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[Music] what's up everyone hey adam good to be back at reimagine for the new crazy year of 2021 i am trevor koverko the co-founder polymath excited to be here hello and welcome to reimagine 2021 this is our seventh conference in a monthly series of events bringing you nothing but the best projects sprite minds and leaders in the space we've been fortunate enough to invite you know many talented individuals and teams to come speak with us providing updates insights and all the above you know that's happening in crypto i'll be your host today adam from the mouse belt team uh where we focus on early stage investments through our accelerator we provide development support to a number of growing projects in the space as well as education within our mouse belt university program um and this is kind of an extension of of that here at the reimagine conference our main objective and goals are pretty simple it's to increase you know adoption awareness use cases and real world applications uh you know at the bottom of it we seek to educate our audience and you know on blockchain by helping them understand crypto's real impact uh again thanks for all of you tuning in here at the moment we have an exciting interview for you today let me go ahead and reintroduce to you trevor uh koverko from the ceo of polymath i appreciate uh the time you're taking out of your day to participate again uh glad to have you back as you know i don't know starting to become a regular on the show uh how you doing trevor i'm doing great i'm feeling the energy and it's great to be back awesome awesome always a pleasure um and i've noticed in most of your interviews is that like your desk would you have this nice view behind you always yeah some people think it's like the zoom background but this is uh how i kind of set it up it's good for for lighting and uh i'm particular about having my cockpit kind of set up yeah particular way that's the one i get fussy if i work on a little laptop i'm not as productive so nice nice man now i've noticed in all the interviews uh you know you got this beautiful background at first i didn't know i didn't know what you know where it was but uh that's toronto right yep downtown toronto awesome home birthplace of ethereum there you go there you go so for those of you that don't know you can catch trevor's first interview with us um if you visit our youtube channel at reimagine2021 um you can also catch many of his keynotes you know podcast uh interviews on youtube as well uh so i'm gonna try and keep this conversation fresh as he's been here before um just to recap for the audience here that maybe not have caught you know the past the past conferences uh trevor has gone on to create polymath one of the first projects globally to propose a concept of security tokens um it enables trillions of dollars of securities to migrate you know to the blockchain benefiting from you know 24 7 market trading programmable equity and access to like billions of dollars you know of unbanked wealth um so let's go ahead and like kick this off um trevor you've had like a pretty successful uh life journey drafted by the nhl you know battled some some serious injuries that like influenced you know your career trajectory from tech and finance now into the the blockchain crypto scene um your impact you know in our industry has been tremendous for for everybody involved and for those that don't know at some point will probably impact impact your life so i'm going to leave it at that to get started um my first question really and for all of you tuning in you can catch his background you know his life journey anywhere on the internet so i'm going to leave it at that but one question that i have man is you were drafted by the nhl do any of your old colleagues or partners do they have any interest in in crypto or like the bitcoin scene um nfl has had some contracts so i'm curious to know just uh out of personal curiosity like do you talk to any any old buddies in in the league about this i know lots of guys you know it's pretty pretty common young males especially um we're trying to even it out so we have uh kind of a more diverse ecosystem but definitely the hockey guys are uh are uh bullish and asking a lot of questions and you know i try sometimes that's a sign that the market's gonna get a bit frothy when you know yeah your non-industry people like asking what a good time to buy is and stuff but uh um it's great i love kind of talking about this stuff and and um uh yeah if you guys some guys in the nhl are uh are asking me about it that i that i used to play with and uh i always try to spread the good work anybody kind of putting this in their salary contracts like you know like uh i forget um you know matt barkley from the bears in chicago i think is getting paid like there's a couple linemen from you know i didn't know that yeah i know the the spencer dim witty guy in the nba oh yeah yeah yeah um and i'm not hockey not not uh not to my knowledge but i know a lot of guys are speculating on the side nice nice cool man i just wanted to kick that off here um so you understand the startup scene uh you come from you know the startup world uh there are many right now tuned in to to this conference to to check out this interview um that are just launching like their own startup you know early founders entrepreneurs um one question that i wanted to ask like what kind of support system like do you have or did you depend on through your startup journey and i asked that because i know you joined an accelerator out in china and i've heard you talk about kind of like you know the the structuring and how to fundraise and how to you know uh you know start a business really and my question is i talked to i talked to many startups and they meet a