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00:00:17:21 – 00:00:35:00

Richard Carthon: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon. And today I got a very special one for you on a very important topic that is extremely timely. All about Web three fraud prevention for everyone. Today we have it. Dan Sutherland, who is the founder at Self. How are you doing today?

00:00:35:17 – 00:00:37:13

Dan Sutherland: I am great, thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:00:38:12 – 00:00:52:24

Richard Carthon: Definitely. And excited to learn more about how timely self is, especially after all this debacle is going down. But before we dive into that side of the conversation, first, let’s learn a little bit more about you. Can you give us some background on yourself?

00:00:53:10 – 00:01:19:06

Dan Sutherland: Yeah, cool. I’m an entrepreneur, so I have been running and investing in businesses since I was 17 approximately, and a fairly broad suite of things. So everything from, you know, promoting nightclubs when I was a lot younger to management consulting and and now with my toes firmly in the world of crypto.

00:01:20:24 – 00:01:48:08

Richard Carthon: Right? Yeah. So what I found with serial entrepreneurs as they start to get into more of the web3 space is like this nice synergistic transition over into it because you can understand just the vast amount of opportunities in it, but you also can understand the amount of challenges that can come with keeping yourself safe as you get into a new innovative space. So talk to us about what made you want to focus on this side of the Web3 space.

00:01:49:21 – 00:02:05:23

Dan Sutherland: So, so I’ve always really liked innovative technology. I’ve liked new, interesting things as they as they come into the market. But my real interest in that context has been in in the way they transitioned from being

00:02:07:21 – 00:02:56:06

Dan Sutherland: the latest thing to being something that has real utility for really large volumes of people. Like, it’s been super exciting to watch the growth of the Web3 space of the NFT space over the last few years. But, but with the best will in the world, as much money as some people have made out of that space, you know, the number of people who are buying nfts online is tiny compared to the number of people who need to pay for their electricity. And I think I think what I find really interesting is how you make that jump between between something that has huge potential and how you flow yourself then into the position where those opportunities and that technology can become something that is useful for for everyday people without maybe them even necessarily knowing that that’s the case.

00:02:56:19 – 00:03:31:06

Dan Sutherland: So I’ve been I’ve been kind of investing in and looking at and following the crypto space for, I guess, since sort of 2015, 2016. And it was always like, this is really cool, is really interesting, but how does it, how does it flow into something that’s, that’s mainstream? And, and I think once I’d sold my previous business five years or so ago, I kind of really started looking properly at what the next opportunity that I’d be excited by was going to be.

00:03:32:05 – 00:03:44:14

Dan Sutherland: And I had a feeling from the start that it was going to be something to do with with blockchain, with digital currencies. But, but actually with there with their power to democratize and their power to

00:03:47:01 – 00:03:54:01

Dan Sutherland: see a shift from the from the kind of extractive model of technology that had been developing since the sort of beginnings of web to.

00:03:55:19 – 00:03:56:04

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:03:56:08 – 00:04:25:01

Richard Carthon: And first I. I know you went by really quickly, but congrats on the acquisition. Like, for every one out there, that’s the founder. Yeah. You know how hard that is to get to eventually that point but also then to. Have your eyes out on what will be that next innovative place that you can go and have impact. So tell us about what was that? How did you first learn about crypto? And then as you were starting to look into the innovative side of things, what made you want to go and create self?

00:04:26:23 – 00:04:29:06

Dan Sutherland: So first, learning about crypto is very straightforward.

00:04:30:22 – 00:04:49:10

Dan Sutherland: I have a friend who lives over in Vancouver and he is a photographer and he was doing some publicity shots for a local company and and once he done the work for them, they said, you know, they were involved in this new thing called Bitcoin. And

00:04:50:25 – 00:04:57:18

Dan Sutherland: would he be would you be open to taking half of his payment in in fiat and half of it in their new token.

00:04:59:04 – 00:05:02:14

Dan Sutherland: And and he said, yeah, sure, that’d be great. Why not?

00:05:04:09 – 00:05:36:15

Dan Sutherland: I think that was back in like 2012. Wow. And it was sort of in the days where, you know, you paid 50 Bitcoin for a pizza. So I think he I think he did quite well out of doing that. And every time I saw him after that, he said, you know, this this Bitcoin thing, you you really should be looking at it. We should be interested in. Yeah, sure. Whatever. And it sort of took a while before I went actually, this might be interesting and and took some notice, but it was his insistence and persistence that this is something I should be involved in that I might be focused on.

