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00:00:39:09 – 00:00:40:08

Ahmed Ismail: Hey, how are you doing, Richard?

00:00:41:04 – 00:00:53:25

Richard Carthon: I’m doing amazing. Appreciate you spending some time, especially with the time difference out there being in London. But glad we were able to find some time to speak today before we find out more about fluid. First, I want to learn a little bit more about you. Give us some background on yourself.

00:00:55:01 – 00:01:21:03

Ahmed Ismail: Sure. Yeah. I am the founder of Fluid Present. So prior to that, I was the co-founder of a company called Haven, which is a regulated custody and OTC trading platform based in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. And also, I was on Wall Street for about 15 years. I was with Jefferies. I was with Merrill Lynch and I was with Credit Suisse.

00:01:22:07 – 00:01:40:01

Richard Carthon: So a lot of background in traditional finance and spending a lot of time in the ways of Web 2.0 finance and somehow made the transition over into Web three. So kind of tell us a little bit about that. Like how did you first hear about crypto and what made you decide like, this is the direction you want to go in your career?

00:01:40:24 – 00:01:54:12

Ahmed Ismail: Yeah, sure. So I was I was at the time the Jefferies Middle Eastern Africa CEO. So I used to I was the youngest regional CEO for about four years.

00:01:56:14 – 00:02:04:08

Ahmed Ismail: And in investment banking and try to buy. What I could see was a world that was in structural decline.

00:02:05:23 – 00:02:07:24

Ahmed Ismail: It was harder as a banker to make money.

00:02:09:13 – 00:02:20:11

Ahmed Ismail: A lot of the stuff was just it just didn’t make sense. At the same time, when I knew the writing was on the wall for the industry, which is becoming more and more evident.

00:02:22:29 – 00:02:35:09

Ahmed Ismail: I saw that. There was a massive gap in the market. For a while Bitcoin was traded and you could see CNBC, you could see the Bitcoin ticker on CNBC. And this is back in 2017.

00:02:37:11 – 00:03:12:22

Ahmed Ismail: No one was looking at how institutions trade crypto. No one was looking at how institutions can even get access to crypto. There was a mass. Amount of. There’s a huge amount of lack of education in the sector, in from the travel community. And this is where I saw my mission and vision to try to fill that gap. And so I got together with an ex-colleague from Merrill Lynch, which is called now Bank of America.

00:03:14:04 – 00:03:21:21

Ahmed Ismail: So we got together with him and we founded Haven. We got a branded. We made all the mistakes.

00:03:23:06 – 00:03:55:01

Ahmed Ismail: And we got off the ground and now it’s the first and largest OTC custody platform in the whole of the Middle East. And obviously the Middle East now is, you know, you see a lot of news around Dubai and Abu Dhabi. It is becoming quite quickly the global center of for cryptocurrency. And they have one of the most advanced cryptocurrency regulatory frameworks, which I actually also helped to write.

00:03:56:11 – 00:04:07:07

Richard Carthon: Which is pretty amazing. And just just for the audience and even for yourself. When I started my professional career, I was actually at Merrill Lynch. So interesting that we both have ties back to that, but.

00:04:09:01 – 00:04:38:00

Richard Carthon: As you’re looking into this issue, you hit on education. And I agree that one is the most important aspect of all of this, to have proper education of what opportunity is in front of us. And I think a lot of institutional players are still getting up to speed on the magical educational points of this. But by you being able to leave trait by come into this base start haven and now starting fluid, how was that educational journey been to help guide what you are now building over at Fluid?

00:04:39:08 – 00:05:18:03

Ahmed Ismail: It’s a great question because I see that the world five years ago is very, very different to the world today. In five, five years ago, you had, I guess, two opposing viewpoints. You had the crypto OGs, the anarchic libertarians, right. Who want decentralization, who are not regulation. And all on the other spectrum side of the spectrum, you had the the that the call it the boomers, right? The guys, the bankers who didn’t believe in this magic Internet money stuff.

00:05:20:25 – 00:05:21:10

Ahmed Ismail: And.

