 Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. Hello everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in Toronto for the untraceable event here in the industry. It's called Blockchain Futurist is where all the industry elite are getting together here in Canada. We talk about the future of Blockchain crypto and everything. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. As we continue 2018, kicking off event coverage with our CUBE brand. But right now we've got two great guests from Startup and they're called Quantum Exchange and Bank, QuantX, Spinge, Nanny Agar, Executive Chairman, and John Willock, who's the CEO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. So you guys got some hard news to talk about, but you guys are doing an exchange model, bringing something really cool to the market which we need to kind of get this figured out. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, problem you're solving, and then we'll get to the news. Absolutely, so I think, you know, the lot of people are doing exchanges, you see them coming all the time and most of them don't really have any specific differentiation or value at. We are not like that at all. We have spent our careers as part of most of the team in traditional financial services and we are coming from the Securities Exchange business to bring the learnings from NASDAQ, the learnings from the like of that sort to the crypto exchange space and to be able to facilitate not only a regulated exchange venue, but also one that is institutional-grade in terms of tools and the client experience as well as the trust factor with the platform itself. So that's really what we're trying to get done with the quantum exchange that we're building right now. And how well is the company, how long have you been around? When did you guys start? How funded are you? What's happening there? So I'll refrain from discussing funding at this point, but I will say we started this year. I left the Toronto Stock Exchange specifically to pursue this in conjunction with MANI. We've been banning this idea around for the last couple of years and the market reached a stage of maturity and size that we said now is the time to get going and do it. And so far, fanfare has been fantastic. Reactions from people in the crypto ecosystem, people in the securities ecosystem has been equally positive. There's a strong desire to see something like this come to market and we're very excited to be able to launch. Before we get to the news, MANI, I want to ask you a question. One of the things that we've seen is two types of behavior. The other guy's got to lose for me to win and then, or both parties can win. We're seeing trends where people are taking a posture against regulators. Oh, they're evil. They're causing all the problems. They kind of don't know what they're doing. We kind of, they're evolving. Maturity levels are different based on countries. But where the success is happening, like Gabriel and with Bit, okay, there's collaboration because the regulators actually want to do a good job in most cases. They just can't get there fast enough. This is the new model. This is what people are looking at. This is the kind of solution, the bridge between industry and the slow, but yet want to change regulators. Your thoughts? Very, very good point. The good news is we're all talking to each other. I think there's dialogue at the moment, but it's not maybe as open as it should be because it's all day one. What I bring to the community and have for the, since I got engaged in launching the first Bitcoin ATM in the world in Vancouver, part of that team, and helping Anthony build the Bitcoin Alliance and Blockchain Association, the Block Forum, which we'll announce tomorrow. I work for Barclays. I work for Vodafone. I was involved in the EMPESA project. And I could see and I understand what does it take for people to start using technologies. I think what everybody is hoping for is this golden moment, like when the first iPhone arrived on the scene. People queued around the block through the night to get a hold of that first device. We haven't had that moment yet, or Blockchain and crypto. We've had the wild enthusiasm, which is all speculation as far as most of us are concerned, but maturity is coming, these technologies, Blockchain and cryptocurrencies want to succeed. It needs to be another converging technology with what's already out there, the internet, your financial ecosystem, and so forth. In my view, there'll be a coming together. There'll be new models altogether. Incumbents will have to pick up the pace in terms of how they go about it, but where we see the opportunity for ourselves, for context, and the industry as a whole, is where the convergence takes place. The dialogue becomes more mature and open and transparent. Regulators become aligned at the moment. We hear of a lot of jurisdictions announcing this, announcing that, but when you start investigating or assessing, it's different flavors, different cultures, different economies. There's the Commonwealth block, there's the North American block, there's the Asian block, Europe. It's a whole different border. You know, I agree with you, and I want to just... This is where it gets interesting. That's where we come into the day. Well, I agree with you, I just want to make a point. During the dot-com bubble, during that internet wave, again there was a mover speculation, but at the end of the day, the forcing function of reality was the growth of the online users was growing every day. And the demand and the commerce dollars were still real. Now, certainly there was an exuberance irrational, in some cases, but it all ended up happening. I think here in this market, the forcing function is, it's the reality that there's demand and there's money, and there's impact. There is money, we don't know about it. Yes, there's... This is coming. It's not like Doomsday, well, it was fake. Really? No, it's not fake. No, we are still in the first inning of seeing what is actually coming out of all this. I think last year's price speculation run-up obviously was set to decline at some point, but there has been a long series of momentum coming out of that where people have realized that this is something much more important and significant than what it looked like three years ago, perhaps. And a lot of that talent is now coming to this space, bringing the capital, bringing the know-how, us included, to deliver something for the next generation of platforms, tools, and ecosystems to really grow this massively and bring it much more to the mainstream. And I think the idea of aligning with regulators helped them move faster. You mentioned adopt technology. We're still in the phase of deploying operational infrastructure. You mentioned some of the things the projects that you worked on, Vodafone, that's cellulence, towers, that's infrastructure. So I think we're still in this hybrid model of, in parallel, capital formation, building companies, and then just, we got to get the roads built. And I understand the posture that a lot of people are taking on. We need to decentralize, we need to open this thing up. But at the end of the day, the consumer votes, you and I know, if we don't have viewers, we don't have a channel. We don't have users, people actually using the technology, not only investing, but actually using it, it ain't going to happen. Be centralized, centralized, or hybrid. And that's the part that we need to open up. So let me ask you guys a question before we get to the news. It's exciting news you used to share. How do you standardize something? Because one common thread of all