But there's Gensler on videos saying that you know Joe Lubin, but nine and
a half percent of the ico right there the documents themselves that Joe wrote says
no specula buying and what I said before, you can't buy more than you
can use. Knowingly, Joe could have justified nine and a half percent,
and he was an officer of the company that issued the entity issuing the tokens
themselves, and he goes ahead and breaks his own agreements. This content is
brought to you by Uphold, which is a great crypto platform that I've been
using since twenty eighteen. Uphold has all the top cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and all
the all coins. In fact, they have two hundred and sixty plus cryptocurrencies
on their platform. You can also trade precious metals, stable coins, and
thirty seven fiat currencies. In addition, they are available in over one one
hundred and fifty countries and this platform is fully reserved. They do audits so
you can trust that your funds are safe. No commingling, no lending out
your funds. If you'd like to learn more about Uphold, please visit the
link in the description. Welcome to the Thinking Crypto Podcast. You're home for
cryptocurrency news and interviews. With me today is Steven neriov who's the creator of
the utility token, the ico and the security token. Steven is also a
VC and the co founder of Etheroreum. Steven great to have you on,
Hiks, Tony. Thanks for having me. Stephen. We've got a lot
to talk about as it relates to Etheroreum. There's so many layers to the
story, your background as a co founder and what's happening today with what the
SEC and Gary Ginster are trying to do. Maybe you can quickly recap the
history of your role as a co founder and you know what maybe when you
first learned about bitcoin and crypto and how that led to etherorem Yeah. Sure,
I mean bitcoin was was interesting because you know, going back to like
my days in college, I got really interested in Anne Rand and you know
what a lot of libertarians talk about, and you know, the creature from
Jekyl Island, and you know understood that you know, this federal reserve thing
was kind of like not really federal, and it was really you know,
there was something wrong here and and so you know that kind of just became
a passionate about the monetary system. I spent many years, as you know,
I wouldn't say gold bug, but very much involved in the gold market.
You know. In fact, in two thousand and eight, I remember,
you know, you know, I wasn't in the same position as like
a John Paulson to get the kind of dealsyd, but I know I sold
all my assets and went half clash and half gold before the two thousand and
eight crash and you know Big One which actually really much, very much came
out of that of that of that crash that took down so many people and
and and you know, foreclosed so many homes and did so much pain and
I think really changed her in the entire generation. So with the toe she
dropped got actually dropped in my lap. And when I read it, you
know, it was really you know, I was like, this is only
nine pages. This was I sat back and I spent like a couple hours
really kind of going through it. And what shocked me. I remember this
really vividly. You know, all these years I kind of was, you
know, with the narrative of you know, there's going to be this hyperinflation
and then there's going to be the civil unrest and then you know, we're
going to you know, like like the German Wimar were went barrels of cash
and all of that kind of stuff and you know, blood and potential war
and and then here I am thirty years in technology, and I mean I
was running internet companies in Silicon Valley in the nineties. You know. I've
been a VC you know, and a entrepreneur since that time. And it's
just ironic that the last place I expected, you know, a solution for
a new monetary system was in technology. And the person who gave it to
me and looked at it and said, did you just hand me the new
monetary system? You know? And so I got I started becoming very involved
in the bigcoin community. Can even like you know, on my Twitter account
you can look, I have a post there where I used to put the
network statistics wasn't really about the price. It was so much about it,
like you know, how it was evolving and there was more transactions and all
of that. But the price was thirty two cents, you know, you
know, like there was a December twenty ten post. Then fast forward about
three years from there again it was right out to Metallic and published his white
paper, and what happened was somebody again dropped it in my lap, and
when I read it, that one actually came kind of clicked really quickly.
You know, I saw, you know, this world computer, the you
know, the EVM, what he was planning on doing. And I really
saw the difference, you know, starkly, because in my opinion, like
bitcoin is you know, uh a monetary you know uh creation that you know,
uh, at least up until now, was more of a one trick
pony where you know, value went back and forth. Of course, there's
you know a lot of development that's going on for a bitcoin for people that
don't know that's going to bring you know, the same capabilities in various formats
and L two's and different things. So there'll be a lot of functionality on
bitcoin. And ironically, a little known fact is that Metallic originally attempted to
put smart contracts onto Bitcoin, but the Bitcoin core dev said they didn't want
to. I think the word was pollute. Uh, you know, their
their their little baby. So what I saw in Ethereum was an operating system
similar to Windows, similar to mac os. You know, even your your
Xbox has one and and ps whatever numbers up to right now. So to
me, it was very much different in this I could grasp the concept of
the decentralized applications or DAPs. And so for those that don't understand, really,
you know, the genius of you know, he you know, he
solved a specific problem and that had not been solved before. But really,
you know, drastically speak, what he was able to do was for the
first time in really history, he was able to allow people, you know,
that weren't even next to each other, to interact without a little man
in the middle. And that's that's really and still have trust in the system.
And you didn't have to have trust in the person you're dealing with.
You didn't even need to know who that person was. And that is you
know, I don't know, you look at the you know, our ability,
the printing press, you know, the wheel, you know, I
mean, it's it's kind of like it's up there with those types of inventions,
and it was you know, everybody got close. You know, we
had digit cash, and you know, there was so many smart people that
preceded him that he built on top and then he was able to solve this
one problem. How Finny was able to a program, and you know,
I don't know if any of one of them ever actually anticipated it to be
as large as it is. So what happened with the Ethereum was they wanted
to do a crowd sale. Technically, it was the fourth crowd sale ever
to have been engaged. When a crowd sales, you know, you're selling
you know, this thing, and in this case it's called ether to the
public in general. And they went to I believe they had spoken to the
SEC, but they'd spoken to untold number of white shoe you know, large
law firms, and every one of them said, what you're attempting to do
is an unregistered sale of securities. You need to register it with the SEC.
This is a security and you know, they just really had no creativity
or answer behind it. They you know, I spoke to them and then
went and met with them. And this was really early on. And how
did you end up meeting them? By the way, it was, It
was interesting because I got tickets for me and these two guys that worked with
me, and as we're getting prepared to go down to the airport for the
Miami Bitcoin Conference where Batallic was going to actually present the ethereum white paper,
you know, to really packed audience, and I had a family emergency,
so I ended up not going, but I was already packed, but I
sent them along. And one of them is actually in that famous picture at
the Miami House for any people, anybody who's seen it. And when they
were talking about this, and they were saying that, you know, they
can't solve this problem, so they don't know how to move forward, this
guy that worked for me said, you know, my boss can figure this
out. So I was, you know, a flattered that he thought I
could figure out what no returning in the country could figure out. But I
immediately right after that, while they were in Miami, I'm pretty sure it
was, Charles reached out to me and said, you know, hey,
I spoke to you know, this guy that works for you, and he
said, you can help, you know, you can fix this. Can
you come up and meet with us? And so we started talking and I
went up and met with them, and when I met with them, it
was now I met with, you know, pretty much the team, and
so it was the team was still gelling. You know. This was December
twenty thirteen into January twenty fourteen. It was the first month that it was
starting, and I officially I think started in January fourteen. But you know,
it was so it was Joe, it was Metallic, it was Charles,
you know, it was Anthony Delario, who's you know, unsung in
many ways because he was you know, he housed it and really was pushing
it and put a lot of the early funding lent, you know, basically
lent money to the enterprise, so you know, and he's a good friend,
and so they were. I went there and I was, you know,
listening. I talked to them, and what they said to me is,
you know, this is what we've been told by everybody. Your guy
says, you could do this. And it's interesting because I told this story
to Kimbilla Russo for her book, and if anybody hasn't read it, it's
an excellent, excellent book. It's called The Infinite Machine. Uh it's a
history of what happened back there. And I said, uh, yeah,
I can do this. And I said how And I said I have no
fing idea, and so they all kind of looked at it. I was
just just not it's crazy, right, you know, And I sounded crazy,
and to be fair, I didn't have any idea how I was going
to solve it. What I did know was this I have I'm a lawyer
by training. Okay, I did what's called structured finance, and so without
getting into the specifics of that, you know, to me, I looked
at tokens and things that in structure financial tranches. You know, there are
different levels of payouts, you know, you know for different assets that you
like break up kind of like tokenization. And you also had a tax background,
you know, an advanced degree in tax and believe it or not that
actually it's you know, tax is not and the lawyers is like, you
don't have a calculator even it's more like figuring out these byzantine puzzle kind of
stuff. So that coupled with thirty years of understanding technology in my code or
no, am I cryptographer? No? But do I understand the underlying technology?
