto right um
ultimately we're issuing a crypto token and we need to accept another crypto token um in order
for this to work yeah the reason i asked is because um it's it's not very straightforward
to get crypto here you know uh banks are difficult you you have your mobile money wallet but it's like
if you could go on an exchange you could try and on binance there is um they have p2p which
sometimes you can get someone who wants to sell their bitcoin and maybe they let you pay them
through the mobile wallet or maybe you don't find them so it's a yeah that's why buying crypto here
most often you know a guy who has crypto and he just sells on whatsapp so um i think it would be
something interesting for you guys to think about yeah i mean don't get me wrong that sounds
incredibly valuable is to be able to work on that space. Let's stick it in the future product kind
of category. And like, I'm sure you're right. And the way I saw mostly this happening in KPR
was the P2P market, right, was very active. But I also know there's periods where there wasn't a
lot available there, not a lot of inventory. So yeah, anyway, we're gonna start where we're
starting, launching the main net, trying to build some demand for RealFi. But we are interested in
kind of extension projects to make things more usable for people in specific countries.
Just to add to that, the minute we've got a workshop open where we're co-creating a campaign
with SPOs to help them attract delegation and ultimately ensure Cardano's network is
decentralized that's why RealFi is supporting Kodano SPOs but John you know I've been talking
to Clay about later on there being innovation workshops where you know we can bring people in
with ideas like this and so it doesn't just have to be RealFi as a product it can be RealFi as a
platform that people could build on to increase utility and TVL so it's definitely in the pipes
and if you come into Discord I'll be able to invite you personally to that workshop
when it goes low.
Thank you, Ben.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not asking,
I'm not greedy, you know.
I'm just, I'm not asking it to be available right now,
but I definitely,
it's something I'm really interested in,
you know, because when we always talk about
banking the unbanked,
it's usually talks around,
oh, you can do this with your crypto,
You can get this here, but then how do you get it?
It's how the whole process of getting that token or that crypto is where the banking happens.
So I just wanted to know, you guys are thinking about, you know, along those lines.
I see Jenny has her hand up.
No, funny because I was actually going to talk about the bank and the bank part because, you know,
And I mentioned this before.
A lot of us like remember fondly as we talked about Ben, like take me back to those days of nostalgic memories.
When Charles used to do his videos and he will end them with Akiva, right?
Like he would like go and fund somebody and he's like, oh, I can't wait for us to have something like this.
in Cardano where we can you know do lending um to people without you know financial um identity
and all this stuff right so it used to be kind of like one of the big things that I will get excited
about so every time I saw Charles in person I will ask him and lately every time I see him it's like
oh real fi's coming real fi's coming you know it's like okay so real fi's here and it's like
I'm looking into this and it looks amazing, but I, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost feels
like there's kind of like going to be a couple, like two phases to this for that to actually
happen, right? For the bank and the unbacked, like, I feel like first we have to attract capital from
people who already have it. And then we'll be able to move into the phase two, which is deploying
the capital through lending and creating partners and then creating, you know, on and off ramps and
things like that as you know to kind of grow that network well is that is that kind of like um
assumption uh does it make sense yeah look the way i like is this right so i would say that our
product currently um supports the growth of let's say the underbanked maybe not unbanked right
predominantly the lending that we're doing is supporting successful you know great underbanked
businesses and providing capital to them, right? And that's the kind of starting point here.
As I say, it's lending with partners that we've been lending to historically, that perform well,
that, you know, are impactful. But that's the kind of category where we can do both of our jobs,
which is one, doing something impactful and interesting. But two, operating in a financially
prudent manner, right? And making sure that the portfolio that we're building is robust,
is strong and also delivers the right yield. So that's kind of how my spin on this, right?
That we're starting with the underbank segment here. Because at the end of the day, if we're
trying to crowd people into using USCR, we also need to make sure that this portfolio is super
strong. And that's also the reason why, you know, all of these CLO ETFs that we have, these are all
investment grade, they're all AAA, we've got all of this UST bills in this, because from a portfolio
approach, you can't just have, you know, 100% emerging markets, right? That's not going to make
sense. So we believe we've sort of trod, you know, done the interesting middle here, where we built
a really robust portfolio that has all the liquidity we need to be able to handle redemptions
and make sure we can maintain our peg, whilst also basically sharing the economics that happen
with stable coins back to people, which is kind of the opposite of the tether and circle
model, right?
Well, that's all held by the issuer.
And you know, by treading this middle path, we think we do a good enough job in every
area to build a really interesting product.
But is it direct lending to a specific business in emerging markets that you can go and look
at like, no, this is a portfolio approach that lets people get, we believe, a really,
great stablecoin product, which we can sort of stand behind and be proud of, whilst also
driving, we think, impactful outcomes across the world.
Yeah, I think that how Phil puts it, he brought up a good point. It looks like you guys are
capturing users that don't really fit in in the current environment. For example, me.
I'm not a degen. I would like to participate, but I don't do this kind of stuff. I'm a long-term kind of investor, right?
Exactly.
So I would love to be able to participate in what I do in a regular finance world, but in crypto. But right now, there's just not really anything like it, right? So this is really exciting for somebody like me.
because I think that if I get empowered in this ecosystem,
I'm here for reasons that are bigger than myself,
then I could actually, it will trickle down, right?
That if I can earn, you know, interest and all this stuff,
then I could put that money to invest in the ecosystem,
which right now it's like all the money that I spend in this ecosystem,
it's just like I'm not getting anything in return.
So you get depleted if you keep like funding things,
if you don't get any kind of return.
So I think this is really exciting in that sense.
So I just, yeah.
So thanks for that.
But I wanted to, because I know there's like so much,
and this is why Ben, I told you that we needed to get the whole hour.
You guys, so much going on.
Because there's a proposal,
and then you have this incentive program with SPOs,
and I want to understand it.
Can you guys talk a little bit about that?
I know that you guys have some governance,
but in the future, nothing concrete at the time.
Can you tell us a little bit about this SPO program,
that incentivized staying in the accelerator program?
Jenny, can Kit ask his question before we get into that?
Sure.
His hazard one, but yeah, okay.
Good evening.
Jim.
Good morning.
Sorry.
Evening here.
jim i'm hi ben i i started researching about real fire when you when you mentioned it like
so last day so i just want to ask a question because i went through the you know websites
what are the plans for like maureen said the actual underbanked people like if you look at
crypto now like the way crypto is and blockchain is i mean for the average person it's still
relatively complex for them to get to you know i was looking at uh what it was saying something
like you're going to be sticking you can easily stick your ada stick your usdr and i feel like
then is real fire not the project for like a product for like people that are already in the
ecosystem like they're already in cardano ecosystem or they're already in crypto then what about
trying to actually you know get people that are outside of the bubble i don't know if
you understand what i mean but i don't know if yeah if you'd like you remember you because we
talked about it like the tweet that's pinned to my profile about ultimately an ecosystem what is
the game that you're playing and the game is growth and how do you define growth and growth
is capital productivity that to me is like why real fire was so interesting and you know i'll
be honest you know after i finished my tour duty with io i dm john and was like let me come and
bootstrap the community for realfi um because i wanted to see kadano and stake pool operators
especially uh get a stake into the rfg token which is the governance token um and that's where
it's coming from and john i'm off the reservation here but like when you've explained the model
this is with my personal questions i'm taking any kind of association with real fly away right
but i've listened to a podcast and he was talking about a totally unrelated topic which is uh
franchises but the interesting thing is he was saying this about an owner operator model where
somebody is going to take care and provide a much greater service if they own you know that
satellite or that franchise is that a little bit like the way that you're describing the
credit and stuff being managed where like an owner operator is kind of managing those different
credits and that money and then you're behind that backing it as part of the system or is this
the stupidest analogy you've ever heard? No, look, okay, so let's talk about the two sides
of this particular market, right? On the one side, what we need is capital. We need to be able to get
capital in. On the other side, we need places to be able to go and deploy that capital. The basic
thesis for real fight is that currently in crypto, there's often a lot of capital, but
places for that capital to go are often based on inflationary economics, pondonomics, emissions,
it's not real, right? And it disappears very quickly once BTC starts falling. So real first
thesis is there are places in which we can go and put that capital, which will have a
steadier kind of return profile, maybe even lower risk, depending on what the assets are,
ultimately more predictable is kind of what we're trying to achieve with our assets.
But then there's like a second part to this, right, which is forget about returns, etc.
We also believe that capital can do good in the world.
And ultimately, it makes more sense for that capital to be going into places that are productive
than what currently happens with, let's say, most stable coins, where it's just holding
US T-bills.
It's just reducing the cost of US government borrowing, right?
And that's kind of our thesis.
Let's make capital work.
Let's make it be productive.
So then the question is, how do we go and deploy that capital?
And, you know, there is the kind of Kiva-like model
where you're really going to the completely unbanked, right?
But that's really hard because you can't do that at scale.
It needs to happen individually.
And let's not forget that, you know,
Kiva ultimately is a charity, right?
And it's not a ginormous, multi-billion dollar
kind of huge scalable fund.
It's done more on the premise that, you know,
the return may or may not happen,
but ultimately you're doing good,
which is an amazingly noble aid, right?
But when we're trying to think about
how do we do things scalably,
it has to work through local providers
and local fintechs who have equity on their balance sheet,
who can afford to provide some defense
to the people who are providing capital on the other side.
And then to your point, Ben,
over like owner-operator, franchisor,
yeah, I mean, these fintechs,
they're running a business
and are highly motivated to make sure that, you know, ultimately the lending activity they do
is working and is great, right? And also that they have the regulatory licenses in those countries
to operate all of this kind of stuff. So my kind of final point on why these people are so important
is actually to give you the example of Goldfinch, right? So Goldfinch recently kind of blew up.
And a large amount of the reason why that happened, I think, is a lot of the underwriting,
which was being done to be able to decide whether this was a good place to lend to,
was basically being done by like ordinary people, right?
They built a model to incentivize ordinary people to go and underwrite opportunities.
And they were doing that on the basis of like, you know, getting some gold fringe tokens.
I mean, like, you wouldn't put your money, I don't think you put your money into a fund
that's being like managed and underwritten by essentially a volunteer, right?
That's not really how things typically happen.
So I think that, you know, the model we have, I think, takes some of the strengths that we see in traditional TradFi, opens up new opportunities to drive impact with capital, and hopefully also brings something new to people in crypto, right, which is a productive, stable coin that's also doing good in the world.
Sorry, it's a long-winded answer about, you know, we were talking about a few different areas of the problem.
I hope that kind of sets out how we see things.
just in addition john i think you know there's a real high laser focus in the team to focus on
getting stuff done and for it to work but in the future a governance token means there'll be
proposals when people can vote on things and and um you know this can evolve right this is just the
starting point am i right absolutely
So what I'm really excited about, or maybe because I've got a bit of PTSD from five and
a half, seven years in Cardano, if you include Cardano Foundation, it's just really fun to
be building cool shit and back in a community at the very beginning where you can have an
outsized impact.
And if you're listening to this X-Base and John is so eloquent and explains it well,
and you want to get involved in RealFi, you know, the Discord link is in the chat.
What do you call it, Jenny?
That applies to this link.
It's so easy to get into the Discord.
You know, there's easy ways to earn the points that will get converted for RFG tokens at the end of the season.
And if you're delegating to a stakeholder operator that's on the RealFi SPO accelerator program,
you're going to be able to earn points passively just by delegating to them.
And the marketing team, John, moved so quickly.
There was this workshop.
I mentioned it at the beginning of the call.
We're doing this workshop with SBOs.
One of the things they wanted was a raised profile.
Within 24 hours, you know, Rob was on a call with me getting website designers to mock it up.
So just the work rate is astonishing.
And the team is a joy to work with.
And they're really deceptive.
And that's the vibe in the community.
If you come in, you are going to be heard.
And you can get involved.
the points are the ones i'm sorry maureen the points those are the points that get converted
into like that is that the governance token right yeah this is a governance token so it's going to
mean you have a really meaningful say you know i don't want to suggest what proposals one might
propose but but all i'm trying to say is this is going for the minute we're at ground zero right
We've all got our origins in Cardano, but what other ecosystems are we going to, John?
Yeah, Ethan, that is happening very quickly.
Maybe this is actually an interesting point to talk about a little bit.
One of the things that we always talk about in Cardano is how do we grow TVL?
How do we grow the usage of DeFi?
Well, it's kind of the chicken and the egg problem, right?
You don't have the liquidity available in Cardano,
So new DeFi projects never really get what they need to exist.
But without DeFi projects, why would there ever be any liquidity on Cardano?
So we think we've got a sort of interesting setup here where, you know, we have our native
contracts on Cardano.
Canonical accounting happens on Cardano.
But we're also putting native contracts onto ETH mainnet.
So what this means is that, you know, you can have your Metamask wallet on ETH and you
can go and, you know, come to the DAB and have a really great experience, right? Your
Meta Musk wallet connects, same as if you're in Cardano, right? You can connect your internal
wallet or your LIS wallet directly to the DAB. But it also means that, you know, any
volume that we see coming from ETH mainnet, where there's already tons of liquidity and
demand for products like this, ultimately is going to grow TVL on Cardano, right? Because
this is where ultimately the assets sit and where the accounting happens. So we believe
that this is also potentially a way to drive hundreds of millions of dollars of TVL for
Cardano by actually building an experience and a product that people want, both on Cardano
and also in ETH.
And who knows, maybe other ecosystems as well, you know, like Solana, etc.
But this is how you're aggregating the liquidity at the end is through the assets there being,
the accounting happening in Cardano, right?
Yeah, accounting is happening on Cardano, so TVL will sit here.
Yeah, we wanted to get into the stake pools angle.
You guys still up for it?
Yeah, you want me to explain how it's working?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so people know what to look forward to and participate and whatnot.
I know that you already selected the pools.
I don't know if you're still in the process of doing that, but just for the users.
So we had 102 stakeholders register, and they were overwhelming.
It's like 97, 98% single stakeholders.
They're in Discord, and we're building up the campaign now.
But basically what it looks like is if you stake to one of the stakeholders in the RealFi Exelerator program,
You're going to earn 100 points a day passively on top of the points that you can earn inside Discord participating in the testnet.
And this is the important thing is that it's a legitimate activity that we're looking for.
It's not vanity metrics.
So this is why a lot of it is going to be on chain for a benefit of it is that you delegate into a pool.
When you come to claim your points, we'll be able to verify that you delegate to the pool.
And that's how you're going to get them attributed to you.
So for the stake pool operator, what that means is stake is sticky.
It's difficult to attract it.
A stake pool operator, by definition, has to attract stake.
They have to wear a marketing hat, which is obviously different to proof of work.
And because stake's sticky, it's hard to differentiate your pool in a compelling way to attract stake.
Now, a couple of things have happened in the past three to four weeks.
right there is the second fire you're already emergo hacks okay so it's timely in the sense
there's a lot of active discussion about where delegation should go so if state pool operators
in our program there is a fear of loss i think that they can speak to where they can say it's
important that you secure aid and these are the best practices and educate people on that but
they're also able to offer hope of gain in a sense of the RFG
token and having a say in governance within real fight.
And it's going to go multi-chain, it's going to be
meaningful, you know. So the state pool operator is able to
say, if you delegate to my pool, and I'm going to be able to
give you this RFG token through the points mechanism. So for the
state pool operator, you can get to differentiate your state pool
from other pools that are not able to do that, right. So that's
the value for the state pool operator.
For the delegator, it's to get even more points and even more AFG tokens,
and it's to get into the community.
When you think about why are we doing this for the state pool operators,
it's because we want to see Kodano's network
remain and become even more decentralized.
There's a gives and gets here as well.
The argument is that I think state pool operators are
some of the most competent technical influences and KOLs in Kodano,
and that these operators are going to be great ambassadors themselves in real-wise communities.
We're going to be able to select because we had 102 registered.
I think there's 90 SPOs in Discord,
over 700 community members in Discord at the minute after a couple of weeks,
and over 600 verified wallets in the testnet.
But there's a couple of mechanisms that I'll just touch on,
which is that the delegator is delegating to state poor.
They're earning passively.
additionally each state pool operator the first 10 delegators that complete the sort of actions
in the quest on testnet are going to get 10 usdr which i'll send to them and then if a state pool
operator has 10 delegators that are first past the place that's how the 10 will work
if a state pool operator gets 10 delegators to complete all of those quests i'll send them
$100 and a real fiery hoodie and some swag and we'll give them a cool disco roll. So why does
that matter? Because when we get to mainnet, I want to be able to show John and the marketing
team wants to be able to look at which of the stakeport operators really participated and drove
performance in a real way. And I think 10 delegators completing those actions is reasonably
low bound, but it does show you that people have come up and turned up. So I think that positions
as well for mainnet. Does that make sense? Or should I have dwelled a little bit more on any
of those points?
So it's like it gives you a signal too on how things are moving, right?
Exactly, right? So somebody I did, someone I've known for a while in my DM saying, well, you know,
RealFly is going to get something out of this too. I'm like, of course, let's give some guests. We
We want to have a community that's made up of people that have been in the trenches, have built their own communities and are committed.
And I think the best way to source that initial cohort is from state pool operators.
There are lots of other ideas I've got and probably too many around how we can engage NFT communities and how we can engage the chains.
But at the minute, I think state pool operators is where to start, you know, because that's where I started in Cardano originally, you know, with ITN.
And then there was like a, I was just after the ITN actually.
It was 170.
Bring it back to basics.
Can give some luck to the house.
For sure.
This is what I was saying to John.
Like, let me get back to where I was.
Let's get back to when it was fun, you know?
And if Midnight's offering rational privacy, right,
then I think we're offering some rational hope, right?
This is an opportunity to get back into it.
So, yeah, I think State Portopo is really interesting.
and they have a really great mix of different skill sets and assets.
And the workshop that we would run, and we are running now with SBOs,
it's about asset-based community development.
So what's nice is, you know, if you've been on X for too long,
it just feels like everybody's looking at what the problems are
and it's been negative.
But asset-based community development is about saying,
look, let's all start off looking at what our strengths are
and what we're good at.
So you're looking inwards first.
and then you're talking about like well what are assets have we got can you actually move into play
here do mutual benefit and to promote these pools and then you can look at okay right so what should
we prioritize and you know what work is there and how might we claim that work and i'm kind of going
into a bit too much detail but some of that workshop is looking at like what are the centralized
marketing buckets ideas we've got so that would be things we all can do for spos um then distributed
marketing is things we could give them to help them go out and talk about real five and everyone
that's been in cadena for a long time knows what it's like um in a community the community is
inherently self-organized you know this isn't an audience that we're just sending messages to
this is a community we want to self-organize around problems if they believe in the vision
if they think that john's um product is really interesting if they can see the value of real
being a platform and to me I think Karana needs a lighthouse of it you know and when my
tour of duty with IO finished I was looking around like what was the most interesting project I could
work on and real fire is it so I'm really you know grateful for the opportunity
thanks Ben I think it's an interesting program and as someone who owned the stake pool I can
definitely testify that it's difficult to attract stake and it's definitely interesting. I guess
the whole program would depend though on what the points are worth, right? So if I accrue a bunch of
points and it's worth less, at the end of the day I am not doing anything with it. So I guess
The challenge I had is that token allocation and certain decisions are still in flight.
So talking to Clay, he's the head of product, the point of the point system is to allow us to start working and doing stuff.
And we can then, the points can be converted to the RFG tokens once the allocation stuff has been signed off.
If you think about campaigns and seasons,
it means that you can allocate whatever the allocation is finally,
the points will still be relative to it, if that makes sense.
Rather than trying to promise something,
we can say, work out what the allocation is,
and then we know that the campaign is going to have this percentage of it.
But I think the RFG token anyway has to get launched.
Whether something has value or doesn't have value, who knows, until it hits the market.
That's true.
Anyway, anyone listening who has a question, please feel free to come up and ask.
I would add one other thing, by the way, which is that if you're delegating to a state pool operator,
who's part of the RealFi Accelerator program, you're not risking any of your principal.
You know, if I've got a thousand ADA sitting in my wallet and I delegate it, that thousand
ADA is staying with me the entire time.
I've never let go of it, right?
But I'm delegating to, say, your pool, right?
And I'm getting my rewards.
But I'm getting these points for the RFG token as well.
Extra, you know?
So I think, yeah, you're getting everything that you're already getting, but you're getting
something extra if you delegate to a real estate pool operator.
Jenny.
I want to make sure, I don't know, KB looks like he hasn't turned up,
but it might be just on my end.
You know how this thing works.
Nope, just glitched.
Okay.
My shoulder's not tired yet.
All right, good, good.
So I guess my question is more about, like, what's next?
I mean, there's so much that's happening with you guys.
I've been reading so much.
Maybe I missed something.
What's the next step?
What are you guys...
Of course, you're busy with the SPO stuff
and the accelerator and the workshops.
But what does the roadmap look like
in the near future?
What's next?
Yeah.
I mean, the big focus is honestly
getting ready for mainnet.
So this is basically buying assets
getting all of our trading infrastructure set up,
figuring out, you know,
how basically we scale assets, right?
You know, it's one thing if we launch
and there's, you know, $20 million of demand,
but, you know, probably the closest analog we have
is Athena, which grew to, I think,
like $2 billion of TBL in like four months or five months.
You know, God knows how successful we'll be,
but you obviously, you need a strategy
if there's 10 million dollars of demand 100 million dollars demand billion dollars demand
so there's a lot of work around that um and then of course on the technical side uh all the cardano
stuff's done smart contracts audited etc but we're busily working on our evm mainnet contracts as
well so all of that needs to get all this as well so there's a lot of technical work uh of course
as well and then we have the gtm work stream you know um which texas will be on which curators will
be working with RealFi, which sectors will be working with RealFi, pitching to crypto
allocators, people who've got lots of stable coins to come in and participate.
So just a lot all over.
But the TLDR is, we're targeting mainnet in probably eight weeks.
So yeah, making sure we're ready legally on the asset side, on the GTM side to be able
to have a strong launch.
Thank you, John.
Can I ask you more of a human side kind of question, which I usually like to ask, which is, what brought you to this?
What inspired you? What moved you? What makes you tick?
I mean, look, I think I've always been interested in impactful finance.
I think for many years I've been trying to figure out how to kind of square the circle and build a product that I think does impactful stuff in emerging markets.
whilst also basically doing something that's useful for people who currently have crypto.
And I think it all kind of clicked for me once I started seeing basically the yield-bearing stablecoin market start to emerge.
When I saw what Athena had done with tokenizing basically this hedge fund trade to be able to generate yield from funding rates,
it kind of clicked to me that we might be able to do something similar.
But rather than this funding rate trade, do something similar and replace the engine
with something that could make capital more productive and more impactful.
So yeah, that's basically been the journey, putting this together.
And now we're ready, and I'm just honestly really excited to see this come to life.
Did you start from scratch, or did you find some tech that was available
and repurposed it or anything like that?
No, we built it all, right?
So the starting point was the last like three or four years where we've been doing this
fintech based lending.
So data driven underwriting of fintechs and providing capital to them and generating, you
know, strong risk adjusted return.
So that's like the more traditional finance stuff we were doing.
And that's also what we were talking about earlier, right?
How do you underwrite a fintech?
How do you analyze the loan book at scale?
You know, all of these loan books have got millions and millions and millions of loans
and entries.
So how do you ingest all of that process to understand that and use it to make lending
decisions?
So we'd sort of been doing that part.
And then, you know, once I saw the, I suppose, the Athena opportunity, it was starting to
think about what else would you need in the portfolio on the asset side?
You know, T-bills, yes.
But what else?
What kind of, and that's the sort of Janus Henderson, Cielo parts that we started to
add.
Then after that, it was okay, great.
We've got like an asset strategy now.
We think it's impactful.
But what would the legals look like?
How would you structure this?
Where?
What regulations, et cetera?
And then finally the technology piece, right?
The smart contracts, how do they work?
But I had some great help with that.
