The Internet of Money - TOKEN2049 London 2021

hi everyone um soltu nouvelle mike the vibe was like he's gonna start dancing and shouting bit connect but you know we'll put that aside uh so hi everyone uh super excited uh to moderate this panel know these two guys for a very long time new acquaintances as well uh you want to start with uh introductions like proper introductions builder yeah my name is uh bill barheit i'm the founder and ceo at abra i've been in tech investing capital markets uh crypto now uh all together probably for about 30 years uh abra's uh well-known popular crypto banking uh service operates in well over 100 countries uh managing nine uh ten figures now of assets we provide trading high-yield accounts as well as lending for both retail and institutions and we also run an institutional business providing the same services as well uh itamar co-founder of argent i'm based here in london and at arjun we we started a few years ago realizing people encryp that owning crypto was actually a very stressful experience that you could wake up in the morning with all your funds wiped from your wallet and so we really wanted to build a non-custodial experience that would be highly secure that could work with the skills super simple for billions of users to use someday we have hundreds of million dollar line wallet it comes in the shape of a of an iphone and android app and with users with 10k and few largest wallet was 500 million dollars so it's very secure for small or large wallets uh great to be in london after two and a half years so great to be here i hope everybody's loving this in person experience again versus zoom uh alex mashinsky uh celsius network uh we i think we invented this thing of yield right the whole idea of paying yield uh 28 billion under management 1.1 million customers we're cranking it up right there going to a billion billion users right so that's what this is all about fantastic so i'll ask a stupid question but i'm guessing everybody's interested what do you think about the price riley right now where is it coming from i know it's a stupid question but um yeah look i mean we we actually were i'll give you the technicals and the fundamentals right since i i do both uh from a technical perspective you can actually look at the charts it's very simple the consolidation pattern looks like a pennant that's a very standard extremely bullish phase when especially in crypto which is a little bit different but basically what it says is you've got this tension between profit taking and strong hands coming in and we just came out of that multi-week actually multi-month um you know kind of pennant flag pattern this week the crypto fundamentals are obviously everything's driven by bitcoin right now still 21 million bitcoin and we're in what we call a massive supply shock in terms of fundamentals which means that the amount of bitcoin which has been leaving the exchanges has pretty with the exception of a small time frame in late may early june has more or less continued unabated since last summer meaning summer of of uh 20. and there's just not enough bitcoin to go around and i think that the stock to flow model that everybody's looking at is gonna break down next year and it's not gonna we're not gonna have even the same pullbacks like we did before and it's gonna be a very different time going forward for at least the top two or three cryptocurrencies we'll see what the shakeout looks like for the rest but it's gonna be super exciting still expect a lot of volatility because of all the leverage but it's going to be a super exciting few months for crypto for sure itamar what's your take i like the optimism that's good fundamental analysis is that you need ease to buy nfts there are a lot of jpegs out there to buy and that means we need to buy a lot of ease so let's say alex what do you think well uh just a few weeks ago to remind everybody we were at 29 000 and there were a bunch of pundits on different uh stages say telling you they're going we're going to 15 000 and even maybe even 10 000. so it just shows you how quickly and now everybody's like oh we're going to a hundred thousand or 300 no a million right so i think the market already priced in etfs and the market already priced in uh settlements or gensler and everything else kind of cleaning out by by the end of october and that's just uh a little bit of rational exuberance right so i think and i've been tweeting about that about us revisiting 29 000 some few months ago no i got a lot of hate twitter for that uh i i think i said 29 056 we hit 29 256. that was the low uh right now we are going to stay in this level 55 to 63 000.