Did I understand how and why bitcoin work? And did I understand how
and why the theerem was working? Yes? But I have programmed it.
Know. But that was a good thing because I guess the best way I
could say it is I was coming at this from a very unusual angle.
It wasn't the smartest lawyer in the space. You know, I certainly wasn't
the smartest technologists in the space, but you know, but I did have
more experience than most everybody, you know, almost, So what that meant
was I had I had seen cycles before and things, you know, don't
repeat it. They certainly rhyme, and it was kind of like that's the
best the way he says, I had a certain angle that I was able
to see this and that was what was allowed me to create I briefly into
it, but the utility token, the ICO eventually the security token as well,
and it was due to that. So tell us about the next steps
for the launch, and you know, you bringing that idea to the table,
like, here's how we could launch is token. Everybody's afraid of the
security aspect, right, How did the idea of the ICO come up?
And so I mean you have to first look at you know, the token
itself and it actually you know, it was it was we ran a bar
and I was sitting with a talic I believe I had a drink and he
was nineteen. I think he had a coke, and it was yeah,
we were still getting our hands around with this thing. Ether is right,
and I said, so let me get this straight. Like you this is
really hell was speakers. But so you need to see you need to have
this stuff to send this stuff. And he said I said yeah, yeah,
yeah, either right, you need to have it right, just send
He said yes, and I'm like, okay, And then you've got these
decentualized applications and they're like you know, hungry monsters, right, you know,
and they need to be fed, and so you need to feed them
with this ether to make them work like and he said it's a correct and
he said, yeah, that's correct. So I said, well, you
know, I said, you know, and I used a couple of analogies.
I said, you know, when you send a letter, you know,
you need to put a stamp on that letter, right, and nobody
would say that that stamp you know that, you know, that one stamp
you know, I'm not talking about a collector's stamp or something like that,
but you know the current stamp sold by you know, in this case,
the United States Post Office, but in other countries, nobody would consider that
to be a security the I also used, I said, you know,
I said, you know, aside from this being fuel on the actual protocol
you know, I said, this, you know, really feels like fuel,
like that you put in your car, you know, but you know
that could depend you know, I said, it's if I'm filling up my
car, you know, with ten or twenty gallons of fuel. Nobody would
say that I just bought a security if I buy a million barrels kind of
gasoline. And unless I'm like American Airlines, you know that very well maybe
a security. So first, what we came up with was this I called
it a functional token, and then it enveloped into what called the utility token.
But the point was I was saying, this is a product, and
it looks and feels like a product, and so long as we treat it
properly, before you know, we actually sell it, which that process became
the ICO. But this is the utility token concept. So once we evolved,
you know, and cemented that this is a product, now we have
to figure out, okay, this utility token that we're now calling it,
you know, how do we now sell this where it doesn't come back and
become a security. And that was you know, kind of a little like
I wanted to rip my hair out because what you're doing is you're trying to
figure out every possible way that you know, what could possibly go wrong,
and in terms of that sales process to the to the public, and that
would turn this product back into security. So one example that I was using
earlier is is the volume. You know, if somebody is buying more of
this product, then they could justify using for themselves. Well, then there's
probably a product motive in there. And for those that don't know, at
least in the United States, there is a thing called the Howard tests,
and it's a four prong tests, and so you know, with that going
on to the specifics, you know, it's like making money off of the
efforts of others and so forth. Is a common enterprise and what have But
really like when it comes down to it, it comes down to is their
profit motive or isn't their profit motive? You know, did the entity selling
this this thing, did they intend for people to make money and people buying
it? Did they you know, were they you know, did they believe
that they were buying this uh through messaging or whatever, that it was something
that was going to go up in value? They believe this is something that
they were going to use, and so the you know, one of the
things I put in there, I'd put a very specific limit and I said,
you know, you can't. We can't sell more than this amount to
any one individual buyer. You know. There were other certainly other aspects of
it, and so I listed all of these and then I just kind of
put them in some kind of order and I said, guys, here's what
we need to do, and I showed it. You know, Fortunately,
I will say give a shout out to, you know, the Joe Grunfest,
who's probably the most illustrious head of the Chairman of the head Chairman of
Chairman of the SEC in the last seventy five years. And he's a law
professor at Stanford Law School. And I worked with him on almost a daily
basis, and he was really up to date. He understood what ether was.
And when I went to him initially with the product narrative that became the
utility token. You know, at first I thought he was going to say,
that's the dumbest IDEA ever heard, and he said, that's that's brilliant.
You know that that really could work, you know, which I'm like,
wait, we were onto something here. And then I worked with him
and I said you know, what if somebody does this, could it turned
into great? What if somebody does that? There was a great sound I
mean like maybe the greatest sounding board you know, on the planet that I
could have, you know had and I think the industry it was a huge
debt to him. And I would say also when the Ripple lawsuit happened,
he became an unpaid advisor to Ripple and did something kind of unpressed and he
sent a letter to Jake Clayton, an old former SEC chairman, sending it
to a current SET chairman like that's not protocol, that's not usual, and
he said, you you should not be taking an enforcement action against Ripple,
and he said a bunch more. But it was pretty hard worded letter.
Yeah, I had Joseph on the podcast and we had talked a bit about
this, and now that was surprising that that letter went out, you know,
to your point, not typical for former SEC officials to do that.
So tell us about you know, with the idea and you use Joe's the
sounding board and you got the you know, the process up and running.
What can you tell us about who participated in that ico there? I've seen
names, but I can't validate that. You know, maybe you can I
don't know if you can name drop or it's it's not appropriate, but what
can you tell us there? So I mean it's you know, there's there's
two sets. So there was about sixty million ether that were sold in the
ICO that were sold supposedly to purchasers of ether. Then there was you know,
I'd come up with this, you know, we'd come up with this
formulation that approximately thirty percent and came out to like almost twelve mine is about
eleven million, nine hundred ether that were given to contributors, so people that
like myself and other co founders and what have you, that participated. That's
part of the Ether that I actually turned down and did not accept. And
I'd say, you know, between that and the reason I didn't accept that,
I also withdrew the investment I was going to make the night before.
And I also had a very large amount of expenses because I rented an office
for them. Metallic stayed with me. I basically paid all of their expenses,
so they didn't have a nexus, which is a connection to the United
States. I did that for the good of the project, because there would
be no conflict of interest and frankly, if the SEC came after anybody,
and these are ominous thoughts downlooking in hindsight, they would come after me.