00:05:23:07 – 00:05:24:09

Ahmed Ismail: There. So the gap.

00:05:26:02 – 00:05:42:02

Ahmed Ismail: And effectively you need someone to straddle both worlds the old world and the new world. The old world isn’t that bad, right? Regulation is, and referee compliance completely protects everyone.

00:05:43:24 – 00:05:50:02

Ahmed Ismail: At the same time, it’s bad regulation that stops companies progressing forward

00:05:51:18 – 00:05:53:11

Ahmed Ismail: and doing business. So.

00:05:55:21 – 00:06:21:04

Ahmed Ismail: You know, initially getting getting a regulated platform meant that you had to speak both languages. It’s actually the best way to educate, you know, traders, bankers, guys in the old world about this new world. And transitioning now to fluid, I see that we’re in a completely different environment than we were five years ago.

00:06:23:05 – 00:06:25:28

Ahmed Ismail: You know, institutional players.

00:06:28:03 – 00:06:30:13

Ahmed Ismail: Are effectively.

00:06:33:06 – 00:06:43:05

Ahmed Ismail: Trading crypto. There’s Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. Both have. Cryptocurrency research desks I mean they don’t

00:06:44:26 – 00:06:46:24

Ahmed Ismail: custody crypto but.

00:06:49:03 – 00:06:58:25

Ahmed Ismail: The world has changed and institutions now are pouring in. And despite the market that we’re in right now, and the fact that a lot of people got burned.

00:07:02:18 – 00:07:06:09

Ahmed Ismail: It. It means the world that we’re in.

00:07:07:25 – 00:07:09:28

Ahmed Ismail: Institutional education is a lot better.

00:07:12:18 – 00:07:25:03

Ahmed Ismail: And so. You know, it touches now and there are new challenges in the industry. And it’s not just education. I think one of the biggest challenges, especially in Defi, is liquidity.

00:07:25:23 – 00:07:58:10

Richard Carthon: Yeah, I agree with that. And from 17 two to now five years and you’re definitely seeing a ton more divisions in traditional finance that are starting to, you know, open up crypto arms so that they can be more adept in being ready for the new opportunities and waiting for that regulation or that that moment where they can flip the switch and really start pouring even more heavily into the space. But to your point, one of the major issues that we’re continuously seeing is liquidity, especially as it relates to Defi protocols.

00:07:58:12 – 00:08:18:11

Richard Carthon: If you look at see what happened with Celsius Voyager and some of these others that are starting to go insolvent. It happened that they went they overlimit themselves and dried up all the liquidity and now you basically are stuck. And it’s a major challenge. And what do you think are some things that can be put in place to help solve this liquidity crisis?

00:08:19:09 – 00:08:33:24

Ahmed Ismail: Good question. I think it’s just the fact that this industry is so nascent. If you look at the whole value of Defi and I think CEO of Pantera put this out there recently, it’s only $20 billion.

00:08:35:24 – 00:08:41:10

Ahmed Ismail: If you look at the size of Qaddafi, it’s $3 trillion.

00:08:43:22 – 00:08:45:18

Ahmed Ismail: Huge. And so.

00:08:50:05 – 00:09:25:24

Ahmed Ismail: There needs to be growth in the industry. Now, the problem is that also. As a trader while you get to that growth while you go through that growth. One of the big problems is that liquidity in the crypto space is highly fragmented, meaning that liquidity stays in a few hands and it’s basically the big exchanges, right? Why is Binance, for instance? HONY owning a holding most of the governance tokens in most defi projects.

00:09:27:18 – 00:09:35:09

Ahmed Ismail: And the reason is because most people trade on Binance. Right. Right. Now it.

00:09:37:03 – 00:09:43:19

Ahmed Ismail: What we created in fluid was what’s called a liquidity aggregator to try to solve this problem.

00:09:45:13 – 00:10:18:13

Ahmed Ismail: So a liquidity aggregator is effectively like an aggregator is an exchange is an exchange of exchanges. So if you buy in layman’s terms, if you use Expedia or Skyscanner to book your flights. That is an aggregator of travel products. So we’re doing the same. We bring all that liquidity together at one place and we’re giving you what’s called best execution. Now. Anyone can do that. Anyone could have a bunch of APIs and build that.

00:10:19:20 – 00:10:32:20

Ahmed Ismail: But building that, putting that liquidity together, there are various complexities. And to actually get the best liquidity and to drive liquidity to.

00:10:34:14 – 00:10:47:22

Ahmed Ismail: Well, to get to get real liquidity into the system, you need to solve for the gaps. Meaning. I need to be able to trade on Binance. And cracking. Really? Really.

00:10:49:29 – 00:11:05:11

Ahmed Ismail: Right. And I need to. There is latency. So by the time me sitting in London sends, I send a message to a server in Hong Kong. All right. I’ve just lost the time.

00:11:06:27 – 00:11:19:20

Ahmed Ismail: Time equals risk pricing risk, which means that your spreads a wider, wider spreads equals lack of liquidity. So you fighting against latency and you fighting against gap risk.

00:11:21:13 – 00:11:21:28

Ahmed Ismail: Right.

00:11:23:15 – 00:11:24:20

Ahmed Ismail: That’s where we are right now.

00:11:26:17 – 00:11:42:22

Ahmed Ismail: And what we’re doing is that we are using AI deep learning and can go into this in a lot more detail to try to solve for that latency gap by predicting it, predicting this latency. It’s only a few seconds.

00:11:45:13 – 00:11:51:21

Ahmed Ismail: But you need to predict it with very, very high accuracy. So much can happen in crypto in a few seconds, as we all know.

00:11:52:16 – 00:12:22:18

Richard Carthon: Absolutely. And for your everyday trader, especially for someone who’s day trading and a high frequency trading. Like you’re saying. It’s bringing on a an elevation of risk, but also money. Like you really are losing a significant amount of money over time, especially as it relates to liquidity standpoint. You have these people who are trying to make solid moves, but because they are, well, they can move the market. And by moving the market, you’re not making your spreads that much thinner.

00:12:22:25 – 00:12:37:21

Richard Carthon: And it’s there’s so there’s so many levels of complexity when trying to potentially make a pretty significant trade. So fluid is helping to solve that latency issue and is helping to aggregate everything in a in a quick and fluid manner.

00:12:38:20 – 00:13:00:00

Ahmed Ismail: Yep. Hence our branding. Yeah. But yeah, exactly. That’s it. It’s simple what we want to do. But to. To solve it is is is is not so simple because it requires a lot of heavy investment in ultra low latency architecture that

00:13:02:03 – 00:13:37:09

Ahmed Ismail: exists doesn’t exist in in crypto yet. And also I so our devs, our team, our technical team come from that try to find background and crypto liquidity is about 20 years behind even though it’s so new and cool, right? Liquidity in crypto is about 20 years behind, liquidity in the equity space, space of the commodity space, the travel office space, if you like. And so what we are doing is fluid is that we’re bringing back or bringing through a lot of the key concepts from a tech perspective.

00:13:37:25 – 00:14:22:01

Ahmed Ismail: So small order routines. For instance, ultralow latency technology. And couple that with. I and deep learning to basically bring a very, very solid. I was going to say solid fluid upon but a solid product that can effectively have zero latency. Right. And be able to look into the future as well and monetize. So if you can predict using your eye what’s going to happen in the next 3 seconds, not only you’re able to eat into the latency, but if you know what’s going to happen in the future, the next 10 seconds, yeah, of course you give best execution, but you also also trade against that.

00:14:24:04 – 00:14:30:03

Ahmed Ismail: Be a market maker and a very, very good market maker because you know what’s going to happen in the market. So.

00:14:33:15 – 00:14:38:21

Ahmed Ismail: So yeah, I think what we are trying to do is pretty groundbreaking. It’s pretty cool, is pretty exciting.

00:14:40:08 – 00:14:42:22

Ahmed Ismail: And really, it’s virgin territory.

00:14:44:15 – 00:15:12:12

Richard Carthon: Yeah. I mean, the fact that you’re trying to combine a ton of different things from spot trading derivatives, margin trading on a community treasury, tokenized markets and this crossing engine, which is kind of a proprietary thing that you’re building out. It’s a lot it’s a lot of complex things to have to build out. But like you said, you have the team to do that. Can you kind of speak to the team that you were able to create to like, help make sure that all of this is able to truly come to market?

00:15:13:03 – 00:15:16:08

Ahmed Ismail: Sure. Yeah. We have head of product.

00:15:18:01 – 00:15:43:20

Ahmed Ismail: One of the strong one of the first guy. Well, one of the key guys at Bloomberg. He’s been building electronic trading systems. For the last 20 years from a product standpoint, from a tech standpoint, will lead risk. He is again 25 years experience building electronic trading platforms for the likes of Goldman Sachs, Jp morgan,

00:15:45:06 – 00:15:49:05

Ahmed Ismail: UBS, and underneath him we have like very elite.

00:15:50:28 – 00:15:54:19

Ahmed Ismail: Elite devs, a senior devs that

00:15:56:10 – 00:15:57:23

Ahmed Ismail: know how to work with.

00:16:00:25 – 00:16:05:22

Ahmed Ismail: Data market data very, very well. We have also

00:16:07:20 – 00:16:10:24

Ahmed Ismail: on the air side, it’s another big investment we’ve made.

00:16:12:18 – 00:16:36:04

Ahmed Ismail: We have a head of data science who is is Professor Lawrence Hennessy. Now we run with data. We partner very closely with the academic world here on the data science side. So we have two academic R&D partnerships, one with Imperial College in London. Which is one of the top the might of the UK

00:16:37:20 – 00:16:57:03

Ahmed Ismail: and the other is looking university in applying Institute of Technology sorry, in Sweden, which is one of the top. Universities in the world for software requirements engineering. So with those two partnerships, we have a team of 15 postdoc

00:16:58:20 – 00:17:05:09

Ahmed Ismail: students and academics who work very closely with our engineers to put together.

00:17:07:26 – 00:17:08:27

Ahmed Ismail: I Aldus.

00:17:11:09 – 00:17:26:23

Ahmed Ismail: It encompasses a hybrid of subsets of machine learning, i.e. deep learning and recurrent neural networks. Long short term memory. So a bunch of different. Algorithmic.

00:17:28:22 – 00:17:32:25

Ahmed Ismail: I discipline’s. In one hybrid model.

00:17:35:09 – 00:17:44:15

Ahmed Ismail: That basically analyses a bunch of features. So it doesn’t just look at the can stuff that most of the corn shot look at, which is,

00:17:46:12 – 00:17:49:00

Ahmed Ismail: you know, things like what is the

00:17:50:17 – 00:18:23:22

Ahmed Ismail: Bollinger bands or Mac V or the simple sort of corn stuff, candlesticks, etc. That’s kind of what we call feature. So I. The data is fairly unstructured and nonlinear. Right. Crypto markets are susceptible to stuff that goes on on Twitter. Someone says something. Crypto markets move, right? It’s got nothing to do with what happened historically, but it’s got to do with what’s called sentiment analysis.

00:18:24:07 – 00:18:26:25

Ahmed Ismail: So this is an aspect that we look at, we look at.

00:18:28:22 – 00:18:36:18

Ahmed Ismail: You know, deep learning on what goes on in discord, what goes on in Twitter, what goes on on BBC News or CNN

00:18:38:08 – 00:19:21:15

Ahmed Ismail: that influences crypto markets. We look at. So we look at different features. That’s one feature. You know, the quant stuff is another feature, but also things like what’s going what’s going on in the price of gold. And we check all that data and we’ve got loads and loads of data that we chuck into the, into the, into the algo and then all of a sudden that algo could easily understand it. Pre processes, the data learns. And is able to predict. Here’s the really cool that we are able to predict cryptocurrency prices for up to 30 seconds ahead of time with a 99.5% accuracy.

00:19:23:00 – 00:19:23:19

Richard Carthon: It’s pretty insane.

00:19:24:14 – 00:19:36:10

Ahmed Ismail: Yeah. So not only are you able to give best execution and do all the latency stuff, but you’re also able to use that to trade. On a nightly basis.

00:19:38:23 – 00:19:39:28

Ahmed Ismail: So this stuff is gold dust.

00:19:42:12 – 00:20:03:25

Richard Carthon: Yeah. I mean, it sounds really exciting. And you got the team in place to keep building out some very proprietary type of information and data. So for someone who’s listening to this right now, they’re like, Wow, I really want to learn more. I want to see how I can participate. Or I use this once it’s ready to go. Obviously, they can go to fluid that finance, but what are some other ways that they can engage and start to participate?

00:20:04:27 – 00:20:19:13

Ahmed Ismail: So we we can buy the fluid flow tokens not yet live. We we did a fundraiser earlier. So once that fluid token goes live, you can buy the flow token, participate in our communities so,

00:20:21:02 – 00:20:38:09

Ahmed Ismail: you know, interact with, interact with sort of telegram groups, etc.. But also we’re going to be releasing various sub products for fluid. So there’s going to be a retail product which has a UI and you’ll be able to use the product there

00:20:39:26 – 00:20:55:08

Ahmed Ismail: and use your token to offset that against fees on the platform. A bit like BnB and Binance. We have a product also for institutions and we have a product for exchanges. So we have three main kind of pillars of products.

00:20:56:13 – 00:21:23:20

Richard Carthon: Excellent. Well, if anyone is listening and you’ve been one of those buckets on that more, again, you can go to Florida Finance, get more information, and also make sure you go check out and engage with the various audiences that they have. But as we kind of wrap up here, I mean, I always like to finish up with two fun questions. The first being with all the information that you have learned over the past five years, if you go in part one or two pieces of wisdom to yourself, when you first got started in this space and your building out haven, what would you tell yourself?

00:21:24:20 – 00:21:38:01

Ahmed Ismail: Never give up. Ever. Just keep going. Full. Come back stronger and you’re going to get stuff wrong on the way. And that’s okay. Never be too hard on yourself.

00:21:40:05 – 00:21:56:03

Richard Carthon: Yeah, those are two great ones. Never give up and not be tiring yourself. You learn as you go and you just have to have the resilience and the the conviction to see it through to the end. So definitely appreciate that sentiment. But as we wrap up here, what is a final thought that you want to leave with all the listeners today?

00:21:57:22 – 00:22:14:27

Ahmed Ismail: Well, yeah, well, thank you for doing that. I’d say this. I think the number one we the biggest problem in crypto crypto is just on the cusp of growth. We haven’t seen any of the growth, especially in the defi space.

00:22:16:16 – 00:22:35:11

Ahmed Ismail: We’re looking at an industry that’s only worse at the moment. $20 billion, that’s nothing. Whereas if you look at if you look at the transfer market, it’s a $3 trillion market. We’re pretty bullish at these levels, and you should be, too.

00:22:37:10 – 00:22:46:22

Ahmed Ismail: So I think the whole space is pretty exciting and I hope that we are trying to solve one of the biggest challenges that we become very, very big ourselves.

00:22:48:06 – 00:23:00:18

Richard Carthon: Definitely. I think that’s a great final thought. And again, I definitely appreciate you spend some time with us today as a reminder for everyone listening. Make sure you go check them out at fluid that finance. And as always, for everyone listening, stay cryptocurrency.

00:23:01:23 – 00:23:25:09

Richard Carthon: Thank you for joining us for another episode of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a cryptocurrency and blockchain education platform has bridging the gap between curious newcomers for just discovering the space and its thought leaders for shaping its future. All opinions expressed by Richard Carthon , the cryptocurrency team and their guests on this show are exclusively their own opinions on this show and any other crypto print production is exclusively for informational purposes.