a lot of resistance there a lot of people who bought coins at these prices who are going to be selling them because they feel that this is their chance to recoup their money back right so so i think we're going to if we can break it on high volume we're going to see new highs we're going to hit 100 000 before the end of the year but uh i would say it's 50 50 if we're going higher or if we're going lower [Laughter] so i'll summarize i'll summarize that this amazing panel opinion we have no idea okay great it's not that we don't have an idea i have an exact idea yeah telling you 50 yeah i said we're going to be at that range for a few weeks and we're going to test if it's if you have high volume you have to watch the volume not the price if the volume is high that means you're going higher if the volume is low if you go to 63 000 and you're seeing low volume we're not going to stay there we're going to break down okay it's very clear and how do you guys as by the way i don't know but i think we should there's a unbelievably cute newborn in the second row right there who's been watching intently since we got on stage i think we should ask her uh because we may get a clearer answer yeah i i definitely think it warns our brother and by the 25 years of doing conferences i have never seen that well done seriously well done [Applause] so so where where do you think it's going uh if assuming we're all optimistic because everybody here is optimistic otherwise we would have chosen a different vertical to work in where do you think it's going in terms of the the yield that the platforms are able to to perform if you compare it to the regular market alex let's start with you this time so we paid 860 million dollars in yield okay if you look at barclays or lloyd's they didn't pay that much money to their customers this year okay so celsius little celsius is paying more yield than some of the largest banks it's not because we're so good it's because they don't pay any yield so so so how many people in the world are going to say yup i want more yield right basically every person on the planet if they have any sense in their head they're going to say you know what we're going to take 10 or 20 of my money and move it over right so the first killer app store value right bitcoin ethereum store value second killer app yield that's eight billion people that want that right the question is how long it's going to take for us to create enough trust deposits trust deposits no money deposits because that comes first trust deposit first then money deposits second the yield itself like we're paying 8.8 percent on coin has nothing to do with whatever whatever you think yield because you creates that yield eight point eight percent tells you how much money is missing in d5 c5 and so on right if it was four percent that means half of that as much as much money is missing right so the yield indicates the demand for stable coin or the demand for bitcoin and you should watch that very carefully right you see us lowering yield that tells you the demand for stablecoin is going down or the missing amount of stablecoin is going down you see yield going up that tells you that bitcoin is going up because in most cases people are borrowing usdc usdt to buy more bitcoin so all these things are actually leading indicators into what's happening and again we have a community of 1.1 million people i'm not telling you what's happening the community is telling you what's happening i'm just a mouthpiece talking on their behalf so bill if we compare the the billions using uh the regular banking systems and the millions who are using the these platforms and getting this yield do you think if we refer to what alex just said that the this uh huge interest or yield that you're able to pay really reflects this gap between millions and billions of users and where do you see it going well the our world independent of the that fact that alex has done a great job paying more yield in the banks our world is a roundoff error in terms of the number of people involved that's the big problem right so if if we get a billion people you know via the banking system where the banks basically start using right our shared lending practices uh to generate yield deals are going to come down it's just common sense um and and so our advantage i think our shared advantage is we're still going to probably pay more of it back to the consumers than the banks will but on the back end where we're doing the lending right the demand is not going to go up commensurate with the amount of money coming in so that remains to be seen in my opinion what happens when the banking system comes in but and they will but it'll probably take five to ten years uh just because of the regulatory overhang you know the questions of you know what's a security what's not a security uh et cetera et cetera but um you know it's the last batch of the internet that hasn't been disrupted by you know the internet itself right is is banking and money and at some point the banks will either die or do it some of them will actually die some of them will try to buy their way in i actually predict there's companies in our space that will start buying banks i think i predict the opposite will happen you'll probably see exchanges start looking to get permission to buy banks maybe not in the u.s where the regulators won't allow it but in other countries for sure itamar how do you see it i mean your model is slightly different you're not actually lending the money out right you're connected to different uh mechanisms in the ecosystem how do you how do you see it evolving uh from your side of the business and if you want to maybe elaborate a bit more about the difference yeah our model is different as we are fully non-custodial permissionless so it's really full access to defy and so we have more optionalities for users what we observe now because obviously it's a bull market so it's actually yield on east that people are seeking so we had waves of a lot of volume in the past on protocol like ave or compound right now what we see is uh is taking so we could give yield around five percent if you go on more complex d5 product you could even get to seven eight percent sticking is is a i would say sustainable mechanic but as more volume goes in it will decrease exactly like you mentioned for landing but it will take more time you can have a lot more validators because before it decreases um and then higher yield is often subsidized so in define you have all these protocols that launch subsidized uh so yield farming whatever you call it uh i would say that will stay for a long time actually because this notion of launching a new protocol a new product giving ownership uh to the community of that product means that you you bootstrap new products and there will be many more in the coming years so i think it's it's artificial in some way because it's a subsidy but there will always be new projects ready to subsidize their their early growth just uh interested to see in the crowd how many of you uh use yield farming or you know are interacting with it all right pretty impressive how many of you are using uh you know uh yield apps like abraham celsius okay so fair man how many of you are doing both wow fantastic i have one more question how many of you planning to use a bank to either store or buy or store your bitcoin or for stable coins well so many i'm surprised why why would you security take them out so what's your uh there's a therapy lounge right there what's your take about the recent uh um evolution in the u.s evolution well i call it exactly yeah it's a bad definition about the recent events in the u.