bunch of people like how dependent or how much did you rely on kind of that support system from mentors advisors you know your parents family i'm just curious there yeah absolutely that's one of the most important success success factors in in entrepreneurship is just who you surround yourself with you know the old adage of you are this the average sum of the five people you hang out with the most and i i truly believe that's that's true i've been very lucky you know and it's something i always try to work on as well is is just learning from from the giants that uh came before you and you know the other saying is you know smart people learn from their mistakes but smarter people learn from other people's mistakes so you don't have to make them yourselves and uh yeah i can't stress enough how important it is to get a good network of coaches of mentors of peers especially the peers you know who are going through it with you and they can relate more and and have that kind of you scratch my back i scrap scratch your back kind of mentality in silicon valley it's it's kind of baked into the dna which is uh why i love going there so much yeah yeah and i asked that question because you know most of the time the public or you know the everybody out there kind of sees the unicorns right like the final result of the uh you know the projects you know now turned companies you know your ubers your netflix or your facebooks all the above right but they don't kind of see the grinds with the ups and downs you know the challenges the failures you know the successes so you know when i do these interviews it's always good for me to kind of share these insights with with you know students and the university partners that we have to kind of reflect like it's not always a clear path you you know you may have to pivot i know you were in finance before and you know now you combine kind of your true loves which is which is tech and finance together and and you know you you you you know up to this point have been successful at least with polymath um that's for sure so i appreciate kind of your take on that as we as we kind of showcase um your journey a little bit yeah look for me um i think it's just important to constantly be evolving and and learning and sometimes it's okay to get distracted you know when you see everyone's focus focus focus but um if i didn't get distracted and on bitcoin in 2012 you know i wouldn't be here today so um look i think for me what yeah your skills and your experience are certainly important but you don't need to pigeonhole yourself into any into any one thing you can always do whatever you want whatever you're passionate about just because you don't you're not necessarily an engineer it doesn't mean you can't get into crypto if you're not um you know whatever you you can you can do whatever you want all you have to do is like have that that kind of consistent that's the thing i always stress is just consistency like okay if you don't have the skills that's fine but you have to make sure you have a plan and accountability to make sure that you're constantly learning and evolving and eventually closing the gap and for me it's kind of been like that from um i i studied finance so that was a good background and very applicable to crypto now actually with d5 now and i'm seeing all these same concepts come back up from uh from the student days with uh derivatives and and swaps and and all these kind of esoteric uh financial terms now they're all applicable now because with with d5 which is something i'm super excited about it's it's really uh the recreation of a different architecture for the financial system and it's more open and it's more transparent but you still often understand the fundamentals of the traditional world i think or at least it's helpful um when you're understanding define other new technologies like that no for sure i come from banking and so the payments the settlements you know these other kind of projects that are tackling you know the cross-border stuff and like you know battling swift it's all interesting and then he just brought up derivatives and kind of everyday you know um instruments and and just kind of a way of life that that we're used to that that crypto is obviously trying to decentralize that um which which it's been great it's been definitely a ride um you brought up like uh silicon valley earlier uh just just a bit ago i know you're kind of a big fan you know silicon valley um the region has always led the way obviously with regards to tech from your perspective like how has silicon valley handled blockchain crypto um and i asked this question because crypto like has no boundaries um and still silicon valley is like you know the tech mecca right but there was a point i'm in san francisco so i kind of heard this for the last few years but there was a point where i i was hearing you know we're not investing in blockchain like you know we're not investing in in in crypto we're not investing these in these in these types of projects um but that's kind of like saying i'm not investing in like ai or like machine learning or something like that so what's kind of your take on the region you know has it led has it led crypto uh does it matter if silicon valley is like you know all in crypto or not because obviously we're democratized as far as how blockchain operates so what's kind of your take on the valley here and and the way that it's handled you know the the the blockchain crypto scene yeah i'm a big kind of uh fanboy of of everything silicon valley is and what it represents and and i always look for content from from the valley because i feel like it's just the most real it's the least pretentious it's it's the culture i'm not just talking about the place itself but just the concept of silk it's just you know it's not