Borderless Crypto

Dear listeners, in this episode, we meet, Jürgen Michels, the Chief Economist of the German BayernLB bank. The bank research team recently published a model that suggests the price of BTC to reach $90K after the halving in 2020. This estimation comes not from some random person, but from a state-owned German Bank. The moment I read the paper I instantly reached out to Jürgen and here he is on the Borderless Crypto. Some of the topics we cover include: What is the difference between hard and easy money? How do the USD, EUR, Gold and Bitcoin compare in terms of hardness? The stock-to-flow model as a tool for estimating the future price of bitcoin. The central bankers’ view on Bitcoin. Why is BTC a better store of value than GOLD?

This is an insightful conversation with Matt Houghan, the head of research at Bitwise Asset Management. Bitwise is the first provider of cryptoasset index funds. In my view, these are very important tools for the growth of crypto’s market cap as they allow accredited and institutional investors to easily enter the crypto asset investment class. Before entering crypto, Matt was the CEO of ETF.com, where he created the first-ever ETF data analytics system. He is also the person behind the biggest ETF conference and the biggest ETF website. Matt and I discuss the history of gold along with the recent introduction of tokenized gold coins. Matt goes on to explain why he doesn’t hold gold in his personal portfolio but instead he does hold bitcoin and other crypto assets. He further outlines the characteristics which make Bitcoin an emerging store of value and he draws some absolutely fascinating similarities between the history of gold and the history of bitcoin.

Hello borderless friends. I am especially thrilled to be publishing this interview with the fascinating Sam Bankman-Fried. While studying physics at MIT Sam came across effective altruism - this is a research field that finds the most promising solutions to the world's pressing problems. Sam decided that he can have the biggest impact in solving these problems by making money as a trader and donating it to important causes. In 2017, he launched Alameda research to address the liquidity problems he saw in the growing crypto industry. Two years later, his team is trading an average of $1B a day across crypto markets, they are among the top 3 most profitable traders on BitMex, having realized profits exceeding $50M. The team has already donated $4M to save human lives, prevent animal suffering, and research AI. I believe Sam, Alameda, and their new exchange FTX are just getting started. I loved this talk and I hope you love it as well.

This time I am meeting Ivan Gowan, who is the founder and CEO of Currency.com. This is the first regulated tokenized securities exchange which allows crypto holders to get price exposure to more than 1000 securities such as Apple, Facebook, and Telsa stock, governmental bonds, and industry indices like the S&P500 and the DAX. Ivan explains in detail how Currency.com work, why the company based its operations in Belarus, what are its most sought investment products, why they are determined to move to a completely decentralized trading engine and much more. It was a pleasure having this conversation and I hope you enjoy it as well. Ivan’s Contact: Ivan’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/IvanGowan Currency.com’s website - https://currency.com/ Currency.com’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/CurrencyCom

This crypto shot features Clay Collins, the founder and CEO of Nomics. I did a 70-min interview with Clay in episode 5 of the podcast. In this crypto shot I have selected some of my favorite highlights from my chat with Clay. This episode covers: How exchanges create fake volumes out of thin air. What makes Nomics different from other pricing trackers and API providers. Why Nomics classifies crypto assets as actively traded, inactive and deadcoins. And we finish off with some valuable insights from Clay on building a successful company. Clay’s Webinar (must watch if you trade and care about liquidity) Crypto Market Data 101: Fake Volume, Exchange Spam, and How The Seedy Market Data Underworld Actually Works – https://webinar.nomics.com

In this episode, I am talking to Preethi Kasireddy, the founder of TruStory - the only place on the internet where you can have truly constructive debates on crypto topics. This is a place where you go to not to argue and prove how smart you are, but to genuinely look for the truth or at least all sides of a particular story. What’s more, you can make money by debating on the platform. Preethi is a fascinating builder. After studying engineering and working 100 hrs/week at Goldman Sachs, she joined the leading VC firm a16z only to realize that she wants to become a founder herself. This made her drop the dream a16z job in order to learn how to code. After a brief experience as a software engineer in Coinbase, she went on to start TruStory with the mission to bring meaningful debates back into society. Preethi’s Contact TruStory website – https://www.trustory.io/ Terra twitter – https://twitter.com/isTruStory Preethi’s twitter – https://twitter.com/iam_preethi

