Want more resources around this podcast? Keep up to date on the latest articles here.

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

00:00:03:09 – 00:00:24:23

Richard Carthon: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current. Your host here, Richard Carthon. And today I have a very special guest all the way out in Columbus, Ohio, working on a really cool protocol that I’m though that I’m excited to learn more about doing really cool things in the air space, gaming space, and so much more. We have Greg Gold, who is the chief operating officer of Dex of Protocol. How are you doing today?

00:00:25:05 – 00:00:34:11

Greg Gould: I’m great. It’s really great to be here. You know, I’m I’m super grateful for the opportunity to talk to you and all of your listeners, because I appreciate and respect what you do, man.

00:00:35:10 – 00:00:49:10

Richard Carthon: I appreciate that, man. And, you know, we had a really good, pleasant conversation leading up to this actual interview. And I’m excited to unpack a lot of what we just spoke about. But before we do all of that, first of all, learn a little bit more about you. Can you give us some background on yourself?

00:00:49:18 – 00:01:20:10

Greg Gould: Yeah, I’m a I’m 45 years old. I’m obviously American. I actually I grew up out in the Bay Area in California during the whole tech cycle. So like I actually grew up in Silicon Valley and like, you know, right in the midst of of Hewlett-Packard and Apple and all those things happening. So I have kind of a a near and dear place in my heart for all things technology. But I’ve been in business for myself for about 20 years, and I’ve managed all kinds of different types of businesses for other people, too, and done a bunch of consulting work.

00:01:20:12 – 00:01:58:06

Greg Gould: So I would describe myself as a business man. But, you know, really, I’m I’m just an enthusiastic advocate for whatever interesting thing is around me. So that’s why I’ve gotten into a bunch of different businesses. I own a music lesson company here in Ohio, a bunch of music teachers that work for me, that I that I was a music teacher. And it just kind of evolved into that. I have a construction company, I have some friends in construction. And and so I just kind of got involved in that. I had a juice company at one point. I sold that to some people who were really excited about continuing that after I had kind of, you know, come to a place where, you know, I no longer wanted to invest my time in that particular business.

00:01:58:08 – 00:02:34:06

Richard Carthon: I’ve done a lot of different things, and I got into crypto actually owning my first investment in Bitcoin through a friend of mine and I think late 2017 and made a little bit of money and then kind of got out of it and didn’t, you know, was happy to have gotten out of it during the 2018 crash. And yeah, a couple of years ago my, my cousin who lives out in California and her husband really started to talk a lot to me about not just crypto, but blockchain technology. And I got really excited about what that could mean and the how early we are on it.

00:02:34:08 – 00:03:10:05

Greg Gould: You know, I was I’m 45, right? So I remember the evolution of the Internet and I remember being in my first apartment in 1995 and somebody coming to install a 14 for dial up modem. And being really excited about it. Like. So fast, you know? Well, you know. And here we are 27 years later. Right. And we’re all carrying around supercomputers in our pockets that do, you know, stuff that literally could put you on the moon. Right? Right. And so it’s like, okay, blockchain is in that 1998, 1995 dial up Internet phase.

00:03:10:21 – 00:03:15:06

Greg Gould: Right. Right. I’m going to get more involved in this. And so that’s how I ended up getting back into the space.

00:03:15:27 – 00:03:51:08

Richard Carthon: It’s really cool, man. Like, we’ve we’ve had a couple of entrepreneurs that ultimately got into this space, and a lot of them kind of share that same enthusiasm of of being able to see Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, which is now as we headed to Web 3.0, which is blockchain, and seeing this as the super early like stages of this development of this new technology and just how much opportunity is still in this space, like a lot of people think like, Oh, I missed the boat or I’m too late, etc., and it’s like, no, we are still so significantly early into this and and you’re like, you brought us something that you follow your curiosity as you follow your passions.

00:03:51:10 – 00:04:10:13

Richard Carthon: And, and this is where it kind of brought you in this space. What about, you know, blockchain technology and. All the different facets in which you can get involved. What what niche part of it. As you learn more about this, you’re like, Huh, that sounds really cool. Now I want to start working on this element of it.

00:04:11:01 – 00:04:17:24

Greg Gould: Yeah. So I think the thing, you know, the know more sort of broader sense of this is, you know,

00:04:19:14 – 00:04:58:02

Greg Gould: we have civilization because people started writing things down. Right. That’s that’s right. That’s the basis of, you know, if you have a small group of people, you know, you can kind of keep track of stuff. But once you have a larger group of people, you have to create ledgers to figure out who has what, who owes who, what, how much you need of this. Right. And so ledgers are the basis of all civilization. And what is a blockchain, really? It’s a digital ledger. We’ve had digital ledgers in many forms prior to blockchain, but it’s a very specific type of digital ledger that allows you to through, you know, basically a computer program through an application, allows you to write onto that blockchain, right onto that ledger and in an immutable way.

00:04:58:08 – 00:05:06:21

Greg Gould: Okay. To me, that is super exciting. Okay. Now we have a way to record information at light speed

00:05:08:17 – 00:05:34:11

Greg Gould: in that can be applied to almost anything. And once the information is recorded, it can’t be changed. Okay. You know, that’s awesome. Now, now we have transparency and we have authenticity, right? It’s absolutely it is. We we joke in all my dev teams, right. Whenever something goes on and somebody is like, whatever, like check the block. The block is truth, right? The block is truth. Like truth, unless you’re a liar. Right.