s mass psychosis with regards to their approach to your businesses i bought a one-way ticket to london i look i'm sure you know alex has a strong opinion on this too alex always have strong yeah we're all in this 50-50 yeah exactly whether we go to jail or not so um i i look i think that there's a lot more clarity in the u.s than people think there is in most areas right if you're holding crypto on behalf of someone else a consumer in particular uh that is a licensed requiring activity in almost every u.s state the big exception being california uh and in most cases that's regulated via money transmission laws if you are doing derivatives on on cryptocurrencies that are considered commodities in the united states that is a licensed requiring activity you generally buy uh the the cftc which is the uh sister organization to the sec and we all know what the implications are if you're doing things like security tokens so so it's not like there's a huge surprise i think the biggest question right now in most people's minds are is there any there's areas where people aren't sure if something's a security or not but that's been a question for lots of businesses over the decades in some cases the regulators have decided in some cases the courts have decided uh and we'll see if you know certain certain other companies lending practices we actually don't issue we actually earn accounts through a bank trust uh so i think we operate differently but i think there's you know there's some overhang in that area of what's what's a security but other than that there is a lot of clarity out there particularly in the us and more than more than i think most people especially the media who are constantly asking me this question who actually you know they've done no homework so they actually don't know or i never do we are overseen by 65 regulators in the united states alone us and our bank you know partners of course but but that's a that's that's a lot of regulators how do you see it affecting if at all your platform i mean you're not actually in whole in possession of anyone in funds you can so we're in a very good place right now if you look at uk regulation we are just a software company we give you an app you deal with it we have no very little regulator no regulatory impact uh overall i would say better to have clarity on regulation even if it's not perfect then gray area where every year we are waiting for the new paper to see on our non-custodial wallet in it uh i think we have a few years ahead i don't know how they will ever uh all they will figure out the way to to regulate non-custodial uh services it's very tricky from technical perspective and so we have a few years and we really enjoy being a non-regulated business always fun so alex how do you see the the evolution of this segment of the market with uh with evolution of the market or in layman words where can i when can i start staking my nfts well so i think i was in token that was it 2048 the thing in hong kong right we were talking about that in 2018. and we filed with the sec voluntarily in 2018. i think we were the first crypto company to do that everybody else was going like machine skill you crazy you're gonna wake up the bear why are you filing with the sec well uh we we haven't received any letters from him since right because regulators want to know what you're doing how are you doing it why you're doing it and so on so the more communication you have with them the better same thing in the uk right same thing with fincen and all the other agencies that bill was talking about so look i i don't think there is enough clarity there's some clarity but there's not enough clarity and uh everybody around the world is waiting for the sec to wake up and tell us what the rules are right so i don't think the sec is trying to squash crypto or slow down crypto or anything like that i think they're right now collecting a lot of information from a lot of companies they want to show who are the bad actors they're telling you very clearly we're suing these guys we're seeing these guys and they're gonna show you who are the good actors right so and when those two are kind of clearly determined all the companies all the crypto companies doesn't matter if you are calling yourself d5 or c5 or any fi you're going to have to choose which camp you're going to belong to right because uniswab didn't think uh unisoft thought they were just a software company and they got a subpoena from the sec right saying hey come over here first of all if you can get a subpoena from the sec you're not really defy because they have somewhere to send the subpoena i understand they got they got they it doesn't matter the point is the regulator doesn't care what you call yourself exactly that's right so so so go completely dial don't have an address no that's not the point the point is is that what i'm trying to say is that there is no conflict between being and i think you're saying the same thing there's no conflict between being fully compliant and being a crypto company of course and if you guys are planning to do a project or anything else don't