In this episode, I meet Daniel Shin, the co-founder of Terra - a fascinating stablecoin and payments network, backed by some of the biggest crypto VC funds. Terra is unlike any other stablecoin. They are not about trading. They are about spending in the real world. In this talk you will learn: How you can save up to 10% on online purchases with Terra? How Terra achieves stability, without being backed by real-world assets. How Terra is better than Facebook’s Libra. How you will be able to get a high-yield interest with Terra on Nexo’s interest-earning account. Daniel’s Contact: Terra website - https://terra.money/ Terra twitter - https://twitter.com/terra_money Daniels’ twitter - https://twitter.com/hyunsung1112

This crypto shot features Daniel Shin, the co-founder of the Terra stablecoin and payments network, who explains how Terra compares to Facebook’s Libra, and what gives Terra a powerful advantage over Libra. Daniel's Contact: Terra website - https://terra.money/ Terra twitter - https://twitter.com/terra_money Daniels’ twitter - https://twitter.com/hyunsung1112

This crypto shot features Daniel Shin, the co-founder of the Terra stablecoin and payments network, who explains why all e-commerce platforms are super enthusiastic to start accepting payments in Terra. Daniel’s Contact: Terra website - https://terra.money/ Terra twitter - https://twitter.com/terra_money Daniels’ twitter - https://twitter.com/hyunsung1112

This crypto shot features Daniel Shin, the co-founder of the Terra stablecoin and payments network, who explains what makes Terra fundamentally different from all established stablecoins. Daniel's Contact: Terra website - https://terra.money/ Terra twitter - https://twitter.com/terra_money Daniels’ twitter - https://twitter.com/hyunsung1112

Today I have a very special guest. Nathaniel Whittemore - the master of crypto narratives. He is a renowned marketer, thought leader, and curator in the cryptocurrency space. He is most famous for his Long Read Sunday twitter threads, where every week he builds an engaging story off of the major news and opinions the crypto community is most excited about. This talk consists of 3 distinct parts. Think of them as 3 crypto shots. You can listen to all of them at once. Or you can listen to just 1 or 2 shots, which cover the topics you are most interested in. Each of these crypto shots is available as a separate episode on the playlist of the Borderless Crypto podcast. Shot number 1 - What is narrative marketing? Why companies must have it as a foundational layer of all their marketing and communication activities? What are some prime examples of crypto business utilizing narrative marketing? And how Nathaniel can help you build your company narrative. Shot number 2 -  Do we need decentralized social media? What keeps us attached to the centralized Facebook, Twitter and what is the key ingredient that could make us switch to a decentralized alternative? This shot presents an absolutely brilliant analysis of the lifecycle of a social media from Nathaniel. Shot number 3 - is about your privacy. Today, for the most part, you don’t have privacy. Google and Facebook probably know more about you than you know about yourself. But that might change as Apple recently started to care, respect and fight for your privacy. Nathaniel analyzes why Apple’s move may be the catalyst to make you a sovereign of your data. Lastly, Nathaniel shares who are the two types of investors he thinks will benefit the most from Bitcoin’s growth. Nathaniel's Contact: Twitter - https://twitter.com/nlw Website - http://whittemore.io/ Long Reads Sunday - Weekly Newsletter - https://www.getrevue.co/profile/nlw

This is the Borderless Crypto podcast. Hello there, this is George and I am excited to share that apart from my long-form interviews, I am starting the Borderless Crypto Shots. These are select excerpts from my regular talks, which give you a concentrated chunk of information on a specific topic in 5-10 or 20 minutes maximum. Тhis crypto short features Nathaniel Whittemore, the author of the popular crypto newsletter Long Reads Sunday, with whom we discuss privacy. Today, for the most part, you don’t have privacy. Google and Facebook probably know more about you than you know about yourself. But that might change as Apple recently started to care, respect and fight for your privacy. Nathaniel analyzes why Apple’s move may be the catalyst to make you a sovereign of your data.

This is the Borderless Crypto podcast. Hello there, this is George and I am excited to share that apart from my long-form interviews, I am starting the Borderless Crypto Shots. These are select excerpts from my regular talks, which give you a concentrated chunk of information on a specific topic in 5-10 or 20 minutes maximum. Тhis crypto short features Nathaniel Whittemore, the author of the popular crypto newsletter Long Reads Sunday, with whom discuss decentralized social media. What keeps us attached to the centralized Facebook, Twitter and what is the key ingredient that could make us switch to a decentralized alternative? This shot presents an absolutely brilliant analysis from Nathaniel.

I am excited to share that apart from my long-form interviews, I am starting the Borderless Crypto Shots. These are select excerpts from my regular talks, which give you a concentrated chunk of information on a specific topic in 5-10 or 20 minutes maximum. Тhis crypto short features Nathaniel Whittemore, the author of the popular crypto newsletter Long Reads Sunday. In the coming 20 minutes, Nathaniel and I cover - What is narrative marketing? Why companies must employ it as a foundational layer of all their marketing and communication activities? What are some prime examples of crypto business utilizing narrative marketing? And how Nathaniel can help you build your company narrative. Nathaniel’s Contact: Twitter – https://twitter.com/nlw Website – http://whittemore.io/ Long Reads Sunday – Weekly Newsletter – https://www.getrevue.co/profile/nlw

Today I am talking to Bill Ottman, the founder, and CEO of Minds.com - the social media platform, which unlike Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is 100% open source - meaning their software code is completely public. That’s right anyone can read their code and see what data Minds gathers and how they use it. What’s more, Minds.com leverages the blockchain with its ERC-20 token which users earn by contributing to the platform and they can spend to promote their content on the platform. Among many other things Bill shares first - what sets Minds.com apart from existing social media giants, second - he gives us a recipe on how to build your profile and grow your followers on Minds.com so that you get way more engagement than what you are getting on FB, Twitter, etc…., third - Bill provides us with a list of open-source products, which fully respect your rights and do not sell your user data. Minds and Bill’s Contact: Bill - https://www.minds.com/ottman Minds - https://www.minds.com/ Minds on Twitter - https://twitter.com/minds   Bill recommends: Open source alternatives to closed-source products - www.prism-break.org

In this episode, I meet Nathan Worsley - the Chief Technical Officer at LocalCoinSwap - a P2P cryptocurrency exchange, allowing anyone globally to buy and sell crypto assets directly with each other securely, completely privately, without any KYC using over 250 different payment methods. This is yet another project that is removing financial borders and therefore I had to feature them on the Borderless Crypto podcast. Even if you are in countries which ban crypto, like Venezuela for example, with the LocalCoinSwap platform you can still buy Bitcoin, Ether, Stablecoins and escape your local reality. In this talk, Nathan shares his story of entering crypto in 2011, how he traded crypto in the early days, how he and his team raised a $12M ICO and everything around LocalCoinSwap and its company challenges. Nathan also shares his investment philosophy, which stands out from what most investors in the space do. LocalCoinSwap and Nathan’s Contact: https://localcoinswap.com/en/ Nathan - https://twitter.com/NathanWorsley_ LCS - https://twitter.com/Localcoinswap_ Evangelists who converted Nathan into crypto: Satoshi Nakamoto & his Bitcoin White Paper Nathan also learned a lot from Gavin Anderson (@gavinandresen) Nathan recommends reading and following: Bitcoin subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/ BTC subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/ Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum - https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin Riccardo Spagni, Project Lead at Monero - https://twitter.com/fluffypony

