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

00:00:06:24 – 00:00:22:00

Richard Carthon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon, and today we got a very special guest that is all the way out overseas working on a really cool project that I’m excited to learn a lot more about, we got Ed Medlow with SelfKey. How are you doing today? 

00:00:22:26 – 00:00:23:15

Edmund Lowell: Doing well, thanks for having me Richard. 

00:00:24:10 – 00:00:28:04

Richard Carthon: Of course. Well, before we get started, go ahead and give us a little bit of background on yourself. 

00:00:29:17 – 00:01:15:00

Edmund Lowell: For me, I grew up in the United States and went to college at Northeastern University. And when I was at Northwestern as part of a co-op, which is kind of this cooperative education where you go and do work while you’re still in school, I started selling real estate and got very involved with doing transactional deals. However, had sort of bad timing because this was around 2008 and I was just in the middle of the subprime mortgage collapse in the U.S. and sort of found myself very quickly, not really facing great prospects in the real estate game, so I looked at my skill set and you had to file paperwork with government and I started setting up companies for my friends, for different real estate investors who I knew. I would set up a legal entity like a Delaware C Corp or an LLC and i would form that entity on their behalf and then help them get a bank account set up. 

00:01:16:12 – 00:02:26:01

Edmund Lowell: Fast forward a couple of years, I graduated from the university, I was able to defer going to law school and move overseas and do a bit of travel. And this business turned into a company called Flag Theory, where we help people incorporate, set up a legal entity in many different jurisdictions around the world and then obtain a bank account. And in the course of doing this business, realized that KYC, this process of know your customer, where I was collecting documentation and then passing that along to the bank and then the bank was kind of doing the same checks that I’d already done was a very burdensome and difficult process for the client, the bank, for me, for everyone, and looked at how we could use technology to make this process a little bit easier. So in 2015, authored a white paper on this topic and went to market with a company called KYC Chain. So this is around 2015. We went through several different accelerators, three different accelerators, we took our product to market big banks, Standard Chartered Bank, and realized that okay, even though we created some efficiencies for the financial institution, the end user, the business or the individual who was trying to set up a bank account, still had to go and submit their documents over and over again every time to the KYC. 

00:02:27:02 – 00:03:18:09

Edmund Lowell: And we felt like a user driven wallet would be a nice product that we could bring to market. And that’s when in 2017, we went to market with SelfKey. So now the SelfKey Foundation has a wallet that’s free and open source that you can download. You can hold your Crypto, you can also store your identity data there and you can take these documents and data and share it with a company that would set up a bank account or set up a company and get residency, get a Crypto loan. So there’s a lot of different things that you can do inside of this SelfKey wallet, which I’m sure we’ll get into. One more product that we’ve launched very recently is called KeyFi, which is a DeFi play built using SelfKey technology, which aims to use A.I. and machine learning to identify and evaluate different DeFi opportunities. That’s my story as quick as I can break it down.

00:03:18:11 – 00:04:02:03

Richard Carthon: Nah. I mean, you gave us a lot to unpack and you have a unique background, right? So you’re a serial entrepreneur, have been through the ups and downs from a financial collapse to then helping entrepreneurs figure out how they can get their business up and running, their bank account set up. So, you know the financial challenges that not only businesses are facing, but individuals face on the international scale. So you know, my first question to you is you know, and we’re going to definitely unpack all the business you brought up, but what was your first introduction to the Crypto space? So you say you wrote a white paper for what became, you know, KYC token, but like, how did you even know, like to write a white paper? Like, how did you even know like, here’s an opportunity in the Crypto space?

00:04:02:29 – 00:04:23:15

Edmund Lowell: Yeah, good question. I mean, I was really paying attention to Bitcoin quite closely since around, I would say 2010, 2011, it was just very interesting to me. It was at that point, very much just this cyberpunk, kind of underground, Hey, this might be cool if it works, but probably it won’t type of thing. 

00:04:23:18 – 00:04:24:03

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:04:24:05 – 00:05:20:10

Edmund Lowell: Like it didn’t have anywhere near the credentials or trust that it does now. It was just like a libertarian streak and I was very much a libertarian and just thought that this was something that was really cool because it represents this opportunity to have freedom and privacy and wealth kind of distilled down into this very simple, elegant technology. And after Bitcoin, there started to pop up all these different Blockchains that are now like really well known, but at the time kind of weren’t. Like everybody was just doing an ICO, but this was before 2017, this was like 2014, 2013. Like I remember the Ethereum ICO when that came out and how everybody was kind of curious what Ethereum was and how it would be different. I just started learning more about, Okay, you know, what is Ethereum, how can we build something on top of it? How could this power a dapp? Even the concept of a dapp wasn’t really clear at that point. 