about being too promotional it's not about being too it's about substance and you see it's not about being flashy it's about you know real uh real real operations and real business and some of the smartest people i know are venture capitalists down there some of the best content i consume is out of you know the y combinators just like stuff that i wish i i consumed earlier on in my career i would have saved me you know learn from other other people's mistakes like i said earlier not your own i learned from my own a lot too much i think but um look and the same with with crypto now it's really i people ask me where's the best place to go the the best content i'm like go to andreessen horror which is crypto school on youtube it's just that's it's it's not promotiony it's very this is how it works this is why it's important and and it's not about like trading and speculating and charts and technical analysis and what most people get it's like why does it matter why are why why did andreessen just raise a 500 million dollar crypto fund for to focus on defy and other uh decentralized technologies so so i just find just that the culture there just the way people always help you can kind of cold email anyone and jump on a zoom or jump on a coffee uh or if you can get outside um and not to mention that's where um all the capital is so that doesn't hurt either that that the vast majority of uh tech venture money is coming out of sandhill road and silicon valley as well but do you think like the general landscape like was accepting do you think uh you know young young young uh blockchain crypto startup should focus on on like in the valley care about it so much uh because obviously it is it is like the tech hub but blockchain crypto toronto has a big scene you know other other parts of the nation have a big scene and then and they're very geographic regions you know europe and china so like what's your thought in terms of like yeah again like i used to or maybe even even in your experience when raising funds were they accepted with you like a few years ago not a view but of like you know the blockchain industry crypto industry do you recall i remember anthony diorio and might have been vitalik were doing a skype call with naval ravicon and i back then i knew who he was as well and that was kind of like my okay so some really smart guys are looking into this space now and uh okay we're onto something here because there's some good validation and but your point is very um applicable because you don't need to it's a misnomer that you have to like go to silicon valley now yeah especially for crypto like look at all the top d5 projects are pretty much like single developers out of eastern europe that wrote 300 lines of code and now there's 100 billion dollars of assets locked up in it and compare that if you want to go create a wall street product forget it you need a whole team you need to wait 18 months and you're probably not going to get a clear answer but this is all permission it doesn't matter where you are um we're going to see a lot more distribution i know there's also kind of a mass exodus happening from from california to miami and texas and i kind of expect that to continue as well until california gets attacked together a little bit no offense but uh yeah but yeah so i look i think of course i'm talking more about like the trip which i grew up in but in crypto man it's completely it doesn't matter who you are where you are doesn't matter your race your gender none of that matters like you just be one person with a with an idea and go launch you know you're in finance and go launch um open op yeah very efficient that's what's most exciting is you can build insane leverage not literal leverage but just leverage in the sense that one person with a few hundred lines of code can build some build a product that attracts billions of dollars tens of billions of dollars of of assets in a matter of weeks and months and that was just absolutely unheard of even in building a startup you know it's very easy relative to 20 years ago but it's still a long process and defined stuff like that it's like very fast the innovation cycle has been compressed dramatically and i'm just excited to see where it all unfolds and do you think this is bled out from your your a16 z's to some of the other traditional vcs now like do you think they're looking at is it still too early you know for them to get in uh because there's there's some traditional vcs that are going in um there were some on the outskirts and then there were like crypto fun you know crypto specific vcs do you see kind of you know the wider uh demographic of investors oming into the scene now that we're in 2021 now with kind of the boom yeah like the institutional um um narrative is kind of i think the strongest um underpinning of this bull market is it's different than in the sense that it's not just purely retail speculators like uh 2017 was i shouldn't say that like 2017 is when a lot of really amazing projects were created and yeah especially in the bear market that's kind of when these generational companies are built look at um amazon facebook google all these were built in in the tech bubble maybe not facebook but the the older ones in 2000 and i guess 2000 2001 and that's when the real building happens that's when you know you find out who's really passionate not just there for uh a quick drive-by but they're passionate about the space and and if they can battle through kind of the bear market it shows that they're a lot more committed to um to what's happening no no you you you bring i'll continue on i don't want to stay on this too long but yeah i posted that so we have the mouse belt our team like launched a startup school just a couple weeks ago for uh for projects teams you know applicants that we've