00:05:38:03 – 00:05:46:19

Richard Carthon: As a friend or a good colleague that I guess first puts you on and then, you know, eventually once you go down the rabbit hole, you look a little bit deeper. So it makes sense.

00:05:47:03 – 00:05:50:25

Dan Sutherland: Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of how we got to sell,

00:05:52:15 – 00:06:09:27

Dan Sutherland: we didn’t get to sell through through specifically looking at crypto. We got to sell through. And self got to crypto through the fact that we were trying to solve this seemingly in in an intangible problem this complex problem which which is that

00:06:11:20 – 00:06:34:27

Dan Sutherland: in real life. Humans want to trust each other. We like each other. You know, our natural inclination is to go, Oh, this guy’s got a nice smiley face. I trust him. And in real life, there are lots of cues that we use that we pick up on about the people that we’re with that allow us to base that trust on on, on something. And we call it gut instincts. We call it

00:06:36:12 – 00:06:45:21

Dan Sutherland: a sort of natural empathy with the people you’re with, but it’s something you can do in real life. But you you can’t replicate it online. It’s it’s it’s

00:06:47:09 – 00:07:03:00

Dan Sutherland: we have this division where we’re simply not in the same space and we can’t pull the same cues from one and one another, even even on a video call. And so we were trying to solve a problem that that we’d started thinking about when I was running my previous business, because we were doing a lot of

00:07:04:15 – 00:07:34:18

Dan Sutherland: very secure tech for for government and for banks and that kind of thing. And know we had a lot of problem with making sure that we knew who was who and what whether they were doing the right thing and lots of hoops to jump through, none of which seemed particularly satisfactory. You know, it’s always it’s always bothered me that when you do a KYC and know your customer process, it’s great at the point in time when you do that check. But like as soon as you’ve logged out of that web page or walks away from the desk where the person’s checked your passport, it’s entirely valueless.

00:07:35:13 – 00:07:41:08

Dan Sutherland: So sort of how do you how do you take these things that we need to do every day and make them useful?

00:07:43:06 – 00:08:20:14

Dan Sutherland: And on top of that, we also wanted to we also wanted to take those processes away from a place where things like identity, things like who we are and how we authenticate with things were somehow in the gift of an organization or a government that could bestow an identity upon us or, you know, a credit that we were who we said we were. I’m me. I just want to be able to tell somebody that I’m me. And for them to accept that and frankly, for them to accept it because I’ve provided them with some kind of proof that an incident is entirely asymmetric world for that, it’s extremely hard to do that.

00:08:20:16 – 00:08:50:21

Dan Sutherland: I don’t know whether the bank is my bank when they call me. So all of these problems were kind of mashing together and making us think about, well, how do we solve some of these challenges? And we started building technology and we started iterating on it and looking at it. And I had a very R&D approach to to to starting these things. It’s entirely counter what every VC I’ve ever met tells you to do. You know, we’re kind of like, Well, let’s let’s see what’s possible.

00:08:50:23 – 00:09:13:17

Dan Sutherland: Let’s let this thing evolve and, you know, grow organically into something. And that leaves you with lots of pivots and lots of iterations through your through your process. In terms of self, we we flowed naturally to the point where with blockchains and specifically public blockchains, because we we went through using distributed patches at one point.

00:09:15:19 – 00:09:33:02

Dan Sutherland: Became the natural way of solving some of the kind of call problems in the middle of this technology. And so we’ve come to crypto and we’ve come to Web3. Because crypto and web3 other right technologies for the solution that we’ve been building, not because we went. We want to get into this Web three thing. How do we do it?

00:09:34:22 – 00:09:35:07

Dan Sutherland: Yeah.

00:09:36:04 – 00:10:09:25

Richard Carthon: I think that’s a really good approach to it, right? So you identify the problem and the tech that really helps to solve that problem just happens to be blockchain and utilizing crypto. So as you’re building this out and looking into this, you’re trying to know your customers better. And the way that you’re doing this, you know, it’s made for developers and you have a lot of different ways that self can be utilized. So a couple on a one of them on here was talking about, you know, child protection, trust and messaging for the gig economy and a bunch of others.

00:10:09:27 – 00:10:12:19

Richard Carthon: Can you kind of walk us through some of the different ways self can be the last?

00:10:13:01 – 00:10:48:28

Dan Sutherland: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, self is a platform, you know, on top of which we on top of which we want developers to build solutions that fit their marketplace. So I think we’re very carefully not trying to kind of eat the lunch at any of our customers. We want them to we want them to have access to the core elements of self, the communication tools, the ability to verify and consume verified information, and the ability to allow people to truly authenticate biometrically.

00:10:49:00 – 00:11:29:15

Dan Sutherland: So I don’t mean using face ID or a fingerprint on the phone. I mean an authentication that is essentially has the same payload as a KYC check. So you know, somebody is somebody and we then allow them to do useful stuff with all those bits of information, you know, so so we have the ability to delegate information with inside self. So as an organization, that means that you can replicate your management and your authority structure inside your business in self. And you know, if every one of your users in your organization has a self account, those people can have their responsibilities delegated to them by their line manager or by the CEO or whoever it happens to be.

00:11:30:06 – 00:12:13:02

Dan Sutherland: And those things become a matter of record inside a cryptographic chain. And at that point, you can, you know, you know, if the guy on the phone is calling up one of the customers, the customer can say, not only does this guy who is calling me using Self’s voice messaging system, not only is this guy who is calling me who he says he is, but he has the authority to speak on behalf of the company that he’s ringing from. So suddenly I have a fully symmetrical set of fully symmetrical authentication and verification process where as the user I know the person calling me, who’s that is who they’re supposed to be and the person who’s calling me, they know I’m the right customer.

00:12:13:24 – 00:12:47:03

Dan Sutherland: And at that point you don’t have somebody ringing you up and impersonating you, impersonating you and trying to defraud you of something. And your call process is way swifter and way simpler. For us. The experience is super important, like how do you make the things that we do every day more frictionless, easier to handle? And if you if you get on the phone with a with an organization, with your bank, they will ask you a bunch of daft questions to try and prove that you are who you say you are, most of which you can get around with a bit of quick googling with self.

00:12:47:11 – 00:13:17:27

Dan Sutherland: They know who they’re speaking to. They don’t need to ask you lots of security questions. They know the person is on the other end. It’s fine and you know who they are. So you can dive straight into, you know, hey, I need a new mortgage and I can’t get my credit card this month or whatever happens to be. You can have that conversation straight away, which greatly reduces the amount of time the organization needs to plow into call centers. You know, 20, 30% reduction in call center time, which is a not inconsiderable cost saving at the same time as being absolutely certain that they’re speaking to the right person and that their customers are not getting defrauded.

00:13:18:15 – 00:13:52:06

Dan Sutherland: And and that model expands out to other things. You know, parents being able to be certain that the people that their children are playing with online on a computer game platform, for example, are actually all under 18. There’s not some guy in there who’s pretending to be 12 who’s actually 46 because they’ve all authenticate if they if they’re authenticating with those systems using something like self, then they’re in a position to be able to be certain that the people are the right age and that they’re.

00:13:53:13 – 00:14:07:13

Dan Sutherland: That they’re someone who should be on that platform. So self is all about having knowledge. You know, the the the process of the process of fraud is one of essentially.

00:14:09:04 – 00:14:43:00

Dan Sutherland: Convincing somebody that the lie you’re telling is true and making them do something because they believe you lie. And what self is all about is giving people access to truth so that they know when somebody is lying to them or they know that they’re in an environment in which somebody is unable to lie to them so that they can then trust that environment. And through that, going back to what we talked about earlier on in the call, through that you have people having the ability to trust in the world that they’re dealing with and have the same sort of trust engagement with each other that you might get in the real world.

00:14:43:29 – 00:14:44:16

Dan Sutherland: Online.

00:14:46:25 – 00:15:19:16

Richard Carthon: The use cases for this are pretty limitless. And one of the first ones that came to mind as you were talking through this was SIM swapping. SIM swapping is a huge issue. And I think if cell phone carriers can have something like this to bear for anyone who’s trying to potentially change their plan or what have you, it helps to prevent a lot of that because unfortunately SIM swapping not only just in Web3 but even in the web to space, is one of the huge drivers of people. Unfortunately having a good bit of their potential wealth being taken from them in a matter of moments after they have successfully done it.

00:15:20:03 – 00:15:55:12

Dan Sutherland: Absolutely right. I mean, the you know, one of the that picks up something really important, which is that what we’ve grown to do in in in the technology space is to trust technology, to trust machines. You know, the the world of kind of trustless technology is essentially about trusting based on who’s got the keys. And in the background of that is the assumption that the person who’s got the keys is the right person. And it’s very difficult to do anything about that. And that’s the kind of key thing that is at the core of self is the ability to extend trust to a specific human.

00:15:55:27 – 00:16:07:18

Dan Sutherland: To say the person who should have the keys is Bob. And Bob has the keys. That that’s a that’s a huge leap because that’s taking that’s taking biometrics from being something that exists in the world of

00:16:09:16 – 00:16:23:17

Dan Sutherland: my face is being used to with face ID to unlock this phone to your phone, acting like those electronic passport gates at the airport and saying, this person is this person who has the right to do the following things.

00:16:25:03 – 00:16:55:13

Dan Sutherland: But very importantly with self, that’s all happening on the phone. And I where where we’re doing we’re not holding user data in the in the cloud. Our users keep all their information on their cell phones. The there are a few services that we have to consume in the cloud. Gradually as we grow, we’re building out native phone based versions of all of those services. So I’ll our goal in in a couple of years time will be that all of this stuff only runs natively on the cell phone.

00:16:56:03 – 00:17:15:06

Dan Sutherland: But for now a few things have to be done externally, but nothing is stored permanently. Externally, everything is is stored by the user on that device. So you have the ability to do verification that is as strong as the stuff that you’re doing at the airport on the one hand, and on the other hand the user’s got complete control of the data that that’s all about in their hand physically.

00:17:16:12 – 00:17:26:29

Richard Carthon: And you brought it up a couple of times. So there is an app on both, I believe, iOS and Android that people are able to utilize. So walk us through someone downloads this. What are some of the things they can initially start doing?

00:17:28:14 – 00:17:59:08

Dan Sutherland: So the first thing that they can do when they download it is they can go and verify some pieces of information about themselves. So most situations where you’re verifying your your information online, you’re kind of giving your data to an organization who is checking it and then coming back and saying, you know, yes or not with self, you’re essentially doing that for yourself. So you’re checking your own information and then saving that information in self where where it can be made useful so you can use it again.

00:18:00:21 – 00:18:31:10

Dan Sutherland: At the moment we are in our beta version that we’ve that we’ve released so far. We’re released, we’re authenticating things like email addresses and phone numbers on the one hand, and then we’re authenticating anything that we can pull electronic biometric data from. So passports with RFID chips with RF, with NFC chips in them, because we can pull key signed photographs and things off those. As we grow, we’ll be able to do more information.

00:18:31:12 – 00:19:00:13

Dan Sutherland: And one of the things that will be releasing later this year is is a bounty program to allow people to help us broaden that pool of data, because at the moment, most of that data is tied up with the same kind of companies that we’re trying to not have people have to deal with. So we we want users to be able to pull together the data about verifiable information and correlated themselves rather than have organizations correlate it for them.

00:19:02:07 – 00:19:50:16

Dan Sutherland: Once you’ve verified that information, you can do a number of other things. So South contains a a communications platform, so a fully end to end encrypted comms platform that allows you to message make calls with each other. Later on. We’ll add video into that that it works very like, you know, WhatsApp and Signal and those kind of things. But one of the key differences with self is that the aim is that the users are. Biometrically gated so we know who the user is in this environment, and the user can check with whoever it is they’re speaking to that they are speaking to the right person, but it’s not somebody pretending to be someone else and that you can check that before accepting that other person into your into your community to be able to speak to you.

00:19:51:03 – 00:19:59:16

Dan Sutherland: So there’s a lot of security gates to me that people can have very secure communications with one another, as well as this thing being built out on a

00:20:01:02 – 00:20:13:22

Dan Sutherland: being built out on a fully end to end encrypted platform. And and as we scale, we’re gradually distributing all of the elements of that so that the platform will will eventually be fully distribute.

00:20:15:00 – 00:20:26:23

Richard Carthon: And that is actually going to just be my my next follow up question is you already have a platform and an app that people can go and utilize right now, but what are some things that are coming in the future that you think people should be excited about?

00:20:27:09 – 00:21:09:29

Dan Sutherland: Well, so there are there are a bunch of things. Let me think about the things that I will be talking to you about and the ones I shouldn’t. So one of the things I think we’re going to be we’re going to be doing shortly is allowing people to. So I don’t know if I’ve gone over this yet, but inside self is is essentially a data store in which you can store verified information about yourself, stuff that you’ve verified, like the passport I was talking about previously, but also things that maybe have been verified by an organization that you work with that’s using self so somebody so I don’t know, a bank that’s done a KYC check on you could be able to share the fact that they’ve done a KYC check on you and that you are who you say you are.

00:21:11:21 – 00:21:47:20

Dan Sutherland: One of the things we’re going to release shortly is the ability for people to store inside their the keys for the crypto that they hold so that they can do a number of things. Firstly, they can verify to other people who they are so that people know they’re sending crypto to the right user, to the right account. They can also communicate with each other, with other people who are inside the ecosystem using the wallets addresses that they have stored inside their self account.

00:21:49:22 – 00:22:27:05

Dan Sutherland: So you start to get some real security and utility of those addresses, but also have the ability to understand who it is you’re dealing with, who the counterparties are in a transaction so that you can tackle a lot of the problems that happen with things being sent to the wrong place with not being quite sure who you’re sending things to. And on a simple side, just sending things to a friend. You know, your your I could just say, Hey, I’m going to send tweets to Richard and I can send it like that rather than having to send it in a in a more complex format. So that’s going to be really cool, really powerful, really simple, extra security bolt on on the top of the way people manage with with their crypto.

00:22:29:07 – 00:23:10:10

Dan Sutherland: From a pure consumer point of view, we are building a social platform. So so that so I was talking before about what users could do with the thing straight away. One of the things that will be in there shortly is, is the ability to engage socially with all the other people that you’re connected to inside self. And it’s very much a kind of step away from the commercial driven, advertising driven world of social media today. One of the key things with our system is that the is that the platform takes advantage of of the network, but it sits on top of and the information that’s being shared is only shared to the people, you know.

00:23:11:06 – 00:23:26:26

Dan Sutherland: So there is no kind of web view of your life that other people can kind of, you know, slightly voyeuristic, be looked in upon. It’s just you sharing in the old fashioned sense cat pictures with the people, you know, and it becomes a more

00:23:28:15 – 00:23:38:01

Dan Sutherland: personal, interactive way of networking. So so we’re really excited about adding that into things. And I think the last thing is a lot of self depends on.

00:23:40:12 – 00:23:46:05

Dan Sutherland: Depends on having users who interact well with one another and who know each other. And so.

00:23:48:08 – 00:23:59:23

Dan Sutherland: Because this is a Web three project we firmly believe in, in the power of user owned Web three networks. So we are shortly going to be taking.

00:24:02:03 – 00:24:32:20

Dan Sutherland: Up to 10% of our governance tokens, and we’re going to be giving those away as part of a program of sign ups so people will be able to earn our governance tokens for inviting their friends to join so and so, their friends inviting their friends to join self and building engagements and the community around that process, which should be really exciting.

00:24:32:22 – 00:24:40:23

Dan Sutherland: And it’s, you know, it’s a significant giveaway. It’s up to up to $10 million worth of tokens. So it’s not a it’s not a small B, not small bench.

00:24:41:12 – 00:25:03:28

Dan Sutherland: Yeah. So a lot of really cool products coming out. Bots do a giveaway of significant money and it sounds like a lot of great things for the community that you’re building over at self. So for those listening you can go to join self dot com for more info. But what are other ways that people can connect with your self and other people over at self?

00:25:05:07 – 00:25:25:27

Dan Sutherland: So the best way, as you’ve already said, is through self because we’re building a communications platform. So we love to be able to communicate that way. Outside of that, you’ll find us on, on, on, on the usual suspects. So you’ll find us on Telegram and on Twitter, and you’ll find us individually in there as well as as well as on our on our corporate connections.

00:25:26:26 – 00:25:47:00

Richard Carthon: Excellent. Well, as we wrap up, boys, let’s finish with a couple of fun questions. And the first is going to be with all the information that you’ve been able to learn on this journey of building out self and going from the web to over into Web three for the technology that helps solve a lot of these challenges. If you give yourself one or two pieces of advice when you first started, what would you tell yourself?

00:25:50:07 – 00:25:50:23

Dan Sutherland: Woo!

00:25:54:20 – 00:25:55:27

Dan Sutherland: To ignore the markets.

00:25:57:21 – 00:26:02:07

Dan Sutherland: And build. The thing that you want to build because you believe in it.

00:26:04:21 – 00:26:05:24

Dan Sutherland: That would be really useful.

00:26:10:21 – 00:26:13:08

Dan Sutherland: Ooh, that’s, that’s, that’s a tricky question.

00:26:16:02 – 00:26:39:18

Dan Sutherland: I think the other one would be. Where these things are. Going to be useful and going to work is probably never where you thought it was going to be. So be prepared to pivot and revisit the things that you’re doing. A new building frequently and constantly question whether you’re doing the right thing or not.

00:26:41:27 – 00:27:03:23

Richard Carthon: Think those are two great lessons of having the resilience to not worry about where the market is, but build what needs to be built and builders build during bear markets, period, and to have a quality product regardless of what market conditions you have. You have to just keep building like that. And then finally, also just to.

00:27:06:12 – 00:27:44:16

Richard Carthon: Stay resilient in the face of it, having to pivot like you have an idea of where you think things are going to go. And it the endpoint isn’t necessarily exactly where you thought it might have to adjust. You have to pivot over to get there. So definitely appreciate that. And then as to wrap up, it’s been a wild couple of weeks. At the time of this recording, I suggested everything happening with FDX. How do you think Self is positioned to help with not allowing these potential things happen in the future, or what can people be doing to protect themselves in the future to not have this repeat itself?

00:27:46:00 – 00:27:49:25

Dan Sutherland: Yeah, it’s been a really interesting few weeks to be launching a business that’s focused on fraud.

00:27:51:24 – 00:27:59:11

Dan Sutherland: So it’s really it’s an interesting question. I think this all comes down to trust and trust in technology. So

00:28:01:05 – 00:28:02:08

Dan Sutherland: as it stands,

00:28:04:05 – 00:28:25:18

Dan Sutherland: when you put your crypto into a centralized exchange, you are essentially putting your fate in their hands. They have your keys and you really have no idea what they are doing or able to do with your keys.

00:28:27:12 – 00:28:58:18

Dan Sutherland: But you also don’t know some other things that apply just as much to decentralized exchanges as they do to centralized exchanges. So you you don’t know that the code they’re running is the code you think it is. It may look like it’s doing the right thing and outputting the right things, but you really have no idea whether actually they’ve got a lovely debug version that’s pulling all kinds of data that they can use to go in front, run the market on other exchanges and make use of your your position from that perspective.

00:29:00:20 – 00:29:17:04

Dan Sutherland: And you don’t know whether the infrastructure that they’re running on top of and this is this is this is true of centralized exchanges really true of decentralized exchanges. You don’t know whether the infrastructure is clean and is is being operated in a way that means that you can trust it. So our kind of.

00:29:18:21 – 00:29:26:16

Richard Carthon: Current default is a sort of slightly blind trust that these things are okay and that your money will be okay.

00:29:28:24 – 00:29:49:27

Richard Carthon: That’s a little bit like leaving your wallet on the bar, in the pub and assuming that no one’s going to buy themselves a beer. It’s it’s it’s still very much the Wild West, and that’s a generic term. And then if you look at if you look at the things that it’s alleged that FDX had been doing.

00:29:51:29 – 00:30:13:11

Richard Carthon: Those things are really nothing to do with crypto and everything to do with a complete failure of corporate governance and people just fraudulently and corruptly running an organization and nobody really checking that that’s what they were doing. And that’s the sort of extreme form of blind trust in what these guys are, what these guys are up to.

00:30:15:05 – 00:30:19:12

Richard Carthon: How to self play into that? Well, in the in the general thing I was talking about a second ago,

00:30:21:00 – 00:30:57:24

Richard Carthon: self is able to prove things about not just people or organizations, but it can also it can also be used to prove things about infrastructure and about intangible things like code. And so we can we can use self to gain a much greater degree of trust in the stack that things are running on, being able to verify that. Being able to verify that the exchange that you’re running, that you’re that you’re that you’re tokens have been placed into in order to be able to sell them is.

