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

00:00:31:26 – 00:00:48:17

Richard Carthon: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon and today I got a very special guest all the way out in Malta working on all kinds of cool projects. He is the CEO of Blox Live and also the founder of ForumPay. We have Joshua Tate. How are you doing today?

00:00:49:03 – 00:00:51:13

Joshua Tate: I’m doing excellent Richard. Thanks for having me on. 

00:00:52:13 – 00:01:27:28

Richard Carthon: Of course. Well, excited to learn about all the various projects you have going on and also for everyone listening, if you have been up to date on Crypto Current TV and everything we have going on with that, we are in partnership actually with Josh and his team with Blox Live and it’s been absolutely amazing content and excited to be a part of that and excited that y’all are going to get to see how he was able to get this originated and provide all this amazing constant, just content that’s coming out to educate everyone and learn about various parts of Crypto and Blockchain. So Josh, let’s go ahead to start off with a little bit of background on yourself. 

00:01:28:00 – 00:01:39:21

Joshua Tate: Sure and Richard thank you. The podcast is great and at Blox Live, I know we really enjoy your contribution and the content. It’s been a great partnership and when we hope it lasts for a very long time. 

00:01:40:18 – 00:01:42:16

Richard Carthon: Thank you. 

00:01:43:09 – 00:02:57:24

Joshua Tate: So a little bit about me, I am, I guess from background education, I’m a lawyer. I don’t practice law, haven’t practiced law in years. I was actually a renewable energy and real estate guy for a number of years before I got into tech about five years ago sort of as the story goes. I got into technology through a company called System 73 and the chairman of that company who’s a very, very successful guy from the U.S. invested and acquired the company with an eye towards solving all of the challenges in distributing video content over the Internet at scale. It was and is a brilliant concept, but it sort of led me into the Crypto space in an odd way. When the company, Systems 73, was sort of in its infancy, we began building our own OTT channels. So just channels on the Internet and various disciplines. The chairman, Bill Irby, and myself were both very interested in Crypto, really from an intellectual perspective, more than necessarily a financial perspective, given my sort of background in energy, in renewable energy, I kind of loved the concept of applying the Blockchain to the industry, the energy industry. 

00:02:58:19 – 00:02:59:11

Richard Carthon: Absolutely. 

00:02:59:15 – 00:04:10:23

Joshua Tate: It was still very cool and the chairman was interested in all different facets of it and it continues to be. What we found when we would sit around the office on, you know, a Saturday afternoon and just brainstorm was that there were very few good outlets for information on the Internet. This was three or four years ago. You know, you could go to YouTube and at the time, there was a lot of information, but it was very difficult to sift through. You could sort of go to maybe Chatter or CNBC or Bloomberg and once a week they may pay it 15 minutes of attention, right? So whether it was from a finance or a technology perspective, it was difficult to really get good and reliable information over the Internet about Crypto and Blockchain. And we were literally just in a position to educate ourselves because again we were intellectual interests. So we said you know, “We built all this technology to help broadcasters scale and distribute content all over the world, specifically video content creators and broadcasters. Why don’t we build a channel that we sort of model as the CNBC if you will or Bloomberg or something of Crypto and Blockchain?” 

00:04:13:18 – 00:04:52:06

Joshua Tate: We liked the idea and we very much kind of just jumped in both feet and decided to do it. So within a very short period of time, we identified a really talented team of producers and writers, videographers, the whole nine yards. We found a studio in this beautiful island of Malta, a big commercial studio within a major television studio sort of company. And I hired people from all around the world to come and join me with this adventure in creating Blox Live TV. We started with literally doing like four or five hours of live content every day from the studio.

00:04:52:08 – 00:04:52:23

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:04:52:25 – 00:05:32:20

Joshua Tate: Malta at the time was very much promoting itself as the Blockchain Island, so a lot of the very influential people in Crypto and Blockchain were in Malta, could come into the studio, talk to us and do real in-person interviews and we had great debates and things. Blox Live has since become a little bit of an international phenomenon outside of the confines of Malta. We developed kind of remote studios across the globe and then we started doing a lot of really working with collaborators and influencers that could touch every corner of the earth, so that we got a much broader spectrum, like yourself Richard.