This time I meet Clay Collins, the CEO of Nomics, a data company delivering professional-grade market data APIs. This may sound boring, but you will be surprised how truly intriguing and entertaining this talk gets. We cover what Nomics does and how it sets the solid data foundations for the crypto industry to grow. Clay and I also talk extensively about trading volumes, fake trading volumes, and how Nomics fosters the adoption of best practices by crypto exchanges with its recently launched “Exchanges Transparency Ratings.” Clay also compares Nomics to CoinMarketCap, CryptoCompare, OnchainFX, and others. Last but not least, we discuss Clay’s extremely successful podcast, his 4AM morning routine, and his expectations of how Bitcoin will overtake the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This was one of the most educational and at the same time entertaining interviews I have done. I hope you find this conversation useful and enjoyable just like it was for me. Other resources mentioned in the podcast: The Bitwise report “The Real Bitcoin Market” – https://twitter.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1109114656944209921 The CoVenture report “Cryptocurrency Liquidity” – https://medium.com/@coventureresearch/exchange-liquidity-analysis-b27260d0bbd8 What Nomics is doing to promote best practices among exchanges. Nomics, Flippening and Clays’s Contact: https://nomics.com The Flippening (Clay’s Podcast) – https://p.nomics.com/podcast/ Clay – https://twitter.com/ClayCollins Nomics – https://twitter.com/nomicsfinance

This time I present you Hart Lambur, the CEO and founder of Universal Market Access, also known as UMA. UMA recently took over crypto media with the announcement of the USStocks token, which allows anyone with access to the internet to participate in the US stock market. The fact that UMA breaks literally all financial borders made it absolutely necessary for me to have them on the podcast. While the project is still in its early days, its potential is hard to understate. UMA is building the infrastructure that will allow even people in the lowest income bracket to build a diverse investment portfolio or to get exposure to assets that are today accessible only to large institutional investors. This conversation was super interesting for me. Hart is an extremely intelligent person on a mission to break financial borders. He helped me learn what financial derivatives are, how you can benefit from the price increase of an asset, without actually owning that asset, and how transparent financial derivatives built on UMA will positively affect the financial world. I hope you enjoy this talk, just like I did. UMA and Hart’s Contact: https://umaproject.org Hart - https://twitter.com/hal2001 UMA - https://twitter.com/UMAprotocol Evangelists who converted Hart into crypto: Fred Ehrsam - https://twitter.com/FEhrsam Hart recommends reading and following: Token Economy Newsletter - https://tokeneconomy.co Christ Burniske - https://twitter.com/cburniske Fred Wilson’s blog - https://avc.com

If you google about “trading altcoins” the top result you will find is Nik Patel and his “Altcoin Trader’s Handbook”, an extremely practical and at the same time entertaining guide on how to analyze, trade, and profit from altcoins. Half-way through reading Nik’s book, I knew I wanted to interview him. He has seen it all - from generating 43X returns to losing all of his capital. In this talk, we cover: Dogecoin, which initially got Nik into crypto. We analyze why the Dogecoin still exists, and why it will continue to exist even without the recent promotion it received from Elon Musk. We then move to discuss how one can trade altcoins in a profitable way as a side hustle alongside your day job or how you can make altcoin trading your full-time job. Nik makes an in-depth analysis of the price of bitcoin and altcoins, the dependencies between those and his price action expectations. Last but not least, Nik shares his rationale as to why even the world’s wealthiest cannot destroy bitcoin. This conversation was truly intriguing for me, which is why this episode ended up being a little longer than ones I previously did. But trust me, every minute of listening is totally worth it. Nik’s Contact: Nik’s weekly market analyses and coin reports (which are also featured on Binance Info) - https://www.altcointradershandbook.com   Nik Patel - https://twitter.com/cointradernik   Evangelists who converted Nik into crypto: Getting tipped with Dogecoin Andreas M. Antonopoulos - https://twitter.com/aantonop   Leaders Nik continues to learn from: https://twitter.com/notsofast   Other resources mentioned in the podcast: Nik’s long Twitter thread about the crypto market from March 12, 2019 - https://twitter.com/cointradernik/status/1105426760492036096 Nik’s visual analysis of coin charts https://www.altcointradershandbook.com/the-precedence-of-price/ The go-to-platform for the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies https://coinmarketcap.com  Feel free to message me, George, on Twitter @borderlessBTC.

This time I have Tory Reiss, co-founder of the TrustToken Asset Tokenization Platform. Tory shares how their company was bootstrapped, raised capital from elite VCs and launched one of the biggest regulated stablecoins - the TrueUSD. Recently they also launched the TrueGBP. Tory and I talk about the ways in which you can use TrueUSD to easily transact internationally or to simply earn passive income with the interest-earning product of Nexo. Among many other things Tory also explains: How fiat-pegged stablecoins can replace traditional digital money; What sets TrueUSD apart from all other stablecoins; How to convert your USD into TUSD; What is the business model of TUSD; Why Tory sees MakerDAO and DAI as a partner instead of a competitor; How TUSD combats money laundering. This was a conversation that sparked me to think even more about the importance and stablecoins and how are accelerating the removal of existing financial borders. Tory's Contacts: https://www.trusttoken.com TrustToken - https://twitter.com/TrustToken Tory Reiss - https://twitter.com/theetory Evangelists who converted Tory into crypto: Satoshi Nakamoto and the Bitcoin White Paper Leaders Tory continues to learn from: Arjun Balaji, https://twitter.com/arjunblj “Cryptoassets The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond” by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar Feel free to message me, George, on Twitter @borderlessBTC   Full Episode Transcript   (01:52) George Manolov: Tory, I'm happy to have you today on the show. For everybody else; Tory Reiss is the co-founder of the TrustToken Tokenization Platform, which has been renowned for launching one of the biggest USD-backed stablecoins. But before we dive deeper into TrueUSD and the Trust Tokenization Platform, can you share a little bit about yourself, your personal professional path and how did you end up in the crypto space working on one of the biggest USD-backed stablecoins?   (02:31) Tory Reiss: Absolutely. My background is a good example of that you don't have to stay in one area or define yourself too narrowly, because whatever you're really curious about, you can learn almost anything online. The Internet has made learning simple; you can be a lifelong learner. If you look at my path, I went to school in Chicago and, and my studies revolved around entrepreneurship, international studies, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. All these topics that really have nothing to do with finance whatsoever. I started my career in enterprise software. So, the first two companies I worked for were very focused on B2B enterprise software. The first being Microsoft, where I spent a good chunk of my early career. And the second being a startup in San Francisco called Lob that was also selling APIs to the Enterprise.   I caught the crypto bug towards the end of college when I first started buying Bitcoin. Obviously once you have bitcoin, you follow the industry news over time. I saw how it was evolving and I was really excited about it, but I didn't really make the move into the crypto space or working in it full time until I saw what happened with Ethereum. In a way, the world was changing in terms of gaining a global compute layer or a global database layer that we could work on from virtually any country. It represented a paradigm shift in computing that I thought was very exciting, and particularly as it relates to finance. I'd always had a fascination with personal finance and financial technology. So, this company ended up being the perfect intersection of all those interests. We started working on what is now TrustToken in 2017 and then in 2018, we launched TrueUSD.   (04:47) George Manolov: What was the thought process of starting a company that is to tokenize other assets? Did you first come up with; Hey, let's tokenize the US dollar? Walk me through that process of how did you come up with the idea.   (05:06) Tory Reiss: It's a great question. At that time, when we saw what was happening with Ethereum and the ICO boom of 2017, what became apparent when we took a step back was that there was a new financial system emerging on the Blockchain. We saw exchanges, OTC desks, new forms of derivatives and lending products. We saw it cropping up everywhere. So, we did this exercise where we looked at traditional markets and tried to think of parallels in what would change in this new paradigm. The first thing we observed when we looked at Nasdaq or other traditional exchanges is that the majority of the value represented on those exchanges are hard assets such as real estate, commodities, etc. So, following that chain of thought, we thought, if Ethereum was going to be running the world's most important computations and many of those relate to financial services, there's going to be a need for a way to legally and technically represent real world assets on the Blockchain.   