seen in the past uh referrals from our kind of ecosystem and getting them into you know forum discussion getting it going uh but you brought up like an interesting point where um i i posted that actually where and i've had this even in in some of our other interviews where like trying to express or showcase that regardless of the environment like a lot of these teams have uh were born out of like you know volatile economic environments you know not suitable and very kind of encouraging uh to understand that like you said if you have a concept you have a project like just continue to work hard create your own opportunities because i don't have the list in front of me but you know even apple right apple i think was one of them netflix came out of one of them i think um airbnb came out of like you know these these down economic cycles so i appreciate you kind of like bringing light to that that 2017 the bear market which is why we actually got into business um the scams the frauds and narratives at that time you know the under delivering of products and services we we decided let's incubate projects like you know we had a vc arm and we had a development team like let's now work and nurture you know these early stage startups and not we thought what was broken at the time was like just money flowing but no support you know partnerships biz dev go-to market strategy so it's kind of cool cool listening to you you know kind of touch on those important topics and here we are now uh riding high on this rally bitcoin rally and and you know the the uh the companies that are now in this space or coming to fruition in terms of like adoption in in use cases which kind of leads me to my my next question here which is the kind of the state of the union for stos like there's been you know uh support from the winklevoss twins like charles hoskinson like the dtc are now um you know talking positively about about this type of of emerging tech um so this seo concept is a process like to handle this like custody exchanges wallets where are we at today in terms of like the sto usage like can you give us kind of a breakdown of you know beginning of the year we just survived 2017 18 19 20. um what's going on in the sto kind of market right now you know it's just to get this out of the way because we try not to focus on it too much but the market cap of all security tokens in existence had an all-time high a couple days ago so it's kind of um i won't say in line with the broader crypto bull market i'd say it's even even more um potent in a lot of ways because it's such a smaller industry so you can have like two three five ten x's a lot faster um but i think the real story here is just the infrastructure that's needed to support uh this this massive kind of avalanche of new security token offerings is is now online or it's it's getting better every day so a lot of people including myself probably underestimated all the different stakeholder groups and pieces of infrastructure needed to have a flourishing ecosystem of security tokens you need custody you need transfer agents you need secondary exchanges all of them need to be you know token enabled and a lot of those things just didn't exist and um you know some folks say you know regulatory clarity is one of the biggest hurdles and in a way that's true but also you know security tokens aren't really in the gray area we kind of know we admit everything is a security so we're just following the existing laws we have technology that make it actually easier to do that and make it easier to be compliant not just for the issuer but for all participants including the regulators we make it it's a lot easier for a regular regulator or compliance department to follow a private placement because it's very opaque in today's current paper system but on on the blockchain it's a lot more transparent you have more you know reporting tools that are easier to access and um i think that's just the beauty of this this industry that kind of benefits everybody it's not a zero-sum trade-off like the existing participants um are better off there's new products that can exist that weren't even possible so it's better for you know entrepreneurs and innovators and developers that are trying to build on top of these new systems um so so i'm just really excited i think uh secured tokens haven't really had their mainstream time in the sun yet but every data point we're looking at including big regulated financial institutions seriously developing you know products and running experiments in this space are really pointing all in the same direction that um significant financial assets will begin to be tokenized um and not just like in the distant future it's happening today um there's a lot of great companies in our peers in the industry like tokenstop and securitize and and t0 and folks that you know we're all in it to grow the pie because we know the pie pick a number and put trillion next to it and that's how big this market is and um we're just trying to really work together to educate people to create standards between all the technologies that we're building it's it's such a big open ocean of things to do that no one project or company can do it all at once so uh it's important to be collaborative and try to create standards together yeah no no it makes total sense and like who would you say the target market is for like stos either either generating stos or maybe buying us security tokens i guess where's the demand coming from because i've always thought like this whole build it they will come kind of on the blockchain side like that doesn't really that didn't really apply in terms of you know the best tech it was kind of more community driven there's a lot of other variables involved to kind of drive like usage utility so like where's the demand coming