try to pretend like the laws don't apply to you or you're going to put yourself in some jurisdiction that has coconuts and because of that not nobody can come after you don't get mouth coconuts though don't bed mouth coconuts no it's you know i'm talking about a specific company that thought that there was a winning strategy you know so back to my question when can i when when can people start um actually doing something with their nfts instead of you know right click save as for jpegs when when the the when the industry always moves faster than regulators always yeah but i'm not asking about the regulators i'm asking about the platforms like when can we start using the value that is kind of stuck in the nfts they're they're are lending platforms that will let you use nfts as collateral now the question is just look a prime broker will traditionally take a yacht a mansion what's the cartoon i own a villain a mansion at a yacht they'll take all of those things as collateral today they won't take crypto of course which is more liquid than any of those things which doesn't make a lot of sense to me but that's banking doesn't make a lot of sense the equivalent is already happening with nfts there are sites now that have figured out how to price certain cryptocurrencies uh sorry certain nfts and as a result i'm guessing the ltvs are pretty low i haven't really gone into detail if if not they're crazy but they will take them as collateral for loans and it's coming we would love to do it if we could figure out how to accurately price it because we don't know what the risk is yet and uh a lot of the uh nfts it's actually in all fairness it's the opposite of what you said before it's not like you know nfts are creating demand for ethereum as the price goes up people perceive funny money to spend and a lot of the overhang right now is going to nfts just like it went to icos five years ago yeah you know it's not the third common sense it's not like we're bringing art collectors into crypto right now these are crypto people getting into art collecting a lot of disposable crypto income 100 i i would say these are crypto people practicing flipping yes and they're not collecting okay the duration of holding on nfts has decreased not increased over the last few weeks so so i think look we we are you know it's the opposite of what we recommend right so so our strategy from day one has been if you're a long-term thinker you know you're thinking these coins are going to go up then don't spend them don't buy anything with them borrow against them right earn yield on it because anyone anyone here happy with any bitcoin they've ever spent on anything anyone here anyone here would like to reverse all those transactions and just borrow against the asset right so so these are really simple assumption if you really in this room and you believe in bitcoin or you believe in ethereum then why are you spending it it's that simple so all nft colleague all nft buyers are not flippers i mean you have i didn't say owning owning a crypto punk is reowning a piece of history uh for many people yeah but the same way that a lot what with the same way did you buy them with fiat or crypto yeah that's a good one yeah you know this is punks are not about uh it's not about a relative to bitcoin right it's an asset i'll i'll challenge you it's an asset that it's you know the the liquidity might differ the value is you know not exactly something that you can uh actually measure how many people here have uh like nfts not like two bucks nfts okay not so many okay and and did you buy it with theater crypto who who bought it with crypto okay so it's very hard to buy it with fiat right yes of course it's this is the we're working on it supply chain is designed for eth or for stable coins right so it's not uh but look again the the it's a two and a half trillion dollar asset class it's not about nfts okay nfts is like the sideshow the the next two trillion dollars are gonna be mostly the top 10 or 15 coins right that's where the increase in value is going to come from so so today a lot of people thinking you know i'm going to jump from this bus to this bus because this bus goes a little bit faster and then i'm going to jump back on the other train because that's your aim of trading there's less stops that's the meaning of trading no okay when you calculate how many fees let me put in a different perspective okay coinbase the tiny coinbase compared to nasdaq in the new york stock exchange makes more money than the nasdaq and the new york strategy should put together and that's because all of you guys are feeding them doing transactions back and forth back and forth back and forth now if you huddled all of that money would still be coins in your wallet more coins take a loan dollar loan spend the dollars don't spell the coins don't trade everybody thought they were smart meanwhile bitcoin overnight went up 11 you woke up how did you feel that morning when bitcoin went up 11 like a genius or like an idiot so that's what i'm talking about just stop trading huddle so should people huddle their nfts now as well 50 50.