00:05:32:22 – 00:05:33:07

Richard Carthon: Sure.

00:05:33:09 – 00:05:59:24

Joshua Tate: So that we can really touch, reach, as far as we could reach in getting the right people and interesting people to talk about Crypto and inform the world about what Crypto was. Again not only from a financial perspective, but also from a technology perspective and how it can be applied to you know, from energy to finance to art to tracking avocados, you know, for sourcing of foods and vegetables across the world.

00:05:59:26 – 00:06:00:11

Richard Carthon: Sure.

00:06:00:13 – 00:07:02:00

Joshua Tate: That was the beginning of sort of my evolution into this particular industry. The next evolution I guess, became when I asked the team at Blox Live, I said, “Would be a really interesting thing to do a series on. I want to do a three part series on the six characteristics of money and how Cryptocurrency fits in with those six characteristics so we can take those criteria,” you know, “The visibility, portability, fungibility, acceptability, so on so forth.” You take those six characteristics and compare a tulip to a cow to a dollar to a euro to a bar of gold to a Bitcoin or an Ether or whatever it is. Let’s do all those and then let’s compare and contrast against those five, excuse me, six characteristics of money and I want to focus on looking at people not just in the Crypto community because we know we’re fans, right?

00:07:02:22 – 00:07:03:07

Richard Carthon: Yeah, definitely. 

00:07:03:09 – 00:07:51:24

Joshua Tate: So let’s look at sort of the skeptics. I won’t say the naysayers, but the skeptics as well. And so they would talk to PhD’s and micro and macro economics and they would talk to hardcore finance guys and then hardcore Crypto and everywhere in between really. Generally speaking, what they did was, what they concluded at the end of the series was the Crypto in fact is or can be argued, certainly very strongly argued, to be superior to most other currencies and five of those six characteristics, right? In that sixth characteristic, we all kind of know are becoming appreciative of the fact that it just absolutely fails and that’s acceptable, meaning you just can’t generally use crypto in your daily life, right?

00:07:52:04 – 00:07:52:19

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:07:52:21 – 00:08:10:24

Joshua Tate: I can’t get go buy a cup of coffee with it. I can’t hop on Amazon and buy whatever my subscription is and that was the genesis of my next sort of interest outside of the media and in Fintech specifically related to Blockchain, solving for the payment piece. 

00:08:11:09 – 00:08:11:24

Richard Carthon: Awesome.

00:08:11:26 – 00:08:13:05

Joshua Tate: And that’s where ForumPay came.

00:08:14:06 – 00:08:57:15

Richard Carthon: Yeah. And before we dive into that and thank you for that you know, just the whole progression. I just want to jump back into a couple of things that you brought up on, especially on the education piece. It’s very interesting that just like you said, what brought you in initially was a curiosity of how do I educate myself and surround myself with thought leaders to not only bring more knowledge to myself and in what you’re trying to do, but then to also bring it to a larger audience. And you strategically found this place in a foreign country that was being very receptive and open to the fact that they also wanted to be seen as this hub that can get out this amazing, just content about Cryptocurrency, Blockchain and everything else, just being that facilitator. 

00:08:57:18 – 00:09:38:12

Richard Carthon: I’m sure throughout the years of you doing this, you’ve been in contact with all kinds of amazing and thoughtful people in this space and it’s really broadened your network and opened your mind to a lot of opportunities that are in this space. Could you kind of speak to that networking piece of what are the kind of people that you’ve been able to find in the Crypto and Blockchain space and how was that kind of potentially changed the trajectory of you know, you used to be a lawyer used to do a bunch of other things in your profession, even in the real estate world, but now it seems like the focus is more into the Crypto space. Can you say that has been, a lot of that has been influenced through the people that you’ve been meeting throughout the years?