00:05:36:02 – 00:05:56:03

Greg Gould: And so that’s the thing that I think is the most exciting thing to me in that sort of general sense. But the applications of that are like super endless, right? And I and this is what I we were talking about how, you know, recent events have have spawned some. You know, questioning amongst, you know, people who are not maybe in the space yet. Right.

00:05:57:28 – 00:06:02:11

Richard Carthon: You know, what’s going on with crypto. So but the the the

00:06:04:04 – 00:06:06:15

Richard Carthon: the the the idea that you can.

00:06:09:09 – 00:06:43:16

Richard Carthon: Record information in a mutable way across any type of medium. Right in and of itself is. You know, probably the most important thing that happened since the advent of the Internet, because many financial records, educational records, even simple things that we don’t even really think of. So like, you know, as a as a concert goer, right. You have you know, Ticketmaster has always had problems. There’s always efficiency issues. There’s always, you know, transparency issues. Right. Right. An NFT is fix that NFT tickets, fix that whole problem.

00:06:43:28 – 00:07:02:05

Richard Carthon: And to me, the most important thing that you can ever do is you when you’re when you’re trying to, to, to do something in a coordinated effort with other people, you do what you want to do. One of three things you want to solve a problem, make something more efficient or provide quality to somebody’s life right now. Unquantifiable value, entertainment, whatever. Joy.

00:07:04:04 – 00:07:39:08

Richard Carthon: Blockchain technology does all of those things. It solves a problem of efficiency. It solves a lot of problems of recording information in an immutable way. And it and it solves an efficiency problem. With everything being automated, there’s obviously there’s inherent problems in that, too, which we need to work through, especially with like the decentralized autonomous organizations and some of the defi stuff. There’s some problems there, right? We need to work through those. But it’s really exciting to see the the application, something simple, like I said, like NFT technology being applied to ticket tickets, to concert, going to whatever you want.

00:07:39:14 – 00:07:41:26

Richard Carthon: It can be applied to all kinds of different,

00:07:43:15 – 00:08:06:18

Richard Carthon: you know, systems in which we need access to things and we need to prove our our ability to have access to those things in a way that cannot be faked. Right. That to me, again, goes go back to truth and transparency. I’m all about things being trustable and the blockchain is trustable. It is a trustable resource.

00:08:08:04 – 00:08:39:10

Richard Carthon: Yeah. And done in a decentralized way to where you can put something, you can put trust into your data like you like your your dev says go back to the blockchain, just go there. It doesn’t lie. It’s all there. And you know, on that point, you know, as we look into what you’ve been building over at Dex, your protocol, you are trying to be the pioneers of the blockchain revolution, like everything that you’ve just been talking about, from creating a vision of a world where blockchain technology is mainstream and more people are connected to it.

00:08:39:12 – 00:08:46:16

Richard Carthon: So going after the mainstream adoption, so can you explain what is Dex, your protocol and what are some of the things that you’re doing to help bring that mass adoption to the world?

00:08:46:23 – 00:09:14:09

Greg Gould: So Dexia Protocol was originally started by Don Rocha, who’s my business partner and the chief executive officer for Dexcom Protocol. And he I often do these interviews. We were sort of like one hive mind, right? Because Don is actually he’s Dutch. And though he speaks very good English, he he’s all these things are generally done in English. And so he likes it, you know, plus, I like to talk. I never met a camera, right? So I never met a microphone. So

00:09:15:25 – 00:09:16:10

Greg Gould: but

00:09:17:23 – 00:09:28:06

Greg Gould: so he started it with the idea that he had built a prototype for an augmented reality application that actually used image recognition technology to scan

00:09:30:01 – 00:10:02:16

Greg Gould: whatever you wanted to scan through the image recognition. So he first started out by it was recognizing this through the statue he had, which is now kind of a funny video for us to watch because of how far the application has come since then. But so he had this idea that he wanted to develop, for lack of a better description, a Pokémon go for crypto. Using image recognition technology in the scanning function. So that was how the whole genesis of it started and end with again the vision in mind of, Hey, let’s bring more people into crypto.

00:10:02:26 – 00:10:35:16

Greg Gould: Most statistics, it’s kind of hard to get hard statistics on this, but, you know, roughly 3 to 5% of the world population is investing in or engaged in crypto. That’s pretty low, right? So there’s lots of room for more people to come in to adopt. Right. So he had this idea in mind. I actually invested in Dexia about a month after it, not quite a month, maybe three weeks after it first launched. And then him and I just kind of hit it off and he asked me to be his business partner. And from there we evolved the concept beyond that. In that flagship augmented reality application we now called Dex.

00:10:35:18 – 00:10:42:23

Greg Gould: The Hunter is is in a limited beta right now in five cities. It’s about to go into a much larger beta here shortly. We’ll talk about that, I think. But.

00:10:45:03 – 00:11:18:12

Greg Gould: The the concept itself was okay. How do we bring people into blockchain is important. Blockchain is the future. How do we bring people in? And so, of course, that flagship application that we now call Taxi Hunter was part of that. But we started thinking about, okay, how do we engage new things? How do we become become connected to other people? How do we what’s the best way to do that? We do that by playing games, right? When you’re in grade school or in, you know, in in primary school, how do they teach you things? You sing songs, you know, the ABC songs.