from in terms of like an sto either like creating it from the you know institutional side or like the demand side from retail and kind of the masses i'm just my chief product officer um really developed this thesis around broker dealers and that's really a primary market for us is interfacing not just saying hey we're going to come in and disrupt um wall street and some of the stuff that i may have been saying years ago but now it's it's more you know how can we augment these existing players they're the ones whether we like it or not that have the distribution channels they're the ones that have the investors and the issuers and i think the prudent strategy here is to really work with them integrate with them and and promote them as kind of our key constituency i think that's where the demand is going to come from nice nice um like you said it you know it's going to be traditional stuff it's going to be the web you know the web 2.0 type type of companies and now we're going into the web 3.0 which which will probably accelerate that in the new business models the new methods you know the new types of companies that are that are thriving are going to be thriving out of this industry um so that's kind of that uh so thanks for kind of tackling that um and i've already mentioned this too in the past regards to what legacy systems are being used from like you know the 80s right uh not too much has has evolved or maybe some things have gotten better of course um but we're talking about disruption we're talking about innovation um which leads me to ask like polymath has an advantage right now to what you guys are you know this issuance platform the sto market uh will banks or traditional entities like firms institutions get involved and create their own platform to kind of compete against you guys or how do you see kind of the market evolving in terms of either them upgrading that their kind of way of doing business or will they just leverage polymath hopefully that would be the latter yeah no look i think there's going to be there's room for a lot of different um so i guess is the way to put it you know for us that we kind of look at a different kind of matrix and for us uh we settled in on public for the chain has to kind of be public for it to be interesting and have that kind of global mentality it has to be public as opposed to a private chain which is kind of like a um private kind of more data about the database kind of like that's internal and and it doesn't have the same functionalities that a public blockchain like bitcoin and ethereum have but also uh permission is the other thing that we settled in on for our new blockchain polymesh and and and just to summarize so we're building a new blockchain called polymesh it's purpose-built for security tokens and we did this after um launching on another blockchain first to learn to kind of get feedback try getting this product market fit learning and then and then we realized that there was there's a gap in the market for a custom layer one chain and that's what we built we started off many many months ago over almost two years now we started and uh and that's that's kind of our big project that we're super excited about of what would a purpose-built layer one security token blockchain look like that's built for the the future world of tokenized stock spawns real estates and derivatives um and we saw a lot of things that need to be invented and innovated on to make this plausible and and we need to have you know compliance and kyc baked into the base layer architecture directly and and you can't have anonymous transactions in today's financial system um that's just a reality so everyone on the polymesh blockchain has to be kyc and but back to your original question you know that the way we kind of nestled in on this was um you know let's let's build a public permission blockchain all of the nodes are permissioned uh and we're aiming to have regulated financial institutions running nodes on this this proof of state blockchain and and and and that's not necessarily the panacea for all of finance it could be but i think in reality you're going to have other more private chains exist that suit the needs of certain institutions for example we had a presentation last night with the canadian securities exchange cse and they're extremely forward-looking um on security tokens and they're building their own kind of security token market and exchange that's that's enabled to interface with with uh tokenized securities and they're they're they have their own kind of products that they're working on that that could be like a fork of hyper ledger or more like a private a private chain so without buying the weeds too much like i think we're more of a global project and we always have been always will be we're not we we do have different verticals and we do you know focus on compliance in europe is different than compliance in the us but ultimately it's a global uh platform that's what's exciting to us is to have this concept of a global financial system that's open where anyone can transact with anyone else and the compliance is done on on chain on with smart contracts in real time and what what's that going to do it's going to lower costs is going to make things more efficient it's going to increase liquidity and it's just going to create a more open and fair and equitable financial system so regarding polymix which i had that down thanks for bringing it up might as well move it up on my list of questions here like what um so is that for you to use is that for other is is it open source or like do other people can can it can plug in play do they integrate it do they develop on on your platform and now it's kind of interoperable with you know with yourself and everybody else yeah absolutely we um we're using a framework