Danel, who started this with me, he was CPO at Cardano and IOG for many years.
We've also been working very closely with Pi at Sunday over the contracts as well.
So yeah, that part honestly has gone really well because we've been working with such
great people. Phil on this call has been super, super, super helpful. So yeah, a lot of great
people. That's it for me. Thank you, John and Ben, both of you for coming here today. Back to you, Maureen.
I definitely would love for people to come up and ask questions. I see a lot of people down there.
I know you all have great questions.
Feel free to come up and ask questions.
So, Ben, so other than all the things we've talked about,
oh, I see Jonah is coming up.
Other than the things we've talked about,
is there anything you guys have left out
that maybe you want to share as far as RealFi is concerned,
what you're trying to do?
I'm sorry go on then well I will then seeing as you give me the conch but what I'm really excited
about um is working with tape and thinking about how we could create an environment in which people
could innovate and come up with ideas and even build but it's like I'm just trying to make sure
that I've set the spo community up for success first but I'm really passionate and interested
about kind of ecosystem strategy and you know you've probably all seen kadana's ecosystem map
and how we can get not just more people like more actors but thinking about the value chain right so
that we can get a network effect so we can think about like a field of interaction so you know i'm
really interested in talking about builders next um but obviously doing it in a way where my
enthusiasm and ideation doesn't get in the way of the important work the team needs to do so i'm
trying to build the opportunities for people to participate around the engine as we're building.
So yeah, I'm really interested in getting developers in next. That's top of my mind.
John, you?
I think you've covered that.
Jonah with the hand up.
I'm just laughing at John saying he's on an audio loop of me talking.
This must be his worst nightmare, just never ending Ben O'Hanlon with ideation.
All your words, Ben, not mine.
Thank you, Maureen. Thank you, everyone, for coming up today. Thank you for the team for
presenting. I had one question. I'm not sure if it was addressed because I didn't catch
everything from the end. I will definitely listen back from the beginning. But the question I have is,
Why did you decide to build another stablecoin?
Is there something special about RUSD that you guys wanted to do that other stablecoins didn't provide?
Yeah, I'll take that.
I think that stablecoins are an incredible product.
They're useful.
Everyone wants them.
and they've already seen proven market demand, right?
You know, I think when you look at Tether,
when you look at Circle,
you can see that the demand was there.
But you're not going to break into this industry
by going and doing the same thing.
The opportunity, I think,
is that both Tether and Circle
have got an incredibly lucrative business model
that they don't want to disrupt, right?
Ultimately, when you mint USDT or USDC,
you give them a dollar,
they go and they take that dollar
and they give you a digital dollar.
But they're going and investing that into T-bills and they're taking all of the yields.
There's not really any incentive for them to go and change that model because it's enabled Tether with, you know, probably around 100 people to be as profitable as Goldman Sachs is.
This was last year. There was an article about it, right?
So it's an incredibly lucrative business model.
I think what we have is the opportunity to go and leverage the lessons from this, which is that stablecoins are really useful.
but change the economic model over who gets what.
And that's what we're doing with RealFi.
So that's kind of the opportunity, right?
It's, you know, take something that works,
change the economic model to provide people
with an incentive to go and try yours.
Secondly, there are some really cool use cases.
You know, yield bearing collateral
from a trading perspective is really interesting.
Rather than posting dollars as collateral for trading,
if you could post, you know, yield bearing collateral or asset appreciating collateral,
then a lot of trades which may not have worked can start to work, right? Just as an example,
if you were getting 8% on your collateral, that's pretty exciting from a trading perspective.
And that's not even really thinking about the opportunities for people to think about it from
a savings perspective, right? You most people in their bank accounts really don't get a lot.
I think my NatWest is like 1% or something like that.
So you can really start to see the advantages of tying this into a dollar-denominated stable product.
I think it's got a lot of product market fit.
So I think that was kind of the idea here, right?
Is rather than starting with something complicated, start with a really useful, easy-to-understand concept like a stablecoin,
and then attach towards it the kind of assets that we're building.
And I think that way it's got the widest market appeal, whilst also doing something differentiated from what the bigger players in the market like Tether and Circle are doing.
So that's kind of how we thought about it.
Thank you, John. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I understand. Just what I heard is that you want to utilize the yield that obviously comes from issuing a stable coin to use it more creatively that kind of benefits your user base and your business as well.
That makes perfect sense.
Yeah, it's actually all going there, right?
We're super transparent over how RealFly charges.
But if you would think about the normal model,
which is Circle takes everything and you get nothing,
we're on the opposite model
where the user takes almost everything, right?
That's excellent.
I had a little follow-up.
Sorry, BlockDuck, I see your hands up.
I had a little follow-up.
I understand that there is like a component where when the user moves into the staking part, that you guys are then sort of like more aggressively investing that profit into yield bearing, other yield bearing assets.
Are those going to be micro loans as well?
Did you mention that?
It's a portion of it, right?
So I was slightly jumping the gun there on this, right?
And probably next week or the week after,
I'll do like a nice simple whiteboard video
on what assets are being held,
how risk is managed,
ultimately what risks you're actually taking.
This is really important for me, right?
I want to make sure that we're super transparent over this.
I believe that risk is being managed
and really, really effectively,
but ultimately, you know,
everyone has to do their own research.
And there are a number of ways in which we create protection from a financial perspective on anyone that's participating on this.
That being said, absolutely, some portion of the assets are basically doing working capital finance in emerging markets, really highly impactful stuff.
But at the same time, generating a nice, you know, a nice return on that particular part of the book and whilst also doing something good.
Awesome. Love that.
And then, sorry, this is just a little bit more.
Will you ever have like a user-facing part of that, of the product?
Will you ever have like the loaning and borrowing component?
Is that something you want to build out as a user-facing product or will be more institutional?
Yeah, look, what you've just described there is kind of the holy grail at the end of it, right?
This like fully decentralized flow all the way through.
All I can tell you is that that part won't happen quickly, right?
There's really good reasons why you do things from a pooled perspective, from a portfolio perspective, with like a bunch of intermediaries within this part, right?
And I would say I've tried to adopt a very pragmatic approach versus a philosophical approach, right?