00:11:18:14 – 00:11:52:15

Greg Gould: The song, yeah. You sing songs, you play games. You interact with each other on a basis where it’s there’s a quality function to it, right? Not just a quantifiable thing, but, you know, a quantifiable thing you’re connecting to and interacting with people through gaming. Right? When you go on corporate retreats, even, what do they do? They play games when you, you know, become part of a of a church or synagogue or a, you know, or a mosque. Typically, the kids in those youth ministries play games, right? So gaming is a great way to kind of disarm people.

00:11:53:06 – 00:12:24:15

Greg Gould: Right. Like because people are armed in a way against crypto. Right. And we’ll you know, one of the things that that we’ve found and is very true and there’s actually started to be some statistics on this. Traditional gamers, people who call themselves self-identified gamers, they’re not playing blockchain NFT based games. Right. Because they are as I said, they’re kind of armed against it. So we want to disarm people like, hey, this blockchain is not it’s not a scam. It’s not that whatever, you know, nonsense is being promoted out there by the corporate media. You know, this is really cool stuff.

00:12:24:22 – 00:12:57:13

Greg Gould: Here’s a really fun game that you can play and you can interact with the blockchain, you can interact with crypto through this game. And so we wanted to build a suite of gaming applications that really allowed for people from all different walks of life from all over the world to be able to find something that they liked. Right? So we started thinking about different types of games, mobile games, desktop games. You know, we have a sword fighting game that we call actually knights. It’s like a arcade style sword fighting game. We have a Build Your Team of Dragons mobile game that we’re about to put into Beta two.

00:12:57:21 – 00:13:02:06

Greg Gould: So we have some, some different stuff. And then we wanted to be able to.

00:13:03:27 – 00:13:38:14

Greg Gould: Allow people to play those games without crypto. This is really important about what our whole mission is, right? We want adoption, so we’re not going to force it on people. We can play our games. You don’t have to connect to the blockchain. You don’t have to get a wallet. You can you can have fun playing the games. There’s some play to earn functions that are non blockchain related. Okay. And you know, I don’t know to go in a huge amount of detail about that, but it is possible to do that. And but you can also earn crypto and nfts and these games.

00:13:38:16 – 00:13:49:21

Greg Gould: And if you don’t get a wallet and don’t figure this out, you can’t really get them. So I kind of joke. It’s like we’re drug dealers, you know, like, here’s an NFT man. Here’s a taste. You know.

00:13:51:15 – 00:13:53:08

Richard Carthon: That’s. I get them, then I’m involved.

00:13:53:18 – 00:13:57:12

Greg Gould: You know, I mean, get em hooked, right? You know? Uh.

00:13:58:03 – 00:14:28:26

Richard Carthon: But I want us to. I want to spend a second on that, though. You bring up a good point of how do you get to a place where people are disarming themselves and also buying in? And gaming is a good way of doing that, no matter what kind of social environment you’re in. You know, you have the icebreaker game, so you have like all these other things that you do when you first meet people to try to understand each other a little bit more and do it in a way that’s, again, disarming and allowing you to be more welcoming of the information that’s trying to be presented.

00:14:29:04 – 00:14:54:19

Richard Carthon: So if that is entry point in which people are now coming in, engaging with blockchain and doing these things, and again, you you have a lot of things going on. You have a bunch of different games, you have an NFT play, but you really have this augmented reality, which is, I think, very unique, especially to this space. And a lot of people aren’t spending as much time on. And at this particular time, can you kind of unpack a little bit more of how can people come in and use some of the augmented reality

00:14:56:07 – 00:14:57:11

Richard Carthon: gaming that you have?

00:14:57:24 – 00:15:34:22

Greg Gould: Yeah. So, so again, Dex, the Hunter is, is our, our flagship application and. In essence, there are augmented reality bounces all over the and soon to be all over the world. Currently they’re in five cities, but and so when we drop those bounties, we can specifically drop them wherever we want to. And we also have obviously basically an algorithm that will drop them in certain radial areas, right? So and there’s a bunch of different types of assets that people can collect. It’s not just one thing, it’s not just, you know, so there’s nfts and we’ve selected some nfts our own market.

00:15:34:24 – 00:15:50:25

Greg Gould: We have two marketplaces because we have two tokens, which I’ll talk about in a second, but so they can get NFT Samarra marketplaces. But we’re also buying and it’s these from other marketplaces, from engine, from Opensea, from bakery swap.

00:15:52:11 – 00:16:22:20

Richard Carthon: And from Selsey. And we’re we’re giving those out, too, as part of that. Right. So they collect these these and they can collect a number of different types of what I would call mainstream cryptos. So Bitcoin, Etherium, Solana tracks a bunch of stuff. Link you can go to our website XY protocol dot com and in the search under the decks hunter gaming page and see all the different stuff that we’re putting in the application then we can we also putting partner projects. So right now currently are the only project that we’re partnering with is our friend John Wingate.

00:16:22:22 – 00:16:54:00

Richard Carthon: I think so. If you’re not familiar with that, you should check out his project. Very cool. Interesting stuff that he’s doing in the in the lending banking space with crypto. He’s got a really cool Dao too. So we’re partnering with them and we’re going to be dropping their their crypto in, in the, in the application too. And then we also have a non blockchain in-game currency that we call Dex Cash and that’s the way that we provide a non blockchain resource thing, kind of like robux, right. It’s like a, you know, same, same idea. Right? And then here’s where things get really interesting.