And I was cleaned, so I didn't think they would, you know,
anything would happen, but it would be protecting the project. I came to
about a million eights, which is like, you know, north of three
billion dollars today. I don't regret it all. I mutually, I was
happy that I did it. But the I think, so you've break it
into these but two buckets, the one bucket, the ones that were given
out to contributors. I actually have the list. I haven't published that list,
and that's like how much did Metallic get? How much did Joe Lubin
get. You know, there's you know, not how much did they purchased,
but given for their efforts, I didn't push published that list. For
a reason is that, you know, there's a lot of well intentioned people's
probably you know, under one hundred people. But uh and you know,
why put a target on somebody's back, you know, letting the world know
that they've got hundred million dollars in ether Maybe they haven't, maybe they don't
still have it, but you know, it's putting people's lives in danger.
So that's why I didn't put it out there per se. But what it
did do is it helped people that were doing you know, online evaluations and
saying, okay, well, these wallets got this amount of ether, these
wallets got this amount of ether, and in some case perhaps they could attach
that to a person or an entity, and in some cases they couldn't,
but they knew that the wallets were connected. You know, I think in
in Joe's case, you know, it was you know that that list probably
was helpful in terms of identifying you know, in particular wallet which then was
connected to all these other wallets, and so you know, so it's the
extent that that's the case, you know, you know, it's really two
different parts. That didn't take away anything from you know, still figuring out
what all those wallets were in the first place, you know, and that's
kind of some on chain analysis, and there's a skill in that, and
you know, that's its own thing. But then once you have that,
you have to definitively somehow prove and you know, having this this list and
it wasn't the only thing that I had, but would actually prove it.
What do I believe, I you know, my belief is that the majority
of the ICO and this was telega in a way, this was telegraphed.
I missed this video, and I guess, you know, I should have
been in class that day because this was not a video that you wanted to
miss. And this is Joe's Hidden Wales video, right, So for the
life of me, I understand if you're you know, I guess you know,
people who are about to commit a criminal act, you know, you
know, usually they speak after and brag and that's how they end up getting
caught. This one like spoke beforehand. So you know, I don't know.
I can't get into Joe's head. I don't want to get into Joe
sat It's probably scary being in Joe's head. But he actually had a video
where he said, you know, if you don't want to scare people,
you know, and you want to buy a large amount of ether, you
know, so you take it and you break it up into like, you
know, hundreds or whatever wallet's. I only saw this because thankfully, you
know, this this extra p Army because of the rip A litigation, did
this the centralized justice and found these videos they found the videos of me that
I didn't even have, and he was kind of like, WHOA, And
I look at this. I said, is this for real? Because he
really saying this and he's giving this advice to people, and it's on camera,
and the whole point of of you know, going before and I said,
limiting the number or that you could purchase, he's literally telling people,
you know, without saying it so much. Hey, Steve figured out a
way for us to do this total legally. But if you want to kind
of circumvent it and for people and not to realize that here's a way to
do it, and you create different entities and you put it into different models,
and you know a problem with that is you know you can probably still
figure out and attach those you know, they've given us enough you know,
bread crumbs, so to speak to kind of figure that out. So the
second, so I believe that Joe was a significant Gary Ginstlewy said he bought
well. I would say Joe said, I've never owned. Recently, at
a conference they said something about half a poor he said, I've never owned
more. I've never owned close to even close to half a percent. I'm
paraphrasing, but even close to was the key component, and kind of everybody
said, oh, he's never owned more than half a percent, and I
said, that's not what he said. He said, I've never owned even
close to half a percent. You know, forty percent is not close to
half a percent. Everybody else realized. I thought, you know, he
was talking about zero point one percent, right, you know, but Joe
was really careful with his words, and that was a slick statement. The
other the other player that I believe, and I saw them at the time,
I just didn't really quite understand, you know what, you know,
the let's say, the history of these entities, and that's the CCP affiliated
when I'm going to mispronounce it, but when Shine of w A n x
I A and she apologies for my Chinese friends you know in America and otherwise
that I mispronounced. But this is a CCP, very closely affiliated CCP entity.
They had a couple of subsidiaries who I knew well, I have known
well and had no reason to believe they were doing anything. I've done deals
with them, didn't think anything of it. One of them was Feenbushi run
by Ben Boschen. I'm not making any allegy I none, it was Hashkey.
I'm making any allegations again into either of these subsidiaries. I have nothing
to show any illicted activities other than the fact that they just are subsidiaries of
this larger wem Shecheng. I believe they were a very you know, large
purchaser in the ico, those two and then you know some Ethereum co founders
themselves. Now, there were reports over the years that JP Morgan was invested
in Consensus. Is a lot of transactions, even JP Morgan forking the Etherium
blockchain, creating Quorum, a private version they launched jpm coin. Was JP
Morgan in any way involved in the I c O or is it that that
comes later with Consensus? And so Joe says that JP Bonger was involved prior
to Maine that launch. I was around, you know, you know,
most everybody kind of scattered. Uh. It was my understanding that there was
a vesting agreement, you know, for X number of years for people to
vest their their ether and Joe took it upon himself to do the terms of
sale, the product purchase agreement, and he was chief operating officer of the
issue to token issuing entity, which means you know, he actually wrote the
documents and it was and it's I dropped the talk of three hour talk with
the talent and an NFT and to go to my Twitter at Stephen Narrayoff,
you'll see it's my pin tweet and in there, you know, Italic asked
me, you know, they were running out of money, and I gave
him. You know, it was a three month McKinsey style, you know,
research into every aspect of the company, and I had really set up.
Most of those were reviewed, you know, human resources, finance,
you know, the list goes on and on, and one of those I
said, you know, Joe removed the best thing agreement, so everybody kind
of like had no incentive to stay. And that was one of the things
I said to him. I said, you know, your only incentive is
to promote the price of either, but not to promote ethereum as a protocol
and create depths, which was the whole idea. So to be fair,
I don't currently have any recollection of JP Morgan being involved. I did start
consensus with Joe. On the other hand, I take pretty cool these notes
on what my daily activities are, and I also keep a pretty good calendar
I did not recall that we had a conference call with a federal reserve in
October of twenty fourteen either until I saw it and then it kind of kind
of started coming back to me. So was it possible? I know there
was, And this isn't Camilla Bus's book. You know, Metallic used to
stay with me on and off throughout that whole year, even though he suddenly
met me a few times in early twenty fourteen, and I do recall it
on our slack boards, there was a lot of veiled comments about the banks
infiltrating us and JP Morgan. It was actually they were mostly I remember it
was focused on Goldman Sacks, which was where supposedly Joe had worked previously.