amazing i love it so looking even more into the future into the metaverse that has recently you know became something more of a of a topic to discuss how do you see it evolving into that and and again as as you said be like the the actual problem with uh nfts is how do you price them anybody here may be working on pricing nfts like all right i think that's interesting yeah there's a dow actually that is pricing nfts on uh independent data sources so just like based on yeah just like uh chain link and the problem is that i know a lot of people because i've seen it with too many punks that sell the same punk to each other just to move up the price and they hope that some idiot is going to come and give them their eath for a price that is five times the real price so we don't want that right we want we want a market that is real a market that represents true value stability right i think it's good for all of us and and when people get burned all we do is we're sending one more customer back to the banking system every time we burn a customer because they're over leveraged or we sold them a coin or or they overpaid for a punk all we're doing is losing another customer in this revolution now if you think that crypto already won the war let me tell you china right now the digital yuan has more customers than all of crypto put together about 12 of all chinese people already have a digital wallet using digital yuan and they have embedded 1.4 billion customers so just because on the internet era we won with the open source platform doesn't mean this time it's going to happen again if we keep losing customers keep losing uh followers we're going to lose all of our coins are going to be worth nothing that's what at stake it's not like a little thing so instead of everybody's trying to make money a little bit of money on somebody else let's bring the next billion people into crypto that's what that's what the target should be for all of us i don't think the the making money in the long term is really gonna matter that much i mean obviously it's great today and i agree that you know yield has become a killer app for crypto but look this is the fastest growing technology adoption in human history period full stop nothing from a macro perspective i i was traveling to 50 countries my netscape days building internet 1.0 didn't sleep the more the more i didn't sleep the more money we made it was directly proportional that's how crazy it was this is growing faster and you're going to see the tokenization of everything you know what we're calling the metaverse right now we barely know what we're talking about and it's going to evolve to integrate the next generation of ar and and vr and and gaming and banking uh not to mention institutions in a way that we haven't even figured out yet you know that mit engineers are are working on now and so the next 10 years is going to be the application layer on top of a lot of these protocols that we just haven't even seen yet and it's just it's and and i agree it's not about trading it's going to be about you know basically making right these protocols work for us as a so elaborate a bit more about how do you see it like more try to picture the the vision of how do you see it evolving like from now how would the next billion people join i mean it's it's to me it's everything from games to the new type of banks you know which is which is what we're building to uh you know digital media collections to me the nfts is a big global game that's how i look at it right it's just a game that actually uses like something that has real tangible fungible value in order to price it and it's just an example of of where this is all going um you know entertainment is going to be integrated into this world right i wouldn't be surprised if we have kind of token-based pay-per-view kind of applications that go into developing markets that can't pay a 10 subscription to netflix right but in the aggregate that may mean more money so when we took money from foxconn a few years ago i was on the board i don't know if julian's here again julian hardy's on chairman of our the new foundation that that we're partnered with uh he ran an iot company that was basically providing the solar lanterns into homes in africa which had cellular connectivities and they use m-pesa to pay for the lights and the uh you make the payment vm peso your lights go on you don't the lights don't go on and and this now is used in millions of homes in in rural africa and in some cases it's the first electricity they've ever had so the the reason this worked in kenya and the surrounding countries was was they had that payment vehicle there's places all over the world where they want to do this but they can't because there's no way to pay yeah right and i think that the internet of money is that for the two billion people that aren't reaping the benefits of this new economy today and that's what's exciting to me that's when i think of the future of banking and tokenization of these things getting them access to entertainment to gaming to schooling to to the basics of water electricity and having the ability to pay so that it's not the government's doing this but budding entrepreneurs which i would definitely trust more than local corrupt governments is super exciting to me to add on i think also i would you mentioned i think 10 years i think things are getting much closer than you know i think three years ago i would have said it might take 10 20 years if you look at what's missing i think the first i mean obviously we are uh not super objective on this objective