00:05:20:15 – 00:05:21:00

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:05:21:02 – 00:05:57:19

Edmund Lowell: So I was just trying to get my ideas down on paper and get smart people to look at it and say, Hey, this makes sense, Hey, this doesn’t make sense. There were some really good people who kind of helped guide me. I was in technology at that time. I was working in a dev shop and kind of trying to understand tech at a deeper level, at least like Web tech. So, you know, that was kind of a brief background of how I wrote that white paper. That white paper didn’t really turn into much other than, Okay, let’s just start to build this. I don’t even think I shared it beyond 50 people, it was not made for public consumption.

00:05:57:21 – 00:06:36:19

Richard Carthon: But I’m sure it was like a really great learning experience and like it made you want to keep digging deeper into the space. And you know, along those lines, as you start to, you said with the KYC token that you got into three different accelerators. And for everyone listening that doesn’t know how hard it is just to get into an accelerator, tough, to get into three is exceptional. And we’re going to definitely dive into your company, but like, I don’t want to pass this opportunity just to ask you, from a business standpoint because we do have a lot of entrepreneurial minded people that listen to these episodes, what are some major takeaways that you learn from going through those accelerators? 

00:06:37:21 – 00:07:08:27

Edmund Lowell: Yeah, good question. I mean, for me, I think as an entrepreneur, you need to evaluate what am I going to take from this accelerator? You need to be really selfish when you think about the terms that they’re giving you. On the other hand, you should think about where you are realistically, right? So you have to balance these two points, which is Okay, this group of experienced people are going to be able to get me connections, they’re going to give me money, they’re going to give me whatever that accelerators offering, right? On the other hand, you need to be really cautious about Hmm, is this really worth seven percent? But I really want to get this up. What do I have here? And I think you have the balance, right?

00:07:09:12 – 00:07:37:26

Edmund Lowell: For us, though, we really try to go into accelerators that didn’t take equity. So we managed to get into a couple of different accelerators that didn’t for whatever reason and that was a really good opportunity to go out, go to market and start pitching customers right away. Like I subscribe to the lean startup method, where like the most important thing for you to do with your staff is to get out of the building, sometimes even before you’ve built anything, right? You need to go and validate whatever it is that you’re planning on building with a live customer and see if they’d be willing to pay for it. 

00:07:38:06 – 00:08:28:01

Edmund Lowell: And what I was learning from going and meeting all these different banks, one of them in particular, Accenture, has an accelerator in Hong Kong and they just lined us up with bank after bank after bank and every single day all that we did was pitch bankers. And I was pitching them about how we would solve their KYC blows with Blockchain. And a lot of them were saying, Well, we don’t know what Blockchain does right now, frankly it’s 2015. But KYC is a huge operational challenge for us. So you’re definitely on the right problem, we’re curious as to how you’re going to fix that. And that’s really been an evolution over time, but for me, the biggest value that I gained from those accelerators was getting out of the building and leveraging other people’s connections to go out and talk to customers. And I think that it’s hard to argue that there’s anything less valuable in business than talking to customers because you’ll learn so much and sometimes you’ll get a sale, but the most important thing is to learn, and to iterate and to get better. 

00:08:28:06 – 00:09:12:24

Richard Carthon: For sure. And just to echo that, I agree. One of the greatest things that’s happened as we’ve been growing our podcast and our listenership is to go back out and reach and just to hear what is it that people want to learn more about and what about our interview styles or whatever correlate and really what stands out in our conversations that are key takeaways that our listeners can go and act on. You know, one of those things has been really learning a lot more about the business that is being created, but then also, like after learning about it, how they can actually go and act on it. So kind of transitioning real quick, tell us about SelfKey and what that product is and if someone that’s listening right now, how they could go and start using it?

00:09:13:26 – 00:09:48:23

Edmund Lowell: Sure, yeah. SelfKey is a non-custodial ball, so if you’re into Crypto, you’re learning about Crypto, well there’s kind of this famous saying that’s not your keys, right? So if you’ve got Crypto on an exchange, it’s not really yours yet because it’s under the custody of somebody else. And Blockchain is an amazing technology because it’s really the first technology, well at least in this time period, that’s a bare asset, right? It allows you to hold and self custody your tokens, your coins, so be it, within your own kind of, in this case, computer or hardware wallet. 

