The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below.

00:01:12:07 – 00:01:42:18

Richard Carthon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current. Your host here, Richard Carthon. And today I have a special guest all the way out New Zealand in that beautiful weather that I’m highly jealous of at the moment. And he is going to be speaking to us about a really, really cool project that is very near and dear to me from the traditional standpoint, if you know anything about index funds. He has found a way to bring this to the crypto world, so I know I’m pumped about this. I hope you are, too. We have one of the people on the core team we have. Alex, how are you doing today?

00:01:43:14 – 00:01:47:13

Alex Masharov: I’m very good, man. Thanks very much. That intro makes me sound like some kind of superhero.

00:01:49:05 – 00:02:03:11

Richard Carthon: Well, I guess we’re going to find out, depending on how XP goes, right? So we’re here to learn about Xbox. Really excited again to learn about crypto index funds. Before we do that, we’ll learn more about you. He gave us some background on yourself.

00:02:04:16 – 00:02:36:15

Alex Masharov: Now, so, yeah, my name is Alex is as you said, I’m based down here in beautiful New Zealand Auckland and my background is of the 20 years in and I’d see coming from a technical background. So I used to work a lot on complex customer facing stuff like I used to work on airline online booking engines and, you know, all the all the kind of logic and architecture behind that and also cybersecurity. So I spent a couple of years on a red team getting paid to hack to hack people’s mainframes and show them the error of their ways.

00:02:37:00 – 00:02:45:10

Alex Masharov: And obviously, yeah, and obviously, it’s all that that transitions me nicely to crypto these days, because if I can’t break it down, you know, probably not many people can.

00:02:45:27 – 00:02:59:09

Richard Carthon: Yeah, no, that’s well-positioned. And I know security is going to be important. We’ll get a little bit more into that later. But what was that first introduction into crypto like? How did you go? And from that kind of background, how did you first learn about crypto and how do you decide to get it involved?

00:03:00:20 – 00:03:28:27

Alex Masharov: So some of my friends, quite a few, quite a few of whom are actually with me on this wild ride, they actually got me into the venture initially a few years ago, and actually it took me a while like I was not. I was not an early believer. You know what I mean? Like, actually? So it actually took quite a few people to kind of sit down and talk through it a few times. And these guys have been heavily into crypto for, you know, all the way since, like 2010.

00:03:30:23 – 00:04:01:19

Alex Masharov: But once I once I finally got it a few years ago, it was like it was like a click. You know, it was one of those things like, once you get it, you just go, Wow, man, like, I can’t believe that, you know, I can’t believe that people are kind of not aware of this. You know, this is going to be world changing. And so from that moment on, yeah, I started getting into it, you know, coming from a technical background, obviously, you know, I’ve managed to get my head around and feel the concepts there, and we’ve got some guys on the team that are much smarter than I am. And you know, and here we are. So these days, I’m a believer.

00:04:02:11 – 00:04:08:17

Alex Masharov: Yeah, well, you you you pick the red pill. You decided to see how far the rabbit hole goes. And here we are.

00:04:08:19 – 00:04:18:17

Alex Masharov: So I don’t think any of us know quite how deep the rabbit hole is going to go. But it’s it’s yeah, it’s going to it’s going to be quite a way it is.

00:04:18:21 – 00:04:34:06

Richard Carthon: And so you learn about this and now you’re being introduced and you’re like, OK, how do I create a company? So like, tell me about the origin story of specs, right? So how did you go from cybersecurity hacking people to I want to create an index fund for crypto?

00:04:35:06 – 00:05:06:02

Alex Masharov: So the guys that are with me on the on the core team, we’ve got a really distributed range of backgrounds, right? So we got our team is going to split nicely down the middle between the guys that come from a traditional business space. So they’re, you know, it’s entrepreneurialism, corporate people, arguably myself included, because I, you know, I used to I used to come from that’s sphere as well. And the other half of the team I like, like crypto fanatics, you know, like guys that are like fully into like smart contracts, experts and guys that I just, you know, like blockchain fanatics.