And Batalic came in and I said, you know, I V And I
said, yo, V. Check this out. And I'm like, they're
like, you know, they're there. They seem to be making clear references
to Joe as being a plant by the banks to take over Ethereum, and
the talent turned red and this isn't Camilla Bris's book. And he went and
he wrote and he says, you know, we're usual agnostic and if banks
want to use it that's just great and if you know, whoever wants to
use it, that's fine. And yeah, I was like, yeah,
that's cool, that was good that you did that. And then I'm like
Joe being a plant for the banks, this is like nuts, and like
I think I got that one wrong. So you know, it's you know,
it takes a big man to make admit his errors. And there were
some people on there that were clearly more tuned in. And it was ironic
because you know, I'm fairly astute person, right, and it's I was
worked. I rented an office. I had my office for my artificial intelligence
company, and that's what I was actually doing prior to Bitcoin, you know,
disrupting my life. And then I had I rented a second office with
like three offices right now. I rented a second office for Ethereum. I
paid for it, did not get reimbursed. And then I opened up a
third office which became Consensus. So I was involved in all of those,
and again it was really to try to kind of protect the project. But
the point was that I was with Joe almost on a daily basis throughout this
whole time. During the crowd sale, almost forty two days, I don't
know how many I did those forty days. With most of those forty two
days, Joe and I were sitting in the same room as the crowd said
crowd sale was proceeding. I will say this, you know, in terms
of who participated, Uh, Preston Byrne put out a chart, I'm a
logarithmic chart that just shows this like perfect, you know, systematic consistent uh
flow of funds into the ICO for somebody who's not only invented the ICO but
just pretty public participated and created in my CEOs than anybody. Preston made a
state comment in there, and his point was, this is so inorganic,
this is so unnatural that you know, I think, if I want,
I don't put words in his mouth, but I think he was basically saying,
this looks like this was purchased up by you know, one two or
three small entity, one two or three small number of entities took down,
you know, the vast majority of the ICO. I'm in agreement with him.
I mean, the chart of speaks volumes, because no ICO chart that
I've ever seen works like that. You know, for the ICO is hot.
You know, you see a huge spike, you know, then especially
because in the early time, in the early weeks, you got I think
was almost twice as much ether per bitcoin that you did at the end.
So why would you wait, you know, unless you were buying up you
know, eighty or ninety percent, But then it really didn't matter when you
were putting it in because you know, the point was you own the same
amount anyway, so you know, it's better that it doesn't look like you
know, and if you did buy eighty or ninety percent, because it was
an uncapped sale, so you could have gone to you know, we raised
eighteen million, you coul have gone to eighteen you know, one hundred and
eighty million. So I don't think they wanted to tip off anybody, you
know, it looks like that. And so they would consistently buy and consistently
buying, consistently buying throughout the whole, and that's just not normal. So
where did your relationship with the theorem folks of Italic Joe Lubin go sour where
criminal extortion charges were brought against you and of course eventually dropped and dismissed.
What happened there? Yeah, so interesting, So we would have to take
a whole another podcast just to talk about the number of coincidences. I use
that word with triple quotes between my false prosecution, which we proved was based
on fabricated evidence of the government fabricated with their own documents from their own records.
But what's interesting is I was falsely arrested in September of twenty nineteen.
But let's go back to May of twenty seventeen. Three things interesting happened.
Bill Henman arrived at the SEC that very month. Also, that very month,
the company that falsely accused me. And when I say I proved falsely,
you know, not only the government documents the extortion that they claimed happened.
What they didn't realize it was on a Skype video call. I had
recorded that entire two and a half hour conversation. So it's kind of like
saying, you know, somebody committed a murder in New York, but you've
got them on videotape in Chicago and you're still charging them. The third thing
that happened was there was an article that was posted that involved other Ethereum co
founders, and it was, you know, it was basically talking about whether
or not this porn project had come out and they were asking. It was
a very serious question and it was from coin Idle magazine, and they were
saying, you know, is this harmful to Ethereum And we all basically had
the same opinion. We said, you know, no, I mean porn
you know, vhs and a lot of you know, they tend to be
at the forefront of technology. Take away the content. You know, it's
just you know, that's you know, it's it's almost a compliment, you
know, if organized you know, it just sounds weird, but it's just
it's historically true. But it's not to condone it in any way. But
organized crime and pornography, you know, you can look at those that you
can almost see, you know, that's where the technology trends are going to
go because they need to do it for their illicit purposes. Even set in
that article that I'm not saying it's on behalf of the theorem. I'm saying
it's my personal opinion, right. And we had agreed, Metallic and I
agreed to call myself a founding advisor the Ethereum Foundation. And this was the
beginning of a massive, coordinated, multi year discrediting campaign to erase me and
to discredit all my activities from Ethereum prior to any prosecution. That's really important.
The Ethereum Foundation set an email was saying that, you know, he
was never involved, Steve's never involved in this project. And you know,
I had a couple of people from Ethereum chime in and say, no,
no, Steve really was a well and then they said, okay, well,
you know you're fine, but you got to take out his title and
don't point him to ethereum dot org. Point him to the Wikipedia. And
they erased me from Ethereum dot org. So this was just the beginning of
you know, Vitalic saying he only met me a few times. Well,
anybody looks at that in early twenty fourteen, the recording our drop was into
early twenty fifteen. It's a three hour conversation. You tell me, who
knows what's going on in there and who's a clue? Is idiot in terms
of you know, what's happening with Ethereum versus me and Vitalent And you know,
I'll go on record is saying that what what is this? You know,
yeah, he's a human calculator, but what the hell has he actually
invented? Nothing? You know, he didn't create smart contracts. He hasn't
gotten the damn thing to scale. It was supposed to scale in twenty sixteen
he had gotten a's a scale and so you know, I think he's done
an extreme amount of harm. But you know that started the let's discredit Steve.
So noboy who pay attention and unfortunately wasn't the type to going around and
you know, blasting everything that I did the way these guys are blasting things
they didn't even do. So what was Steve? Why? Why were they
trying to do that? Is it because of the ico aspect? You were
trying to distance themselves from that. Now they were trying to distance me.
It took me some time to figure this out. It wasn't until I had
some ideas, but really, you know that the hint min emails were really
solidified it for me. And then I started going through my thousands of documents.
I had more documents of the ethereum than anybody else, and I realized
the free pass that Bill Hammond gave that said the theoeum was now desential and
therefore doesn't need to be regulated as security. And you know, therefore,
I guess it's a commodity or whatever. I had documentation actually signed by Vitalic
that said that Ethereum was not decentralized. I'm paraphrasing it here. I've put
it up and it's on my Twitter account that it's not decentralized and they need
to issue basically the same number, that's sixty million ether within the next three
years four months, which is right around the time of the Hintman speech.
They had issued less than half of that. So, according to the internal
documents of Ethereumvitalic and Joe Lubin knew that they had not been decentralized. However,
both of them went in to meet with Hintman under oath as one thousand
and one. You know, it's a felony to lie, and there's no
way they could have told himman, because then he couldn't have made that speech.
I'm not for one second going to defend Himan because I you know,
I can't prove this, but you know, it's hard to imagine that he
didn't know about this, but evidence needs to prove that one out. What
I can say is that the email that had that document effectively was sent to
from the lawyer Jeff Albert who was in the meeting, doesn't sound like he
said anything, whether that's a criminal conduct or not, you know, needs
to be seen. Was sent from him to me, to Joe and the
talent. There were only two other people that even knew this document existed.
And I can tell you those two people had no clue what was in this
document. They didn't understand the legally, they didn't send any of it.
You know, I think one signed it and the other one I doubt he
even read it. So really, the only only a person who was let's
say, not on the inside that knew this document existed was me. So
they needed to discredit me, you know. I think they thought that the
false prosecution would end. You know, so if people don't understand that when
you're indicted by the federal government, there's no statistics for getting that indictment dropped
because it's you know, pretty close to being a unicorn. It's that rare.
