 How's everybody doing today? I'm your host Rich from RichDVLive. I'm here with two very special guests, Ben Samaru, the CEO of WonderFy Technologies and Mr. Wonderful himself, Kevin O'Leary. How are you gentlemen doing today? Great. Thank you. Thank you for joining us gentlemen. I have a bunch of questions for you guys today. First and foremost, let's talk about WonderFy Technologies. Ben, congratulations on the launch of the IPO. Everybody's talking about WonderFy Technologies on the NeoExchange. Please tell us a little bit about this company and why you're so excited about it. Absolutely. WonderFy really is the proxy for the DeFi space. Our core focus really is product and technology. That's what we've been building for many years in the crypto space, our founding team. Our app, WonderFy, which we'll be releasing in a month or so, is really focused on, let's make DeFi accessible and simple for people. There's huge barriers for people getting into it, but a ton of potential behind the technology. That's really our core focus is the app. That's kind of the first bracket. The second is assets that we hold on our balance sheet. We have select assets that we see long-term value in in the crypto space, obviously, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then specific DeFi assets that really drive value. They're not speculative assets and we're long on them. This isn't a trading portfolio. They're held in a qualified custodian. We're earning interest on some of the assets through staking and other mechanisms in DeFi. The third part of the WonderFy umbrella really is around strategic consolidation. We're stepping into a market where we're really ready for some consolidation in the crypto space. Our unfair advantage with WonderFy, which really crosses over the product and the consolidation strategy, is we have probably the most valuable currency, which is the power of the crowd and of influencers like Kevin and Josh Richards, who have millions and millions and millions of dedicated followers. They're bought into the WonderFy story, our mission. That really creates some super interesting opportunities for us with getting the product into people's hands and then also with really consolidating some companies that are profitable in the space, but are spending a ton on marketing, really are having trouble around getting their product out. We're really excited about launching on the NEO yesterday and that's an overview of what we're doing here at WonderFy. Congratulations on launching on the NEO. Our community is super excited about WonderFy technologies. Everyone's gobbling it up and buying the stock. Kevin, I have a question for you. You've invested in FTX and Circle, two of the biggest names in crypto and now you're the largest strategic investor in WonderFy. Tell us about your investment. If you think about what I did with Circle and FTX, that was to solve for my operating company compliance issues. I disclosed previously, two months ago, that I had 3% waiting in crypto, primarily in Ethereum and Bitcoin, but I wanted to increase it to 7% by year end, not just in those assets in many different crypto assets. For the operating company level, I have an internal compliance department of external auditors. I have to also report to the regulator because I'm an investor in so many other financial services companies. I don't have an option to be a cowboy here. I can't run around. Think about this. If you're running a billion dollar mandate, you want to put 10% into crypto, you're not going to download an app and put $100 million in it. What you actually need is the infrastructure. You think about a stock or bond. When I buy a stock or bond, there's immediate mark-to-market ability. I can check it new and exactly what my holdings are at every single mandate. I know at the end of the day what the mark-to-market is. The auditors also can look at it on a weekly, daily, monthly, quarterly basis. Of course, we have to prepare our regulatory reports for every jurisdiction we're operating in. In order to do that in crypto, I needed very large infrastructure. I got that in circle for USDC and I certainly got it with FTX. Now, when I thought about what I was my daughter who knows I'm using borrowing and lending strategies to get interest on my crypto called me up and said, look, I'm making nothing on my bank account. Nothing. I'm getting two basis points or something on my savings account. Is there any way I can use your strategy to go and do what you're doing? In the operating company, I said, no, I've got like four people that I've had to hire just to do that and be compliant. That's when I met Ben and realized we can do this for consumers. My daughter and 100 million other people with WonderFi. What she needs is an easy way to do exactly what I've done on my large platform and I'm compliant, but she needs tax reporting. She needs capital gains and loss reports. She has to have those come April 1st for tax filings. What we're building with WonderFi is her solution. She can do exactly what I did. She can start small. She can get some