00:05:06:25 – 00:05:27:01

Alex Masharov: And so just just in talking with Justin, talking with these guys, you know, everybody obviously have their own kind of view on what’s possible. These guys were all involved before he expects these guys were all involved in other projects as well. And so finally, we were like, Listen, why are we why? Why don’t we just make our own thing? You know, like we we know what we’re doing,

00:05:28:27 – 00:06:00:25

Alex Masharov: right? And so, yeah, of course. And so, yeah, I really look, that’s what’s that perfect intersection between between something that something that’s new and something that doesn’t exist yet in crypto, something that’s, you know, an important tool, but also something that I felt would be would be quite understandable, you know, something that that would be of benefit not just to people in the space already, but also to newcomers, to, you know, to maybe more traditional players that are kind of hedging their bets.

00:06:01:18 – 00:06:32:03

Alex Masharov: And that’s where this idea came from. And because, you know, crypto index funds are such a basic tool of traditional finance. Ever since we first came in in the seventies, you know, it’s arguably the default method of investment. Yeah, people, people who don’t spend all their time playing the stock market and learning individual stocks and all that, you know, they if they got investment money that they want to bring in, they put it into an index fund and, you know, and it works for them, you know, they’ll they’ll bring it in and leave it there for years, and it works because the system works.

00:06:33:07 – 00:07:03:23

Alex Masharov: So it just seemed mad to me that in crypto, there was no such thing. Crypto inherently as so much more volatile than traditional finance, right? And yet there just seems to be no way to actually get in without without meaningfully mitigating that risk unless you’re willing to spend really a very serious amount of time learning the market, pricing individual tokens and, of course, individual coins crash in an hour. Right. So it just seemed crazy that this very basic tool wasn’t wasn’t there. And so we decided to build it.

00:07:03:25 – 00:07:07:12

Alex Masharov: And then and then we discovered why it wasn’t there, because it turns out that it’s not so easy.

00:07:08:02 – 00:07:42:06

Richard Carthon: Yeah, let’s let’s unpack that because like you said, most people who come into the crypto come into the finance space when they have there for one case set up and et cetera, most of them get into index funds. It’s the safe sure bet to get your whole full five to eight percent year over year and, you know, ride into the sunset. Now in crypto, like you said, is extremely volatile even for your blue chips, your top 10s, et cetera. And to try to create a fund that helps to index and to protect downside automatically is not a small feat at all.

00:07:42:08 – 00:07:49:08

Richard Carthon: So like, how are you all able to put some things in place so that anybody can be able to come in and create their first index fund, if you will?

00:07:51:00 – 00:08:37:28

Alex Masharov: Well, it took a while, so we’ve been working, you know, we’ve been working on this project, so developing it for well over a year now and then. And that’s with that’s with entirely our own dev team as well. So we actually we actually maintain and pay for our own developers. We don’t we don’t outsource development. So yeah, there were a lot of technical challenges along the way. You know, I don’t want to bore your listeners by getting into the nitty gritty of things, but there’s a huge amount of complexity associated with managing things like slippage between transactions, managing with things like making sure that an index fund is composed of coins or tokens that have some kind of shared shared context, if you know what I mean, like in the traditional space and index fund that usually has some kind of meaning behind it.

00:08:38:00 – 00:09:18:20

Alex Masharov: It’s not just a random collection of stocks, right? Is this something you know, you’re either investing in forestry or, you know, automotive or whatever it is? So within crypto, we wanted to do something like that as well, that there’s some kind of meaningful context to what you’re getting into, but it’s very difficult because of how volatile all the tokens are. So technically, it’s it’s actually to be able to technically allow people to come in with a single asset like you did or something. And in exchange for that, you know, with a single transaction purchase, a pie of all the tokens in the fund and actually be able to be able to get that equity back at any time without middlemen.

00:09:18:22 – 00:09:46:02

Alex Masharov: Right. Because that’s the whole point. You don’t want to, you know, you don’t have to you want to give your money to somebody. You want to make sure that that money is actually there in on the smart contract managing the index fund, right? This turned out to be technically challenging. You know, we we really had to create a fair amount of technology from scratch in order to in order to be able to do this. So I’m very proud of the of the more techie guys on the team that have managed to achieve this because I know they had some sleepless nights.