00:09:39:19 – 00:10:59:21

Joshua Tate: Absolutely. I mean, the educational pieces you’ve identified are incredibly important. It may be one of the most important things in what we do in the Crypto and Blockchain space, just due to some of its origins and some of what I consider to be unfair stigmas attached to the industry. The way that very successful people like yourself, have been able to do that is get out and educate the community, both on the Crypto side and non-Crypto side, skeptics side about it. You know, when we started Blox Live, the buzz around the channel and all the people coming in and out of the studio, it would be very difficult for me to name even a top 10 list of the folks that I met that sort of influenced me in space, but there’s some great ones. Michael Dupree was one of the founders of EasyBit, Adam Back, who’s probably one of the most brilliant minds of mining that exists here. There’s a whole bunch of those guys and girls that I’ve met in the space. My producers were incredibly influential. When we started Blox Live, my producer knew far more about Crypto than I did. And again, I was in the process of educating myself through building something that I thought would not only help educate me, but also educate others. 

00:10:59:24 – 00:11:00:11

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:11:00:13 – 00:11:34:19

Joshua Tate: And so they helped educate me from the very beginning, which really piqued my interest in it. There was a kind of an ongoing joke around the studio, saying, “Okay, we’ve got to get Josh in and talk about this and talk about this.” And I said, “No I don’t want to listen because you guys know what I’m talking about, I’m trying to very much learn.” So there’ve been a number of very influential people, sort of in the space who have become great friends, advisers and really have encouraged me to continue my journey in the space.

00:11:36:18 – 00:11:39:01

Richard Carthon: Yeah. Which is great and what I was gonna add to that. 

00:11:39:03 – 00:11:45:15

Joshua Tate: It’s just a proposal. You know, kind of closing things to be able to thank all the folks who had some influence. 

00:11:46:12 – 00:12:16:26

Richard Carthon: No, for sure. And what I really want to touch on there was just a lot of the listeners that come to our podcast are not only interested in the Crypto and Blockchain space, some are aspiring entrepreneurs and just need that extra push to just start. And the whole point is that of course with education, you’re informing yourself. The whole point of this is to spark some sort of curiosity in you, so that you can pursue it and take action. And it’s okay to not know everything and to learn along the process and to learn along the way, as you’re pursuing something that you are curious about. 

00:12:16:28 – 00:12:42:18

Richard Carthon: And so just on that kind of transitioning back to ForumPay, you were curious as you were doing your research on the six different elements of what makes money and you saw that basically usability and being able to use in everyday use cases wasn’t there. And so with that pursuit of how do we create something to help with that you started ForumPay, so can you tell us a little bit more about you know, what it is and how are you helping to solve that problem?

00:12:43:24 – 00:13:04:08

Joshua Tate: Sure. We have, you know, to touch on what you said about the entrepreneurial spirit and things, it’s one of those you educate yourself, you learn a lot. Any time you build a business, I built a handful of businesses in my career, but you never know everything. If you ever think that you’re the one that knows everything, you’re probably in trouble again. 

00:13:04:19 – 00:13:05:04

Richard Carthon: Definitely.

00:13:05:06 – 00:14:28:13

Joshua Tate: But when you get into it, you dive into it and you become passionate about it, that’s really what inspires that entrepreneurial spirit to continue. So with Crypto for me, it started with media and then carried into something that I was a little more comfortable in which was the finance perspective, but with ForumPay, really the genesis of the idea was in what I described before. We did an article about it because I was interested in it or a series of articles and the other folks were interested in it as well. The very popular series, by the way in amongst all of the you know, sort of custom series of content that we created at Blox Live, but once the conclusion had been reached, you know, seeing as I have some pretty decent experience in tech companies, I said “Let’s put together a team of Blockchain developers and let’s find some really talented folks and let’s give a certain amount of criteria.” And it seems to be easier if you come up with a good structure of what you’re trying to fix in the world, right? Or the problem you’re trying to solve and then you attack it in a very methodical way forward, you’re always going to make mistakes and learn what you don’t know along the way, but as long as you approach it from some sort of decent methodology, that’s how in my opinion, you can build a sound foundation for building a business.

00:14:29:02 – 00:14:29:17

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:14:29:19 – 00:14:37:29

Joshua Tate: The criteria for ForumPay that really we looked at, again was get really talented Blockchain developers because I’m not one, right?