You know, years will go, you know without any federal indictments getting
dismissed. I got mine dismissed with prejudice. That's how rare that is,
you know. But the discrediting campaign was if I went out and spoke,
they said Oh, he's just, he's just you know. Even there was
an article that came out right afterwards and said, you know, instead of
saying, this is monumental, you know, including me getting a list of
all the OG's in the space that they wanted me to cooperate and turn on,
which I never did. Fused, I told them to go bleep themselves.
I said, I'll never cooperate with you because I think it's a witch
hunt. Instead of going into all of that, they kind of muddied me
up and make it sound like, you know, I have loss of credibility.
This campaign is foreign ride. So but what I'm Steve, and I
apologize if I miss this, But what I'm trying to forgure is why they
are trying to discredit you. Is it simply because of a document or you
guys had differences, you know, the relationship just went bad, or you
didn't go along with something they wanted to do. What took place there?
No, I think I think that No, they did something illegal. I
was able to blow the whistle on that, and I also knew something else
that was really important when I left the theorem, you know, I basically
you know, I would have ended up having a millionaire ether right when Joe
and I were doing starting Census, at some point I decided I did not
want to work with show, and I just said, whatever my percentages,
you know, and you know we were arguing between twenty five and fifty percent.
Whatever the pointed. I said, here at George, I don't want
any claim on the consensus. You know, you could have it. And
so you know, there here's a guy. I'm not saying I'm the only
person that knows about a lot of the illicit activity that they did, but
a lot of people are in the payroll, so to speak. They knew,
you know, take it. I guess I take it as a compliment
that they could not buy me. And it was a smart move actually,
because had they tried to come and said, here's ten billion dollars, just
keep your mouth shut, you know. I mean, the first thing I
would have done is, you know, kind of gone to the authorities.
So you know, they had to silence me somehow. So we didn't have
falling out. No, we had no issues. I didn't even realize that
this is stuff had happened. And to be fair, the time that it
was happening, I didn't know what I knew, I didn't know what they
had done. So at the very beginning, I didn't know that I was
a whistleblower. It wasn't until they came after me and then I started researching
it that I realized why they had come after me. So let's talk about
Hinman. It's been publicly documented through Empire Oversight, getting FOY requests and emails
through the Ripple lawsuit as well that Hinman was warned by the SEC Ethics Office,
You're not supposed to be talking to these folks and so forth Right,
Simpson Thatcher was part of the enterprise e leade theorym alliance. Is it as
it seems on its face that reason Hinman was so called compromise is because maybe
his law firm that he's getting paid by had a vested interest. You know,
to me, it's actually much much deeper than that. You know,
all of that's true, and you know, the conflicts of interest and the
warnings he received and just ignored are mind boggling, absolutely mind boggling, And
supposedly the SEC Spector General is looking at it. I don't know how much
I hope we put into that, but there's something else I would say,
as I mentioned earlier, Hayman got there at May, to the SEC at
May of twenty seventeen. Okay, the discrediting campaign against me started also in
May of twenty seventeen. The company that was a setup that ended up falsely
accusing me of extortion, I got introduced to in May of twenty seventeen,
and power oversights for your requests all start from the date of May of twenty
seventeen. So if Hyman, you know, this is just kind of like
logic. I don't have a document stating this yet, but the SEC inextripa
inexplicably has working gigabytes of data on me, even though supposedly according to them
in a d J, they weren't involved in my prosecution. What I can
say is all of this happening at the same time means it had to have
been pre planned, which means it had to predate Hyman getting there. So
my very strong belief based on all these facts, it's their inferences, So
I want to be clear about that. What do you call me conspiracy theory
there? But they're very logical inferences and we will get to discovery through my
lawsuit. Uh. Is that Himman and Clayton were actually sent to the SEC
for this primarily this very specific purpose to you know, give you know,
monopolization, uh, you know, halo and favoritism to ethereum over all of
this crypto. Wow. But and this may be a tough question to answer
because if that's the case, right, let's say that they were sent there
to get this going. And we see some of the things that played out
the lassit against Ripple and so forth. Who's the head of the snake here?
Who's spearheading this? I guess is my question? To coordinate all of
that? Wow, some of those cartoons you see like a snake with many
heads Lisa or something. Yeah, there's certainly snakes in here. And well,
what I can say is this, if you back up for a second
in the zoom out, Yeah, why is the SEC from Clayton and Hindman
and one administration giving favoritism to an entity that appears to be controlled by a
cc P affiliated company? And then fast forward to Gensler doing exactly the same
thing with pro Medim controlled by the very publicly by the same CCP affiliated entity.
That's a scary thought, right, So, like you know, is
you know, has that has the CCP infiltrated our administrative state and higher I
don't know. I can't answer that definitively. What I can say is there
were you know, I helped Architects zero that was the furtive her security token
on the for Security Token exchange. Yet this license that was given you know,
technically by FINRA, but which is you know, effectively reports to the
SEC like Gensler, was given to a company not only that was controlled by
this a CP entity, but that has no product, no technology, that
kind of nothing. And it looks like, you know, snake oil.
And yet you've got a company that in T zero which is now one by
the New York Stock Exchange ICE, you know, in terms of Continental Exchange,
and he doesn't give it to them. An American, you know,
large one hundred plus billion dollar market cap New York Stock Exchange. They own
a New York section, but they're also listed on the in new Ark Stock
Exchange doesn't give it to them. And there's the list of other companies that
were that were you know, we were looking for this magic bullet license,
so to speak. It's also telling about how he's using that. Yeah,
it's fascinating because I spoke to Aaron Kaplan I promete him, and he's echoing
gainster statements about all these things are digital asset securities, that terminology that Gainster
has been using, and they they're viewing E theorem as a security and they're
happy in prout of their license, Like we get the custody first digital acid
security, which is etherorem and straight from the horse's mouth, right, So
something fishy is going on there. So the billion dollar question for you,
given you know the plethor of experience you helping to set up the ICO,
was E theorems a security at the ICO launch? And is it still?
And is it a security today? Hi? Everyone part in the interruption.
I'm Tony Edward, the founder and host of the Thinking Crypto podcast. I
have a you favor to ask you. If you haven't subscribed as yet on
YouTube or the podcast platforms, hit that subscribe button, hit the thumbs up
button, hit the notification bell on the YouTube platform and on Spotify or Apple
or wherever you get your podcasts, please leave a five style rating and review.
It supports the podcast, It allows me to bring great quality content to
you. Thank you for your support, and I'll let you get back to
the content, yes, thing else not because of anything that I did.
I mean, I ended up properly. Had they followed my guidelines, you
know, they could have at least mitigated or potentially prevented it. You know,
there's some argument about using the funds to actually build out the network.
But that being said, you know him and says putting aside basically the ICO,
you know, all of this other stuff. You know, we're gonna
bless them anyway. But there's Genstler on videos saying that you know, Joe
Lubin, but nine and a half percent of the ICO right there the documents
themselves that Joe wrote says no specula buying and what I said before, you
know, you can't buy more than you can use. Knowing Joe could have
justified nine and a half percent, and he was an officer of the company
that issued the entity, issuing the tokens themselves, and he goes ahead and
breaks his own agreements. And the night before, you know, a day
or two before the Crowncil started, Joe had changed the language to say,
you know, discouraged prohibit itself, you know, uh, secular of buying,
and then lawyers changed that to say prohibited, so you know, it
just kind of looked like Joe was leaving room there, you know, wiggle
room to do this Againstler's saying that the respect of that of buying you know,
you respected of buying you know, you're you're you're, and it's by
an officer of the issuing entity, how do you do not trap the trip
the Howie test right there, right and he's on you know, on a
film you know at m I T stating this. Why does he know this?