00:09:46:22 – 00:10:05:19

Richard Carthon: Oh, absolutely had to do just to figure this out. So that’s on the technical side. That’s the way foundation what’s what’s behind the curtain, if you will. But from the on the front end, for someone who’s listening to this right now, what would that experience look like? So I come on to experts and I want to get into when the index funds walk me through how I would do that.

00:10:08:11 – 00:10:36:07

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00:10:39:29 – 00:11:10:14

Alex Masharov: So right now, obviously what pre-launch? So, you know, you’re not going to see too much there, except for the UI that you can start familiarizing yourself with. Well, once we launch, what you’re going to see is you’re going to see literally a list of index funds. Now these index funds are going to is going to include funds that we’ve created ourselves. What I mean by that is funds that we have, if you like, we’ve organized ourselves, not funds composed of our own coins and whatnot. So you’ll see all the familiar tokens in there. You’ll also see funds created by other people that have been approved by us.

00:11:10:16 – 00:11:40:18

Alex Masharov: Now, when I say approved, all we’re doing is we’re just checking that there’s no there’s essentially no scam coins in a fund, right? What we don’t want people to do is to create an index fund that’s that’s composed of good, solid tokens, none. There’s one or two bullshit dodgy ones in there and people come into that not knowing what they’re doing. Remember, index funds are supposed to be a tool for, you know, for a relatively amateur investor, you know, and people lose their money because tokens crashed. So all we do is we just make sure that there’s no shard coins, basically.

00:11:40:20 – 00:12:14:06

Alex Masharov: And then we we know we’re proved to be good to go. And all you’ll see is a list of these funds with a buy button. Basically, you hit the buy button, you’ll be able to transact. It’s a single transaction in USD T or use the T equivalent. And what you’ll get back is essentially a stake of the index fund equivalent to the amount of equity that you’ve brought into it. Right. So it’s really as absolutely as close as we could make it to traditional index funds. It’s literally you just you just bring it, you know, you buy into the fund, you get what we call liquidity provider tokens.

00:12:14:09 – 00:12:45:15

Alex Masharov: You know, it’s technical. We don’t don’t have to go into it. Basically, what it means is that if you want to get your money back, you don’t need our approval. You can just literally transfer those LP tokens back onto the onto the fund and get your money back any time you want. So, you know there’s no risk to you and then you just hold them. You just do whatever you want. You know, if you if you want to take an active interest, you can obviously play with multiple index funds. The LP tokens themselves are actually stackable if you want to get into that. Otherwise, just like traditional finance, get into the index fund.

00:12:45:17 – 00:12:48:12

Alex Masharov: Leave it for years. Nice and easy.

00:12:48:26 – 00:13:12:01

Richard Carthon: Yeah, Sen, forget so quick on boarding ramp for your investors, some different types that you can get into, which is again, if you’ve worked with any for one case in the past or looked at these type of options, that’s typically how it goes. You have a couple of different even risk profiles within index funds. Even though all are supposed to be relatively safer, some are more risky than others. So you have a couple of options you have.

00:13:12:10 – 00:13:31:28

Alex Masharov: Yeah, that’s actually on our roadmap. So initially, the number of index funds is going to is not going to be too great. But as you know, as we go on, we’re going to create new ones. And exactly like you said, they’re actually going to be a risk profile based, you know, because yeah, if you, you know, in crypto, everybody’s used to, you know, it’s making a lot of money because there’s a lot of risk. But that’s,

00:13:33:15 – 00:14:03:28

Alex Masharov: you know, like that’s in a way I don’t want to. I’m not trying to. I’m not trying to get up anybody’s nose here, but that’s a game, you know, that’s not how traditional investment works. So for people that are coming from a more conservative perspective, they want to deal with risk levels and they’re quite prepared to take a lower profit if there’s a guarantee of stability there. So, yeah, exactly will offer index funds that basically, you know, if you want to if you want to go in for a higher risk fund, there it is if you want to go in for an extremely conservative fund. Here it is.

00:14:04:00 – 00:14:35:25

Alex Masharov: You just pick it, enter. You know, that’s how it is. We’ve got a guy on the team that’s that comes from from inside. If you like the world of traditional investment. Yeah, and yes, he I remember the first time we were discussing his idea, we had to explain it to him three times because he was just like, what? You just talking about an index fund? And he just could not believe that you couldn’t do this in a, you know, on a on a on a on a concept or on cryptocurrency, which is supposed to be all about investment, you just could not believe it.

00:14:36:10 – 00:14:37:12

Alex Masharov: And finally, he was like.

00:14:38:28 – 00:14:42:05

Alex Masharov: OK, we’ll just create an index fund. Sounds good to me.

00:14:43:21 – 00:15:14:20

Richard Carthon: Yeah, it is was Occam’s razor like sometimes the easiest thing is just like the solution and you’ll stumble across it. But like you said, it’s a it’s a it’s a difficult thing to overcome, but it sounds like I’ve been able to kind of crack it and I know I’m excited to to see how it comes into fruition. But going back to your security background? One of the huge things with a lot of this is always going to be security and with having potential third parties that would become an improved to go in and create these index funds as well.

00:15:14:22 – 00:15:19:11

Richard Carthon: Security is always going to be very important. What are some things that you’ll put in place to make sure that everything stays secure?

00:15:20:19 – 00:15:53:03

Richard Carthon: Definitely. Thanks, man. Put your hand up for me. All I got to do is get it right. So, yeah, as you said, man, like, you know, the whole point of this is to appeal to perhaps a more conservative investor, a person who’s coming from a more traditional space. So the idea to them, the idea that you would literally just transfer all your money to an account is just nonsense. Like, that’s not, you know, that’s not how that works. So one of the basis one of the most important things about our project is that all funds are retained on the smart contracts.

00:15:53:06 – 00:16:26:05

Richard Carthon: We don’t have access to them, nobody’s got access to them. They’re literally and you know, they’re they controlled by the smart contract on the blockchain so that the weak point, if you like, is the smart contract itself. And so we had to be really very sure that that this was going to work because otherwise we would be disappointing a lot of people. So in order to do that, we yeah, we went to the trouble and expense of getting our smart contracts fully certified and audited by Sarthak, who are a world leader in such things. And we worked with them for a little while.

00:16:26:07 – 00:16:59:28

Richard Carthon: You know, they they came back with a few things and we fixed them. So it was a bit of a collaboration there. And now we’ve achieved the point where, yeah, we’re fully certified, you know, certain things that were completely legit. There’s no way for those funds to leave the smart contracts. It’s a big deal for people who don’t know it’s a big deal. Yeah, yeah, it’s a huge deal. It was long. Yeah, it’s it’s a long. And if I may say so expensive process, but we felt we just had to do it specifically because it’s such a cornerstone of what we’re trying to do. You know, we’re really trying to, you know, this is not a this is not like a short term project, if you know what I mean.

00:17:00:00 – 00:17:15:00

Richard Carthon: Like, this isn’t like going into an NFT launch or something. The whole point of view is that we’re trying to put together a foundational component of of a platform for investment in crypto. So this is a long burner, and therefore we had to make sure we have got the foundation right.

00:17:15:20 – 00:17:47:20

Richard Carthon: Right. And that’s awesome. Huge. Congrats on getting that done. Like you said, it’s a it’s definitely an investment and it will stretch all that for the future. And it’s good to see that you’ll have a long term view on this. And what’s something like an index fund? I’d imagine it would be because when you think about mass adoption into the crypto space, you typically have things that people can bridge that make sense to them, that you can then bridge into this newer space, which a lot of people are familiar with index funds. How do you think this is going to help further mass adoption? What are some other things that you think are going on that are going to continue to further mass adoption in this space?