called substrate and that's um what polka dot is based on so we have some good interoperability with that um that network and we're obviously very bullish on on the parity team that built that but um yeah that's exactly right we have um kind of a base layer chain that others can build on top of and we will be building on top of it ourselves but we totally want to build a community of developers and especially developers maybe a little different than the average ethereum developer we're targeting you know engineers that work at jp morgan you know it's kind of like wall street type developers that that can build financial modules and tooling on on top of the chain and um and anyway so that's kind of our our niche in the market and we're super excited with the feedback so far no no that sounds good and and you talked about standards earlier like i think does the uh i think you have like the the 1400 standard uh was it the erc or is that is that good is that transferable is it um first talk to me about that standard like what makes it a standard what was so what did you guys do to develop this standard for everybody else to use one and then two uh does that standard transfer over to polymatch did you have to redesign it or it's kind of the same thing yeah there's a lot a lot we learned in that and we got a lot of good adoption as well i think erc 1400 is kind of the de facto security token standard that a lot of our peers are are leveraging and using which is amazing that's that's why we released it and open sourced it um even even bigger organizations like consensus with a y of new york um supports it and same same with um b and p parabolas one of the biggest banks in europe um also through a project called curve supports it as well so we got a lot of really good traction on on that standard and it's so important to have standards have interoperability um that's how you know wall street works not as well as it should but you you still need to make sure that uh these things can speak to each other and with blockchain i think it's going to blow away uh interoperability that we see today um in the dust it's really unbelievable now what we're seeing with erc20 you know that was invented uh by a ethereum community member and what did it do it made all the wallets talk to each other it made all the exchanges integrations much easier and and i think we need that same kind of interoperability with security tokens and and yes erc erc by definition is ethereum based um but we we're lucky to bring kind of the same standardization over to our layer on blockchain as well yeah and i think you know you guys are tackling so based off of what i'm hearing from you based off of the feedback that you're getting the blockchain component was kind of you know a barrier or some concern what other concerns do you hear outside of that from your feedback dealing with broker dealers dealing with institutions is there any kind of at a high level like again you just took care of like the blockchain component of it is there any kind of still obviously this hesitation too but anything kind of in the way that we still need to work on yeah you know i think the in this look at the industry as a whole is very is very nascent and um i think it's just so important for everybody to have a collaborative mindset like i said earlier every every um partner in the space you know we're trying to build something for nothing we're trying to reinvent somethin that didn't exist before we're creating a new market in some ways in other ways we're integrating and augmenting in existing markets so i always try to emphasize this that there's no there's no enemies here there's no zero-sum games like every conversation we do a lot of of talking and collaboration with with traditional institutions on wall street now and whether we're looking for nodes on our network through the community or whether we're looking for um partners in our network or issuers or other service providers in our marketplace you know it takes it takes a team to do this you need illegal you need accounting you need custody you need all these different you know people to work together so it's not it's not an easy task it's a kind of a spaghetti ball of all these kinds of interesting um stakeholders working together but but look when it happens and it's working it's very elegant we i always like to point to a company called figure which is founded by a guy named michael kane he's a very decorated silicon valley executive an entrepreneur and they're tokenizing home equity lines of credit and they're actually issuing it on chain i think they have their own blockchain as well that's kind of purpose-built for that and it's amazing because they're actually doing it i think they've tokenized more than a billion dollars worth of key box and they're they're also saving money they're that that's the beauty of this it's not just a shiny object like it's actually dramatically cheaper i think i've heard almost 200 basis points cheaper to tokenize using um the blockchain than it is in the traditional way with pushing papers around and all these unnecessary red seekers in the middle so i think that's just a microcosm of what's possible and if it applies to key locks which is a decent sized market but not nothing compared to you know the rest of wall street um i think you just see this unlimited potential really and what what does that mean when you uh you know maybe he uh he locks aren't familiar with a lot of well it's a home equity line of credit so you're borrowing against your house for those that are like you know trying to understand what what you and i are talking about it's a product on the banking side i used to sell those all the time um good way for people to kind of you know tap into the value of their home emergency money whatever all the