these major inflection points, at least in the major cycles I've lived through, has been standards. But it's not going to be your grandfather's standards. So GCP, IFE was different. The OSI model is a different generation. The internet was different. Web, web social's different. What may happen may be different. So, but standards play an important role. But no one has clear visibility yet what will be standardized, what should be standardized. You guys have any thoughts on that? Well, that's where John comes in. He's lived the world of standards, at Nastic and TMX and elsewhere. Now we need to bring it to this world. How do we scale operationally to get a cohesive exchange that can scale and to learn value? Where do the standards focus need to be? What should be the emphasis? Why does that light get shined on? And where does the energy go to? I think, you know, you want to look at standards. Think about something like this ECF debate that's been going on. There's a huge speculation about whether or not that's coming. I think a lot of people who are looking at that ETF debate specifically don't actually understand some of the economics and the mechanisms behind the scenes. So for example, what is a fork? When you think about traditional securities, you've got corporate actions like a stock split or a dividend. A fork is an entirely different concept with entirely different results. Those are the sorts of things that need to be discussed, standardized and brought to an industry cohesion to be able to successfully deal with some of these events as the market progresses and to bring some normalcy to some of this as well. Especially if you want to bring institutions to the fray. And I think that comes to one of the other initiatives we're working on which is the industry body called Block Forum which we're going to be discussing in a moment that can really help be that driving point of a second. This is the news. This is news. You guys are announcing, let's get to the news. You're announcing a couple things. Start with what you were just talking about. You guys are announcing a forum. Can you explain? Correct, correct. So we're launching officially to the remainder of the crowd here tomorrow. Block Forum which is an industry association that will be especially behind driving, adult thinking behind all this, putting regulation into play, discussing commonalities around policy, around how to standardize and how to really make all this interoperable. And I think that's the key word. If you have individual pillars of islands of activity, that's not going to be the same as having a cohesive global solution. And that's what we really want to drive. An exchange solution? Well, in our case as Quantex, absolutely. But an exchange and the services we can offer is one part of the whole puzzle. There's a whole series of interconnected affairs that have to work together. And that's what Block Forum is going to drive, is this assembly of different connected parties who are all working for the greater benefit of the crypto ecosystem. Who's going to be involved in the forum? Who is the stakeholders? Who can join? Is it a membership? Is it a consortium? Explain that outwards. It is a membership. There will actually be a token that will have very interesting membership related tokenomics attached which we could disclose at a later date. And that economic alignment between the parties who are staking effectively their interests in the certain topics that they want to back under certain efforts will be a completely unique model compared to what we've seen in the industry today. We're generally speaking, it is a committee who drives something on behalf of members. This is really fundamental for all members, democratically from individuals all the way up to institutions to be able to participate and voice their interests. So you will see governments as members? Yes, absolutely. You will see industry leading stakeholders and practitioners. The whole idea of the body is not to create new policy or reinvent the wheel. We're getting policy, we're receiving regulation. It's how do we put this in practice? Where are the success stories? How can we show the industry as a whole? Governments, across your restrictions to align around best practice. So a melting pot of people to get a conversation going to start shaping an agenda or just to start talking? So we're talking to governments at premier and cabinet level. We're talking to boardrooms of banks. We're talking to think of your top 40 leaders in blockchain and crypto. We're talking to all of them and engaging them. The vision of the outcome that you and can envision in your mind, what is that outcome for this group? What do you hope to accomplish? What is the end result? If you can kind of assume things go in a good way, what happens? I think this is a unifying voice for leadership in the industry to discuss with the outside of crypto world, that is, and really bridge that gap between those who are within and understand natively and those who need to be brought in to be able to interact with this and really grow all of this industry. And provide the role models. This is a success story. Exactly that, exactly that, to bring the best to the front and really show that there is actually serious opportunity, serious business. This is not just a series of hackers or whatever nefarious activities people casually may think that the blockchain industry is. This is something very serious and very real and we want to be the voice for that. Awesome, and you guys have some other news on the fundraising front. Industry first. You guys are raising some money. You're doing a private sale. Correct. When you share as much as you can. It's a credited investor, so I think you can promote it. I will say with a caveat, as you say, it's a credited investor's only and we have not completed our discussions with our legal counsel. Having said that, we are taking the model of a traditional securities exchange membership, seats on an exchange which can be purchased, which have rights attached, which are a title asset separately from equity of the exchange, for example, separately from a utility token as you would have seen with many other exchanges. This is something that we feel is a very unique model. We are very excited to be able to launch this and come to market first with this concept, which again, is blending the best of the old and the new. We're taking tokenization, we're taking concepts that have existed in the previous markets and previous worlds and blending them together for something that is somewhat unique and wholly new in this application. Well, I hope you guys raise a lot of money. We need more harmony between regulating government entities to bring the whole world together and certainly from a money-making standpoint, the liquidity that exchanges can provide as the world starts to understand where the groove swing is and where the swim lanes are, especially with security tokens. You bet, you bet. And the success here is going to be measured in ability to scale sustainably. We want to demonstrate that for this model. We need some leadership there, so good luck. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We are here live in Toronto, Canada for the Blockchain Futurist Conference. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Extracting the signal noise, talking to the most important people, the hottest stories here, the most colorful people, people traveling around the world, sharing that insights with you. Stay with us for more big coverage here. First day of two-day coverage of Blockchain Futurist. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks.