EP 352 – Is DeFi Changing Global Finance? – Paul Quickenden – Easy Crypto

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Michael Waitze 0:03
I think we’re on. Let’s do this thing. Hi. This is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast. Paul Quickeneden the Chief Commercial Officer of Easy Crypto, is with us today, Paul, thank you so much for coming to the show before we give our before we get into the main part of the conversation, can we give our listeners a little bit of your background for some context?

Paul Quickenden 0:22
Yeah, sure. So hey, thanks for having me on board too, Michael, it’s really nice to connect. So I am someone who’s worked in the technology and business place for a long time. I spent 15 years working for a telecommunications company here that was doing it and telco convergence, and that really sparked an interest in me and disruptive technologies. And then, since then, I’ve kind of been following those so I was in kind of mobile app development and, latterly, and blockchains and crypto. So that’s, that’s my background. I primarily focus on the strategy, marketing and sales, part of the of the of the industry,

Michael Waitze 1:01
and what got you into crypto?

Paul Quickenden 1:05
A good friend of mine, and I don’t know if I’ve ever stopped to thank him, but yeah, a good friend of mine got got me in. I was, I was between jobs, and he was working for a blockchain indices maker. So they were making, you know, before we had ETFs, they were trying to solve that problem, yep, and a sister company was looking for someone to do their consultancy and help businesses launch and do ICOs and all that sort of stuff that was, Oh, nice, all part of it back in back six years ago. Sorry, that’s how I got in.

Michael Waitze 1:32
I remember hearing first about it in like, 2012 I want to say it’s a long time ago, and I’m not a crypto holder, right? So I’m not bragging right. Unfortunately, yeah, but I remember hearing

Paul Quickenden 1:44
the best bunch of stories. I think we all Yeah. You know, looking back at the past is brilliant. And I wish we, wish we had acted on some of our impulses a little bit

Michael Waitze 1:53
earlier. Yeah, maybe not for me in my case, maybe not acted on some of my impulses. But we’ll leave that for another time. But a lot of the talk back then was just about the blockchain itself. And to be fair, I didn’t really understand it. I mean, now, obviously I think we all understand it way better. But there are two things interplaying here, right? There’s a back end technology thing, and then there’s the front end kind of internet gold thing, if you don’t mind me saying, yeah,

Paul Quickenden 2:16
yeah, I think that’s fair. Yeah. So blockchains are So, solve, you know, kind of a honeypot phenomenon that goes on with banks. You know, thankfully we don’t have a lot of bank hacks anymore, but when they all launched, launched internet banking like it was quite common, and people forgotten that. And, and technology’s got a lot better and, but that’s, that’s life. And so blockchains are decentralized. That means there’s lots and lots of copies of the last part of the chain, and to hack them, you know, essentially, what that means is you’ve got to within the net the time period between the next block being minted. You gotta break the chain and then convince all the nodes in that network that what has happened previously didn’t happen, right? So that makes them pretty secure, right? That’s, that’s, that’s a wonderful piece of technology that the world can and, you know, is adopting. And then the other parts of that is the how, how we’re signing things using, you know, cryptography and wallets and all that sort of stuff. And particularly now that we live in a world, and there’s, you know, lots of high, profile elections going on at the moment, being able to decipher what’s real and what’s not, particularly as we edge into an AI world, is it going to become an increasing challenging phenomenon? Yeah.

Michael Waitze 3:33
And you know, I didn’t expect to talk about this so much today, but just because you brought up the elections, I was having a conversation with a friend last night about digital money, about Bitcoin, about blockchain, and how the decentralization, like what normally happens. So I was going through this, right? I used to sit on a trading desk, and if a war broke out, if an earthquake happened somewhere, there would be this, what we used to call flight to quality, right? So you would be 100% sure that the Deutsche Mark or the euro or the yen would get sold, and people would just start buying dollars. That just happened every single time. It would revert to the mean, for sure at some point. But just to feel like if everything goes upside down, I have US dollars, that’s going to be okay. I think it’s pretty safe to say that a lot of people feel that way anymore, for whatever reason, without getting into the politics of it, but I feel like that’s more it’s a global phenomenon too. And maybe you can comment if it’s if it’s not just a now phenomenon, but if it’s a generational phenomenon, if that makes sense. Do you know I mean like are, is the younger generation changing the way they think about money and investments? And if so, why do you think so?

Paul Quickenden 4:39
So, there’s like, answer that. So yes, the younger people are changing the way they’re thinking about their investments. And so, you know, I’m currently based in New Zealand that we have a tradition of a, you know, you get wealthy by buying houses. I think it happened in Vancouver. It happened in Australia and a few other places. Yeah, and. Is, you know, the accordingly, the house prices are crazy. And, you know, when everyone’s saying they’re crazy, you just accept they’re crazy. Yeah, and so what we are seeing is that there’s this phenomenon where people are just dissatisfied with that, like they can’t get into those markets. Traditional investing isn’t working for them. You know, even accessing US equities and that sort of stuff has been a challenge for certain parts of the world, and so they are turning to alternate investments. Crypto is one of them, and obviously that’s the part that I play in but, you know, we’re seeing people investing in wine and whiskey and, you know, a whole bunch of other assets that aren’t top of mind when you think about that sort of stuff, because the entry price is low. You know, you can spend as low as kind of 50 100 bucks. It’s speculative, so that, you know, but over enough time, everything seems to be in the main, the main assets in crypto heating up into the right so that’s a, you know, a decent story for people to get their head around. And they’re seeing it as a way to get to financial freedom in a different, different path from their mothers and fathers and their grandparents. And so that’s that’s certainly going on in terms of crypto in the dollar, like, I think there is a weakening of the dollar standing as the global reserve currency. Crypto certainly playing a part in that. You know, if you, if you go down certain rabbit holes, you’ll see that certain OPEC members are, you know, no longer just exclusively accepting the dollar as payment. And that’s that’s happened in the last two or three years. Yeah, for oil, you’ve got the BRICS nations evolving, or the SCO nations, depending on who, which, which group you’re looking at. And they are definitely talking about forming security alliances, but also, you know, breaking the hegemony of the US dollar and foreign trading and all that sort of stuff. So it’s like, and we, and we live in a time where, for, you know, recent pandemic events, you know, trust and and enterprises and authority isn’t quite what it was. And so I think it’s a confluence of things coming together, Michael, where, you know, all of these things combining, it’s just kind of right people are aren’t as accepting as of the status quo as they used to be. Yeah,

Michael Waitze 7:11
I want to, I want to make a point. I asked the internet while you were talking, what $19,000 in 1970 is in dollars today? And you’re probably thinking, why 19? It feels like a really random number, and that’s because that’s the price my parents paid for their first four bedroom house right by the ocean, actually, right by the bay in Massachusetts. And that would be $153,000 today. You couldn’t buy my parents house today for 153 grand. And I think this is what you’re talking about. I know in Sydney for sure. I know you’re in New Zealand, but I know in Sydney for sure, because I have friends that live there, there’s been like a 30 year bull market that’s just made, like regular people not possible to buy real estate in the same way that they could have 25 or 30 years ago. I think that’s a fair statement. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Quickenden 7:53
And you know, lots of metrics are supporting that. You’ve got. You know, the metric of your earnings to the blissing of your house is like 789, 10% times, right? It’s crazy. So and again, if you’re and I’ve got an 18 year old son, if you fuel him, you looking at a housing market with an average price of a million dollars. That seems like a very steep thing to say, Yeah, and you have to save for three or four years to get the deposit and and that, you know, he doesn’t have that kind of patience, so his own kind of thing. Yeah.