00:17:49:00 – 00:18:19:17

Richard Carthon: So mass adoption is the very word. I mean, what I’m personally most interested in at the moment in crypto is actually bringing in more people into the crypto space, regardless of what project that is right. You know, I you know, I think obviously, you know, because I’m I’m behind that, you know, I believe that we’re putting together a very good solution for for for new entrants into crypto. But but if for whatever reason, they choose to not go with the specs, they choose to go with somebody else. I’m fine with that. I just want to.

00:18:20:02 – 00:19:04:05

Richard Carthon: I kind of want to open people’s science on sounding very cycle here. I want to open people’s eyes as to what crypto really is because I think the population at large and especially kind of unexpectedly. But I think players from the traditional finance space are actually usually quite clued up about these things. They hold crypto in this still in this kind of disdain, and they think that is just some imaginary coin that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and they don’t really understand it. So the most exciting thing to me is actually creating tools, platforms, teaching material, whatever it is that actually helps to ease people over that, you know, over that kind of critical moment when they when they get it.

00:19:04:28 – 00:19:39:00

Richard Carthon: And I think this is I think that he expects is a really important stepping stone because an index fund is something that is immediately recognizable to anybody from traditional finance, no matter what level they’re at. You know, it could be a mom and pop mom and pop investor that’s got, you know, two thousand dollars in a fund somewhere could be a could be a hedge fund dealing with billions. They both deal with indices in one way or another. And if if we can just point them to this thing and say, Listen, man, you know, here’s something that you’re very, very familiar with. Let’s just explain, you know, let’s explain the difference to you with regards to how it works in the crypto space.

00:19:39:14 – 00:20:09:03

Richard Carthon: They immediately give context. You know, they immediately have an understanding of what this thing is, whereas previously it was just imaginary imaginary ether coins somewhere. And so that’s yeah, that’s that’s very, very key. It’s very important to me. It’s very important to my team is this is a project that enables participation in crypto by as many people as possible because the more people come in, you know, the faster is going to become accepted. And basically, you know, that’s a win win situation. We all went from that.

00:20:09:22 – 00:20:39:08

Richard Carthon: No doubt, man. And I think it’s crucial as we continue to move towards mass adoption is part of any really awesome product. Is the onboarding and the initial user experience for your brand new person who doesn’t necessarily know or have never been in the crypto when they’re trying to come and get into your next one, will they have to already have crypto to do it? Or will they be able to come in and add a credit card? Or why are put in information like how are they going to be able to onboard into getting into one of these funds?

00:20:40:00 – 00:20:42:21

Richard Carthon: Yeah, yeah. You’re pushing me, man, you’re pushing me.

00:20:44:14 – 00:20:45:03

Richard Carthon: So it’s fine

00:20:45:05 – 00:20:47:19

Richard Carthon: if you don’t want to talk about this, by the way, we can also not say all of this.

00:20:48:02 – 00:20:58:08

Richard Carthon: Of course, I want to talk about it. I to talk about everything. So, yeah, look, you’ve had a really big, a really big thing as well. This is absolutely a key barrier to a lot of people.

00:20:59:27 – 00:21:19:09

Richard Carthon: So we on our road map, we already have. We already have plans to build a payment gateway, so we’ve got it. We already have a technical partner that we’re working with to make that happen. There’s still a few things to go in there. Most of them are actually non-technical. Most of them are to do with regulation, something that will probably touch on a bit later.

00:21:20:24 – 00:21:55:16

Richard Carthon: But the ads at launch, where people will need to already have crypto funds in order to bring them into, you know, bring them into the index funds, that’s just that’s just a fact of life, you know? So that’s a limitation. That’s a limitation. We got to, you know, we’ve got to live with the way that we’re making it easier for people. There is, as I said before that you need you only need one to get in, you know, as long as you go to USD, you can get in. You don’t need to. For example, if there’s eight tokens on a pool, you don’t need to like, hold a stake in each of them already in order to be able to come into it.

00:21:56:18 – 00:22:16:20

Richard Carthon: So, you know, we do a whole bunch of a whole bunch of exchanges behind the scenes to, you know, to allow that to happen. The next step off of that, of course, as you say, is to just let people enter a credit card number or transfer funds from an account and basically get into that way. That’s something that’s absolutely in the works. There’s just a few more hurdles to jump through, right?

