 Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. This is where a global event from Silicon Valley, New York, all around the world. Investors, entrepreneurs all coming together to build this industry, a lot of great conversations. A lot of conversations around Puerto Rico as a place to domicile these great investments and companies. Obviously post-hurricane, a lot of action here. A lot of interest. Blockchain for good, crypto for good, also for money making. Our next guest is Scott Meis, who's the Network Society Labs. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. You have a knack for being in real inflection point and met markets. We first met almost 15 years ago in Silicon Valley. Nanotech was a field that was a great track. It's doing great work, has great impact. You're now, and we see each other, oh hey, you're a version of a feather flock together. You're going, you're doing crypto and doing some work. Take a minute to talk about what you're doing. Scott, what's the work? Network Society Lab, what's that about? Right, I guess we're both living on the bleeding edge. So yeah, I'm the CEO of Network Society Lab and we're a venture development firm. So we provide the same services as an incubator or accelerator, but primarily for the portfolio companies of Network Society Ventures, which is another company that's in the Network Society Koretsu, which is headed by David Orban, who's speaking here today. Is that a investment group, or is that more of an advisory service? The fund is a seed stage venture capital fund, yeah, that focuses on exponential technologies and decentralized networks, companies that are driven by that. And we work with those companies to help them be successful. Okay, so two different groups. The lab team is down and dirty, help advisory, accelerate the mission. Right, and in that same Koretsu, there's also Network Society Research, which is a think tank, and Network Society of Media, which is a media company. All right, so what are the things you're working on? Give us a taste of the kind of ventures and projects you're working on right now. Most of the work we're doing right now is what we call token sale management, and that's basically taking responsibility for executing a token sale from beginning to end, all of the activities, and bringing together service providers that are world-class in each one of the responsibilities that need to be executed in order to have a successful token event. And then we manage them the same way, a general contractor and a construction environment manages subcontractors. Is that because there's too many moving parts? There's a lot of lawyerly going on, you get tax advice, is that the reason? Why we structured it that way? Well, we want to keep a lean internal staff, so we don't want to have huge headcount, and also this allows us to work with world-class people, like for instance, on two of the projects we're doing now, Michael Turpins, the PR guy, so that automatically means that among the team, there's over 50 ICOs under the belt, and it's the same for every service provider. They've done some significant number of these, and the combined experience, the combined capability, is really the best team you can get together in the world. So talk about the global impact of this, because we were talking last night, we were saying, hey, killer app is money, and that's what blockchain, cryptocurrency, essentially decentralized apps are all going to have flowing through them, value creation, value capture with money as the killer app. What kind of projects you're working on that go outside the US, and is it global phenomenon, and what's your take on that? I'll give you a specific example, one example, which is called Wealth Migrate, and they have a coin called the Wealth E coin, Wealth with the capital E on the end, and what they are is a fractional real estate ownership company, so if you're someone who's in the emerging developing world, and you want to begin to build wealth, and you'd like to own a piece of first world real estate in the US or Australia or UK, you can go to this website, and today the minimum is about $1,000, but by implementing the blockchain further, they want to eventually get down to $1, you can buy a piece of real estate and enjoy the returns on that. So this is a closing the wealth gap, it's giving people who are just getting into the middle class the ability to own real estate and build wealth. And what's going on in Puerto Rico here, if you had the folks couldn't make it here, what's the dynamic here? I see the hurricane pretty much crushed the island. Yes. Well documented, but the entrepreneurial culture here is coming together with outside ecosystem communities. What are you seeing here in Puerto Rico? What's your observation? Well, it's actually a pretty fascinating experiment. I mean, Michael Turpin of Transform Group has been living in Puerto Rico for quite some time, and he was kind of the pied piper evangelizing in this place and saying, hey, this is a great place to come live. It's got a favorable tax structure, et cetera. And I think it's fantastic that the crypto community is essentially adopting Puerto Rico and also moving here. So all these activity is really going to give a shot in the arm to the Puerto Rican economy. And people are doing that very intentionally as a way to give back and help to rebuild the island. So what do you say to the folks out there that say, well, it's not just Puerto Rico, there's other domicile digital nations out there. I mean, today the UK announced or yesterday announced that they're going to convert to fiat currency with the faster payment system with Coinbase. It's a significant radical move. So Ken Puerto Rico can maintain a position and countries like Baja Rain, which Amazon works with, you got Armenia, you got China, you got all these, you know, Stoney. I mean, you have people who are jockeying for similar positions. I mean, is it going to be a new digital nation sovereignty structure or? Well, Puerto Rico has a particular advantage in this part of the United States. So if you're a US citizen, then this is the only place where you can go and stay in the US and get this special treatment. So I think it's always going to have a little bit of a niche there. But I mean, this is truly a competitive environment. It's global, it's very competitive. There are certain nations that are very, very anti-crypto like the United States, for instance. And there are certain nations that embrace it. I mean, the one that we like best and where we're doing a couple of token sale events or ICOs is Malta. And Malta has a history of creating a regulatory environment that's very favorable to things like financial services and eye gaming. So doing digital currency is something that's a natural for them. And the government and the regulatory agencies are all in. So they're a competitor. And there are many others, as you said, but I think that's all good because competition will bring down prices, spur innovation, et cetera, et cetera. And that's fantastic. And regulatory posture and policy will be the gating factor for competitiveness for nations. Yeah, that's one of the major factors. It wouldn't be the only one, but absolutely. I mean, when you've got a situation where the regulators are saying, our mission in life is to have a light touch. We want it to be regulated. We don't want a lot of fraud going on. But we want to make it easy for you guys to be doing these things. It makes a huge difference. So what do you say to the folks out there that would say, okay, Michael Turpin, he's got so many ICOs, he's just pumping and dumping these things. He's got so many ICOs, and he's a promoter, basically. And he's not really, I mean. And he started out as a PR firm. Yeah, he's a PR firm. You got a PR firm as a leader in the industry. Some people will say, hey, I want to see Goldman Sachs come in. I want to see real players come in. I want to see more validation. The PR messaging is not going well. Look at Brock Pierce. He got taken down by John Oliver. New York Times wrapping up. So you have a lot of like, fud out there. Yes. So what do you say to that? What do people say to that? I do think there's- That's my own opinion, but I'll share it after you share yours. I mean, just one observation is, you can tell a lot about a person's personality type by what their initial reaction is to cryptocurrency. It's almost like a Myers-Briggs, right? And the- Explain that. Well, just, in my experience, I've introduced the idea of crypto, or now that I'm in the field, a lot of people have approached me, friends, and- Who want to learn? Who want to learn, but you know, it's, they come into it with certain biases, right? And for some reason, crypto really pokes at people's biases. And, you know, some people can't go to the fact that, well, you know, why does it have any value? Right? And they go, well, you know, and I go, well, why does the United States dollar have any value? I mean, you've got full faith and credit of the government that's in debt by $20 trillion. You know, is that a good idea? And, you know, but they don't understand the- What are some of the reactions you get across the board? What's the spectrum of reactions? I mean, you got the one end, which is fraud, is bad, and- It's got to be a scam. The next revolution is here. It's the entire spectrum. You know, and again, like I said, it has a lot to do with what people's personalities, that people are very conservative and skeptical. They're going to be conservative and skeptical about it and look for the negative. If they're very innovative and cutting edge and open to new ideas, they're going to think it's cool and interesting and it's an agent for change. Well, a lot of people I talk to, and here's my opinion. I personally believe that you can't PR your way to industry momentum. That's the old way. So I'm down on the whole press release model just pump and dump, and you're seeing a lot of that. And it's not just to transform a group that says PR in general. There's also people with misrepresentation. So to me, that's a communication vehicle, not primary. The key is value creation. Which companies are creating value? Which ones, communities are endorsing? Who has real communities? Who doesn't? So I think as investors come in, the thing that I'm hearing is smart money's saying I want quality deals, and I got to peel away the promotional layer and look at the core data. That seems to be a flight to quality right now in this market. There's a major flight to quality. I mean, we're probably in the third or fourth era of ICOs. And there is a flight to quality because people realize what I call these deals are vaporware or field of dreams. These are the ones where there's really nothing there give me 30 million and I'll build this the most I'll boil the ocean for you. That's why we like to work with companies like Wealth Migrate because what they've done is on relatively small capital proven a business model and started a business. And now what they need is money to scale that model. And those are the ones that we prefer. And that's when people can look and say, I can see that this business model's working and that's where a lot of the risk is factored out. And now it's just about making that a bigger business. You know, the thing I tell people is when you look at selecting service providers or partners, whether it's a PR strategy advisory, it's not so much the function. I mean, I was just, you know, I'm against the PR angle, but let's take transform group. They have a really social network. So the signaling is if they are involved or you're, so it's about the network you're choosing, right? Yes. So to me, it's not so much the functional PR or the functional advisory. It's really, who's bringing the network effect? Yeah, that's true. Investors to the table, partners to the table. Well, and that's good and bad actually, because you're talking about hype, there's no more fertile hype environment than social media. I mean, one of the things I find to be really scary is that a proxy for the quality of the ICO is how many telegram followers does the chat group have, which I think is just insane, you know, so. You can game that. Yeah, absolutely. Scott, what are you working on now? What's next for you? What's some of the things that you see happening in the next year? Well, we're just staying heads down, you know, executing several of these token sale events or ICOs, and that's what we're going to do. We're also going to get back to the original knitting, which was our mission, which is expand our venture development services. So have a full, you know, pallet of things that the startups from Network Society Ventures can choose from so that we can help them make successful. Token Mechanomics is the critical decision that every company has to make. Yes. And having advisory help is great. Thanks for sharing your opinion here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here in Puerto Rico for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Blockchain Unbound. Back with more coverage after this short break. Thanks for watching.