00:16:54:12 – 00:17:27:21

Richard Carthon: Um, not that it’s not already interesting, but we also can drop QR codes for partnering businesses, for people to be able to collect and redeem at those businesses. Okay, so this is revenue generation for us and a form of advertising and marketing for those businesses, right? So there’s these bounties. They’re geotagged all over the place. You open up your phone or texting hunter application, which I’d be happy to get you the testflight for, if you like, or I don’t know if you’re an Android or iOS user, but we can get you whatever you need and we can drop some bounties right on your head if you want to and you can.

00:17:30:27 – 00:18:13:19

Greg Gould: But so you open it up and just like, you know, with Pokemon Go, there’s an air screen, you see the augmented reality object in a container. That container opens up this all animation sequence and out pops out that crypto or whatever that you’re collecting the taxi cache or the NFT or whatever you collect that it gets stored as a basically a placeholder inside your application. And then you go through a process where you request to have that actually sent to you. And then we have deployer wallets that send those out to people. Okay. So it’s a it’s it’s a the mechanics of it are I kind of joke because I was talking with this venture capitalist and he was like, How are you going to get around the whole iOS problem? I said, Well, it’s because I have analog thinking in a digital world.

00:18:13:21 – 00:18:27:24

Greg Gould: I built this whole system to sort of avoid the crypto portion of of having interactions of actual crypto inside of the application. So it looks like they are going to approve us all the way. We’re approved for public beta and all that stuff. So I think we’re in the clear.

00:18:27:26 – 00:18:30:03

Richard Carthon: Awesome. Congrats. That’s a big hurdle.

00:18:30:08 – 00:18:48:21

Greg Gould: That is actually the thing that they kept pushing back on us about was actually the way we had our login system because we use a a third party resource for security reasons. So we’re not enabling the ID of somebody login. So basically we’re, we’re, we’ve hired a

00:18:50:20 – 00:19:22:06

Greg Gould: we’ve we’ve essentially hired another company to handle the security for us. And so but the way that that was actually working, so the application that the app store people kept being like, no, this isn’t user friendly of the system. We were like, Oh no, what are we doing? And then finally we got, you know, so we figured out what they wanted us to do and they approved it. So it’s good. But yeah, so that’s how that works, right? And so somebody can go out and they can walk around. Now you got move to earn. Right. Right. We had to play to earn portion.

00:19:22:08 – 00:19:23:13

Greg Gould: You got to move to earn portion.

00:19:25:01 – 00:19:55:10

Greg Gould: And we have a whole NFT concept that kind of allows different levels of access that we call taxi badges. And those entities are upgradeable, meaning that interactions within the game are stored as metadata on the back end of the server. And then that’s correlated in a related back to the NFT, which gives the NFT basically like a growing value, right, as it has interactions of the game. All of our nfts are gaming. These are all upgradable entities that work on that basis. And you know, they’re walking around, they can upgrade their access by doing more exercise.

00:19:55:12 – 00:20:30:09

Greg Gould: Again, move to earn. Right. And then on top of that, we have some kind of forced action that we can do when they actually collect crypto. So they have to answer a question or maybe follow a Twitter or a lot of different things. And now you have learn to earn. So it’s play to earn with move to earn and learn to earn. All built into it, right? An augmented reality portion of it. And it has a business model built into it. Revenue generation through the non blockchain and gain currency decks the cash revenue generation through marketing and advertising revenue generation through partnerships with other crypto.

00:20:31:16 – 00:20:38:10

Greg Gould: And we have some other revenue generation ideas that are funded on the metaverse side of things, but I won’t get too deep into that. So it’s really an all encompassing app.

00:20:39:15 – 00:21:10:25

Richard Carthon: Yeah. So let me let me dive into that real quick, just as a recap. So with the Dixie Hunter, you will have the ability to do a are in the sense of if you’ve ever played Pokémon Go, you go throughout this real world where you’re moving to earn a game, playing to earn, you find these different cryptos. So let’s say that there’s Bitcoin, chainlink, etc. and you get them, but you’re not actually you don’t have them in that moment. It’s almost like an IOU, if you will, and then at one point you’d be able to redeem and you actually get paid out and what you’ve been able to get into your wallet.

00:21:10:27 – 00:21:35:10

Richard Carthon: But then also you could do other things where you can scan in like if there’s like a local business and they’ll give you a discount code to go eat at a restaurant or something like that. Or you can also, if you like, watch a video to learn about something. At the end of the conclusion of learning about that particular thing. You then get rewarded for learning about that particular thing. For example, if someone’s ever been on like Coinbase Earn and you watch a video, then they pay you for watching it. Something similar like that.

00:21:35:23 – 00:21:42:09

Greg Gould: Yeah. And they ask you to ask a question. That’s actually where I got the idea from like it was that’s. I mean, I totally stole that idea. Sorry.

Want to dig deeper? Check out our articles here.  

00:21:43:08 – 00:21:44:12

Richard Carthon: It’s a good one.

00:21:44:21 – 00:21:53:20

Greg Gould: You can consume. No, I mean, it’s a good idea, but it’s. That’s where I got the concept from. I was like, okay, so, you know, and, and.

00:21:55:07 – 00:22:08:15

Greg Gould: Yes. What you said is 100% right. Okay. So all of that stuff, that that was a much more succinct way. I tend to talk too much. That was a specific form of putting that. And I appreciate your succinctness.