By the way, that's another question, like why do you know this?
You know, Gary, Please any question, you know, any answers
respond at the point is he why hasn't he gone after them? Since he
had the audacity to call x RP a security prior to every getting to the
SEC and then prosecute you know, the enforcement action even more egregious is against
Chris and Brad, which is kind of like just unprecedented. But yet by
his own words, I Thinkian would have been a security and he didn't do
anything, you know, towards that end. I think what you're seeing here
is, you know, I boasted something to this effect recently, you know,
in twenty eighteen him and gave him the free past speech. And you
know, for those of you know that monopoly, you know, there's to
get out of chill card free. And so you know, what Gensler appears
to be doing is that card to everybody involved, including himself, prior SEC
officials, actors such as Luban and Batalic, other entities such as j P.
Morgan and the CCP affiliate entities get out of jail card, you know,
get out of jail free card. And what that means is he's using
the merge. When they went from proof of Steak in twenty twenty two,
it's like, okay, now joining in for security. Okay, mister Densler,
you said it was a security basically in twenty fifteen, twenty fourteen,
twenty fifteen. You know it's a security again. Actually you're just going to
use this one. No. I mean what that does is it says,
okay, we don't have to worry about anything before twenty twenty two, because
we don't want to worry about anything between twenty twenty two. So it's like,
yeah, if you create you know, a massive criminal activit video on
the scale of Rico and unprecedented where Enron and made off or like barely rounding
decimal errors, and you want to just kind of cover that all up.
You know, there's so many points in which Ether was treated as a security.
Let's just pick the latest one in time and we'll cover the rest up.
In meantime. We gave this license to Prometheum, how coincidental, and
Prometheum can then use it on their alternative trading system and trade it as a
security. And the interesting thing is it may not have been everything they had
wanted previously to monopolize all of crypto, and I hope my presence and the
receipts that I produced help prevent that. But what the banks want to do,
you know, the I'm not implicating Blackrock at all, but I'm just
saying Blackrock has talked about they want to do this. I believe, you
know, maybe JP Morgan everything, especially with what you're talking about with quorm.
They can start tokenizing real world assets. That's the first security token that
I had done. And you can do that if ethereum's a security right as,
you can do it. You know, we actually did the first it's
called t zerop for t zero. We launched them on ethereum as well,
so they may still be able to may not be able to monopolize crypto per
se, but they may be able to monopolize the market that arguably is bigger
than crypto, using a clearly defective product, that has created all the laws
and has received all cons of favoritism, and now it's just trying to get
brushed under the rug. I don't think it will. I'm pretty optimistic that
it won't. There's too many flavors involved. I'm bringing a lot of receipts
to the table. It's not usual where you've got somebody, you know,
they called me whistle blow. I'm really not a whistleblower, looked. I
mean, I think I've I've you know, arguably i've been you know,
invented more in this space than than than than most. And I just happened
to be at the right place at the right time because of what I was
creating. And I'd like to think that I have some ethics, so whatever
risks I have to take. When I was in the depths of my prosecution,
I made a commitment to myself. I said, when I get out
of here, I'm going to tell the world about what I saw, what
happened. And I'm going to do everything I can to hold those people accountable.
There seems to be a race here, you know, they seem to
be in a rush. So now all of a sudden to call it a
security, but we're going to call it a security. Give it the prometheum,
which will still all of our friends on Wall Street to kind of take
this over. And if you also listen to another one against their speeches,
he talks about specifically how the incumbents can take over a disruptive technology. Yeah,
to them, they kind of draw it out, which is what he's
done, given no guidance, you know, for over a dozen years or
plus, and then eventually kind of, you know, take over the industry.
And so in large part that's exactly the playbook that he said on camera
is exactly what's playing out. Steven. I hope you don't mind me asking
this, and it's a genuine question because I think about myself being in your
position. But all the receipts that you have, and they've already done things
to try to stop you, are you ever like in fear of your life?
That? Look, man, I might be in danger here because who
is involved in so many layers government, private, industry, Wall Street and
so forth. But I'm not. I'm not not a dare double right,
It's not I'm a truth slayer, right, and I expose non truths.
It's it's who I am, you know, you know, so I very
much believe in die free. You know, you know, you know exactly
how they say the phrase, but you know, live free or die.
I think it's I have no intention of dying. I've heard the phrase.
You know, I'm willing to die on this hill. I am willing to
die on the hill. But I'm not going to die on this hill.
You know. I made it clear to them, and they understand. What
this means is that there's far far more detrimental evidence that I have that I
could expose. Those have been put into let's say it's decentralized, put into
a lot of other hands that if anything were to happen, they would be
exposed. So I did cover myself. Do I spend my time worrying about
it every day? Now, you know? I mean, you know,
I guess you know, maybe there's a spiritual component of me that you know,
if you think about that, you kind of attract what you think,
and I don't. I just kind of put it out of my head.
You know. Do I lock my door? Yeah? Do I do?
But do I you know, do I have security, you know, guards
around me or anything like that. No. I mean it's you know,
the realities of a state wants to take you out, you know, and
they are able to. They would unless they think that taking you out is
much more detrimental. You know, they're going to suffer some damage. Will
they still survive as an entity? Yeah? Probably, you know, but
they need to you know, need to have more transparency and accountability some of
the other stuff that I could chop out, you know, I would put
their status in real jeopardy, and frankly, I don't not do that because
I don't want to expose them. I don't not do that even because of
my own safety. I'm not sure that, you know, the society is
ready for some of that, and I'm not sure that it would actually be
beneficial on a net basis. But it is in hands other hands who can
make that decision when the time comes. Right now, I have a very
tailored focus. I need to focus on this. This is multiple unprecedented events
and how we get this across to the world population. But this is not
something that happened to the US. You know, the US was complicit in
it. You know, this is a fraud against the world. It's an
attempt to take over the monetary system and the financial systems of the of the
globe. Right, So this is something that's happened to countries. You know
that is happening and should be outraged in Europe, even parts of Asia and
South America. And you know, you're seeing what's you know, happening in
South America. You know, they're buying their bitcoin and you know they're they're,
they're they're they're getting wise to all of this. So you know,
you know, at the end of the day, uh, hopefully you know,
I've got my angels in my army behind me too, you know,
protecting us. And I would like to say this that for those of you
people that think it's these huge you know, countries and you and it's true,
they are and they're there to be appropriately respected but not feared. Everybody
told me that you can't beat the FEDS. I had multiple agencies. The
first time anybody ever proved that multiple agency coordinated over dozens of pe people to
fabricate a crime against an innocent person. Knowing the person was innocent, and
I prove that that's unprecedented, right. And I did that because while I
had a healthy respect for you know, the federal government, at no point
did I ever fear them, what could ever let them get into our minds?
And I think as a society it's really important that we close off our
minds and say no the propaganda that we're being given, what we're being shown
on the news, the things that they're telling us. You know, we
need to like you know, shows like yours are key where you're bringing the
truth out and people in their bones, you know, when you get goosebumps,
you know you're hearing the truth right, and you know when you're not,
when you're being you know, you know, fed aligned. I think
you got a book to write there. And but with that, but to
you know, beating defense and these agencies and so forth. But I want
to go back to Hintman for a second. When Hinman gave that free speech
was the thesis that he used that a blockchain, right forget about maybe ethereum
for a second, can be centralized but then eventually more to become more decentralized
based on maybe nodes and so forth and I know hester Perce, the SEC
who's been pro crypto, has put out some you know, literature about that.