00:14:38:01 – 00:14:38:16

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:14:38:18 – 00:15:25:11

Joshua Tate: Surround yourself with people who are really, really good at what they do. And then I set three criteria, I said, “I think that if this is a business worth investing, you have to solve for three specific things.” One: You can’t force somebody to have to use something they’re not familiar with from a consumer perspective. So with ForumPay, it was I don’t want somebody to download my app, I don’t want somebody to have to, you know, go buy a specific coin necessarily, although that can be valuable for some people or anything else. Basically I said the system has to be wallet agnostic and when I say wallet agnostic, it means that anybody who owns Crypto on their whatever wallet they have, because we all have our favorites, right?

00:15:25:13 – 00:15:25:28

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:15:26:00 – 00:15:46:18

Joshua Tate: Whether it’s Coin Base or Jack’s app or whatever it is. I have to be able to, any consumer that has that wallet has to be able to interact with my system. That was the first criteria. The second criteria, I guess there were four, second criteria was we have to be able to accept any of the popular Cryptocurrencies. We can’t be tribal to just Bitcoin, we can’t be tribal, to just an Ethereum.

00:15:46:20 – 00:15:47:05

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:15:47:07 – 00:16:27:24

Joshua Tate: You know, we need to be somewhat agnostic when it comes to Crypto. Now obviously, you’re not going to accept every of the two thousand plus coins or tokens that are out there in the day, but as long as you generally go after 95 percent of the market, you should be pretty safe and you’re trying to be able to provide the resource to. The next criteria was the merchant can’t have to care because the education really comes in for ForumPay at the merchant level, which is telling somebody look, there is I think the last stat I read was 20 percent of the global population in 2019 owned Cryptocurrency. 

00:16:28:09 – 00:16:28:24

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:16:28:26 – 00:16:30:17

Joshua Tate: That’s a pretty big consumer market, right?

00:16:30:26 – 00:16:31:18

Richard Carthon: Yeah. 

00:16:31:26 – 00:17:15:15

Joshua Tate: So a merchant, who is otherwise unfamiliar with Cryptocurrency or the Blockchain or anything else sort of in this industry needs to understand that they just are approaching a growing and very passionate consumer base. What they need to know is that whatever money it is that they like to accept or what goes into their bank account goes into their bank and that they don’t have some perceived risk between the volatility of a Bitcoin or something like this. So the next criteria effectively what I’m getting at is it has to be instant, the conversion literally from Crypto to Fiat has to be instant and it has to go to the merchant’s account, just like it would if someone was paying with a credit card, right? 

00:17:17:08 – 00:17:17:23

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:17:17:25 – 00:17:47:18

Joshua Tate: That was the next criteria and the last criteria was I also can’t be in a position or don’t want to be in a position to ask the merchant to then have to have a special bank account somewhere necessarily, right? When PayPal began for example, both parties had that PayPal. I didn’t want that necessarily to have to be the case. The merchant really needs to be able to take a payment from someone who’s standing in front of them making that payment of something of value that instantly converts to what they perceive as value and then goes into their bank account like anything else. 

00:17:47:22 – 00:18:40:06

Joshua Tate: I said, “If we can solve for those 3, 3.5, 4 criteria, then I think we actually have something that’s very valuable in the marketplace.” And it does something else, which is really important to point out. From a purely Crypto perspective, the ability to solve for the acceptability fact, right? Meaning make it a modicum of transaction and solve for the different factors that we solve for, so that it is a real and acceptable format of payment does a really unique thing to the value of Cryptocurrency. Once you’ve made it transactional in nature, you will effectively reduce the volatility of it. That’s a natural occurrence of making it a modicum of transaction. Once you reduce the volatility of Cryptocurrencies, naturally it would sound economic principle, would say that the value then should increase. 