00:22:09:09 – 00:22:30:23

Richard Carthon: Oh, good. I’d like to to make sure I bring it all home. But with within decks your protocol, obviously you have decks Hunter. You have a bunch of other games that are within the ecosystem. And there are plenty of ways in which gaming can help bridge the gap between people and mass adoption. But as you kind of like take a step back, you look at the things that you are building. How do you see?

00:22:32:20 – 00:22:50:09

Richard Carthon: The gaming space within blockchain evolving over the next year or so. Obviously with current market conditions, as the technology continues to evolve over the years, like how do you start to see the scale start to tip in the other direction with getting more people flowing into the space?

00:22:50:24 – 00:23:22:04

Greg Gould: Yeah, I think we had a big influx over the kind of late 2020 through late 2021. Right. There was a bunch of people piling in and now that’s sort of slowed down and actually people probably exiting and especially in the midst of what has recently happened, which is unfortunate, but that’s the cycle of all things right now. So growth pattern ever looks like that, right? It looks like this, right? Yeah. That’s that’s just reality. So this is a necessary part of that process of that cycle.

00:23:22:06 – 00:23:25:00

Greg Gould: And I think, you know, now what we’re going to see is.

00:23:27:15 – 00:23:45:25

Greg Gould: I use this analogy a lot, and I think you’ll probably appreciate this, but it’s like a forest fire, right? Forest fires are bad if you live in the forest, and certainly they’re bad for lots of things. But natural forest fires are a natural part of the forest for the forest life cycle. And when it does do as though it’s terrible and

00:23:47:18 – 00:24:06:25

Greg Gould: damaging and catastrophic in many ways, it does clear out the deadwood in the underbrush and provides much needed minerals and resources back into the soil that the forest needs to be able to grow to a much more viable force than it was before. Right. And I think part of what has happened here is kind of like a forest fire. Right. And what’s what we’re going to see is we’re going to see a lot of.

00:24:09:14 – 00:24:42:00

Greg Gould: We’re going to see a lot of the projects, tokens that either A, never had good intentions or B, aren’t being managed very well. They’re going to get wiped out. Right. Right. And where and what’s what’s going to happen is so right now, it’s really hard to get noticed. You know, and I use this analogy a lot, too, when I talk to people, it’s very hard to be allowed. The loudest person in an already very loud room. Right. Right. It’s just like, you know, it’s like flashy stuff everywhere. It’s like, you know, it’s it’s, you know, it’s like Times Square, you know? Where do I look? You know? Yeah.

00:24:42:15 – 00:25:12:16

Greg Gould: That’s kind of how the space has has kind of become in terms of trying to get the attention of legitimate investors. People are looking for something quality to invest in. It’s just hard to see what that is in the midst of all the flashy craziness. And what’s going to happen, I think now is, is we’re going to see the projects with utility, the projects with good management, the projects with, with good ideals and, and, you know, transparent, authentic people running those projects, they’re going to they’re going to rise to the top. They’re going to get a lot more attention.

00:25:12:18 – 00:25:19:05

Greg Gould: They’re going to get that much needed capital. They’re going to get that much needed investment. And those holders, you know, social media.

00:25:20:23 – 00:25:27:07

Greg Gould: Momentum. And so we’re going to see a shift away from, I think, the meme coins and, you know, the.

00:25:28:24 – 00:25:54:08

Greg Gould: You know, I don’t know how you feel about this. And I, you know, so I’m the defi stuff really worries me because like this, like, you know, handing out massive PR on the basis of literally nothing, that’s not a sustainable thing. Right. We know that. We’ve watched this happen to Wonderland, to Gyrate. I mean, we’re going to watch it happen to these other projects that are doing these things. It just can’t work, right? You can’t just make stuff up out of nothing. Right. So, I mean, you can for a little while.

00:25:54:26 – 00:26:25:03

Richard Carthon: And you can you have to find a way to actually have an underlying something of value that can continue to propel it up. I think just just to speak to this for a second, I think Defi overall can work. I think there’s a lot of Defi protocols that didn’t fully figure out how to complete the circle. And a lot of those are going to die. And unfortunately, the people going at the beginning of the circle do well. And as long as they exit at the right time, they do fine. But with problem is for people who enter that potential defi protocol at the end get stuck left holding the bag and that’s, you know, hurtful.

00:26:25:11 – 00:26:29:16

Greg Gould: Right. And I think if you create a system which is

00:26:31:02 – 00:27:03:05

Greg Gould: it is not possible for it to do anything other than that, that that’s not an honorable thing to do. Right. So, you know, we need to try to create systems that are sustainable. And sustainability is, you know, has got to be this next evolution, I think of crypto is going to be a lot about utility and sustainability, right? That’s what you know, that’s what the forest fire is going to clear way for. And, you know, I said this the other day, but who I’m not like some you know, I don’t worship CC by any means, but it has some very potent wisdom that he posts on Twitter sometimes.

00:27:03:07 – 00:27:08:00

Greg Gould: And one of the things that he did say was and who knows if he’s actually posting it. But anyways, one of the things he did say was.

00:27:09:20 – 00:27:46:17

Greg Gould: You know, what we’re going to see now is projects with utility. Come to the light, you know, and I’m paraphrasing that, but that’s the truth, right? So what’s going to happen? We’re going to see in in terms of specifically the gaming, you know, there’s been some really cool gaming applications that have have taken off. In particular, I think everybody, you know, is most familiar with ACSI actually has done some really interesting things and done a good job with bringing attention, to play, to earn. They’ve done some pretty cool things. They really missed the sustainability thing with with Smile, Love Potion and they’re trying to correct that, right? And they’re actually doing some of the cool thing, you know, with the sponsorships.

00:27:46:19 – 00:28:18:18

Greg Gould: So I can’t remember what they’re but they’re called the you know, are they. I can’t think what the word is. But they but they let you know, individuals are are able to use other people’s axes, you know, so they’re doing some cool stuff. And it is kind of bringing some people out of poverty and, you know, really poor places. And that’s awesome. Right? But there is some problems with that. And so I think we’re going to we’re going to see a move away from unsustainable mechanics and play to earn some sustainable mechanics and play. And and that’s why what we’re that’s why we’re we’re being cautious about how we’re setting things up and we’re being very focused on sustainability.

00:28:18:20 – 00:28:51:14

Greg Gould: So, you know, we have as I said, we have two tokens. We have DXY, which is our what we call our native token. And eventually we’ll move to our own blockchain, which we’re working on, and that’ll be the native coin of the blockchain. And then we have DXY Gas, which is our blockchain in-game currency. Okay. And the reason why we wanted to do that is we wanted to have something that could be a store of value and that could be a, a measure of, of obtaining access to governance for the protocol and then something that could function as an actual currency that we could control the supply of.

00:28:51:16 – 00:29:26:21

Greg Gould: Right. So DXY won’t be midtable. It’s not midtable now you know, we’ll, we’ll, we, we want that to be a store of value. We don’t want it to, we don’t need to supply it to do this dex in-game currency that we’re using to pay out rewards with. But also people are paying into the system to be able to use this system, buy, buy, buy, buying. And it’s all of our NFT marketplace that we generate. Obviously we have a royalty portion that when people resell their NFT and it cost it cost actually gas to be able to to to get access to that those blockchain assets ends in Hunter.

00:29:26:27 – 00:29:52:12

Greg Gould: So the dex the gas is flowing in and we’re using it to send it back out as the reward system. Right. That’s what an economic system is. Right. People are spending it and then we’re rewarding it out and people are spending it. And as the supply as demand increases and we need to increase the supply, we can do that. And if demand decreases, we can decrease the supply. And so we can control the situation. We don’t we we wanted to be able to do that. And so I think you’re going to see lots of people.

00:29:53:29 – 00:30:10:11

Greg Gould: That are interested in sustainable mechanics doing similar things. Right. It just kind of makes sense, right? You want to try to create a system that sustains itself that that money is flowing in and then falling back out and flowing in and flowing back up. That’s what gross domestic product is, right?

00:30:11:14 – 00:30:46:15

Richard Carthon: And that’s what you need. The key word here is sustainability. And as you look at a lot of gaming mechanics and even looking at some defi protocols, etc., the challenges that they faced where they set up things to build momentum, to get people using it, to get people to start putting in money without really solving the problem of, okay, like once all this money comes in. How do you sustain it? Because for the model to work, the money has to come in and then more money has to keep coming in. But what happens if you have a downfall and money starts flowing out? You can’t necessarily sustain the momentum that you built.

00:30:46:19 – 00:31:34:05

Richard Carthon: And so by and that’s what I was talking about earlier, the concept of completing the circle, you’ll have like, you know, 50 to 75% figure it out, but that last 25% to keep it as a sustainable business model, that that bet last, let’s call it 50 to 25% is where I think a lot of gaming and defi protocols are struggling is to try to close that gap. And it becomes like, you know, the chicken and egg scenario, like how do you get the people in and start spending money so that you can start getting some cash flow just to get it going, to kick start it and get the the momentum built up? And then how do you keep the money flowing so that even if people start to flow out, it can continue to sustain itself without having a more capital injection.

00:31:34:18 – 00:32:03:20

Richard Carthon: When you have your downward laws and having some, you know, some money in your reserves to be able to keep up whatever system you put in place. So it’s a it’s an interesting concept. Sounds like you’re doing a lot to try to help solve those challenges. And, you know, I know that I know you said that it’s. Can you speak on that? Actually a little bit for for next hundred for people who are excited like they heard this or like, oh, my gosh, this sounds amazing. I want to play this, especially once it launches to the world. What can they do to participate?

00:32:04:06 – 00:32:41:02

Greg Gould: So right now, we’re running a kind of closed beta in five cities. Columbus, where I live, Amsterdam, we’re done. That’s Manila and Istanbul. We have two very large communities, and then London, where we have some kind of boots on the ground, you know, a good core community there. So it’s because we’re just trying to, you know, bug test things, get some some feedback about the UI and the the UX of the of the application and and then automate some of these systems. So there’s, there’s some automation that we need to put into place that we just haven’t done yet because we want to make sure things work the way that they should before we automate some of the stuff.

00:32:41:04 – 00:33:12:01

Greg Gould: So but then we’re going to probably expand into anywhere from 25 to 50 cities in a few weeks and we’ll announce what those cities are, but they’re going to be some pretty obvious ones. Austin is definitely going to be one because we’re all going to be there for consensus in June. So there you go. All of us, but seven of us from my team are going to are going to be there for consensus. So we’re going to kind of do an Austin take over. We’re going to try to get people at consensus to download the application and hunker up. I’m going to put a bunch of really cool stuff like right in the conference. So it’s going to be right there. So, but

00:33:13:23 – 00:33:54:03

Richard Carthon: so Austin, you know, other major cities that are sort of obvious, New York, L.A., Tokyo, you know, all of Singapore, we’re going to do a bunch of places and really just, you know, joining our are following our Twitter you know actually protocols our handle joining our telegram chat, Dexia chat. I follow any of our social media. You’re going to find out what those cities are going to be. And it’s going to you know, there’ll be a beta link that we’ll be able to provide for iOS for Apple users, and then what’s called an AB file, which sometimes, you know, used to be the AP file, but an AB file that we can provide for Android users.