USDC or some dives and stable coins or whatever she wants or whatever she wants and then start lending it out and garner a little interest and learn how it works. That's the whole idea. I feel all my bases are covered. Yes, I'm a strategic investor in circle and FTX, but also now in WonderFi because I need something for my millions of social media followers. That's great. Now, I absolutely love the idea behind WonderFi because I have an accounted index that's out of Calgary. I've had it for years. I got Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and I'm not getting any rewards. I'm not getting any staking rewards at all. I love what you guys are doing here and I'm going to move all of my assets over and we're going to get our entire community to move all of their assets over to WonderFi. We're really excited about what you guys are doing. Now, in saying that, Ben, you guys have a wonderful team here that you've put together, a very powerful strategic team. Can you talk a little bit about your team that you've put together on WonderFi Technologies? Absolutely. I'll start with the management team, which is our co-founders, so myself, Kong, Kardick, and Dean. Kong, Kardick, and I, we were part of the first coin capital team, which was acquired by Galaxy Digital in 2018. That's one of the bigger names in the space. Really, what we did there was we, again, found a problem to solve, built a product around it and that's what led to that acquisition. We've all been in the crypto space for a long time, which helped us build really good relationships and that's what's allowed us to move so quickly with WonderFi and get people like Kevin involved because we have a track record in the space. We're really proud of what we've done and super excited about Path Forward. And then in terms of our team, we've got an incredible team as well. Our engineering team and product team have built products that have been used by millions and millions of people, like Shopify and HootSuite, and some of the product and engineering team are founders themselves. So they're very entrepreneurial, very involved in the crypto space, so we have a world-class team building the product. And then on our board, it's the CEO, former CEO and co-founder of Hud-8, Sean Clark. Hud-8's biggest Bitcoin miner in North America, listed on the NASDAQ, huge success story, and the CEO of Big Digital, which a lot of people in the US and Canadian markets will be familiar with. They're focused on compliant first crypto and Stephanie Lee's on our board as well, who's a high growth CFO. So we've got a super well-rounded board and then on our strategic investor side, which really is the unfair advantage. Not only were we backed by Argo and Big and these household names in crypto, we're also backed by Sam Menkman Freed and Alameda, which is the biggest name in crypto. Sam, however you want to cut it, what he's built is incredible. So we're backed by Sam, we're backed by Kevin, the biggest name in finance and investing. And then Josh Richards, who I would definitely encourage your audience. If I don't know where the demographic falls with your audience, Rich, but some people, if it's more millennials, might not be as familiar with Josh yet, but he's the voice of Gen Z. He's a strategic advisor to the NHL. He's got a podcast with Dave Portnoy. He's breaking into the millennial crowd as well, but he's got a really unique lens on Gen Z, which is the biggest demographic in the world. And so we've got just a really incredible team of strategic behind us. And again, I just like to say this because I think it's important, especially these days where there's a lot of projects that are being promoted and people get brought on in different ways. We're not paying a dollar for these people. These are people that are invested in our company. And I think that's really important because it is part of our unfair advantage. We love that here at Rich TV Live. We love to really understand the fundamentals of every deal we invest in. Now in saying that one of the deals that we invested in a couple of years ago, one of the hottest IPOs that Kevin has actually famously invested in is Mind Medicine. Mind Med. And our community got in at 30 cents and it was a 10x for our community. A lot of our members are still holding the stock. Now my question for you, Kevin is, is Mind Medicine similar to WonderFi and is WonderFi potentially the next Mind Medicine as far as potential growth? What got me into Mind Med was the idea that the market is so huge for a solution to things like anxiety and opioid addiction. And Mind Med was the first of many companies now that are starting to pursue these medicines going through the trial FDA trial process. But that's right. It's a very binary investment. You kind of, I own stocks in many companies that are in psychedelics because I think at some point we're mostly in stage one and stage two trials, so you've got time to wait. But you want a really broad portfolio of different molecules. Now, the same is true for what's going on in DeFi. The size of that market, its