00:30:59:06 – 00:31:10:00

Richard Carthon: Clean from the top of the stack down to the bottom is a really powerful bit of openness that exchanges could usefully take advantage of

00:31:12:10 – 00:31:44:23

Richard Carthon: being able to know that the people who you’re dealing with at the exchange are the right people being able to know, as we will nicely be able to do that. If you’re if you’re sending some tokens from one place to another that you know who the recipient is and the recipient, notably the sender is, those kind of things are really important, particularly if you layer an elements of anonymity on top of that. So one of the things that we’re really keen on itself is our ability to verify that a human is a specific human, but without exposing any personal information about that specific human.

00:31:44:25 – 00:32:05:01

Richard Carthon: So, you know, is this I’m sending this to the here. Is it going to a specific person? That’s quite powerful on its own, even without having to know who the person is. It’s the difference between know this isn’t going to a specific person, this is going to be an organization or this is going to a server. Those kind of things are quite useful to be able to do so.

00:32:07:17 – 00:32:45:01

Richard Carthon: We kind of believe in entrusting nothing and verifying everything, but providing that verification in a really straightforward, really easily consumed way. And I think that’s where we see us adding real value into the into the exchange space is their ability to take that kind of current desire to be very clear about their balance sheets and expand that to being very clear about. Yes, we should trust their exchanges and we should trust their platforms, because here’s the proof that they’re trustworthy and it’s being able to provide that proof where I think self will really be able to help.

00:32:46:13 – 00:32:56:24

Richard Carthon: Yeah. Two, two great examples. One was the proof of solvency is definitely something that a lot of people are pushing for right now. But then even trusting that where money’s being sent on both sides, right

00:32:58:25 – 00:33:29:11

Richard Carthon: as people come into the space and they’re moving their crypto, it can be a very scary moment when they realize that if they somehow mess up the address or somehow think they’re sending it to one place and it goes to another, it’s there’s no take back. So once it’s once you said that’s that, that’s it. And you even have examples I think is either Coinbase or crypto dot com that recently sent millions of dollars to the wrong place. You’re like you’re an exchange. You do this all the time. How do you, how do you mess that up in something like self could help with not having that problem.

00:33:29:13 – 00:33:56:21

Richard Carthon: I’m happy that verification and doing some of that so I definitely see the use cases there. So definitely appreciate you, you know, expanding on that. And I know all the listeners here, it’s another way to be safe and in all of the ways that unfortunately fraud is both going around, but also to verify where your money is going. But, you know, as we wrap up here, then, you know, what is the final thought that you want to leave with everyone listening today?

00:34:01:15 – 00:34:04:05

Richard Carthon: So fraud is something that happens in the.

00:34:05:28 – 00:34:09:08

Richard Carthon: Spaces between the things that we know for certain.

00:34:11:12 – 00:34:23:13

Richard Carthon: And. Everywhere. We leave a gap. Of uncertainty is somewhere where. Somebody will. Try and defraud you.

00:34:25:03 – 00:34:55:04

Richard Carthon: And it’s a it’s an a particularly unpleasant thought, but it’s more prevalent online than it is in the real world. And the more things that we push online in the way we do them today, where our trust is based on assumption and hope, the more space there is for fraud and fraud is already the third biggest economy in the world by GDP. Only China and the US have a bigger economy than fraud.

00:34:55:08 – 00:35:13:06

Richard Carthon: Five and a half trillion US dollars last year. And that’s just the stuff we know about. These guys have a better business model than most of the rest of businesses. And they’re growing faster. And unless we do something different to try and combat them, that’s only going to get worse.

00:35:15:03 – 00:35:28:10

Richard Carthon: Yeah, I think that’s a great final thought and it’s. A great reminder that we have to continue to protect ourselves. And there was a lot of lessons learned, a lot of black swan events that happened

00:35:30:05 – 00:35:54:18

Richard Carthon: to keep it top of mind for us. So I think again, self is a very timely company that’s doing something to help improve a lot of this. And as a reminder for everyone listening, make sure you go out to join self dot com for more information. But then thank you so much for dropping all the gym sharing all the information everyone make sure you go and give self a look And as always stay Cryptoquant.

00:35:55:19 – 00:36:16:04

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

00:36:16:06 – 00:36:17:00

Richard Carthon: Production is.

00:36:17:02 – 00:36:19:05

Richard Carthon: Exclusively for informational purposes.