above but in this discussion what does it mean to tokenize the heloc so i come from the bank i do this process with the application i deal with uh the len you know our internal lenders i deal with the underwriters um you know paper pushing like documentation and you may or may not know but like what it what does that mean to tokenize a heloc so yeah i i don't know the the exactly how the sausage is made but what i do know is what's what's why tokenize like let's let's look at an example look at the dollar you know i love staple coins don't like cash don't like fiat because stable coins it's it's a portal into this whole other universe that dollar based and the dollar is kind of digital in this empty log in your bank account and you see a number but it's not like natively digital and what that means is it's just kind of a piece of paper on your screen but but when you upgrade to the blockchain you have a new called kind of financial rails underpinning um the system it's just so much more efficient there's no bank holidays there's no you can't um it's cheaper it's faster it gives you access to defy smart contracts it gives you access to uh lending protocols where instead of like going to a bank and filling out paperwork and talking to a guy in a suit for three hours you can just send your usb c stablecoin to compound and every seven minutes when there's an ethereum block mine you get uh 10 to 15 apy interest sent back to you uh in real time and that's that's exciting and and that's just the tip of the iceberg you know we're seeing uh protocols like decentralized exchanges now that were kind of a shiny object i remember back when polymath was launching and i think ether delta was was the first kind of mainstream one but it was a toy it was like there's not a lot of uh volume but that's not the case today i think this month or last month um uniswap did more volume than coinbase and just think about that coinbase is the biggest north american exchange by far it's going to have a massive ipo probably like 100 billion or something and there's one little protocol that probably one guy or a few a few you know guys and girls released and uh and it's doing like i think 50 to 80 to however many billions of dollars of transaction volume with fees like the protocol has fees to incentivize uh good behavior and um that's just unbelievable to me and how can that not be the future it's just better for everyone it's more efficient the fees are are more fair and transparent and and it's just the beginning and and that's uh that's what i think what is the tokenized home weak lines of credit it's a it's a piece of a lot of those things where it's just uh it's more efficient it's peer-to-peer it's direct and um and you don't have to have this whole back office of hundreds of people you know shuffling papers all day to verify transactions they're still using fax machines by the way no yeah i'm not surprised and that's fact um no you brought up earlier and i meant to bring this up when you talked about like people launching their own projects you know swap was one of them i think hayden like did it you know as a research project and wasn't an engineer but kind of knew what's up and created this this uni swap you know v1 which is kind of cool um so we've talked about like a lot of positives um what do you see or what do you think are some of the drawbacks i guess um some of the risks uh that maybe you personally kind of have identified or you know may it may be a risk it may not and this could be i don't know i mean there's smart contract risk right there's scalability risk that we've had um there's all kinds of different technological risks but do you see any kind of drawback from the consumer side that we should be worried about um it all makes sense logically it's all being built you know there's audit firms and kind of you know measures you guys are following rules with the sec but is there any kind of drawback that the consumer may face or that we may potentially hit because at the moment it's been kind of smooth sailing a little bit yeah look there's lots of um there's lots of risk here this is not for the faint of heart not just the volatility but technical risk like there's a lot of hacks and this is not just mount gox and some sketchy-ness with some a founder or whatever this is like honest mistakes where smart contracts get get hacked and there's there's back doors or bugs that appear that that that no one really found and the audits aren't being done properly so there's there's a ton of risk and i think you know any new technology the internet had a lot of risk when it was uh getting started and the the encryption and whatnot wasn't developed yet and i think that's what we're starting to see in crypto is is um every day it's becoming more mature it's becoming more stable in a lot of ways it's becoming more liquid and and because of how inherently transparent it is um we're gonna have i think an even more stable and secure system than what we have today even though right now it's still kind of the wild west in waterways yeah and i think it's i think it's come a long way though from 2017 2018 it was kind of nuts but um and dylan talking about risk and compliance and i mean you know polymath was born out of your guys's attempt to you know develop this token and like sell it and there were some issues and you couldn't there was no uh platform or or a guideline to to develop you know you know security uh tokenized security so like how has your journey been with um the regulators the public agencies like these types of bodies i'm sure you have close relationships how has that conversation been going because you can't regulate if it's not being built you're building and then you get regulated there's kind of this catch-22 like especially with innovation and disruption of