potential, is massive. And I'll just give you a couple of uses because it's a great analogy of drawing. If I could only solve and I'm using, I'm going to be using WonderFi to solve for my, you talked earlier about how your assets are sitting there as property and not getting any, let's call it rent. If you think of Bitcoin as an asset like a building in Boston, well, I get rent off my building in Boston. I get a check every month. I want the same thing to come out of when I loan out my stable coins or my Bitcoin or whatever I'm loaning out. And that's the WonderFi platform that's going to help me do that and provide the reporting I need. But that's just one use. The other use that I think DeFi is going to solve for, and we don't know when yet, is going to be just take FX trading, currency trading. Every time I buy a stock on the domestic exchange in Switzerland or Paris or London or Zurich, I have to pay an FX trader to convert my fiat currency into the Swiss franc or the Euro or the British pound, then buy the stock every time I pay a fee. And that FX trader adds zero value. And I've been doing this for years. I can't wait to eliminate that because one day the regulator in Switzerland will agree with the regulator in New York and say, okay, we can use a DeFi payment system to actually do that trade and not have any fees or 99% less fees. And so those are all the applications coming and those markets are huge. So if you're going to get into DeFi, you get three basic benefits when you buy and become a shareholder of WonderFi. Number one, you're getting a portfolio of crypto assets that we hold on our balance sheet, and we hold them for strategic reasons. So you're getting exposure to multiple assets. Number two, you get a proprietary app that we're building and maintaining for hopefully millions of customers. And number three, and I think this is where it's going to get very interesting, because Josh Richardson and I have millions of followers, we're very good at reducing customer acquisition costs for any company. So we're going to try and find companies that have assets we would like to own and buy them and use the WonderFi platform to do that and help those shareholders reduce their customer acquisition costs. So I really like what we're setting up here. I think the analogy of the giant market that my men's trying to address and the giant market that WonderFi is trying to address makes a lot of sense. And I think it's one of the reasons I'm still a huge shareholder in my men, and I'm a large shareholder in WonderFi as well, because I think they're great strategic investments. That's great. I'm super excited to continue to watch this evolution, because this is just the beginning. So to think about what the potential is, it's kind of like getting invested in TD Bank when it first started. I mean, it's super exciting when you think about the potential, a digital bank that's giving you rewards, it's going to put a lot of pressure on traditional banks. So this is the future, and we love WonderFi technologies here at Rich TV Live. So my next question for Ben is Sam Bankman-Free. Wow. That is like the biggest name in crypto. What is his involvement in WonderFi? And does this align WonderFi with FTX? So I mean, I can talk about, yeah, so Sam through Alameda, which is a trading firm that's associated with FTX is invested in WonderFi. So we got introduced through Kevin, you know, and amazing, you know, have had some amazing conversations with Sam and his team. They are doing incredible things over at FTX. And so, you know, I think we're really aligned on mission. I think we're exploring opportunities there with them. And Kevin can speak to this a little bit more. Some of the viewers might be aware that Kevin is an investor in FTX and, you know, a sponsor promoter of FTX. So we're aligned on many different levels with them. And to me, it's if there's one name person company that you want to get aligned with in the crypto space, it's Sam and FTX. That would be, you know, my pick hands down every time. So we're like, you know, from my perspective as, you know, the founder of this company, one of the founders of this company, that's, you know, that's really sort of a dream come true. And then now it's about, you know, exploring the opportunities that we have with them going forward. Ben, I got one more question. What milestones can our viewers expect in the near future? So we're focused on, you know, heads down on the app. So that will be, you know, a big catalyst for us getting that out in the market. It's thousands and thousands of users that are waiting to use it. And a lot of them we're interacting with and doing testing with. So we're super excited about that. There's nothing like it on the market. It's all around accessibility. Like this is a space where it estranges a lot of people and a lot of users. And so we're, and we've been in it for a long time. We've seen the cycles. So this is just about like defies about democratizing finance, but nobody can understand it or use it. So let's solve that problem. So that's going to be