00:33:54:05 – 00:33:56:01

Richard Carthon: And then actually there’s a there’s a beta.

00:33:57:21 – 00:34:21:14

Richard Carthon: Kind of a public beta link that we that we can push through the play store. We’re a little bit nervous about doing that because we don’t want like everybody to just download it and start trying to do all kinds of stuff. But so yeah, so that’s what, that’s what’s coming. And once we get through that phase, which I think will be probably early June, we’re just going to, we’re going to we’re going to open it up everywhere. We’re going to put, you know, literally tens of millions of bounties.

00:34:22:27 – 00:34:24:26

Richard Carthon: Planet that sounds awesome.

00:34:25:05 – 00:34:56:26

Richard Carthon: Yeah. And I do. I just want to really quick touch back on the sustainability thing. Just, you know, and I know I’ve taken up way too much of your time today, so I apologize. As I said, I tend to talk, but I do want to because I think it’s important to talk about this in general, not just for Dexia protocol, but for your listeners. And I think this is something that based on the conversation that we’ve had today that I think you would probably agree with, yes, blockchain is the future. And yes, crypto is a very important part of that. Those are two different things people tend to conflate. I mean, they’re they’re connected together, but they’re not the same thing.

00:34:57:18 – 00:35:00:12

Richard Carthon: You can have blockchains without crypto and they exist,

00:35:01:28 – 00:35:12:05

Richard Carthon: but you can’t have crypto without blockchains, right? So so yes, blockchain is definitely the future. Cryptos is definitely a big part of that future. But the reality is, is that we’re not going to like get rid of fiat

00:35:13:20 – 00:35:49:09

Richard Carthon: currency, so we’re not going to get rid of of government backed currencies any time in the near future. And so the step towards this is a hybridization of your business model to include not just crypto based business, like what you were talking about closing that loop that that other 25%. To me that’s including the inclusion of traditional revenue streams like marketing, advertising, transaction fees. Okay. Things that are already being done by major projects like Salon, right? Salon is hooked up with MasterCard and Visa and they’re getting transaction fees, right? They have revenue coming in.

00:35:49:11 – 00:36:37:04

Richard Carthon: Right. Because what you’re talking about is having a war chest of capital to be able to wait through the the downtimes. And and you do need that. You’re going to have to have reserves in place to be able to sustain yourself through, you know. Periods like we’re having right now. Right. So, you know, those those traditional business models, again, marketing, advertising transactions, lots of other things. The ticketing that I talked about, which I think is really exciting. All of those things that’s going to be a part of this. And if you can create a a crypto project that has utility, has great applications, a good ecosystem to bring new people in, give them products that they know that they can trust because they come from the project that you’re already using their application, the gaming application.

00:36:37:06 – 00:37:10:15

Richard Carthon: That’s why we’re building all these other applications are well at our swap, all these things, right? And then create revenue models in that that are reasonable and sustainable and use that money to fund the business fund development, create that war chest. Right. At the same time, you’re developing more and more of the utility function of your technology in the utility function, of your tokens, in the technology of of whatever it is that you’re trying to do. If you can do those things, you’re going to close that loop, right? That’s where the sustainability factor comes in because real dollars are not going away any time soon.

00:37:10:17 – 00:37:31:23

Richard Carthon: I know again, there’s the crypto anarchists in the world. You know, Bitcoin’s the future. It’s all going to be. No, it’s not that. That’s I mean, maybe in 100 years, I don’t know. But definitely not in the next five years. Definitely not in the next ten years. We have to look at this as being, you know, these things need to be connected together. And there’s actually major industry players who are advocating for this and doing this.

00:37:33:14 – 00:38:03:29

Richard Carthon: You know, already I’ve talked a lot about somebody I’m a huge fan of. I don’t know if you know who she is, but Caitlin Long from Custodial Bank in Wyoming. Super brilliant woman. Yeah the great a lot of great things. I saw her speak at the Bitcoin 2022 and was just like, you know, we need to put her in charge of things like she’s, you know, so but there’s a lot of other industry leaders, too, and and they’re all kind of saying the same things. And one of the things that you and I talked about in the beginning of this conversation is that in order to stabilize this thing and again, to as we talked about, Bitcoin and the Nasdaq look like the same chart.

00:38:04:02 – 00:38:43:14

Richard Carthon: Right. And that there’s a reason for that because the money that’s in these things are following each other. Right. In order for those things to become decoupled from one another, we’re going to have to have real money with the real, real money forces, things like Vanguard, Fidelity. You know, we talked about this CalPERS, these big investment funds to start getting into crypto. And in order for that to happen, we have to have this hybridization of things and we have to have regulation in place. And without those things, we’re screwed. And and I mean, we’re screwed like we are going to be stuck in this, you know, pegged system with the stock market forever if we don’t get real money in there.