We're doing things that work, that have been proven to work, that manage risk effectively, versus trying to stick towards maybe a more purely decentralized dogma.
At the end of the day, I want to build a product that scales, that does its job well, that people love to use more than I want to stick towards a fully decentralized ethos.
So yeah, absolutely.
It's a direction that's interesting in the future.
But at the moment, it's very much done through regulated partners working with FinTechs that
have licenses that have been doing this for years, that have large equity cushions, that
have really, really good track records with really low default rates.
When it comes towards the other parts of the book, right?
The CLO ETFs, we're working with some of the largest providers of these in the world with
really deep secondary markets so we can always sell those assets if we need to have redemptions.
So yeah, that's kind of the approach, right? We're trying to build the best portfolio possible,
but still driving impactful things. But in a proportion that still means that we can meet
our redemption requirements, that we're not holding too much risk, etc, etc.
Well, again, I really appreciate that thoughtful answer. Thank you so much.
Thanks for the questions, Jonah. I see Blogjog has his hand up.
Hello, Maureen. How are you?
Hi, Blogjog.
It's good to see you. Good to talk to her. Good talk to you. I can't see you right now,
but ultimately, well, so first off, I just want to say, hi, Ben. Haven't talked to you in a minute.
Ben is one of those people that was like almost like an onboarding emissary for me
into the wider community and made me feel very, very welcome.
And also engaged me and got me to start thinking about
how I can contribute to Cardano in a broader sense.
And so I want to first say I'm really glad that Ben is a part of this particular protocol
and the team.
And of course, also with John.
John, I've been following you since the beginning.
I've been around here seven years.
And one of the things that led me here was pushing power to the edges.
And you were the lead on that, in my mind, over all the work that you've done.
I know you've ran into a lot of roadblocks.
It's been very difficult, especially in some of the regions that you work in.
But at the same time, it's very challenging, I know.
But you kept on and you didn't give up.
And that's one of the things I really value when it comes to people that I either follow or work with.
And so, one, first, thank you for all of that.
The second is that, obviously, I'm a BD lead for USDM.
We had a meeting yesterday with Senny and Clay.
Great guys, by the way.
Great part of the team.
Look forward to meeting the rest of them.
But I'm curious, we had a little bit of discussion afterwards having to do with how exactly, in your mind, could USDR be used as a way to be able to mint USDM?
You know, this is something that we're discussing now, but it feels as though we couldn't exactly take USDR or burn out into USDR through USDM through our portal, which we do with USDC, USDT and PYUSD.
But we'd like to be able to do it with USDR as well.
Do you see a path for that in your mind?
Such a great question.
And to make you feel better about this, this is all actually on my list for Monday to start looking at.
basically the guys said that you had a really great conversation.
They've got some notes for me and we said we'd have a chat about it on Monday.
So you're probably a couple of days too early for me to give a proper answer to that question.
What I will say is, you know, I'm obviously a huge fan of what you guys have been doing at USDM.
You know, you're kind of like the homegrown Cardano stable queen.
So yeah, you know, I'm excited for us to try to think about ways in which we can sort of work together
and support what you guys have been doing.
So no easy answers for you right now, but I promise you you're on a list for Monday.
No problem.
I look forward to that.
And I do look forward to working with you guys in the future and finding solutions to things.
Because ultimately, in the end, the real goal for me and the reason I came here was to, in effect, affect people's lives.
And in most cases, without even potentially knowing I'm doing it.
And it's just simply because Cardano and its ability to be able to reach anybody anywhere and empower them.
And when you give people financial security, self-sovereignty, freedom of choice, no matter where they live, you've now empowered them and more than likely everybody around them.
So it's exponential in its impact.
And so this, in my mind, is something that is very near and dear to my heart.
And I want to definitely happen.
And I know you said this is you're doing it a little bit more pragmatically.
I understand that, you know, doing these, like what Kiva does, say, for example, the default rates surrounding that, the way they built that particular model is to, in essence, kind of break even, it feels like to me.
It isn't like a real business venture, more so as a philanthropic way to be able to provide people loans, which I actually do that.
And that was Charles, actually, talking about that, I want to say, three years ago or something.
And I've continually kept doing it since, you know, and it's been absolutely amazing.
It's exceedingly gratifying to be able to do that.
And so I really look forward to the day where it comes full circle.
And what you guys are doing with USDR does provide that ability to be able to also provide that particular function as well.
And then at that point, we've arrived, right?
And we've successfully done what I think Cardano is meant to do.
So, yeah, looking forward to that, John.
Thank you for coming to Cardano for Coffee.
And Ben, thanks for coming in and chatting, man.
And you're never too verbose, my friend.
I think I match you at least potentially.
So not to worry.
Yeah.
You know, look, let me just add one final thing
and then I apologize to everyone,
but I do need to jump.
But, you know, look, even with essentially the sort of,
I consider it kind of my like trial years
across the last three years
when I've been working on this model,
you know, I was lending out
a relatively modest amount of capital
from a real world perspective.
But I still think we did something like,
you know, 4 million loans across,
you know, for countries whilst we've been building out the model for this.
And that's huge scale, right?
From, as I say, a relatively modest amount of capital,
but huge impact as well, right?
So as we go and we roll out Cardano, sorry, roll out RealFi,
be looking to sort of tell more of these stories,
but that's the kind of impact you get from doing things
in a more institutional way versus, you know,
the more human to human Kiva side.
So yes, of course, you lose some of the immediacy,
the connection with that end person that you're lending to.
But what you get is scale, and scale drives impact as well.
So, yeah, I think there's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here.
Thanks, my friend. Appreciate it.
And here's to the future of us trying to change the world,
and we do it one little bit at a time.
So, appreciate that.
Thanks for coming in, Ben and John.
We have 10 minutes to the end of the show.
but I do want to know if you guys have a call to action
for everyone listening right now.
Yeah, my call to action is to join the Discord
that if you're in Cardano
to delegate to one of the state pool operators
that are in the RealFi state pool operator program
and it's an opportunity to be part of the community early
and if you were here in the early days of Cardano
that might be something you'd really like to do.