And following that chain of logic, we thought what asset or what financial instrument which is the most well understood and widely adopted instrument in the world? And it was pretty clear at that time that it was the US dollar. We thought; this is going to be a great proof of concept, that if we can prove to the world this idea of representing a dollar on the Blockchain, then we could represent any asset. We saw it as a first step in just proving out the thesis that we could represent real world assets on the blockchain.   (07:06) George Manolov: Alright. In terms of company building, what was the process? Because I know that you have raised capital from some of the top investors in Silicon Valley. So, did you first launch some sort of MVP? Did you have something prepared or in the running? or was it straight raising capital and then building it?   (07:31) Tory Reiss: I think people should know that the reality of startups is way messier than they appear from the outside. This company started in a totally different space. We pivoted into Blockchain and it was very painful in the beginning. We didn't have many resources. Over a year ago, there was just five of us working away and we didn't really have a chance to have an MVP because as soon as our product would go live, it meant that basically anyone in the world could use it. So, we just put together all of the pieces, it was very much what I would call MacGyver, in the sense that we took a lot of toothpicks and bubble gum in the beginning, like a lot of manual processes and a lot of hard work behind the scenes to get our first version of TrueUSD out of the door.   With that being said, the most important things are security and compliance. So, even if there were lots of manual processes for us on the backend in terms of how we interact with the banks or how we interact with our users, we still had to make sure that we had world class security and world class bank-grade compliance. We couldn't skimp on those, which was very tough. That was our biggest investment area early on.   We started in the same way as most other startups; we were literally working out of the same house that we were living in. It was both office and where we lived. Once we had our product out of the door and we had traction, it then became a lot easier to raise capital. Today, we have thirty-one people, both here and in Asia, and a great office here in Selma. But it's not easy; you might be sleeping on a couch for a year or two before you actually get traction and have enough capital to move into your own space.   (09:57) George Manolov: But then it's totally worth it, because you start building something big and TrueUSD is already quite big. If I'm not mistaken, it's the second largest USD-backed stablecoin after the notorious Tether. So, can you share a little more about TrueUSD? You say it's the most obvious asset to tokenize, but why so? What are the needs that TrueUSD solves and how do people use it? What deficiencies does TrueUSD solve?   (10:41) Tory Reiss: That's another good question. At the time, we thought it was a great move because anyone anywhere in the world knows what a US dollar is, almost anywhere. I shouldn't say 100%, but most places in the world recognize and accept the US dollar. That was our logic at the time, that okay, if we tokenize that, then we don't have to explain what the token is, because it's essentially a dollar and people understand what a dollar is. What we only realized after, was that the product we created was far more useful than we originally imagined. The first use case for a USD-backed stablecoin was trading. Traders were using it because they could only trade crypto to crypto and they needed a stable store of value during volatile markets.   Now, in the grand scheme of things, that's just a tiny use case. And by tiny, it's still a multi-billion-dollar market today. It's still about $3 billion in market, but it's still relatively small. What we've learned over time is that, the market beyond trading and beyond crypto is massive, because what we've actually created is a new payment rail. What's very important is that we've helped increase the velocity of money, the velocity of capital, and we've offered an alternative way to move value that's outside of the control of the traditional banking system. Traditional banks, which have been the gatekeepers for time immemorial, have been able to charge whatever fees they want on FX which is conversion between multiple currencies. Or if you want to move money internationally, they pretty much set the terms. But with TrueUSD, if you want to send money to anyone, anywhere in the world, you can do so in a matter of seconds and pay about 2 cents on average, which is the transaction fee on Ethereum. In many ways, it’s really a very powerful tool, because capital can now be moved more efficiently. If you're a lender, you can raise money in the US and deploy it in Indonesia the same day, that's never been possible. Or if you're doing remittances. The applications are so broad across financial services that we're now thinking