So was Hinman's thesis valid, But like like we were talking about,
not entirely accurate for etherorem because of all the details we've discussed. No,
I don't think it was ever ballid. I mean it was, uh,
it was not decentralized. He actually said two things. He said, you
know, similar you know to uh. He said that bitcoin was desential.
Is perhaps from the beginning that's directly contradicted in the Ethereum opinion letter that Batallic
signed. Let me be clear that that document that I'm talking about has a
metallic signature on it, so that's incorrect. The second component of it is
said it's now become sufficiently decentualized. Well, according to its own documents,
it hasn't been. In his depositions, he did, We did an extensive
amount of due diligence. You know, you would think if you're the SEC,
you would not be calling in Joseph Lubin and Batalic and say, hey,
so tell me what happened. I mean, I didn't get the benefit
of that. Nobody said to me and saying, hey, are you innocent
or not? No, you're not innocent. Okay, so you can go
home, you know, I mean that's what this is not where we have
agencies, right, you know, unless they were just looking to put on
the record. But those records were those interviews would transcribe and they were under
oath, so they will they will be really and so that no points it
had to have any validity. Mm hmm. So let's let's pass forward to
Gencer and what he's doing now. So the reports came out this week that
the SEC is doing an investigation into the Theorem Foundation. They are looking to
block that etherorem et F. They're looking to categorize ethos a security. We
touched a bit on it, right, the Prometheum strategy and so forth.
So in context of the ETF, do you think this is uh something to
block that ETF and also uh to like you said, push this tokenization security
aspect to Wall Street? Well, I think it will. You know,
I think the ETF, you know, is always a possibility, But I
don't think that's the direction that they're headed at now. I think they realized
that that was kind of d o a. You know that on arrival.
You know, hopefully my emergence had something to do with that. But you
know, they're saying, you know, how do we cover up everything that's
happened in the past and still benefit from this control that we have over etheroeum
and utilizing ethereum for our own purposes? You know, I think that's the
dual new mandate that that Gensler has. And keep in mind, Gensler was
with the CFTC. He was making comments, you know, a long time
ago. He's been talking about this for years, ever before he got to
the SEC. He's the one who prosecuted this enforcement action, you know,
him and and Clayton just dropped it on their way out, like literally,
and so you know, he's not you know, some people say, wow,
it didn't start under him. I'm not sure what that means. I
mean, he continued it and in many ways with the enforcement action, he
actually did the whole thing. So it I'll give them credit because it's you
know, for being insidious. It's it's it's a rather clever way of covering
up one's sins while still trying to make some use of the asset that they
were trying to utilize to monopolize all of crypto. You know, maybe they
won't monopolized all of crypto, but they may be able to monopolize all of
cokenization of real world assets. And for those of you who don't understand,
you know, that's like a four quad trillion dollar estimated market, you know,
the the world economy. I don't even think it's one one hundred trillion
something like that. Four quardter trillion is like four thousand trillion. It's like
forty times the world economy, something that you know in the neighborhood just orders
of magnitude larger. So there's, you know, this massive opportunity, and
you know, why are they picking ethereum, you know, I mean obviously
you know there's a control aspect there that they can manage it. Yeah,
And to your point, just this week, and I'm not sure if you
saw the news black Rock, it was announced with coinbase and securitized, they
started tokenizing investment funds on the ethery and blockchain. So to your I mean,
we're seeing it playing out right before our eyes, and eth is often
chosen above many other smart contract platforms that are out there. So to your
point, there seems to be a clear bias or agenda. It's the right
way there. Now you have a lawsuit, tell us about that lawsuit and
what's going on there. Yeah, so the lawsuit is actually against the UH
the US government, and it's for malicious prosecution, so it's not against Joe
and UH batallic per se at this point. Though, when we get into
discovery, you know, depending on what we find there, you know,
they could be at it. And that's for it's a very hard lawsuit.
It's very rare that laws would like that could be could come across. It'll
be a record setting lawsuit. Technically, you have to sue agents somebody with
the rest authority. So we're assuming the FBI agents which pursure themselves and falsified
documentation in order to pursue my false prosecution. But then the United States steps
in for them, and that should be filed you know within a month.
Wow. The other question I want to ask you in context, and there's
so many things here, so forgive me if I'm jumping around a bit,
but do you feel the SEC or Congress actually will have to pass legislation to
update the how we test to be able to categorize tokens appropriately given that this
is a very different world from the nineteen thirties when the How We Test was
put together. You got blockchains distributed globally, some centralized, some decentralized,
tokens distributed globally. What is your outlook and how the US is going to
treat these things? No, I mean, I think you know updating and
how it does, how it tested the US Supreme Court decisions, so you
know, I guess Congress could over overrule it, you know, in a
sense, you know, you know. But on the other hand, you
know, twenty nineteen Warren Davidson and I helped them with this, had the
Token Taxonomy Act, had a safe harbor free utility tokens. You look at
a jurisdiction site right now in the UAE and Dubai and particular. You know,
you want to start an exchange. They give you an application. Here
are the things you have to you know, they make a lot of sense.
And here are the things you have to do. You want to issue
utility, you took it. Here are the things you do. You get
a license for it, you pay a fee, and you know, there
are very common sensible ways that have been implemented in many countries across the globe
that we are choosing not to because they're working, they're flourishing. There's you're
finding you're not finding, you know, the kind of fraud. I'm sure
there's always going to be fraud. It's an early industry, with any industry
that was fraud, right, and certainly less fraud than I think that there
is on the governmental side. But you know, you don't necessarily you know,
Clayton said, you know, we don't need to disturb our securities laws.
Well, you certainly need to at least clarify them. And I think
creating safe harbors for that, overturning Howie you know, in this and for
this instance is a possibility. It's just I'm not necessarily true that it's necessary,
because there are ways in which you can do this that you can say,
depending on what you want to do, here are the requirements. You
pass those into law, and you know they're kind of this like separate regime,
you know from how but you can go either way. The point is
that they don't want to go either way. You know, they can legislation
other than you know, Elizabeth Warren saying that you know, hamas or criminals
or whatever whatever word. She just wants you just throws out whatever organizations you
want and says, you know, they use crypto for I listed activities.
You know, wouldn't it be interesting if the government was using crypto for listed
activities? Who knows? It's uh uh. I would say it's very hypocritical
in terms of what they're doing. And they're clearly stalling to have innovative implementing
regulations because regulations stops them from doing arbitrary enforcement actions like they did against Ripple,
and I think that's what they're looking to do. I think they took
advantage of the FTX thing if they weren't involved in the f t X thing
from an early state, and that showed the kind of damage that they could
do where regulations would stop them from doing that. Now you're still involving crypto.
You're building a metaverse project. Can you tell us about that? Yeah?
Sure, so, you know, it's interesting. My background is really
more an AI you know, as much as I've created in crypto, and
so we have some technology and some seminal patents that we realized the would actually
lend itself well to creating a digital twin of the Earth, and so it's
a certain model that we have. It's going to be introduced shortly, and
that would allow you to do things that you just couldn't do today. You
could, you know, in real time you kind of like teleport to the
Japanese Gardens or the Times Square, and it's intended to allow people to have,
you know, immersive mostly augmented reality experiences where they couldn't otherwise have them.