What about you, John? Call to actions?
Oh, if anybody has any great interviews or X spaces that I could line up for John, DM me them as well.
Thank you.
Yeah, just call to action is, yes, as Ben says, you know, follow us along on Discord.
But, yeah, please do play around with the testnet.
You know, testnets are not just to be able to give out points.
They're also to battle test your product.
So it's really useful, right, for the development, engineering, and product teams to be able to do that.
And then, yeah, just get excited to main that.
I think we have an opportunity here to build a product that's really useful.
They can attract the liquidity over from ETH World to put some real points on the board
for Cardano in the DPI TVL side.
So, yeah, please do support us rally around and I think we can do something special.
So thanks everyone.
Thank you guys for coming.
I can't remember this part at the top for anyone that wants to join.
I just want to say thanks for taking the invitation and I appreciate it.
Just a reminder, you can always come here.
It's open and free.
It's like we've been doing this for five years now.
And now that you're here, just come and join us.
Keep us updated on what's happening.
Mondays is open for all, so it's always a great day to come and give an update.
If anything changed throughout the week or you have a new announcement, it's a great way to stop by and do what we call drive-by shilling.
just to keep
a little watering hole
sort of thing
keep people in the loop
and if you have something bigger you want to talk about
just schedule
another long
form and we just dedicate some time
to it
all the best to you guys
thank you Ben
I feel like an interview with Ben
the life and times of Ben O'Hanlon
feels as though this might be a feel good
piece
that we could discuss.
And you might have some nice juicy tidbits.
We need a happy ending, though, right?
Well, there's always having,
and you landed right in the right spot.
I was worried for you for a hot second,
and then I wasn't worried for you at all
because I know you manage yourself very well.
So I wasn't really concerned.
And then you landed with John and the rest of the team,
and I was just exceedingly gratified by that.
So, yeah, I would love to hear a story from Ben.
I mean, for some people, they don't know,
in some cases, who Ben even is.
you know really right and so i mean i've known him for shoots since consensus austin and before
that in chris's space with the tech space i used to come in and jump in there and talk so um yeah
i think that would be absolutely amazing just to have ben come in and speak for 25 minutes on
everything he's doing and is a little bit of his experience here that'd be awesome
i'm actually writing a um i think i mentioned this at the very beginning
i don't know what you want to call it an e-zine or a book or a series of five um posts but
basically it's about the intelligence revolution will be decentralized um let me get my thing up
and i'll give you 30 seconds of the outline but basically the prelude is talking about like money
as a coordination technology um hang on are you interested in this because i'm going to post this
in the next couple of months if you read did you read the numbers come before strategy in my pinned
post, Jock? I have not. No, I have not. I still have your map, though. I have it sitting on my
desk, actually. Okay, so the map is showing you how to think about ecosystems in terms of roles
and layers, right? Then pinned to my profile is an article about numbers come before strategy,
and there's a flywheel in it that shows how ecosystem growth can happen if you agree that
growth is capital productivity and that the issue in an ecosystem is the blind men and the elephants
so that is that roles and layers will optimize rationally locally but that if you look at it
from a system-wide point of view those behaviors aren't always rational when you think about the
good of the whole you know and so therefore what you need is you need to establish a small set of
system-wide units of account. This is an axis around which 100 different projects or 100 different
proposals or 100 different schools of thought could contend. And it allows that decentralization,
which is a superpower of crypto. But you do need to understand what are the core numbers that you're
ultimately trying to move, right? So the reason I've explained that is because there's three
kind of pillars I'm trying to tell. One is the numbers, which we've just discussed.
the second is what i'm talking about now which is basically like where are we right when i look at
near protocol or eigenlayer i think those guys are really good at pivoting to the narrative cycle and
i think that karana has to think about where are we in terms of like the grand narrative the arc
of history right so that's what this vision piece is about and then later on i want to get into
stories which which is in fact super positions across many minds but okay you can start the
timer 30 seconds i'm going to tell you what i'm writing right so it starts with the prelude uh
you know and we talk about how money is a system was captured in the 20th century so money is a
coordination technology control over monetary affairs is a critical part of genuine sovereignty
so that's individual businesses the nation state and by the end of that prelude we're then able to
say like in the 21st century the coordination technology is AI and that is going to be captured
right if we're not careful right so there's the symmetry so that's our prelude right then we go
into like the acts which are basically like the stakes which is you know setting the stakes are
we going to join the permanent underclass so this is like a fear that everybody has right and how
the intellectual commons is being captured right and are the intellectual inheritance of all of
our children is being taken away from us.
And there are some axioms that are explored, right?
So basically, these are the axioms.
Technology is an agent of change.
An example is a mechanization in print, right?
Our agents have changed.
Got a big printing press, for example.
Technology is a conduit for coordination.
So the Enlightenment would be a good example of how you had to have those conditions,
steam and print to get to the enlightenment because basically print standardized information
and suddenly america and france and england could start discussing ideas and it standardized it too
right um and then you get to the third axiom which is technology is ecology so it's not just
that technology is a tool that you change the world with it's an environment that we're in
that changes us as well. And I'm getting there, Jock, right? Stay with me, right? So why am I
making all of these points? Because the point I'm trying to make is the Enlightenment was about
governance, right? Man's ability to determine his fate, right? Or women, you know, I'm modern, right?
And the second Enlightenment is in economic Enlightenment. And that's actually what crypto
is to me. It's the conditions that you need to determine your own economic sovereignty. But
But the revolution hasn't happened as prophesied.
You know, we feel that like big finance or government have come in and take crypto.
So the argument that I'm making is it's only because of where we are in time.
Right. If you went back to a certain point in the Enlightenment, you would think it hadn't happened.