on that but we will it is the story of the web all over again it's the new layer on the web so it's all about being open and permissionless meaning you will have way more innovation on a permissionless network than you would have on a permission network and that's why you need wallets that are non-custodial so people can access any service they want and not have a gatekeeper who can decide but today or in the past few years i would have told any new users go on con base or go on celsius you you cannot custody your fund yourself and that's why i mean there will never be a future where we have a global financial system where a billion people or more have some kind of secret whether it's a pass or a seat phrase and if i have your secret i have all your money and if you lost your secret sorry you lost all your savings that won't happen and that's really what we were obsessed about uh for the past few years at arjun but now the next phase of the problem is okay with something secure simple and it costs 50 dollar to take any action so again we're back to you should do celsius i believe it's pretty you don't have guest fees uh everything is smooth but that the technology is coming now you have actually in the room people like starkware you have easy casing uh roll up solution on top of ethereum are there today and they are they will evolve in the next six or nine months so to be the full-fledged solution but suddenly you have experience that can be super secure where you have the safety net in non-custodial that you would have with your bank or with this custodian you have no super low cost and scale i'm not sure we'll be able to get a billion dollar in the next year a billion people in next year but we will we are getting there and then you have permission less so then the innovation is coming and so any anyone with a phone in any city in any village can certainly have access to that same same financial system so i'll give it a year or two done really ten years yeah i think the foundation will be there then we need to build use cases how about remittance uh for some markets we might need some stable counts but the building blocks are there alex i i hope that that's what we're going to happen but i did voice of ip right uh 30 years 30 years almost anniversary in a few months just over half of the population is using voice of ip you would say wait a second it's for free why wouldn't 8 billion people use it 30 years just over 50 percent here we're talking about all the money in the world right so this is not just about somebody opening a wallet it's about somebody opening a wallet and then moving all their money over just because i have a wallet with a hundred dollars on it doesn't mean that i moved over from the banking system so my point is it's going to take much longer than we think because what the fight is over is all the money in the world and that's what's going to take a very long period of time so so we may have 8 billion wallets but we may have only 1 of the total aum and we're going to be fighting over again trust the fight is over trust trust for security trust for uh execution trust for storage and so on so on that's going to take a very long time the banking system has 700 years head start against us 700 years since the medici is in italy right so that's what we're fighting over so it will take time to have all the money of the world but for me the fight is a very making useful today crypto is not solving or problems for many people highly you can earn yield you can use credit cards what else do you need it's not solving new problems it's things that we're not we're solving people for relatively rich people uh it's a new investment class they make a lot of money it's great who are not really let's be honest and we have an event tomorrow we have an event here on saturday come meet the celsius every one of them will tell you a story how they changed their life not just didn't solve a problem it changed their lives because you can make life-changing money the same way that people who buy an nft in may we have people we see people designers who earn twenty thousand dollar a year that's only make three hundred thousand dollars it's more than one week it's it's changing so when you see a light at the end of the tunnel when you know that you have a path towards financial independence when you know you can pay your bills it's not about becoming a millionaire it's about knowing that you have your path because most people today this baby over there doesn't have that path because again you you can work two jobs and you're not going to be able to afford a home impression from two percent yield to five percent will not give you that pass well that's why it's 8.8 you know with eight point eight percent you can that's the whole point and we know that in bear market it will be zero point five actually it was twelve percent during the bear market so but look the point is alex over time it will decrease as you said earlier that's what people look i i invented this okay so i'm telling you that for four years celsius was the first company to offer yield still offering more yield than anybody else we our rate started at four and a half percent went up all the way to 12 now it's 8.8 so my point is everybody along the way told me how it's going to go down because well now you have 25 million wait until you have a billion okay we've got a billion wait until you have 10 billion we've got 10 billion the average percent doesn't have money to put in savings they simply do not have money to put in savings the average person even in a country like the u.