00:22:16:22 – 00:22:48:15

Richard Carthon: And but it’s great that it’s in your roadmap and that you have that in there, right? So the the part of crypto right now is that to get into a lot of these really unique opportunities, you do have to be in the space. As in, you have to be able to have some crypto to do some of these things. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t map out and have ways for more and more people to be able to come on even easier. So awesome that you all have that mapped out in that you are doing that and you brought up another big thing that’s always on top of people’s minds regulation. How has setting up an index fund been with all the regulators out there?

00:22:50:25 – 00:23:11:01

Richard Carthon: Yeah. Tough is the answer, so yeah, we’re we’re still working through. We’re still working through it. We’re confident we’ve got a solution, obviously, but. Regulation is really the buzzword of, I think, is going to be the buzzword of twenty twenty two for crypto right now, especially over the last

00:23:12:20 – 00:23:40:09

Richard Carthon: two years, probably not no longer than two years. Crypto is is kind of. Is no longer a game, if you know, if you know what I mean. Now, obviously two years ago, it was already possible to make huge amounts of money in crypto. So I’m not suggesting that it was a game at that point, but it’s being treated as a much more serious thing. Over the last two years, a lot of government actors and big, you know, big players, shall we say, are becoming very interested in regulating it.

00:23:41:25 – 00:24:32:26

Richard Carthon: And it’s not it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s just a challenge, you know, there are benefits and opportunities there. But it’s something that know not just us, but everybody I guess has to think about more and more is, you know, how do we deal with KYC requirements? How do we deal with financial regulations going financial service provider regulations, all of these things, we’ve got a solution that works at the moment. You know, it’s an ever changing, ever changing field. This is actually another reason that I think projects like ours are very important is because if you were to expose the end customer to having to do all this, they would never in a million years write like if if I just know one guy, you know, if I took a guy off the street in Los Angeles and I basically said, All right, man, listen, you know, you want to invest 100k in the crypto.

00:24:33:16 – 00:24:45:15

Richard Carthon: You know, here’s a pamphlet of 300 pages of the rules and regulations you need to be aware of, literally not to go to jail. All right. Yeah. Like this is this is how it is. Read all this. Figure it out. Let me know what you want to do.

00:24:47:02 – 00:25:29:18

Richard Carthon: No, right, so so we have to do it for them, and we have to do it for them in a way that doesn’t obligate them to some kind of complex additional process, which is which is how is how it’s been four in a number of in a number of cases. You know, I remember back in the day when the trade on Binance or you had to do was create a, you know, create an account like you would on any online shop. And you know where you go these days, you have to go obviously through extraordinary KYC measures in order to, you know, to trade. So what we want to do is we want to make sure that people as much as possible are away from that or they don’t have to do anything that is not absolutely required of them and that the platform so he expects or another platform does it for them.

00:25:29:28 – 00:26:13:12

Richard Carthon: So right. And towards that end, you know, we leverage the principles of DeFi. We leverage the principles of of allowing people to transact through anonymous anonymous pools. Index funds are obviously, you know, depending on the tokens inside them, are safeguarded in various ways. It’s just about making sure that we we’re compliant with everything we need to be and our customers are compliant without even knowing what it is they’re compliant with. Because I think that this is one of the yeah, this is one of the things even in traditional finance is this this onerous amount of legislation that’s placed on people who just want to do something very, very basic, which is just earn money on their investment? Right.

00:26:13:14 – 00:26:15:19

Richard Carthon: That’s right. That’s all there is. There’s no more to it than that.

00:26:17:23 – 00:26:26:15

Richard Carthon: So regulation is the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity of twenty twenty two for crypto, in my opinion. And you’re already hearing it printed

00:26:27:17 – 00:26:48:26

Richard Carthon: round that go through it again because Alex, just for some great, great, great knowledge out there, which is really important as we look again back to mass adoption of companies handling a lot of that to keep the safety of their end users in check and without them having to be worried about this because it can be a detrimental.