technology like this how has that kind of uh relationship been um overall i guess for the last few years because you guys are providing uh you know it's a well-needed company polymath what you're doing it not only helps regulators and like the government side of things but it's also allowing institutions companies projects you know entities to to be uh confident that they can develop this you know sto and like not face any fines and you know go through the whole court system so how is that relationship been with with you your team and everybody else that you work with that's supporting or or wasn't supporting and now they are you know i think we we've been lucky i think from the beginning people have kind of seen the potential value in this and um you know there's always there's always doubters and whatnot but i think you know as mainstream as as crypto and blockchain is going now and and we're seeing like major public companies you know buying bitcoin for their treasury management like who the heck would have guessed that i would not have suspected that to be a bitcoin use case um but that that's just the reality of i think any um new technology becoming mainstream you know you have the early adopters or whatever it's called the s-curve or whatever we're seeing that play out in real time and um look i i just think it's going to get more professional more institutional more mainstream but at the end of the day it's also going to disappear in a lot of ways in the sense that the better blockchain works is means the less you know it's there and and no one really needs to know that their transaction is being settled by a new consensus algorithm on a new uh layer two scaling blah blah blah that doesn't matter like people only care about you know their user experience and i think that's what we still struggle with as an industry is making a lot of the the user experience uh elegant to the point where you don't even know what's going on in the background but coming from like but like some of the relationships you have in terms of dealing with compliance and regulation i'll have those relationships like been i'm sure you talked to you know a bunch of um you know these types of profiles uh have they've like do you collaborate like pretty closely with because you're a compliance platform and you're offering securities and you're just following the guidelines but do you have a close relationship with like uh certain governments or you know reports absolutely i i might have to jet uh in a sec but but uh we really we really embrace that and we do proactively engage with you know the mas and singapore and and the sec in the u.s and some of the provincial regulators here in in canada and we're always trying to like lobby and and and collaborate and they've been really really good like i gotta say the regulators get a bad rap sometime but they've been very open their doors are always open we've um taken advantage of that and and they listen and i think they've had a good light touch approach to regulation and thank goodness because if they tried to squeeze it out too fast it would have been good for the incumbents but not for our our burgeoning industry so so we do we do prioritize that it's been a core tenant of our new blockchain poly mesh that that that we're hoping is going to come out this year and um and everything we do is is is that that was kind of our mo from the beginning is how do we um lean into regulations and and embrace regulators and and and hear them and have dialogue with them and not just try to like run away and find loopholes and so on nice to make sense i know you got to run in a couple minutes last question what excites you right now outside of stos you talked about d5 is there anything else you know i know you're an og investor and you've seen you've seen a lot of the the companies come out anything that that you're following in the space or new things or something that you want to see that you know we haven't tackled yeah proof of stake is really exciting i actually founded a company called tokens.com um with uh andrew keagle who's who's the ceo and um it's been a lot of fun diving into that space like polymath is coming out with the proof of stake blockchain and um there's a really huge opportunity i think for staking to go mainstream and staking rewards which are basically dividends on your token um to help people get healed in this environment that's really the name of the game so i'm super bullish on that i'm very keen on on seeing um a lot of these proof-of-stake blockchains become kind of the default modern standard for uh consensus and um yeah very very bullish on on staking tokens you know polka dot look at ethereum too like upgrading a proof of work network that's 200 billion dollars to proof of stake is a non non-trivial endeavor yeah the fact that they're going down that road i think shows how serious they are about you know staying relevant and being the number one uh staking chain and also how how important staking is and how big of a difference it is compared to proof of work so yeah just i just i started receiving some emails on on staking rewards for eth you know no minimum balance like they're trying to get this product going get people involved so that that's kind of cool um all right man i don't want to take up too much more of your time i appreciate you trevor for joining us for your second time around um we hope to have you back uh appreciate your insights and like you know talking with us uh you know sharing what you guys have been working on and uh good luck to you hey i really appreciate it thanks a lot and uh anytime we'd love to all right folks for all of you tuning in to reimagine 2021 uh appreciate you checking out trevor here ceo at polymath um you know hope you enjoy the conference and we'll talk to you soon thanks you