And you know, you go into a mall and you go, let's
say you want to buy a suit or a dress. Instead of looking like
an avatar with an NFT, you actually look like you. Is a representation
of you, but it's it's a digital twin, and so you're probably gonna
want to look sharp the way you look now and you're not going to look
like Daffy Duck on a spaceship, right, you know, and it'll be
familiar. And we happen to have had built this all out for a smart
city project that we were doing, which will still be doing as part of
this. But we believe that the real metaverse is the one where you're going
to look like yourself. You're going to feel like yourself, but you're gonna
be able to do things quicker faster, cheaper. So if you want to
you know, instead of us having this conversation right now, you and I
could be sitting across the table from each other. You know, are you
a glass song? We could be sitting right across which and you look like
you, I look like me, right, and it feels like a familiar
setting, you know that. You know, we could create a setting or
it could be you know, the setting that you know is in your office.
And the commercial potential of this is just really astronomical. You know,
I think in ten years, something like this could be larger than any economy
on the planet. So if you want to have you know, you want
to go, Let's say the hottest club nightclub is in it easier and they
you know, they have a limit of having people they can have in there,
and we have to respect the laws of physics. So let's say it's
five thousand people. Well, they could create a digital representation, a digital
twin of that, and then people from all around the world could go and
experience that. And instead of flying there and you know, paying all the
expenses and the time and the month, you know, an entire day,
you know, it's deal and getting there, you know, you could just
put on your glasses and you could be right there right now, you know.
So the potential there. I'm giving a really high overview. I think
it's going to be a game changer. We own the technology to do that,
we have the patents on it. But more importantly, since twenty ten,
we've been actually building out this tech. We didn't realize we were building
it out for this purpose, but about two or three years ago we realized,
hey, wait, we actually have the tech to build a digital twin.
And the beauty of it also is that the users without going into all
the specifics of how, but it'll be fairly easy for the users to be
building it out. You know a lot of things I see, like,
you know, some of these metaverses, most of the meta verses, they're
going against the grain of what like made social media you know great, and
that was user generated content. So the users are going to be building this
out and really easy for them to do that, you know. Whereas they're
building out you know, a whole world, and they're going to have to
keep it updated and that's just that's just not how you know, and we're
really not doing Web three are really jumping into web five. It's kind of
like what we're you know, what this project's all about. Where we're leap
producting it all, you know, all the way and to the user generated
content will keep this fresh. It'll be content that people want, right you
know, if you have if you have a vacation home and a man cave
in that vacation home, but you're at regular, regular home, you can
fill filming a vacational but when you're in your regular home, you can feel
like you're sitting in that exact room and it looks like that exact room,
you look like exactly like you, and you can invite you know, three
forty your buddies and you you know, you could have a beer and whatever
you want to have, you know, making an example, but you know
it would feel like the real world. You could do things that you know
are more fantastic. But it's really geared towards creating transactions and interactions and immersive
experiences, and so it's it's very heavy. While it'll be launched, I
will say this is probably the most ambitious projects I've ever been launched in blockchain,
while at the same time, I think is the first true AI project
that's being launched in blockchain, So this the token will be really it's very
much an AI token and the technology is probably seventy eighty percent artificial intelligence.
Can you tell me if you're using a blockchain that's already in the market,
or you have your own proprietary blockchain. We're going to be announcing that soon.
Got it. I'm excited to see that, man. That's awesome.
I will say this, I believe that the winning layer one blockchain will be
the one that has the killer DAP, that has economies of scale and network
effects and all of that. And I believe that killer DAP is going to
be what people are referring to as a metaverse. You know, we're saying
it's an immersive experience. So I believe whoever kind of wins this, the
blockchain underneath that will be the winning blockchain. Mm hmm. Well, I'm
excited to see that, man. That that sounds fascinating. And I you
know, given that your backgrounds in AI, I got to ask you about
the you know, this ascension of AI and what we're seeing open AI and
chat, GPT and so forth. And then there's talks of AI is going
to take away a lot of jobs, but we know many times there's a
short period which is a massive disruption. Jobs are lost, but then there's
jobs creation. What is your outlook and how AI is going to change the
world like in the next ten years. I think it's gonna be massive,
I would say in a couple of things. I think, you know,
the calls that like Elon and some others have had for regulation and they're so
worried about blockchain right and box, I think you're a couple of billions tillion
dollars right, and it's you know, it doesn't pose the threats that AI
and nowhere near the threats that I pose. This, So I think,
you know, and I know the White House issued some executive orders on this.
I think that they need to be more regulation in terms of how it's
being built up because it can become very dangerous too. I think it's you're
right, it will be disruptive. And what you'll see is, you know,
just like the Industrial Revolution and other you know disruptions. You know,
in terms of technologies, what you'll see is, you know, people go
upstream. And so right now I could probably use chat GBT to write a
very basic legal contract that I would have had to call my lawyer for so
now lawyers will be more focused on you know, planning and strategic analysis,
and in fact those things are worth more than putting together a document. So
in some ways, you know, it'll be you'll have to have more experience.
It will be a little bit harder to compete, but you probably could
do even better. And I also don't forget that the chat GBT is making
the lawyers work a lot, a lot less, a lot easier, and
probably a lot more profitable. So net net, I don't think you know,
I use my h our metaverse. And then for those who don't know
it's it's called clone kal o n E. In there, we expect to
have more generative AI entities that look like real people. You know, somebody
wants to teach you a skill, or somebody you know who you know you
want to go and talk to about some information, but it actually looks like
a real person as opposed to just you know, getting something from chat GVT.
And arguably there'll be more of those than actual real people in there,
but you'll be using those and those will be generating revenue for the companies that
are producing those, and people that have to you know, create those generative
AI you know, real you know, real looking people. So you know,
that's the whole industry on and of itself that will be that will be
coming out, you know, because this is a new service that I've wasn't
able to do before. There's it's coming from money, many different directions.
But when you look at ten or twenty years from now, you know,
aside from the the risks that are you know, that are associated with us,
I think it's going to catapult our standard of living, our experience and
the joy that we have in terms of life. And in the end,
I think it will be a lot of concern over nothing because I think people
will have a better standard of living. And for people to remember, standard
of living is really about how much leisure time do you have and how much
do you work? Right? You know, that goes back to our conversations
with inflation and the FED and all of that. It's a whole separate conversation.
But the point is I think AI has the ability to give us back
more leisure time than we've had, you know, you know, given the
industrial revolution and we've had three or four revolution we should be working a five
hour week and we're not. It's gotten worse, but AI has a chance
to help, you know, reverse that trend of it. Right, Stephen
Man, I wish you had more time. Will have to do a round
two and to talk more. But I got some wrap up questions here for
you. Favorite food, I'm sorry, oh a wrap up questions for you,
rapid fire fa what's your favorite food? Oh? My favorite food?
It's a good question, uh delli. Favorite musician or band. Favorite musician
or band, tie between Billy Joel and the Stones. Favorite movie, favorite
movie right now, I've been watching Ready Player two quite a bit. And
favorite book, favorite book. I can't say warm piece of it's really long,
believe or not since it's a good old high school catcher in the rye.
Oh yeah. And when you're not doing anything metaverse wise or crypto,
what are you doing for fun? As a hobby nature as Steven? A
pleasure chatting with you, and thank you for taking the time, appreciate your
insights, and like I said, we'll have to do part two, but
thank you so much for joining me. Thanks Tony, I have a wonderful day.