00:09:49:03 – 00:11:10:18

Edmund Lowell: I kind of like hardware wallets because they’re a little bit more easy to back up in some cases. And yeah, hardware wallets have a lot of benefits we won’t get into now, but anyway, you can go to SelfKey.org, you can download the wallet for free. You can check the MD5 Hash to make sure it is a legit file downloading from SelfKey.org Yeah, from there you can go and you can store your Crypto on there. It’s non-custodial, so we don’t even know the Crypto that you hold or what you’re holding. And you can uniquely with the SelfKey wallet also store your identity data. So that allows you to go into the marketplace and do things like one click, set up a company, one click, set up a bank account, do these complicated or complex KYC interactions in a very simple way as the wallet kind of guides you. And the beautiful thing is that the more you use the SelfKey wallet, the more useful it becomes because you can leverage it for additional future products or services that you might get in the financial space. So what we’re trying to be at SelfKey is this one stop shop where you can compare different products side by side and say, Okay, this Crypto alone doesn’t look as good for me, but this one looks good. And then when you click on it, when you go to sign up, it would help you go through that process a bit easier. So that’s kind of a good way to get started with SelfKey is to play around with the wallet. It doesn’t cost anything, it’s free, it’s open source. Yeah, I don’t see why you wouldn’t use it if you’re in Crypto

00:11:10:20 – 00:11:36:16

Richard Carthon: For sure. And just to kind of elaborate on that a little bit more, is it a little bit for your more experienced type of Crypto user, power user? Is it more, could a newbie come on and use it? Is it one of those things that you kind of just grow with by using it? Because just like you said, like obviously the more you use it, the more effective and useful it is, but who do you see as the ideal person coming on to utilize this?

00:11:38:07 – 00:11:49:08

Edmund Lowell: It could be beginners or advanced users. I just think that some people who are in Cryptocurrency don’t self custody their coins because they’re scared in some way and they just keep their tokens on Coinbase, for instance. 

00:11:49:16 – 00:11:50:01

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:11:50:03 – 00:12:33:09

Edmund Lowell: And I really think that’s a mistake. Nothing against Coinbase, right? I actually think that they’re a fantastic company. The point of Crypto or at least a major part of it is that you are self custodying your assets. And if you’re not self custodying of your assets, why are you buying Crypto? You might as well be buying you know, lots of other things that we could get into as well. But it just to me, kind of the true philosophy of Cryptocurrency is that of self custody. And this is something that’s really been kind of there from the beginning and it should be there to the end. It’s been now turned sort of like a financial asset and that’s been interesting to see how that’s kind of changed the environment, where now you have large institutions getting to the space and they require custody because they’re a large institution. 

00:12:33:18 – 00:12:34:03

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:12:34:06 – 00:13:15:18

Edmund Lowell: But if you’re an individual user, there’s not really any reason that you shouldn’t self custody your assets. It may seem confusing, but we try to make that really simple, right? Things like backing up your seed phrase, things like splitting your seed phrase so that it’s kept in different locations in a safe way. These are really important skills for somebody who’s getting to the space to learn, and it doesn’t have to be a large amount of money that you’re putting at risk in the self custody wallet, right? I would argue that it’s not really a risk, but start with something that you can lose and learn how to like, go through those technical steps to get it set up and protect yourself. Those are really, really important skills, that serve you well as Crypto becomes more important. 

00:13:15:21 – 00:13:49:24

Richard Carthon: For sure. And you actually brought up something that I know we’re going to dive into in a moment on mass adoption and how I think that we’re potentially getting closer to it. I think we’re still a ways away just because it is a challenge for your everyday person to just come on and use it, but we are still getting closer to that. But before we dive into that conversation, I know that you talked about how SelfKey’s now moving into the DeFi space and making a DeFi play by utilizing that. Can you kind of speak to what that is and how y’all are kind of diving into that space? 

00:13:50:24 – 00:14:13:07

Edmund Lowell: Sure, yeah. So we had in our SelfKey R&D department, which was a DeFi aggregator. So an aggregator is basically a dashboard that allows you to aggregate in several different products from different companies and view them all from one dashboard, right? So if you look at other aggregators that have been successful, you could look at like, a Mint.com, right?