s yes i agree with that that's because their credit cards are eating them alive charging people twenty four percent so alex you have to change your behavior you have to get rid of your debt and then you have to start saving you don't start saving while you're paying 24 to your bank that's lunacy so let's get back to the the question as uh as bill said how do how do we bring the next billion people again should it be artists voice of vip no just like 50 to me it to me it's the marriage and the democratization of what's happening in the west with developing markets right and this has been an unbelievably successful test for us we have almost two million registered users now and we have people with eight figures of dollars in their abra accounts and we have poor farmers in the philippines guatemala ecuador with a hundred ten dollars in their account and i answer a lot of questions my team does i actually do it myself sometimes at night on the weekends from customers on twitter and it's not the people with eight figures sending me questions on twitter it's the people in the philippines in in like i said india you know we have indians in dubai using abra to store money and then using stable coins to send money to india and then cashing out through our cash teller networks they're not using bank wires like our wealthy users it's the same exact app i've never seen any outside of the web itself and whatsapp all right which are communications and information retrieval tools i've never seen anything like it and this is what drives me at this point is is that democratization of something uh in the financial system that the banks have no incentive none to work on they're disincentivized it costs so much money to onboard a consumer in the philippines in the banking system they don't want a five dollar deposit it's it's they it's not like oh we can't afford to take it they literally don't want it because if you call them they've they've lost money on you yeah right and and so you know i i think that's how we get to a billion to answer your question is to keep pushing the envelope on the little guy who is is and gal who is out of the financial system today but sees that you know in this global movement towards decentralization which is what we've been on since the pc and the internet and the smartphone that this is the phase of that where i can actually store money i can put my money to work i can send money and i don't have to trust the government and the banks necessarily who didn't want me in the first place yeah when we yeah when when we hit that 29 256 dollars just over a million customers a million people who were long on exchanges right leverage long got liquidated how many of those people do you think are still in crypto so i agree with everything bill is saying you need to get new customers but if you keep bleeding millions of people on the back end people keep falling off your bus how are you gonna get there so it are we gonna get there much faster if we stop bleeding so the funny thing is that you know who's shutting all that down the regulators the sec is the one who forced ftx and coinbase to stop offering 100x leverage it wasn't me or you right we still consume those products for no reason so so we again this goes back to i'm i'm you know again i've seen this movie with voice of ip bill has seen it with you know all the stuff that he was working on during the same period of time so we're telling you that this is not a fader complete that we're gonna win automatically okay and if every one of us doesn't bring 10 people and educate them about saving and educate them about not taking leverage and about yield and about how to be just how to have good habits right and not bad habits we're just not going to get there it's that simple i know that you don't need it's not a use case that will bring a billion you can it's really a thousand use case it's ringing a million you can have celsius in yield maybe you're bringing a hundred million or hopefully a billion by yourself gaming a good game easily 10 to 100 million probably more and then remittance another 100 million that that's how you'll get there that's the beauty anyone can build it up and you will have a few of them that will bring few million users and that's how we grow to a billion and how do you see in in that because 50 percent of it 50 50. but how do you see it i mean uh again to to my experience it's a bit more for advanced users so arjun started as you know we wanted to be revolute without the bank uh it was super simple you could you wouldn't see gas you wouldn't see anything there's no difference between sticking or getting nearly urgent and in a centralized platform or in revolut and then what happened is gas started increasing slightly and so we realize a user with a hundred dollar or five hundred dollar would be pissed because it's 50 to remove your savings and so we refocus on much more advanced users and that's why we have these wallets with million plus dollar in wallet and that's why it became much more advanced then now what's happening and we are rolling that out as we speak in a few weeks we'll be live on the year two where suddenly those action we're reducing cuts by 98 percent so it's certainly 10 cents 20 cents instead of 50 to 100 for this transaction so now we can go back to users one ram directly to their two they can have yield on is unstable count they will be able to trade it's affordable and it will get cheaper over time uh and now we can go back to hiding all that complexity this is not a technical uh challenge anymore the big technical challenge has been solved now we have to go back to to the roots and really making this super simple