Michael Waitze 8:27
And to be fair, at 18 years old, your life is moving way faster today than it was when I was 18, for sure. Anyway, um, do you want to talk about some of the research that you guys have done, and then maybe dovetail it, dovetail it with the research that Bank of America has done, because it feels like those two things are in congruence with each other. Yeah,

Paul Quickenden 8:45
yeah, yeah. So we did a survey of Australia, New Zealand citizens, and Bank of America obviously did their own thing in America, and the research was really conclusive that adoption and crypto is is growing and people are more interested in it in both, both countries. It’s, you know, getting close to 50% are either in or interested in getting into crypto, which is a big number, yeah. And then, you know, the other key theme that I just talked about previously was the younger people in particular, feeling disenfranchised or excluded from certain investment classes, and they’re looking at crypto in particular, as one of the options to build financial freedom that’s never gone away. People will still want financial freedom. They’re just looking at alternate ways of doing that. And crypto is forming a larger part of their answers for the bigger a bigger part of the community. And then the last thing that we found in our research is that the user experience for new people coming into cryptocurrency isn’t fantastic. And you know, the way I describe it is, it started out with a bunch of security geeks created something and and we’ve never really recovered from it, right? And so in they were. Be offended when I tell them that, because, you know, the way it works. You get a wallet, you have this 24 word key phrase. You’re like, what do I have to do with this? I gotta store that securely. You know, that’s, that’s kind of the world we’re trying to introduce the mass market to. And so there’s lots of people ourselves to include trying to solve that particular onboarding phenomenon. And that’s, you know, that’s what we’re we at, easy crypto. See, Bank of America, their research painted a very similar pitch. You know, they were, they were looking at a slightly a larger cohort, you know. So they would sort of in the 20 to 40 range. But the the list of assets that that cohort, the younger cohort versus the, you know, people like me and my parents are investing in a very, very different and again, it’s lower entry price, slightly more speculative by risk standards, but they’re, they’re trying desperately hard to break into or get away from some of the treadmills that They feel like we’ve been on. And the research, again, was clear. Housing’s down, equities are down. Four Oh, ones are down, crypto up, other, other, other assets are up, right? So,

Michael Waitze 11:12
yeah, look, it’s also harder to invest. The stock market’s on fire, right? I mean, if you look at the S, p5, 100, if you look at the, sorry, the New York Stock Exchange indices, right? They’re all on fire, hitting record intraday highs and stuff like that. But it’s expensive. Like do you want to talk at all? Because you talked before about buying wine and buying whiskey and stuff like that, and even some of the good investments in those alternative assets themselves, on an individual basis, are expensive. But do you want to talk at all about fractionalization and how that makes it a little bit easier for people even to just take part, if that makes sense,

Paul Quickenden 11:43
yeah, yeah. So look, there’s a movement inside of various industries, and it’s not just crypto, but they’re trying to expose some of these big, chunky assets to wider people, and that will serve the market, let’s be very honest. It makes it, makes it more available, and the way they’re doing that is, instead of forcing you to own one share, one, one house, one, you know, 50,000 bottle of whiskey, they’re they’re fractionalizing it and so that you can share that amongst how many, however many people that you you want. Within crypto, people have been doing that and with property since probably 2018, 2019, there was a famous hotel in Aspen. Aspen. Thank you. Who originally did it? And there’s even a securities exchange in America that was listing things like that, but real world assets, that’s the parlance we use inside of crypto like, they’re really focusing on getting government bonds tokenized. That’ll open up the market to a different group, people like, Isaid, whiskey, wine, cars. So, you know, probably nirvana for someone like Uber. But, you know, we all in New Zealand, we sit here, we’ve got two cars out there, you know, we have two car family. It gets used a fraction of the time. What would happen if I bought into a company like Uber, I only needed a car, you know, there’s a pool of 100 cars. Only needed one. When I needed it would turn up. It was driverless. You know, it would be, that would be a really good story, right, in terms of fractional ownership but that’s really taking Clayton Christensen’s disruption to the nth degree. That’s way out there, because it’s suddenly I’m not owning a car, I’m owning a share of a ride service, and my share means I get to ride when, when a car is available, right? And so quite a different proposition. And that’s that’s kind of the view, the the vision around fractionalized ownership. It just bringing down the barriers to these high profile, high high price point items, paintings, even doing it like it’s it’s a thing, right? Any investment class that people are thinking about, they’re all talking about how we can fractionalize it.

Michael Waitze 13:54
I love this idea of cars. I’ve been talking about this. I used to do something called the Asian blockchain podcast, and that was back in 2017 and I used to talk about the fractionalization of cars all the time and autonomous driving. And back in 2017 it wasn’t that far away. We’re still not there. Yeah, that was seven years ago. No,

Paul Quickenden 14:12
well, again, like, who was it? Bill Gates, who said, like, we’ll overestimate how long, you know, it’s one of those things I just friend of mine was in San Fran this weekend and sent me a video of a Waymo driving us. Waymo, like, that’s pretty cool. We’re getting close. We’re getting close. So, yeah, like, but it flips the capital markets and it flips our established views on ownership. So it’s a big cultural change. I guess there’s my view around some of those things.

Michael Waitze 14:43
I think so too. Look, you have an 18 year old son. I have a 22 or 23 year old daughter, and I feel like, when I was 16 years old, right, I got my driver’s license, and I remember asking, even though we were poor. I remember just thinking, like, I wonder if I can get a car, because all my friends had cars, and, you know, they were tinkering with the engines and stuff like that. But it. Was a thing you really wanted. And kids would actually get cars for their birthdays. And kids would ask their parents, can I have a car? Can I borrow your car? Yeah, my daughter’s never mentioned it even once, not once, yeah, yeah. I don’t think she’ll ever own a car. I don’t know it’s weird anyway.

Paul Quickenden 15:18
So that’s a big social change. Yeah, really. Big. Change, massive.

Michael Waitze 15:21
And to her, I mean, remember, like, when I was a kid, I lived in the suburbs. There were no taxis around, but then there were definitely no Ubers, right? So for them, mobility is simple, I think, yeah, I agree. Anyway, talk to me about easy crypto and like, what is the stuff you see most on the platform? Where do you operate right now? You operate in New Zealand, in Australia and where else? Yeah, and then South Africa. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yes, yeah. So

Paul Quickenden 15:47
we’re in three, three jurisdictions, so we’re, we’re a business that age a lot, a lot like a foreign exchange broker. So we take in dollars and we issue crypto to the end user. So we don’t hold on to it. We’re called non custodial. We send it straight to people’s wallets, and if they want to sell it, they can sell it through us, and we’ll put dollars in their bank account. So, you know, collectively known as an on off ramp, that sort of stuff, like the things that are really popular. So our base is traditionally, people newer to crypto. You know, we’ve now got six, seven years of operating. So there are some long term customers with us. Bitcoin is still the daddy on the platform, but its role in our and our volume is slowly diminishing, really. Yeah, so would have back in 2018 it would have been 70% of volume, and now it’s not, it’s kind of getting close to 35% Oh, wow. Ethereum there. Solana is a very popular platform now and then, you know, we have a very in crypto. We have a very long tail. So we offer about 150 assets. That’s not, you know, that pales in in comparison to some of the exchanges. But, you know, we quickly, you know, outside of maybe the top 15, you’re talking about people doing fractions of ascent of volume. You know, it’s a real long tail industry for us, like we do see spikes in interest as means and or, you know, news events happen. So, you know, ripple, at the moment, is a business that’s got a big pending court case for the SEC. Anytime there’s any kind of market using moving news on ripple, we’ll see a spike in that volume, that sort of stuff going on. But, you know, over a long enough period, like we still see people gravitate towards the big high cap coins. And you know, we’re, we’re a business that want people to do well out of crypto. And so our advice to them is structure their portfolio so that, you know, even in crypto, there’s risky assets and there’s less risky assets. So we’re saying to them, you know, invest wisely. Have a think about what your strategy is. And, you know, try not to speculate too much.

Michael Waitze 18:00
What do you think about liquidity? Like, how has liquidity changed over the last two or three years? And I always used to, because you said, almost like an FX broker, right? So I always put it in the context of FX. FX trades about $7 trillion a day, something like that. So it’s a lot, and the crypto market cap is only around. I’m just looking@coinmarketcap.com it’s around $2 trillion maybe a little bit more. So what do you think about liquidity and what kind of has to happen. Because there are two things, right? We talked before about making it more mainstream. I mean, everybody trades FX at some level, even if they don’t know they’re doing it right? Because if you buy a car from Japan, you’ve somehow done an FX trade, you just don’t know it. How do you get this thing to be more liquid over time?

Paul Quickenden 18:42
So the traditional answer has been to co op more retail users in so, you know, crypto was definitely a mainstream it was a move that driven by retail traders to begin with, and probably right up until about maybe 2021, that was the case. And then we now have Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy and all those kind of guys in our space. So the original plan was to get more users on more wallets, more people participating and holding and doing that sort of stuff. You know, under the hood of crypto, it is pretty sophisticated. You know, we have market makers, and we have OTC desks. We’ve got people who are liquidity providers and making money doing that. And so, you know, the structure of the market, I would imagine, looks remarkably similar to the markets you played in. Michael back in on the trading getting

Michael Waitze 19:28
closer and closer, for sure. Oh, absolutely.

Paul Quickenden 19:33
So, you know, there are market makers. If you’re a new project, you probably have to pay to play to get your liquidity. And so you’re, you know, you are engaging a market maker to make sure the spread stays at 1% or whatever the value is that you arrive at, right? If you’re already a successful project, you know, doing very well with millions of people doing it like that. The the spreads and the liquidity on those things are really, really quite good. You. And, you know, there’s, there hasn’t been an instance, I can think of them in the last four years, where in the market, one, one coin is choked up just because there’s not enough liquidity. That doesn’t happen anymore, like it is. It is just a thing. But new, new projects, absolutely, you know, you, you’re in the speculative end, and you can, you can be left high and dry trying to trade out,

Michael Waitze 20:20
what, um, what are the differences between, or are there differences between the market in New Zealand, the stuff you see there, the way people behave there, Australia and South Africa, feels like it’s a completely different animal. Do you know what I mean, and, and not just from a regular standpoint, regulatory standpoint, although I’m very curious about that as well. But I mean, just from a trading standpoint, are there different things that people are doing, or is it starting to kind of revert to the mean and just converge?

Paul Quickenden 20:44
No, they definitely have favorite coins. And that’s, you know, not unique to us. There are, there are coins that run in certain markets. New Zealand, for instance, really likes Cardano. It’s, you know, one of the older, more established projects in our in our book, it consistently trades higher. Whereas, you know, South Africa, they, they, they have strict capital controls in that market. And there’s, there’s a much there’s a restricted list of tokens that they can access. They pay a premium, and they typically skate towards Bitcoin like their Bitcoin dominance is a lot higher. That’s what we see on our platform. And Australia, like Australians behavior like they seem to be much more comfortable trading. Like their financial My observation is, their financial literacy is higher, higher. You know they’re they’re a nation that is more familiar with buying and selling assets and and doing that in a structured way. And so, you know, we do see my we see we see the activity. And so the the velocity in the user base is a little higher in Australia. So again, they got different traits. New Zealand’s, like I said, we got, like our property, that that moves at a slower pace than shares. So I think our literacy is determined by that as well.

Michael Waitze 22:02
What is the impact of all these big banks in the United States coming into the market, right? And having actually ETFs on some of this stuff, and, like you said, building indices too?

Paul Quickenden 22:10
Yeah. So my view is net. It’ll be positive, because suddenly you’ve got sophisticated people who can hedge and have options and do all of that sort of stuff, and that will bring over time, it’ll bring down the volatility. Yeah, little, a little careful what we ask for, because, in my opinion, volatility has a bad name. Volatility can be good and bad,

Michael Waitze 22:33
yeah, particularly if you’re an options trader, can be great, right? Anyway, right? Yeah, exactly.

Paul Quickenden 22:37
So, so I think that will happen over time, and we’re seeing that with Bitcoin like it’s wild rides as well as they are, and not nearly as wild as that. We’re prior 17, right? They’re just not that’s getting more it’s getting more mature. We’re certainly seeing liquidity, and the ETFs and Bitcoin price are definitely correlated when there’s inflows into the, you know, the the ETFs, we’re having good days at bitcoin price, and so they’re going to start commanding more and more attention in terms of what they do. And I would imagine my, my mental playbook is that when, when the Fed starts blinking a little bit more, and, you know, the fed fund rate comes down, the yield on bonds and money market funds is going to fall away, and people will have to go up to up the risk curve. Then we will see, we will see more liquidity via these, these, these vehicles come into the market. That’s kind of what I think will happen. And you know, we won’t be the only beneficiary, but, you know, the US, the SMP in particular, like that, it’s completely you know, people think Bitcoin is concentrated. But apart from the seven amigos, like, like, is it really been an ECP? You know, summer, it’s, it’s quite interesting. I don’t, it doesn’t look like it’s evenly distributed to me, and some really good shares have not shown yet. So, you know, I think there’s going to be some interesting times ahead when people start chasing better, faster returns as well.

Michael Waitze 24:04
Yeah. I mean, look, we can spend hours talking about what actually drives the index price, the indices prices in the United States. And like you said, it’s really it’s highly concentrated in individual stocks. But because there’s such a heavy weighting for the indices, they drive the indices higher by definition, and the higher they go, the bigger they’re waiting they have to then get rebalanced. Like, I don’t know how much information most people that are listening have about how indices work, but fair enough, yeah, it’s not very well distributed. I want to ask you this too, what drives because you operate in Australia, New Zealand and in South Africa. The Aussie New Zealand thing would have made sense to me just because they’re right next to each other, not really, but you know what I mean, close enough to each other, yeah. But what drives where you guys operate? Like, why not operate in the United States? Why not operate in Europe? What drives it for you guys? Well,

Paul Quickenden 24:49
so our founders are shamelessly southern hemisphere focus. So, so shamelessly, because we love it. We felt, we felt that crypto. Ecosystm, the user base in Europe and the US was really well served. You know, the Coinbase has been around for a very long time, but stamp is a European exchange has been around since dawn of time in crypto. So they, they had, they had a vehicle to get into our space, whereas, kind of below the the equator, that wasn’t the case. Then, look, we’re in those countries because they they are all ex English colonies. They share a legal precedent, commonly fair enough that helps, and it certainly helps our understanding around what we can and can’t do. And then, you know, there was certainly a little bit of, you know, good fortune and having people, or the right people come along. So some, some of the one of the offices were set up because we had people in New Zealand, and they relocated back home to Australia, for instance. That was they kind of went, it went that way, and went, hey, well, why don’t we? And it felt right. And the legislation and the relations were similar enough that we went, Yeah, we can do that. Whereas South Africa was deliberate, you know, there’s 60 million people in South Africa. There’s some of them were desperately poor. That trend around trying to build financial freedom is definitely in that market. And so, you know, we wanted to go into a scale based market and participate there. So, you know, quite different, quite deliberate in South Africa got

Michael Waitze 26:20
it. Can I ask you this? So you talked a little bit about the regulatory environments, right? Do you think at some point they all converge? I mean, not exactly, but at some level, right? Like the trading rules in Japan seem pretty similar now to the trading rules that the SEC has in the United States and the European Union obviously, has converged. Do you see the crypto stuff kind of dropping to the bottom of the funnel? Do you know what I mean, and looking more and more and more assembled over time?

Paul Quickenden 26:43
Yeah, look, I do honestly, at the moment, you at the US is the outlier, like everyone else is converging on it. You know, in at a compliance level, I’m going to get the acronym wrong. Is it effective? You know, they’re the one who issue guidance for how you do AML and all that sort of stuff like that’s flowing through globally. So we’re all converging at AML, KYC level and that sort of stuff. And then, you know, every nation has its own regulator. Some, you know, the the US model is enforcement base, whereas everyone else is. It has a different play. But they are all right, you know, issuing guidance and rules around how you deal with your customers, what you can list, how you market to your like, everyone’s doing the similar sort of stuff. So I think we really are, Michael, it’s just because it’s happening in every one of these small jurisdictions. It feels really spirit, but, and there is regulatory arbitrage, like, yeah, there’s a there’s a reason why, you know, you have financial hubs and BVI and, you know, because people have been doing that for any, for every as well. Yeah, so that stuff’s going on, and they just, you know, they’re marketing themselves as being a little slower on regulation. So, you know, that’s just kind of how it’s playing out.

Michael Waitze 27:59
Can we stop talking about money for a moment and talk about identity? So in India, I forget what the name of it is, right? But India has been building a decentralized ID system for a while now. They’re trying to roll out to the entire population. And the only reason why I mentioned India, not that it has anything to do with easy crypto, per se, it’s so large, right? 1.21 point two, 1.4 billion people. They’re trying to do this for everybody. And I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past, you know, seven years, thinking about self, sovereign identity, right? Like, why don’t I own all this stuff that’s, you’re smiling to me, but don’t you think about it like, I want to own all the stuff that’s, that’s mine, and I want to, and I want to be in charge of it. Sorry, go ahead.

Paul Quickenden 28:39
No so I’m smiling because it’s very rare that people actually understand what self sovereign is. So well done. You like, if you believe that we’re entering into this kind of new way of industrial we’re beyond the industrial when the digital revolution, how we interact with the world is really, really important, and knowing who we’re interacting with is really, really important as well, right? Yeah, so having control of your identity, and moving from being the product to which is, you know, kind of where we’re at now with Facebook and Google, yep, to being in control of how our stuff is syndicated, what’s ours? How you provably say that’s yours, like, like, that’s a really big step, and it will be a really important step. And, and, and my personal view is some of the cryptography that we use all the time in crypto can go a long way to doing that sort of stuff. So we can do zero, you know, it’s quite technical, but you’re knowledge proof, exactly the ability for me to say that’s that’s okay with about me exposing all of my identity to you, Michael, I think is a really powerful thing, sort of a long way completely. And if you. If you I got this is triangle going on at the moment. And, you know, we talk a lot about AI, yep, prior to that, the the bubble was metaverses. And prior to that, the bubble was crypto Right, right? And, and in my view, they’re semi linked, because AI is going to be generating the artifacts that live in a in the metaverses, and crypto is going to be the thing that’s being used to pay for it, and how we manage all of that is going to be using wallets and signing technology and all that sort of stuff. And whether it’s the generation of cryptography I use or something different, like I just think they’re really linked and and we’re not ready, because, you know, we’re already seeing big fakes all all over the web for various elections. Or, you know, India was just going through an election. It was, it was rampant over there. So having having the ability to control that stuff and really trust what you’re reading and the source of what you’re reading, that it’d be pivotal to us as a people like I think it’s so big that I don’t think we can get our eight around

Michael Waitze 31:01
it. It’s actually the thing that I’m most passionate about. This idea of self, sovereign identity, is more important to me than the trading of crypto. More important to me than all this other stuff is this idea of in the physical world, at least up until now, like, you couldn’t get a driver’s license, a marriage license, you couldn’t go to a hospital without proving who you were, like you needed a birth certificate or some way to identify yourself, but online, you could be like 1000 different people, and people will make the argument, right that, yeah, but if you don’t know who I am online, right, then I can get a job because you don’t know that I’m in Vietnam as opposed to in Silicon Valley. So that there’s some, you know, balance there between anonymity and what I get paid. And that’s just one example, but at the end of the day, I should know who you are at some level, at least enough so that I can I know I understand, like zero knowledge proofs. I’ve done some work on that as well, but I should be able to trust that you are who you say you are. I guess it’s maybe the more important thing, if that makes sense,

Paul Quickenden 31:54
yeah, and that’s and you and I are going to agree wholeheartedly on that, because without, that degree of trust. What are we? Nothing. How do we interact? Yeah, nothing. And a whole digital ecosystm has to have a level of trust on it. Yup. And if we can’t, and we’re going to go back to meeting face to face, so it breaks, like, that’s, that’s the worst case. And so, so I just think, I think it is a really big part of the you know, and again, like, I really not precious if it’s using the cryptography I use, but I do think self, sovereign, identity, zero knowledge, is just part of the equation, yeah, and there’s lots of governments. New Zealand’s doing it as well. Like, we were redoing our digital rights as a nation, but they’re written for something, a world that was five years ago, right? And that’s the bit that’s shockingly scary for me, is, you know, somebody operates in this space, so Yeah, and

Michael Waitze 32:47
look, we can spend another hour or two talking about whether government officials and the bureaucrats actually understand the stuff that they’re legislating, but I think that that’s true for most technological chains. So let’s not go down that rabbit hole, right? Because otherwise you’d be in the government and they’d just be mucking around outside.

Paul Quickenden 33:03
Yeah, no, I agree.

Michael Waitze 33:07
What else did I want to ask you? I made a note to myself. We talked about online and offline. Talk to me about Celsius. Look, I was reading some of the stuff that you were writing, right? Because this is one of the things that I do. I’m nothing, if not curious, and if I find somebody that I think is smart, I just read through this stuff that they write to think about, what is the stuff that I need to know? I met Alex mashinsky. Okay, I did. I met him face to face. I talked to him. I was at a crypto conference in 2018 I want to say in France. I was at Paris blockchain week, and, yeah. And I was actually moderating a panel. I was moderating the penultimate panel there with I had, like, somebody from Belgium or somebody from Brussels on the panel. Was really great panel, and the head of something in France, and we had 300 people in the room, but in one of the breakout rooms, Alex mashinsky was there. Mike, who’s this guy, because he’s very, if you’ve met him, he’s big, like, he’s got a big personality. He’s very charismatic, and he’d done a lot of great things before, according to him. So I’m just curious. Like, you know what I mean, he seemed kind of like a little bit of a huckster when I met him, but what’s going on? Yes, team

Paul Quickenden 34:15
about he might have been right, yeah. So I guess for your audience, so Celsius was a crypto bank, effectively. So people were depositing their crypto in Celsius and getting loans back, and they went bankrupt, and they were affected by FTX and all sorts of things. But last week, we started seeing news that they were suing their former customers who had withdrawn their funds prior to their bankruptcy. Okay? Because, because they we’re not like, you can see, it’s kind of, you know, excuse my French, but bet you’re crazy. Yeah, it’s my money.

Michael Waitze 34:53
I’m taking it like, I don’t understand. We

Paul Quickenden 34:54
took our funds out because it was our money, but we were suing you because you took your funds out and they. Caused a run on our bank and caused our bank proxy. But not only that, you know, the prices back when that happened were probably down, maybe, I don’t know, 150% and but they want today’s value and back. They want people to repay the funds, their funds back in today’s value. So it just seems so ludicrous that it’s like it’s really hard to to, to give it credence, but it’s, you know, people are posting about it all the time, like it’s, it’s real, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it smacks of desperation, I guess, that they, they’ve missed out on, on, you know, this, this bull run, and they’re trying to recruit somehow for some bad actions, right?

Michael Waitze 35:44
Yeah, I think, I think machines just afraid of going to jail, like bankman Fried anyway, it’s always interesting to end on something funny, unless there’s something else that I missed or something else that you wanted to point out, like about easy crypto, maybe best way for people to find you or find out more about you, were found out about the business. Where can they contact

Paul Quickenden 36:02
you? Yeah, well, look, we’re just at easy crypto com. It’s all it’s pretty easy to find. And if you are in one of our countries, you know, you’ll be automatically directed to our local website. So please don’t come on board. If you sign up, you’ll get access to the newsletter that Michael was referring to and and we just want to make you the journey into crypto as painless as possible, and get you into the you know, this disruptive technology that we think is going to make a change. Awesome. Thank you very much for having me. Michael,

Michael Waitze 36:31
thank you. Paul Quickenden, the Chief Commercial Officer of Easy Crypto, thank you so much for doing this. I can’t believe you guys were actually able to buy easycrypto.com. So good for you, makes it so much easier. No pun intended.

Paul Quickenden 36:43
That’s all right, there’s nothing like Kiwi ingenuity in action. Michael, don’t worry. I love it. I love it. Thank you.