a big catalyst for us. And like I said, I think the space is ripe for consolidation. I'll maybe just quickly touch on, because I know there's a lot of conversation around, especially for your viewers in Canada. I know you have a mixed audience, but for the Canadian viewers, there's, you know, a big push on regulation in Canada. And we've seen the first licenses get issued for centralized crypto exchanges. My experience background as a securities lawyer working specifically around licensing fintech companies in the crypto space, like going back a few years, the one big problem with regulation in Canada is as soon as a license gets issued for something new, like a, you know, whether it's a crypto investment fund or a, you know, an exchange, companies spend many, many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting that first license. And as soon as that's out, you're going to see many more licenses come out soon, because they've done all the hard work and heavy lifting with the regulators. So we've got, you know, 15 or 20 centralized exchanges in Canada. So consolidation is coming, licenses are coming. And our view, again, on the accessibility pieces, not only do we need to have a decentralized app where people can own and control their own assets and are in yield on it, which is our app, but we need to have ways to get people into crypto. And so centralized exchanges are a part of that, part of the ecosystem. So we're, you know, we're exploring some consolidation opportunities that I think we're in such a good position for because of our backing and then also just timing in the market. Fantastic. One last question for Mr. Wonderful, or should I say Mr. Wonderfie? I think that that's a genius name, Wonderfie. Obviously, the origin is for Mr. Wonderful. So one last question for you, Mr. Wonderfie. I've heard you're very particular, and I know from watching you, you're very particular with what you invested. So when you made this decision in the crypto space to get into Wonderfie, you had to obviously put a lot of due diligence and a lot of time into it. Can you talk a little bit about some of your other investments you've made in the crypto currency space? Sure. You know, when I get involved in a company and do something like put my name on it, Wonderfie, for example, let's be transparent. I'm ripping off Richard Branson's Virgin strategy, and I'm happy to do it. I know Richard, but I think it's a brilliant marketing strategy. So you'll see many other companies I invest in adopt that nomenclature because it fits into my portfolio. But I always eat my own cooking. I don't invest in things that I don't use. And so the best way to be an investor is to understand the product as a user. And so for me, you know, when I talk about FTX, I'm an investor, but I'm also a user of the platform, the same with Circle. I use it. The same thing is going to happen when that app launches in, you know, less than 30 days here. I wonder if my family is going to use it because I've got lots of kids that want to be able to do the same thing I'm doing on an operating company level, but they need compliance too. And so my thinking is it's always invest in what you use. And then you'll have the knowledge of what the person you're serving is using. And that's pretty well been in and everything I've got. I mean, my goodness, I look at my portfolio of private companies and venture investments. I have all these products around me because I use them, you know, whatever it is, from food products to wireless charging and all of the same thing. But when it comes to crypto, my biggest concern right across the board is, am I compliant? Am I doing this in a way that does not change my compliance platform? Because I have to be compliant given all the other investments I have in services, financial services that have to be compliant too. It's that simple. And, you know, I love what WonderFi is doing in terms of the reporting. Yes, you can, you know, move your crypto in there, but also we'll give you the right reports to become tax time. You're compliant. You know exactly what you made or lost and you're able to report it to the regulator. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us here today on Rich DV Live. Congratulations on the IPO, WonderFi technologies, and you defy decentralized finance stock that you guys can buy. Guys, if you like this video, please smash the like button, comment down below, share the video everywhere and subscribe. Thank you for joining us, gentlemen. I must just say before we leave that Rich DV Live is strictly for information and education purposes. Please do your due diligence, do your research before you invest in anything that we talk about or discuss here on Rich DV Live. In saying that, I think WonderFi technologies is a great opportunity for investors to get into decentralized finance early before it explodes. And I believe it will. Thank you guys for watching. If you're not winning, you're not watching. This is Rich from Rich DV Live saying, have a nice day everybody, and thank you for joining us, gentlemen.