 From Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello Ryan, welcome to theCUBE coverage here for AWS Summit in Bahrain in the Middle East. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here, it's our second year covering the evolution of cloud computing in the region, changing the landscape of entrepreneurship, government, society, obviously data is the new oil, so we're excited to have our next guest, Abdul-Elmo Iqil, who's the co-founder and partner at RAIN, hot startup with some seed funding, I think has cracked the code on the crypto money-making aspect of cryptocurrency. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you for having me. So let's get started. You guys have a small team, got some seed funding. Interesting strategy on crypto, everyone went ICO, kind of a fraudulent market, it's international, we all come to watch in the ICO, US cramping down on it. A lot of entrepreneurs love this market, a lot of innovation. You guys had a different approach and doing something very innovative. Take a minute to explain what RAIN is doing, because you've cracked the code on crypto to fiat, which has been the legit use case for making this all this way. Absolutely, so all of the founders, the four founders, Yahya Badawi, AJ Nelson, Joseph DeLago and I, we've been in this industry for quite a while. We've been here five, six years and we've seen all the hype cycles come and go about sometimes about blockchain technology itself and sometimes about the ICO craze. And we've really just came down to what is the viable business model. We're all entrepreneurs and we had looking for a new opportunity, as with a lot of people coming into this industry, with as with any innovation, lots of opportunities arise. And we've looked at the world and the world had many exchanges that were the most successful businesses in this industry. The exchanges facilitating the trade, that was the most interest, that was the highest demand. And that was the real use case. And we found that there were exchanges popping up from around the world, but they weren't here any in the Middle East yet. And perhaps it was due to regulatory uncertainty or other difficulties of coming into this market, but Bahrain really opened up for us and we met with the central bank of Bahrain about three or four years ago and things really got started from there. And being a marketplace, you got to have a lot of governance, it's all a lot of regulatory pressures from the folks that have started. People who watch theCUBE know that we've been very bullish on crypto. We love blockchain as an underlying technology. Yeah, there's some sustainability issues around Bitcoin and others, we recognize that. But in general, this is a wave that cannot be denied. Money's flowing, right? So money's flowing in crypto, she got crypto to crypto, you guys have the fiat piece of it. So this brings on the first kind of liquidity opportunity in crypto to real money. Yeah, absolutely. So that's our main goal is we're serving both retail and institutions. And we believe there's going to be a lot of traffic from the traditional finance world, from institutions and individual investors into the crypto world and the opposite as well. A lot of people had challenges with taking the profits out of exchanges and withdraw them to their bank in a regulatory, compliant way. And that's really what we're solving here for the lowest fees in the region. Bahrain wants to be a modern society. They're going all in on cloud computing. They want to be a cloud country. They're open to new ideas. What attracted you to these guys? What made them different as it was that their vision was that their posture on oversight. What were some of the things that makes it work here? Well, at first it was the reception. The Bahrain central bank had a fintech unit already in 2000, I think early 2017. So that was great. I think other central banks around the region and the world were just starting then. There was the Bahrain fintech bay dedicated working space for fintech companies here. So the ecosystem and the reception was really what attracted us at the beginning other than knowing that Bahrain was a good financial hub for quite some time for the region. So we joined the Bahrain central bank's regulatory sandbox, which allowed us to experiment and test whether we can do this in a safe and secure way. And about a year and a half later, central bank drafted the regulations for crypto asset exchanges, brokerages. So now that that regulation got drafted and published, we graduated from the sandbox, thankfully, and we were allowed to apply for the license. Shortly after we applied, we earned the license, thankfully. So what's next? What's goes on now? You get a lot of work, probably a lot of coding, gotta make sure the fintech compliance and a lot of hurdles there, I can understand that. What's now next? Got the regulation in place, you can expand. What's the plan? Well, we announced the license and at the same time, we also announced closing our seed round. So with that, we were able to grow our team the past month from eight to nine people to 15 to 17 people now and just more and more joining on board every day. And really, our focus is growth. Now, we are out of the sandbox. We don't have the limitations of the sandbox we had before. And we have banking relationships already made with different banks. So now we're just trying to reach out for the market. So we have grown our customer support team, grown our engineering team, hiring and compliance officer, and other growth aspects just moving forward. Standing up the basics of the business. That's right. What's your target audience gonna be, the institutions at first, retail? What's the target audience? It's really both. It depends on what the market is providing. We see institutional demand that has always relied on, when we spoke with institutions, they always relied on getting the license first because they don't want to operate with anyone on license, which makes it really interesting because that means they haven't been able to get into the digital asset, the crypto asset world the past few years while it's going up and down. So we see a 50-50 divide, most likely, and it's going to be a similar ratio than the rest of the world, but right now it's a lot of retail customers. Abdul, great to get your perspective here. Obviously you've been in this space for a while. We saw the fire hype cycle go up and then the wet blanket, crypto winter hit. In the United States, certainly it put a clamp down on most ICOs. The SEC is looking at a bunch of startups and behavior. Pretty wild west as they call it, but internationally it's still been pretty active. Even in the crypto winter, go back, say 2018, go back last year on March, it kind of stopped, got cold, and then frosted over. Now it's been a block of ice if you want, this crypto winter. What's your take on it? What's the vibe internationally? Obviously money's still flowing. Bitcoin's over 10,000 I think this morning, but still a lot of activity. Some tokens have fallen away, some are staying around. What's your assessment? So we've seen a lot of cycles. If you've been in this industry for five, six, seven years, you'll see that we've had multiple of these winters, some of them lasting longer than others. And this late last one didn't last as long as the one before. So every time we see a boom, we have a lot of media and a lot of people coming in, brand new, trying to educate themselves about what is this. So we see just an everlasting cycle of just expansion. And the price right now is not at the all-time high, but it's still considered pretty significant. The beginning of the year was only about three or $4,000. Right now it's about $10,100 for a Bitcoin. As with the ICOs, there have been a lot of concerns rightfully so because anyone can whip out a token and start selling it almost as a security. But the central bank of Bahrain has a list of acceptable crypto assets that they will allow us to list. So right now we only have four cryptocurrencies or assets, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and XRP, but nothing more than that at the time and we hope to add more in the future. Yeah, Ripple's been taking some hits lately in the US. What about EOS and some of these other ones around the coin that gets out of the corner? You get some growth, you're seeing some new things. How are you guys going to be evaluating some of these other new currencies? Is there a formula? You keep an eye on them. Is it a consensus? Right, so we are agnostic to choosing the crypto asset that our customers want to invest in. If the central bank of Bahrain accepts this as secure, liquid enough, and essentially time-tested as well if it's been around for, let's say, three to five years with no network issues, then maybe retail customers can invest in it, but if it just came up and it's brand new, it might come up, it's not time-tested security-wise. It hasn't gone through some certain pressures that are necessary for a network, for payments or storing of value. So the central bank makes the decision on what they're going to accept, what they list as viable. That's right, but we take customer input all the time. We started with just three, and then we had a lot of demand for XRP here in the region, and we listed it after getting it approved. So we can't get Kubecoin up there yet, can we? It depends on how high is it up in the... It doesn't exist yet, it's coming. They're coming for two years. Everyone knows it's been coming. What's your final thoughts to entrepreneurs out there because there's a lot of activity. This is one of those things where persistence really matters. Know your space, stay humble, deal with these cycles because they are happening. There is a high velocity of cycles, seasons, if you will, winter and summer. Well, I really think people should be more calculated, to think long-term with this technology. A lot of people are trying to make a quick buck or just make something thinking that it's just a quick way to make money, but I really think people should educate themselves, both the entrepreneurs and the retail investors that, you know, about the market, about the technology, so they can really see where the use cases might be of most need to the market. Talk about your expansion plans. You have two co-founders in the US, you're the co-founders in Egypt. Is there going to be a remote team? Is it going to be in Bahrain? What's the hiring look like? Where are people going to be located? So most of our, if not all of our customer support, our client service agents are here in Bahrain. We have the co-founders now, Joseph and AJ from the Bay Area. They're in Bahrain as well here for the majority of the year. They're in the office now. The engineering team, however, is a little scattered. Sometimes we find security is a really high priority for us. It's the number one priority for us, as any cryptocurrency exchange would be. So we really scout talent from the US, from Canada, from other places around the world. So our engineering team is based in the Bay Area and other places in the US. Aside from Joseph, who leads it, who's the co-founder here in Bahrain, and the rest of the business and customer team is here in Bahrain. So really the gating factor on hiring is making sure it's securities number one. So it's not so much get people filled in an office on the engineering front. No, it's definitely, we look for high quality candidates. So that's our priority. We may be a small team, but they're all superstars, to be honest. What's been the biggest challenge that you guys had to overcome in this process? Because it's tough to get the license. Was it just being patient? Was it the diligence? What were some of the things that you overcame that were challenges? Well, it definitely was a challenge to talk to a lot of regulators in the region in general. Bahrain was by far the most cooperative. So right now, the challenge is perhaps talking to other regulators. When you talk expansion plans, we are serving the whole Middle East here from Bahrain. But we'd ideally want to also set up banking in Kuwait or UAE or Saudi just so we can have better, quicker on and off ramps for the customers there. One of the big stories is obviously Amazon Web Services has a region here. Pretty important, pretty big deal. What's your take on what you think this is going to do for the region, having an Amazon region, multiple availability zones. What's that going to do for the entrepreneurship equation? I mean, it's fantastic. We see a lot of excitement here from entrepreneurs in the region. And especially with regulation about having customer data stored here in the region, it's really going to help a lot of entrepreneurs also mitigate any downtime from hosting it in other places. New generation of entrepreneurship hitting the scene here, isn't it? Yeah, it's really exciting. And lots of funding going around, lots of ideas. Pretty really, really exciting for all entrepreneurs. Fail fast, as we always say, no one likes failure, but it takes guts to start a company. Of course, of course. Jill, thanks for coming on. I appreciate you. So congratulations on your success. Thank you very much. It's theCUBE coverage here. We are in Bahrain for AWS Summit. We'll be back with more after the short break.