00:14:13:15 – 00:14:14:00

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:14:14:02 – 00:15:08:15

Edmund Lowell: Where you can aggregate your different financial accounts into one dashboard and get a picture of your financial history all in one place. So we actually decided to spin this out from SelfKey making its own projects. We felt like it would be better to stand on its own two feet to be a project that can have its own token, that can have its own ecosystem, that can have its own community. So we split out this project, which we call KeyFi into its own entity and it’s kind of its own thing at this point. So you can go to KeyFi.ai and you can actually use it to kind of look and evaluate different DeFi opportunities to enter into those opportunities, and you can also get a credential from the SelfKey wallet, which makes you eligible for different things, like, for instance, building rewards. If you’re from one of the countries that are eligible for token rewards, you could earn that through the KeyFi app just from using the app. So, yeah, that’s kind of like a high level overview of what KeyFi looks like. 

00:15:09:19 – 00:15:40:15

Richard Carthon: Which is really cool. I mean, the fact that you’re being an aggregator and I think Mint is a really great example for anyone that’s used it. I personally use it, that instantly, like, made that connection for me. A newbie that’s listening to this, can you kind of paint a little bit more of a picture on first, just elaborating a little bit more on DeFi in itself and what that is? But then two, how if they want to come on and capitalize on these opportunities, like what does that look like for them? 

00:15:41:10 – 00:16:21:25

Edmund Lowell: Yeah. So the most popular part of DeFi right now is DeFi lending, right? That’s really what we’re seeing explode in 2020. And DeFi lending is earning a return on your Cryptocurrency via it stablecoin or via a volatile asset, where you’re basically either lending that to someone else and then you’re earning an annual percentage yield on that asset or you’re putting the asset locked up and then you’re borrowing against that asset. So within the context of the greater economy, some of these lending protocols are offering six, eight, 10 percent on stablecoin, when your bank is offering one percent or less. 

00:16:22:03 – 00:16:22:18

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:16:22:21 – 00:16:35:04

Edmund Lowell: So from a purely financial standpoint, you’re getting a higher yield. There are some additional risks involved, of course, and these aren’t banks that we’re talking about, they’re oftentimes decentralized lending protocols that exist completely unchanged. 

00:16:35:23 – 00:16:36:08

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:16:36:10 – 00:17:39:01

Edmund Lowell: However, from a financial standpoint, purely looking at maximizing EO, these present really interesting opportunities. Now, if you want to get into these lending protocols, you could go and you could sign up one by one, and then you could keep track and manage those separately, or you could enter in through a common dashboard, which makes the experience just a lot easier. And basically, that’s what we’re trying to do, is put a UI layer on top of these smart contracts. We haven’t deployed them, other companies have deployed them and you’d be interacting with their smart contract, but you do it through this dashboard that aggregates it, allows you to move between them more easily, allows you to make decisions more easily because you can evaluate risk or you can look at opportunities. You can use the data feeds that we have to see, Okay, what might be the most interesting place for me to put my stablecoin if I wanted to get into DeFi and play around. And kind of on top of that, if you are getting in through this protocol, we do have a credential you are eligible. You can earn some tokens as a reward simply through entering in through this gateway. So, yeah, that’s that’s a little bit more about what we built there.

00:17:40:06 – 00:18:11:18

Richard Carthon: Yeah. No, I mean, I think that’s a really good way of explaining that and I appreciate you elaborating. For those listening, I think a way that I kind of put it all together is if you’ve ever been on a Coin Market Cap or a Coin Gecko to find like some of the, let’s call it the top one hundred Cryptos, you might have to, if you want to find those individual websites, that’d be a pretty big task, because one, you’d have to know they exist and then two, you then have to go to their website and then sign up for all the things and do all the things and it would be very taxing. But an aggregator like you just described to have it all in one place. 

00:18:11:20 – 00:19:02:19

Richard Carthon: Now, I know that I have 50 to 100 places I can go and use DeFi to lend against what kind of yields I can get in return and I don’t have to go all these places. I just go to this one interface that shows all this information is very powerful, it’s very quick and efficient and I do see where that use case is. So thanks for elaborating on that, it really does sound really cool. So everyone listening, make sure to go check that out. Something that I kind of want to go back to just for a second is getting back to that use case of mass adoption and making sure that the pathway to getting there, 2020 has expedited that. And I think a lot of it has to do with COVID, I think a lot of it has to do with the U.S. presidential election, I think a ton of things have to do with what was going on. But like you know, what is your take on how we are getting closer to mass adoption? 

00:19:04:24 – 00:19:40:02

Edmund Lowell: Yeah, good question. I think it’s going to come from two directions, so one is that we live in a macro economic environment, where you have central banks, you have governments printing a lot of negative yielding bonds and debt, right? So essentially, the Japanese government will say to you, I will give you 95 percent of a cheeseburger ten years from now for a whole cheeseburger today and there are people who are signing up and taking that deal. But it’s not exactly those numbers and they’re not trading in cheeseburgers, they’re trading in Yen, but you get the point, right?

00:19:40:09 – 00:19:40:24

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:19:40:26 – 00:20:24:16

Edmund Lowell: You wouldn’t give anyone a whole cheeseburger for less of a cheeseburger in the future and that’s what negative yielding debt is. And there’s trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of this negative yielding debt that’s out there. So that’s the traditional financial infrastructure and the system that we find ourselves living in. And then you have kind of this alternative decentralized financial ecosystem, which is offering more than a cheeseburger in the future for a whole cheeseburger today, right? So that’s interesting for a lot of people because it’s just simply a place where you can find yield. More risky or not, it is a better yield than traditional assets are presenting at the moment, particularly in the fixed income space. That’s from the purely financial standpoint. 

00:20:24:23 – 00:21:01:24

Edmund Lowell: I think from a technical standpoint and the philosophical standpoint, those are also really interesting things for certain people, right? The idea of owning your own money and being a self custodian, that’s going to appeal to a certain segment of people. The idea of this is that technologically really interesting thing that I’d love to learn about, that’s going to appeal to some people. But I think the way that we go mainstream is that you have to make it really usable, right? So if I think that the technology is cool, if I think that it’s philosophically really interesting, if I think that, Wow, this is something that I could make money on, that’s great, but how do I get started is kind of like a big barrier, right? 

00:21:01:26 – 00:21:02:24

Richard Carthon: Exactly. 

00:21:02:26 – 00:21:41:10

Edmund Lowell: Because it’s tough to set up, knock a sturdy wall. It’s tough to research and go through different DeFi find opportunities and pick the best ones and keep track of them. And that’s really what we’re trying to do at SelfKey and KeyFi is make it super easy for the user to get into the space and to interact with these different verticals. I think that the user experience is kind of the critical barrier to mass adoption at this point, right? If the technology is better, if it’s more philosophically aligned with some of these ideals and they feel like they can make money with it, there’s not a whole lot stopping them from jumping in other than, Okay, this is too difficult and I want it to be really easy, right?

00:21:41:12 – 00:21:41:27

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:21:41:29 – 00:21:51:02

Edmund Lowell: And it has to be. So that’s what we’re trying to do you know, as software developers, as wallet developers, as aggregators, is to make that process really, really simple. 

00:21:52:05 – 00:22:49:26

Richard Carthon: And I think it is extremely smart. And I’ve brought this up in previous episodes that I’ve done that the path to mass adoption is when something is so intuitive that anyone can pick it up and use it. Like you don’t need to be trained on how to use a Crypto product, it’s just, Hey, you go do this thing and you get this result, right? And the next, I call it three to five years are the projects who are actively doing that and figuring that out. So whenever the curve finally comes and everyone catches on to, Oh, this whole Crypto thing is real, it’s not going anywhere, we need to jump all over this. You’re already miles ahead because people aren’t going to be looking for like home run hitters, they’re going to be looking for what works right now in this moment and I’ll start with you. And so you already have a first mover advantage. And if the technology, like you said, has been built correctly, you’re sticky. And that’s why I think you know, it’s just a really smart play and a really smart approach to be doing that. So, again, thank you for that answer. 

00:22:49:28 – 00:23:09:25

Richard Carthon: And just one more question that I want to ask you, there’s a lot going on in the Crypto and Blockchain space and there’s a lot going on in just the financial world in general with everything that’s going on, what are some things that you are looking out for that you are more conscious of and are consciously watching that you think others should be looking out for in, let’s call it the next three to five years? 

00:23:11:18 – 00:23:47:26

Edmund Lowell: Yeah, I think what we’re starting to see is just more acceptability from an institutional level, on Bitcoin, on Crypto. If you look at 2020, right? You had this market crash in March where Bitcoin went from around, I don’t know what it was before, but it went down to like, 5,000, 4,000, right? And so some people would say, Well, this didn’t act like it was supposed to because in a deflationary or a liquidity crunch, people sold Crypto, but the reason they did that is because they needed to sell all of their assets. So gold went down, everything went down. 

00:23:48:20 – 00:23:49:05

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:23:49:07 – 00:23:57:03

Edmund Lowell: And then after that, it was sort of furiously bid for the next several months, went from 5,00 to now you know, as we’re sitting here today, over 15,000. 

00:23:57:17 – 00:23:58:02

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:23:58:04 – 00:24:33:05

Edmund Lowell: And that’s pretty incredible, right? Because it was very resilient during that time. And I think what that shows is that it is an inflationary hedge. We’ve kind of speculated and that’s been a thesis which hasn’t really been proven, but now it’s starting to be and I shouldn’t say that it’s unproven because every year Noval says this and I really think it’s a smart goal, it’s like every year that Bitcoin is around and it stays around is more validation that it won’t be killed and that it is kind of fulfilling the promise, which it intends to do as an asset class, right? 

00:24:33:15 – 00:24:34:00

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:24:34:02 – 00:24:56:08

Edmund Lowell: For us to have witnessed this new asset class come into being is like a pretty big thing, right? Yeah, for a number of different reasons, but I know for me personally, I kind of feel like I missed the Internet start. I was there, I was 10 years old going on AOL and like that was my that was my world. 

00:24:56:10 – 00:24:56:25

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:24:56:27 – 00:25:16:24

Edmund Lowell: That was amazing, I wasn’t I wasn’t launching a product, I wasn’t Jeff Bezos at that time. And now it feels like the Crypto industry is taking off in such a way and it’s at such a point, it’s at an inflection point, right? Like you gave the example, you know, how early are we in the game? I think if it’s like a nine inning baseball game, we’re maybe in like maybe the third or fourth inning, like it’s still really, really early. 

00:25:17:00 – 00:25:17:15

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:25:17:17 – 00:25:36:03

Edmund Lowell: And there’s still a lot of things to see what happens next, but it’s been really amazing to witness what’s happened so far, right? And by the way, I don’t think I’m Jeff Bezos at all, like that’s not who I think that I am, but I’m just glad to participate in this space. 

00:25:36:16 – 00:26:16:05

Richard Carthon: Right. I mean, you’re in the game. Just like you said, we’re still in a very early game, but you know, you’re at least on deck getting ready to bat, right? And I think it’s really interesting and really cool just the amount of opportunity. And I like the fact that you brought it back to like the Internet bubble. Like the way I like to allude it to our audience is this is that wave. Like, what are you going to say a decade from now or 20 years from now when you look back and you tell your kids, I could have bought Bitcoin when it was worth $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 or I could have bought SelfKey back when it was whatever. And like, look at it today, right?

00:26:16:07 – 00:26:49:16

Richard Carthon: You don’t necessarily know who the winners are going to be. You don’t necessarily know who the Amazons, who the Googles, who these large projects are. Like AOL was a lead runner, but they ultimately didn’t make it, right? Ethereum might be AOL, you never know. Like, if they can’t figure out if Eth 2.0, you just never know. But like, the whole point is, is that if you’re in the game and you’re playing and you just survive, you have a great chance at having an outrageous opportunity to just fly through at a pace that we haven’t seen since the .com bubble, right?

00:26:49:21 – 00:26:52:08

Edmund Lowell: Well it’s that sort of transformational technology. 

00:26:52:10 – 00:26:52:25

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:26:52:27 – 00:27:03:06

Edmund Lowell: Right? Like it’s that big of a deal, right? Like the Internet allowed us to exchange information. And the amazing thing about Blockchain is it allows us to exchange value in a peer to peer permissionless way, right?

00:27:03:21 – 00:27:45:26

Edmund Lowell: So the Internet is about information, I can like, download a torrent from my friend in Indonesia all the way in the United States, right? And we can exchange that information, but now we can exchange value in a permissionless way over that you know, protocol, well a slightly different protocol, but it runs on top of the Internet. And that’s just a fundamental sea level change for technology, right? So it’s just such an exciting time to be involved. And everybody or some people will give the excuse, Hey, I don’t want to get involved because it’s too late, right? Why would I buy Bitcoin at $15,000? It’s already at $15,000, it used to be a $1, why would I buy it at $15,000? The point is kind of not that, right? The point A, I think it’s way more important to learn and to understand what is this technology.