00:18:40:16 – 00:18:41:01

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:18:41:03 – 00:19:31:07

Joshua Tate: So there’s an interesting market benefit to it for everyone involved. And then there’s an interesting collateral benefit, specifically to Cryptocurrencies in the long term. That doesn’t even get to or begin to approach the benefits of actually using Blockchain, just as a technology to consummate things. The benefits of using Blockchain from a security perspective, the no transfer of personal consumer data, so no customer security you know, I.D. theft risk. Those are all things that are really, really interesting about the Blockchain. So you know, when you start to dive into payments as being a real mechanism for mass adoption, it is very multifaceted in how it works and applies across the board. 

00:19:32:15 – 00:20:44:28

Richard Carthon: Yeah, for sure. And thank you for breaking down, basically the three plus steps roughly to get all of that accomplished and just like you said, it’s multifaceted and there’s so much that goes into being able to make that work in such a way that you don’t have to think, you could just pull up in use. It becomes intuitive and getting involved in Crypto right now and even Blockchain is a friction field experience. And when we can start to create atmospheres of frictionless experiences and just I can pick up and use and just go, that is when I know we’re hitting the right place. And I strongly believe that the companies that are building right now to make it intuitive and to create experiences that are any and everyone can use this right now. You don’t need an instruction manual, you can just pick up and start doing it, in the next five to 10 years, they’re going to be the ones that just soar and just crush it and it’s because they’ve been doing all the hard work right now. And so I just you know, kind of to transition a little bit you know, where is ForumPay at right now in its product development and what is the trajectory looking like right now?

00:20:46:08 – 00:21:33:18

Joshua Tate: So from a product development standpoint, it’s done, it’s complete and it’s out. It took us some real time and very much the hard work of some very, very talented Blockchain developers to make sure that the technology worked. And also some great financial minds to understand how we make the whole entire ecosystem work in the Crypto world. One of the major challenges is to be totally frank with you, is once the technology was done and we had all the financial architecture and the payment flows and you know, the QR codes and the ability to multiple Cryptocurrencies, all those various features or benefits, it was making sure that we had multiple redundancies in the exchange and the banking infrastructure component because at the end of the day, we’re still settling merchants accounts and whatever their preferred Fiat is, right?

00:21:34:06 – 00:21:34:21

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:21:34:23 – 00:22:04:23

Joshua Tate: As we think banking tends to sway in one way or another depending on which way the wind blows, well traditional banking anyway, on its position on Crypto. So I basically was in a position where I said “Look we’re in payments, we’re handling people’s money, this is their livelihood. I’m not going to launch this product without multiple levels of redundancy and just simply the settlement process, which is moving the people’s, you know, funds to their account once it’s been converted.” 

00:22:05:05 – 00:22:05:20

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:22:05:22 – 00:22:15:18

Joshua Tate: So that was actually a challenge for us that I said that I wouldn’t launch the business without these five levels of redundancy in there. We now have nine and so.

00:22:15:20 – 00:22:16:08

Richard Carthon: Excellent. 

00:22:16:11 – 00:23:15:24

Joshua Tate: We’ve been in the market for just over 30 days now. It’s been a very organic approach from one side, meaning little old Josh goes and knocks on merchant’s doors and you know, kind of espouses the benefits of ForumPay and the ability to accept Crypto and so we’ve gotten some really fun merchants that I’ve actually been able to go and sort of talk about the product and the market with them. And then some of the much larger scale opportunities have resulted from us integrating ForumPay into existing payments infrastructure, where they already have lots and lots and lots of merchants. So in the future, I think a lot of merchants within the very near future, without disclosing too much, a lot of merchants in a lot of different sectors will see that their payments provider will be offering them ForumPay within their service portfolio very soon. As soon as actually the middle of next month, in certain circumstances. 

00:23:16:06 – 00:23:18:02

Richard Carthon: That’s awesome. 

00:23:18:23 – 00:23:29:04

Joshua Tate: So that’s been really fun. It’s one of those things that when you get it in front of somebody and you’re able to talk to them, like you and I’ve talked about and educate them, there’s nothing wrong. 

00:23:29:15 – 00:23:30:00

Richard Carthon: Yes.

00:23:30:02 – 00:23:31:00

Joshua Tate: It’s really interesting. 