The revolution, then the glorious revolution, French revolution, American revolution, all these things happened as like a cascading event.
right so the argument i'm making is that um ai is the selection pressure that is going to create
that revolution and that's why i'm saying technology is an ecology right because the
environment creates selection pressures okay um and the fact that everybody's scared of what's
going to be happening with their jobs aren't going to be replaced oh my god it's the end of the world
and it's like tyranny there's like the four horsemen of the apocalypse charles was talking
about right um where you've got ai and quantum and bioesthetics and then you know and all these
technologies that when you combine it with ai which is extended cognitive capability without
consciousness right um is terrifying so then the argument is well you know you're gonna have there's
gonna have to be an information insurgency it's gonna have to be a counter-revolution
where we say no you can't capture all of our intellectual inheritance and set it back to us
as a utility on a meter right where like and there's something interesting happened right
where the usa put export controls on fables so then it's like this is really interesting because
a nation states cannot allow right their ability their means of cognitive production
to be taken away at a whim depending on where you're born right which is why the prelude was
relevant because we've seen this happen with the monetary system right now ai is at stake so now
sovereign nations are going to have to start responding to this right um and then like where
we're getting to is basically this is like act four at this point about crypto superpowers which
is you know uh instant capital uh capital for instant global capital formation and and the fact
that you can give everybody a stake the incentives you know and that's how you can drive coordination
uh and so then when you get to this point what you're saying is okay let's start looking at what
what the superpowers and capabilities of crypto are um and i'm gonna this is i don't know am i
sounding crazy so i'm trying to write this whole series out and um i've been deep in it this is
like what i did after i left io i went a little bit crazy you know um i can carry on by the way
i'm just conscious that i probably just uh streamed or talked at you for a little bit there
but but the car with the culmination anyway so here are the five acts right um the stakes that
we talked about like where we are the permanent underclass the pattern with those technology
axioms uh the crisis we just talked about um where everybody can be touched you know who's allowed to
eat it's a famine so there's abundance but it's only if you can access that abundance that you're
going to get this utopia that's promised if you can't access the abundance that's actually a famine
right which is what people are worried about then we talked about the second enlightenment and
superpowers oh right and then the final combination act five now i'm done jock is too long in 30
seconds, isn't it? Is the shelling point. And the point is, what's going to happen is China,
and you're already seeing this, they're going to make open source, open weight models available to
deprive America of that, of having that system of control the same way they did the monetary system.
And also because they're building chips and production and this kind of stuff.
And so therefore open source and open weight and decentralised,
is the counter revolution is inevitable.
So that's my pitch.
How long does that take me?
Three hours?
Someone needs to talk.
Otherwise, I just feel like I'm in a cupboard.
I've just ranted at the cupboard for a good 30 minutes.
You lost block, Jack.
It's a rabbit hole.
Did any of it make sense or not?
For all of it made sense for me, Ben.
I read the article.
I think you posted it somewhere else in your sub stack before, right?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
You should put it up in the top if you know how to do that.
I can't do it from my phone.
I was pinned on my thing.
But the point is, the reason you would write it is because you want to be able to say, like, the fight's real.
There's still this exciting tech that we've been building.
and everybody's tired with governance and fucking shit and you know everybody needs to get paid like
fair enough me too we all have to get paid right but but the point is like i just when we got into
this it was because it was fucking exciting and we wanted to build cool shit and we thought we
could change the world and like you know we felt like the systems as they were um just weren't
serving us or our children or their children and i want to get back into that and i can see the
grand arc of history when you start looking at those revolutions and those technologies that
were agents of change it's really interesting um and i and i just think something like that is what
could galvanize people you know potentially but um i think that a lot of us feel that way
ben to be honest like uh today's interview there's like one part that john was talking about like um
kiva being a charity thing right and i'm here like well you don't have to go too far to take
it to kiva i mean i feel like this this whole like our ecosystem turned everyone every regular
everyday person that was willing to put some capital to lift this uh turn people regular people
and to angel investors that were not angel investors,
like supporting all this like startups
with absolutely no, you know,
nothing to back up this, you know,
this investment, nothing but risks.
And it was like so much people lost so much money
that a lot of people are just broke, man.
And they're just still showing up,
but there's no money.
you know this is too like so this is the thing with john is like he he's not uh real fire is
not trying to um it's not retail money right it's businesses so i like that and then i like what
you're saying as well because it's like the old age of like l1s and where it was really partisan
like i feel that's going to die one way or the other because the agentic economy won't care about
like the the um the what's the word i'm looking for um but the partisan politics of it right
they're just going to care about the primitives and like what does the tech actually do
and we're probably a little bit we're not on top of a genetic economy yet but then finance coming
isn't going to care about this stuff either so i think the other thing is like crypto and blockchain
and even tech right it it is a narrative market right it's narrative cycles and the reason that
I think that you need to go numbers, vision, and then stories is because of that superposition.
So, you know, there's many, many minds are co-occurringly coming up with these interpretations
and probabilities. And that's the superposition I'm trying to get about in AI, where everything
is like such a hyper, fast velocity cycles, where you don't even like so much is happening so fast,
and it's changing all the time you don't even know uh which way to lean in you know there's a
lot of opportunity to shape um that attention that potential narrative energy if we as uh
cardano can get out of ourselves um and i think like you have to bridge these other ecosystems
and real five is one way of doing it and possibly pogan and i think the guy from c swap was trying
to do bitcoin stuff too so i'm not just trying to name io ventures you know um but we have to
bridge the other ecosystems um and we've got to kind of um get fresh talent in which means i think
we need to get out of our bubble to be able to yeah we have to become one ecosystem like the
industry has to kind of yeah work together yeah it's yeah it's like relationships it was people
all the way down right like do you do you know there's um do you know games or what is it minecraft
or whatever where you can make all of the land disappear and you can just see where it's just
people all the way down the whole thing's people you know um so yeah um yeah so sorry jock i didn't
give you my life story but uh it would have basically gone i got born in england lived in
saudi went to lots of boarding schools in england and then i worked as a chef did market research
built a banks community and then I got into privacy projects and then I got into Kedane.
That's my life story.
So I don't want to cut the show short, but I really do have to go.
Thanks for coming, Ben.
And I really enjoyed talking to you guys.
So maybe you can join us, like Jenny said, once in a while for banter
or just to talk more about the project.
100%
Thanks everyone
This is my last day
So I won't be in CURTA or NOVA coffee after today
So thank you Ben for showing up for my last day
All the way to you guys
Love you
Jenny I'm so glad I caught you on the last day
I know you are exiting
I didn't know this was the week