for for users okay you want to take some questions from the audience anybody has questions hello hi um as alex said security is perhaps the most important hurdle to pass yesterday bill said that abra is the safest way to earn yield which implies sub-optimal practices by others in the space i'm curious what those are and as a follow-up question do you think the yields reflect the risks or is there a security arbitrage uh that you see yeah um so when i feel that when i say that we're the safest place to earn yield today it's it's relative to the fact that i know we're doing everything possible from a risk management's perspective um that we can possibly think of right so uh i i think i'm the only person in the space who was a cryptographer for a large three-letter agency and also uh ran a fixed income uh portfolio at goldman sachs uh as a quant and so you know being able to deal with both worlds is very very hard and so we've we really have spent a lot of time money uh and testing building i think a risk management business with uh within abra that uh is is fantastic and the best in the space and so you know we we've forgotten a lot of opportunities right when when everybody in in the yield space was chasing the uh the our play on great on grace you know the the grace guy i explicitly told my team this is speculation right you're already taking speculative risk holding crypto that's not the purpose of yield right uh and and so i think at least that's i'm not going to speak for everyone else in the space but that's the perspective that we've had since before we even launched the product and we spent uh i don't know a couple of years working with our bank partner we could have launched the product much much sooner right using our trading partners under money transmission licenses and we explicitly chose not to do that and we delayed the launch uh for quite a while working with banking partners and lawyers to basically work through the compliance processes for doing it that way while we were also extending the risk management capabilities of the company and there's a lot of people in our space that simply don't know the questions to ask from a risk management perspective um and you know i i see resumes all the time you know from from people in the space and when i dig in they just don't know and i think it's going to take a concerted effort and it's just my opinion i don't work for all these other companies so i don't know what the practices are but i think it's going to take a concerted concerted multi-year efforts to put the right mis risk management practices across the entire industry uh and and we're trying our best to do our parts to be you know at least a single steward of that i think we have a question over there yeah the the so we have the biggest target on our back right 828 billion i can tell you every hacker in the world is saying oh let me just go and hack celsius you know they have the most money if you get into our accounts you're not going to find any coins there because our business is to lend them out so the risk is not protecting of course it's great to protect and have the most security i can tell you we have the safest wallet right everybody can just say that the question is how many times did you get hacked and do you still have all the coins that were given to you right so i can tell you that we land out we have hundreds of thousands of loans right with institutions the risk is not can you keep them safe in your wallet the risk is are these institutions or exchanges or defy going to return those coins to you the counterparty risk is the risk right and celsius had zero in four years longer than anyone else no one here has done it for four years zero zero institutional uh basically situations where they either didn't return the coins did not pay the interest or had any kind of default we had thousands of margin calls where they had to give us more money or give us more collateral but zero default right and again we show that we give all that information we have what's called proof of community where you can go into the blockchain and verify everything i'm saying by yourself even if you're not a celsius customer you can go in all the data is public and you can see all the transactions they're not going to tell you who the counterparties are but you can see all the transactions verify everything i'm saying so your bank is never going to give you that right try to go to your bank and say i want to know what you're using my deposits for i want to know who you're lending them to did they return the money and i want to know if i'm earning i'm one percent of the pool i want to know if i'm earning the same thing like alex or somebody else right that's the transparency that we need to have in this industry and i would say we have the smallest target on our backs we cannot we cannot take your money we cannot freeze your money uh a bad actor government cannot force us to freeze your funds uh while they can with most people uh on this stage uh and it's uh it's really for us i think long-term users will probably not care uh but it's really it's about can't be evil versus don't evil uh and that means we can innovate we can move super fast we are not sitting on billions of dollar money uh where every every action it's all about the process internal process internal review in our case the code is on the blockchain once it's there we can't temper with it we can't even upgrade your wallet uh and that's really uh that's been our approach okay we have 50 seconds i don't think we can actually make another question make a statement 50 50. thank you very much thank you guys been a great panel thanks everyone thanks good job