00:23:31:02 – 00:23:31:17

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:23:31:19 – 00:24:01:28

Joshua Tate: And it has a multitude of benefits that people don’t even necessarily totally appreciate yet, but they will. And I’ve always been a big proponent of saying, “Look, I don’t think Cryptocurrencies or or any particular Cryptocurrency is going to replace Fiat” in any you know, it’s just not. Fiat is not going away, but if the traditional world thinks that Cryptocurrencies are going away, they’re also fooling themselves. 

00:24:02:00 – 00:24:02:15

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:24:02:17 – 00:24:08:28

Joshua Tate: Now if those worlds can seamlessly interact, well then you’ve got something there. 

00:24:09:00 – 00:24:09:15

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:24:09:17 – 00:24:24:15

Joshua Tate: And then the adoption goes up one way or another, depending on where the market goes. So a lot of what I do is really focusing on how to make those worlds interact seamlessly, which allows Blockchain and Crypto to flourish in a global environment at scale. 

00:24:25:19 – 00:25:09:18

Richard Carthon: Right. And something you touched on I want to dive into just a little deeper real quick or just to reemphasize is the power of communication y’all. Being able to take something very complex or what people perceive as complex because if you don’t understand something, you are being introduced to something that is changed, there’s always going to be friction and resistance. However the way that you make the resistance less or even get them to get to a point to where they want to listen and receive is to be able to effectively communicate it to make it interesting and then have them think of how they can apply it in their own world. And if you can effectively figure out how to communicate those talking points in anything that you’re doing, it’s amazing how much progress and how much ground you can cover with doing all this. 

00:25:09:20 – 00:26:24:21

Richard Carthon: And you know, I’m sure with Josh doing Blox Live over the years and just all the communication that he’s done, he’s figured out how to refine it and be really good at his craft. And so you know, my challenge to everyone listen today is if you have your own project that you’re working on or something that you’re passionate about, figure out how to effectively communicate it in a simple way that your mom, your father, a child could understand that really quickly because when you can bring something down to its base, you truly understand it and comprehend it. And if you can’t do that for yourself, then the challenge is to go and truly learn it for yourself. You can go and communicate it. So you know, Josh, awesome work with ForumPay. Definitely looking out to see your big announcement in the next month or so and I understand how this is going to have so much power in the marketplace by being a bridge from Fiat to Crypto. And yeah man, I’m excited for it. And something else that I want to bring in kind of transitioning just a little bit is you’ve been in this space like you said for you know, three three to four years, you’ve interviewed all kinds of people in working on various projects. What are some things that have captured your attention over the years that you think are really cool projects?

00:26:27:04 – 00:26:54:28

Joshua Tate: There’s an upcoming exchange, which I think is really interesting called Limitlex that’s coming out. There’s a new art project that’s out that I just saw from one of my buddies that’s really interesting. We talked about the education bit, for example, we used to have a show on Blocks Live TV and I think from time to time we still do it. It was called Kids on the Block.

00:26:55:00 – 00:26:55:15

Richard Carthon: Okay.

00:26:55:17 – 00:27:10:29

Joshua Tate: To really bring all these kids in and then teach them on the air about Crypto, just as you’ve identified with you know, showing them how it could be applicable to them, you know, different types of the Blockchain. 

00:27:11:01 – 00:27:11:16

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:27:11:18 – 00:27:39:21

Joshua Tate: There are so many projects that are out there right now. You know, Richard, your project is in amongst the most important in the world right now, which is actually the ability to get out there, bring the spotlight to anybody and everybody in this industry that has a viable project and a real spirit, a real passion to turn the industry or to continue the industry forward and its perception globally. So it’s very hard to depend.

00:27:40:12 – 00:27:41:19

Richard Carthon: That’s fun. 

00:27:41:23 – 00:28:12:02

Joshua Tate: Ultimately I will tell you one thing and it’s just a funny story. We did a magazine interview in our very early days of Blox Live. And when they didn’t think that the mike was hot any longer, he actually hung up, thought he hung up and said, “That was the worst bleeping interview I’ve ever had.” So for any of you who have a funny experience, don’t let things like that frustrate you. They’ll make for better stories as you grow. 