00:26:50:11 – 00:27:20:12

Richard Carthon: It could be detrimental to them even coming on and wanting to use the product in the first place, so the impetus definitely is going to continue to fall on these companies to figure a lot of that out. And the more that you have figured out and are doing things by the book and doing in a safe way, the more adoption you’re going to get because people are going to be like, Hey, here’s a trusted source, here’s a way that you can come in, et cetera. And like you said, you’re playing the long game, you’re doing the groundwork that you need to to make sure that everybody feels safe, secure about coming on and using everything you’re building.

00:27:20:14 – 00:27:20:29

Richard Carthon: So that’s

00:27:21:01 – 00:27:50:07

Richard Carthon: awesome. I always think like what I you know what? I myself use this project, you know, like what? I actually could I be if I wanted to come in and do this? Could I be bothered? You know, and if if all I have to do is, you know, connect the wallet and make a make a transaction, then yeah, sure. All right. But if I try to do that, then, you know, up comes a nine page long form that I have, you know, fill in my, you know, my dog’s maiden name. Then, you know, I’m just not going to bother. Right? All right. So we’ve got to make sure that it works for real people.

00:27:50:28 – 00:28:09:26

Richard Carthon: Absolutely. And sounds like you are definitely doing that. But Alex, again, maybe you’ve dropped a lot of amazing information for us today. I always like to wrap up our interviews with two fun questions. The first one being with all the information and knowledge you have right now, if you go in part one or two pieces of wisdom to yourself when you first got it started on this venture. What would you tell yourself?

00:28:11:23 – 00:28:45:16

Richard Carthon: Buy Bitcoin a good a good piece of advice. Yes. So I guess the most important thing I would say, I would say, is don’t assume that anyone else knows what they’re doing just because you haven’t got it completely figured out yet. You know, when, when, when I first started, I kind of had this impression. I looked at a whole bunch of projects out there and I thought they had it all figured out. And I thought they were just I thought they just had it made. I thought they knew everything. And then I realize now that actually, you know, more than half of them were just complete bullshit.

00:28:45:26 – 00:29:09:21

Richard Carthon: You know, there’s a lot of there’s just a lot of crap out there, unfortunately. You know, the crypto space of the moment is very oversaturated with with people who unfortunately do not know what they’re doing, and it can be hard to tell the difference. So just a piece of advice is take your time, do do your due diligence, do your own research yourself as far as you’re able. And if you, if any red flags come up, just move on.

00:29:11:12 – 00:29:26:01

Richard Carthon: Hey, you heard it here first. Great, great. Two pieces of advice to give back to yourself, and I think a lot of people can definitely benefit from it. But as a final fun question, I always like to wrap up with what is a final thought that you want to leave with everyone listening today?

00:29:28:23 – 00:29:31:24

Richard Carthon: Well, I guess I guess the final thought is.

00:29:33:23 – 00:30:05:04

Richard Carthon: Yeah, it is my fondest wish that everybody take the time to just continue to educate themselves on what crypto and the idea of crypto really is. I think that even among people that are already, you know, already playing in the space that already holds even even quite significant assets in crypto, there’s really no understanding of what it is. You know, there’s an understanding, Oh, it’s a coin, it’s worth something. Here’s an NFT, it’s worth something. But you know, just like in the real world, it’s not enough to know that, you know, here’s a here’s a dollar bill.

00:30:05:06 – 00:30:39:14

Richard Carthon: Two of them buys a coke or, you know, here’s a gold ring. It’s worth a lot of money. If that’s not enough for you to really understand how to work, how to work with the concept, you know, in order to have any hope of being successful with investment or with just using your money, intelligently need to know a little bit about what underpins the system. Where does the money come from? Where does it go? How is how is exchange controlled? Who controls it? Because without that underpinning, you’re kind of, you know, you’ve got random bits of knowledge and they’re free floating and there’s no connection between them.