00:27:45:28 – 00:27:46:13

Richard Carthon: Yes. Yes.

00:27:46:19 – 00:28:08:28

Edmund Lowell: That’s really where you should be coming from is a curiosity standpoint, right? Because Bitcoin will go down from 15 to something else, right? And then probably someday it will go back up, right? And if you are constantly waiting for, like a permission to buy from someone else, you’re looking for, like, a price prediction, I think you should be really careful about listening to people’s price predictions because are you going to listen to that person when they said sell?

00:28:09:02 – 00:28:09:17

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:28:09:19 – 00:28:15:05

Edmund Lowell: Like, why are you not basing this off of your own intuition or assessment of the market? Why are you basing it on somebody else? 

00:28:15:10 – 00:28:15:25

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:28:15:27 – 00:28:23:06

Edmund Lowell: So I think you should be really careful of the gurus or people who say Bitcoin is going to go to X amount by X date. Be careful with that. 

00:28:23:08 – 00:28:23:23

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:28:23:25 – 00:28:47:12

Edmund Lowell: Like really try to use your own best judgment, only play with something that you could lose and also try to do it from a curiosity standpoint, because the Blockchain world has so many different projects, right? But a lot of them, frankly speaking, aren’t very good. So you kind of have to be able to be able to discern, Okay, does this make sense, does it not? With your own mind, right?

00:28:47:14 – 00:28:47:29

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:28:48:01 – 00:29:11:05

Edmund Lowell: If you’re just listening to someone else, you’ve kind of already failed because now it’s not a decision you’ve made. So you are behind the eight ball from the beginning. So anyway, I know that we’re not getting into, like, investment advice or any of that, but I just think that if you’re curious about the space, the best thing that you can do is start. And the best thing that you can do is be curious and try to learn. And very rarely will those things lead you wrong, right?

00:29:12:10 – 00:29:47:07

Richard Carthon: Father curiosity, which is one of the things we preach here, and to educate yourself and all the opportunities that are here. And we just want to empower everyone that’s listening and give them the access to knowledge and information to make your own decisions. We just want to give you the access and I think you’ve done a great job today of giving us a lot of access into the various companies that you’re working on and the various opportunities that are within them. So on that note, I do want to say thank you and also want to ask, like I ask all of my speakers who come on the show, what is a final thought that you want to leave with everyone here before you go? 

00:29:49:06 – 00:30:31:00

Edmund Lowell: Well, a lot of times I will say why did I start building SelfKey? Because I think that SelfKey really hits at one of the most fundamental questions of our time, which is who owns our data and what are we doing with our data? And how are we storing it? How are we managing it? We talk about data being kind of the new oil all the time, right? Well, self sovereign identity is refined oil. It’s really, really important, this topic and I would encourage people to kind of learn and get into that. And kind of the best way to do that is through SelfKey.org. And with DeFi, if you’re interested in the DeFi space, which I think is a really interesting space as well, maybe less philosophical, it’s more about earning money, quite frankly. 

00:30:31:24 – 00:30:32:09

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:30:32:11 – 00:30:47:11

Edmund Lowell: But I would say play around with something that you can afford to lose in a way that educates you. And a great place to start is KeyFi.ai where we use AI and a DeFi aggregator to try to make DeFi a little bit easier and more accessible. 

00:30:47:25 – 00:30:48:10

Richard Carthon: Awesome. 

00:30:48:12 – 00:30:50:27

Edmund Lowell: That’s my closing thought. Thanks, Richard, for having me today. 

00:30:51:12 – 00:30:56:12

Richard Carthon: Of course, we’ll definitely appreciate it. What are some ways that people can learn more about you and connect with you? 

00:30:58:17 – 00:31:27:05

Edmund Lowell: SelfKey.org, we have a mailing list, we’re pretty consistent with our newsletter every week. KeyFi.ai is another one where you can learn about DeFi from getting involved and playing around yourself. So that would be the best tool. I don’t have social media myself, I feel like I’m the only ever that doesn’t have social media. You can hit me up on LinkedIn if you want, I guess. I have tons of messages sometimes, so please don’t be offended if I don’t reply. The best way to stay in touch is definitely our newsletter, that I’m very consistent with the answer. 

00:31:27:26 – 00:31:33:27

Richard Carthon: Gotcha. Well, again, I really appreciate your time today. And everyone listening, Stay Crypto Current.