00:28:12:10 – 00:28:51:05

Richard Carthon: Yes. Wow, that’s awesome. Well, I’ll tell you this man, as we kind of wrap up the next I think three to five years in Crypto are going to be and Blockchain is going to be very, very interesting. I think what could have taken the next decade to get to has been expedited because of COVID and the receptiveness to how much Crypto and Blockchain is being received by the greater world and understanding that, “Oh this is probably here to stay, how do we get involved sooner than later.” What do you think are some things that people should be aware of or be on the lookout in the near future?

00:28:53:19 – 00:29:36:27

Joshua Tate: Well this is totally self-serving, but payments. I think payments happens to be one of the most important parts of actually mass adoption or even education. If people can spend Crypto and a merchant realizes that there’s a massive amount of Crypto consumers out there in the world, it’s all the better for everybody. It’s a compounding sort of way to reach people about Crypto. Everybody spends money generally every day or whatever on something in their life and if they’re using Crypto or they’re accepting Crypto to do it, regardless of the peripheral benefits of supply and demand and shipping shifting the curve to the right, I think it’s something that’s massively important. 

00:29:36:29 – 00:30:38:17

Joshua Tate: So whether it’s me with ForumPay or some other sort of unique payments environment, so long as it’s really truly a Blockchain based payments environment, I think that’s critical. When it comes to really just very cool Blockchain technology, there are so many. I wasn’t kidding when I met the avocados thing, you know, the tracing of certain things, just organic fruits and vegetables is really interesting. Knowing the source of your food using Blockchain as basically an infallible ledger or trace mechanism. I’m sure there are people who are working on, for example, contract tracing utilizing Blockchain because it’s a scalable, decentralized solution even to just making sure that we’re safe in the environment that we live in and with the existence of a global pandemic. You know, things being contactless and digital and secure. Overall I think they are incredibly important.

00:30:40:11 – 00:31:12:03

Richard Carthon: Definitely and thank you for bringing that up. And I agree, especially on the payment front. People are going to start using Crypto for everyday payments, I think it’s inevitable. I think it’s just a matter of time and I think the companies like yourself, like ForumPay, who are working really hard to make that happen sooner than later are gonna be the ones that reap the benefits of tapping into this, the potential of this marketplace. So I really do appreciate all that you’ve dropped on us today, but like what is a final thought that you want to leave with all of our listeners?

00:31:18:18 – 00:31:48:15

Joshua Tate: Get involved with Crypto, listen to Richard’s podcasts, learn as much as you possibly can. Again, I was a bit of a skeptic, I was intellectually interested person in the space and I think that once you get to know the space and once you get to know more importantly the community and how passionate the community is and how credible the community is, despite some of the old you know, sort of bad things that people attributed to Crypto, I think that you’ll see that people will just pick up on it very quickly. We received what I refer to as the hockey stick curve, right?

00:31:48:17 – 00:31:49:02

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:31:49:21 – 00:32:23:27

Joshua Tate: The hockey stick curve every day shows itself in Crypto and Blockchain projects and really, really, really good ones. And a lot of the people are savvy enough and are becoming more and more savvy every day in Crypto that the less reputable things have substantially gone by the wayside, I think we’ll continue to see that. Support great Crypto projects, do your due diligence and understand what their ultimate benefit value is and keep supporting Richard and his podcast because he’s doing important work in our industry.

00:32:26:00 – 00:32:35:02

Richard Carthon: Appreciate that Josh. Thank you for that final thought. For everyone listening, what are some ways that people can connect with you and learn more about Blox Live and ForumPay? 

00:32:35:04 – 00:32:52:18

Joshua Tate: Blox Live, just please watch us it’s BloxLive.TV. B-L-O-X L-I-V-E.TV and ForumPay is ForumPay.com. You can learn more about there, you can contact me directly through either of those sites, reach out, and that’ll put you in touch with me for sure and I’d love to talk to you. 

00:32:52:20 – 00:32:52:27

Richard Carthon: Excellent. Well Josh, again, super appreciative of your time today and for everyone listening, Stay Crypto Current.