00:30:39:24 – 00:31:18:04

Richard Carthon: And I’m not saying everybody needs to go out there and do a degree in economics or or finance, but just even the odd YouTube video from, you know, from somebody who knows what the hell they’re talking about can really help just piece it together in your head. At the moment, crypto is crypto is still pretty disjointed and random. You know, there’s there are very, very serious projects out there with very serious financial backing, occupying pretty much the same amount of mind space. I think in the collective consciousness as projects that are just doing something completely, you know, putting out multicolored baboons, it’s, you know, there’s no connection between the two and yet and yet they’re there.

00:31:18:06 – 00:31:29:11

Richard Carthon: So just continue to support, you know, continue to educate yourselves, continue to support the projects that you believe in in the crypto space. Let’s all move forward together because at the end of the day, crypto is a good thing for all of us.

00:31:30:03 – 00:31:41:18

Richard Carthon: Absolutely. Alex, great. Great. Great final thought. Thank you so much for sharing that with us and for sharing all the amazing insights you had today. What are ways that people can connect with you and learn more about Exp?

00:31:42:29 – 00:32:16:28

Richard Carthon: I got our website experience Dot Finance. And there’s a link to our Telegram channel there as well. You can get in touch with us by email and, you know, whatever else. So we are already live on. Be assuming that. So there’s a link at the top right of the website that you can click and check out our UI, even though it’s going to be updated soon where we’re launching in quarter one this year. So over the next or the next two or three months. Keep an eye out for announcements and all that on our website as usual. Yeah, just keep an eye on us over the next over the next few months and come along and join the ride.

00:32:17:29 – 00:32:48:10

Richard Carthon: Awesome. Sounds great. Everyone makes sure to go check that out. I really appreciate you sharing all the information again, Alex, and for everyone listening. Stay cryptocurrency. Hey, CryptoQuant crew, we want to give a quick shout out to all of our faithful listeners out there. It’s been an amazing journey and we really appreciate your support throughout the years as we’ve been growing as a community. Each episode, we decided that we would start sharing some of the reviews that you were leaving for us. For today, we would like to share this review. Today’s review comes from Meghan with podcasting. You, Richard does such a good job covering a variety of topics.

00:32:48:14 – 00:33:22:10

Richard Carthon: Their guest offer valuable insight as well. I would recommend this podcast to anyone looking to be inspired and informed. We sincerely appreciate this review and all reviews and would like to ask that if you’re enjoying our show, please take a quick moment to go and leave a review on our podcast so that hopefully we can be highlighting your review next. Simply go to our show notes or go to our website where we have a link, where you can share your review today. Hey, everyone, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For more information on today’s episode and all of our episodes, please visit us at WW w that crypto dash current, not SEO.

00:33:22:18 – 00:33:54:00

Richard Carthon: You can also find a link in the show notes. Want to stay up to date on the latest news in cryptocurrency? Sign up for our newsletter today. You’ll receive daily emails Monday through Friday that are personalized and curated content specific to you and your interest. Powered by artificial intelligence, you can either go to our show notes or go to our website to sign up today. Are you an accredited investor looking to invest in cryptocurrency? Quezon City Capital can help go to Quezon City Capital dot com for more information. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the quality of our podcast each week are improving.

00:33:54:07 – 00:34:09:11

Richard Carthon: I can only thank my amazing producer Andrew Darida with the Ritter Productions, who has been putting all of this together. If you have any podcast music or audio needs, please go to Ritter Productions dot com. That’s D-R.I. TR Productions dot com.

00:34:15:03 – 00:34:28:02

Richard Carthon: Thanks for tuning into another episode of cryptocurrency with Richard Condon’s. We’ll be back with more exciting developments from the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency next. But until then, stay cryptocurrency.

00:34:37:27 – 00:34:39:27

Richard Carthon: He was now.

00:34:44:19 – 00:35:19:09

Richard Carthon: Thank you for joining us for another episode of cryptocurrency. Just one quick reminder cryptocurrency is a cryptocurrency and blockchain education platform that’s bridging the gap between the curious newcomers who are just discovering the space and the thought leaders who are shaping its future. All opinions expressed by Richard Lathan, the cryptocurrency team, and their guests on this show are exclusively their own opinions. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Richard. The team and their guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or to follow his financial advice. This show and any other cryptocurrency production is exclusively for informational purposes.