00:38:43:16 – 00:38:59:03

Richard Carthon: And again, the reason why we need real money in there is is not that there isn’t real money. But I mean, like we’re talking about, you know, CalPERS is this you know, it’s not, you know, fidelity, you know, that kind of stuff. Right? The reason why we need that in there is because those people they have and those those those.

00:38:59:27 – 00:39:01:14

Richard Carthon: Big entities, companies of.

00:39:01:16 – 00:39:48:15

Richard Carthon: These, they have an army of lobbyists. They have like they you know, they’re going to advocate if they have money in it, they’re going to advocate for protections not just for consumers, but also for the businesses and for the investment funds that are in those in crypto. And we need all that stuff and we need smart people. We need transparent and authentic people like you. And from your show, you know, I’m not just kissing, ask me. And I mean that we need people. And I said this to a lot of people, to John, when I mentioned from being social, you know, one of our a friend of the project, Tyler Hill and I was and Lorenzo, these guys are, you know, YouTube, Twitter influencers, but smart, authentic, genuine, transparent people who are interested in the longevity, the future of crypto, right? The sustainability of of of crypto and blockchain.

00:39:48:22 – 00:40:10:28

Richard Carthon: That’s what we’re all interested in, you know, and I think we can find our way there. We just have to continue to advocate for that regulation, continue to advocate for the hybridization of, of, you know, crypto and traditional revenue streams so that we can balance those things and continue to advocate for large investment funds to. Help support. This technology.

00:40:11:18 – 00:40:29:12

Richard Carthon: All right. And, you know, I think that is a great final thought to to wrap up with and to get to a point of sustainability, we have to keep finding ways that more traditional ways of business models and revenues to be able to come in. And as as Greg was saying.

00:40:31:12 – 00:41:04:02

Richard Carthon: One of the ways that we can continue to do this is to have some of the big institutional money be able to come in and the way the path forward for that is through regulation. So we need to continue to build regulation and have the parameters and have the nice box that is given so that we know how we can start playing within these environments so that we so that these big institutions can now have safeguards in place so that they know they can start to mitigate the risk. They can start to do the risk assessment so that they can feel more confident to pour in some of their money and resources into this space.

00:41:04:04 – 00:41:30:02

Richard Carthon: So you start to see really big movements up in the right direction as it relates to crypto. So I mean, we unpacked a lot today, Greg. I think there’s been a really interesting conversation. I’m sure all of our listeners are going to enjoy it as well. And again, I really do appreciate you spending some time with us today. I know you mentioned a couple of ways that people can connect with you, but go ahead and say that one more time. How can people continue to learn more about everything happening over at a textual protocol?

00:41:30:17 – 00:42:09:14

Greg Gould: Yeah, so probably the best way to community and you can communicate directly with me. I’m still very involved with our telegram chat, which is is if you go to telegram, it’s text chat, you follow our Twitter address, your protocol, you can follow my Twitter. Jacksonian on Twitter. We’re really not that if you go to our website Dexia protocol dot com again you can see in the my name the chief operating officer of Dexerto protocol and you can find all of our socials and stuff there. And you know, one of the things I’m proud of is, is that, you know, Don and I and Andrea and some of the other executives on our team, we’ve maintained a very close connection to our community through Telegram and Twitter.

00:42:09:16 – 00:42:25:03

Greg Gould: And sometimes that’s hard because like just like, you know, we’re really like a thousand people talking to me, but and that can be challenging in some ways, but it’s been really rewarding too, and it’s actually been a great resource for us to continue to.

00:42:29:04 – 00:42:42:05

Greg Gould: Get really good ideas, right? I saw some Twitter feed yesterday or something that somebody was like remarking that that crypto Twitter is the only place where people with a with a $1,000 investment

00:42:43:21 – 00:43:14:03

Greg Gould: bag can talk to and tell somebody with a $10 million investment bag how to do their investments. You know, it’s sort of a joke, right? And I and I made a joke that like, yeah, well, you know, come to telegram where, you know, all day long I’m being yelled at by people who have like a $10 bag that I haven’t turned that into $100,000 yet, you know? Yeah, right. And I’m not sure what the obsession is with Lambos. Like, it’s just the. We’re not cute cars anyway, so. Or functional in any way. But. So. But, you know, on the flip side of that.

00:43:15:17 – 00:43:55:05

Greg Gould: Crypto gives voice to people, right? It does. Like we we and and people who wouldn’t normally have a voice sometimes have often have really important messages. And so those messages are being heard and being picked up on through social media and through other things. So we’re grateful for the opportunity to connect with people in that way. And again go to DXY or protocol dot com and you know. You know follow our social media is reach out to us and you know I hope that that people come and ask you know whatever questions they want to and try to understand what we’re doing and we’re not perfect.

00:43:55:07 – 00:44:09:12

Greg Gould: You know, we’ve made mistakes along the way. I think the difference between being successful in things at my experience and being successful with things is not not making mistakes. It’s recognizing that you’ve made a mistake and learning from that mistake and moving on right as mark.

00:44:09:19 – 00:44:10:08

Greg Gould: Absolutely.

00:44:12:19 – 00:44:15:29

Greg Gould: Good choices come from experience and experience comes from bad choices.

00:44:16:17 – 00:44:29:15

Greg Gould: So no doubt. No doubt. So everyone listening, make sure you go and check them out. Go be a part of their community. And again, Greg, thank you so much for spending some time for us with us today and for everyone listening, stay cryptocurrency.