 Hello, Ryan. It is a pleasure to sit down with you. Thank you for joining us here at Coins Heligraph. First, I'd like to know, what, when they hear your name, when they hear Dash, and they hear, what do you think people should know about you? Well, that's a very interesting question. First of all, thanks for having me. So, I think when people think of me and what to know about me, it's that I got into digital currency and I got into Dash for, I think, the right reasons. And I really believe in the technology. I really want to see it be successful. What's driving you to want this success for the industry? Very early on, there are a lot of skeptics of the technology and I can look at the technology and other people can look at the technology as this space grows and grows and recognize that it offers tremendous value to society. And it offers tremendous value, particularly to people who are the most disaffected by society. People that live in countries with low degrees of financial freedom, with very poor quality financial systems, including the currencies that they use, as well as the ability to open up entirely new marketplaces that couldn't exist with higher cost transaction methods. And so, as I look at the technology and the potential that is there, it's very clear that this will have a tremendous impact on the world. And so, how can we make it usable and bring it to the people that are most disaffected by the current set of technologies and the current environment that they're in? And so, I think that there aren't many opportunities in life where you have the right skill set, the right passion, the right opportunity to truly change the world. And I think that the world of cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets is one of those rare opportunities. And so, I think that there's a lot of people that are here for the wrong reasons, which is they see money being made and they believe that they can carve out their piece. But I think that the community at Dash and the people that are working at Dash are truly passionate about the mission behind all of this and what can be done with the technology, what kind of improvements to society, what kind of gains and efficiency can be had. So, when they see and they hear the name Ryan from Dash, it is the one that's changing the world for the better through cryptocurrencies. Look, I'm one guy, right? There is an entire team at Dash and there are a lot of other people working on other projects. The truth is, nobody knows which of these projects at this point is going to be successful. We have a belief at Dash that there are certain things that are needed to bring to the market before this can truly expand out to the masses. Well, if you mind that, that's a very interesting point and I want to get deeper into that with you, because it's not just the payments, right? It's payments, it's acceptance, it's product, it's brand knowledge, it's product industry knowledge. What do you think are the major barriers to adoption for the majority of public to have cryptocurrency in the everyday life? Well, I think that there are some adoption factors that apply to any new payment methodology and then there are some that are specific to cryptocurrency. So, for Dash, we're focused a lot on the ones that are applicable to any new payment method, because we really don't think that the first generation cryptocurrencies nailed those and they could be done in a much better way. I think that the first generation cryptocurrencies were designed by computer scientists and cryptographers and people that understand the tech, but they didn't necessarily understand the payment space. And so, by taking payments industry best practices and applying them, we think that we can have a much greater impact. Do you think that taking some of the old payment industries best practices could actually be a barrier to entry to moving ahead? Are you guys looking at this as a new template and saying, this is what our barriers to entries were? These were our roadblocks and Dodd-Frank, for example, etc., that you know the industry barriers. How are you approaching it? So, I think that these adoption factors are pretty universal across time and across technology. And for a consumer, those adoption factors are number one, usability, number two, security, and number three, a switching incentive. You need to address at least two out of those three better than an alternative technology for a given market in order for a switch to occur. And when you evaluate against those three criteria and you evaluate first generation cryptocurrencies, they fail on all three. On the security front, which is the one that most people say, well, Bitcoin is incredibly secure. Well, it's incredibly secure for the recipient once a transaction is in a block. But there's a couple of ifs there. One is for the consumer, it's not very secure at all. Once you pay for something, there's no recourse if they fail to deliver the goods or services. That is not a secure transaction. Like I said, it provides security for the merchant, but that's where security is almost less important. On the switching incentives, the consumer actually has to pay to use this technology that is competing with a credit card that will pay them with cash back or rewards. And so there isn't much of an incentive for consumers to adopt it. And then on usability, if you've ever sat someone down with no instructions whatsoever as to how to use a cryptocurrency, how to acquire it, how to use it, and how to use it to pay for something, there are a lot of barriers along the way. And there's a lot of points at which people fall out of that process and throw up their hands and say, I can't figure this out. And so if you improve on all three of those, you should see a higher conversion rate of consumers that get attracted to it that actually make it through that process and actually have the incentives to try it and switch. And so we're working on all three on the consumer side. On the merchant side, there's a whole different set of adoption factors that are important, including ease of integration, including the security for them, the ability to participate in programs, the ability to attract new consumers. How do you actually bring a new consumer that otherwise wouldn't transact with you? Are you helping in your plan with the B2B2C play? Are you helping those businesses with a pool, a suite, a variety of services for them? Well, we don't seek to operate the services directly. We seek to be the network, but we do want to bring an ecosystem of services to bear, whether those are compliance or exchanges so that you can move in and out to fiat currency or other services like loyalty, rewards, offers, things that help drive consumer demand. And so we're working on all of those components. However, as a decentralized network, we don't necessarily seek to operate those ourselves. In order to spur some of these things into existence, we may create reference implementations of some of these things, potentially on our blockchain in order to have a first version of each of these services. But it's much better to have an ecosystem of competing services. Your goal basically is to replace the credit card, to replace the banking industry. In a general sense, what is your specific goal with Dash and what would you love to accomplish when I talk to you in about two years? I know that the prevailing mantra in the cryptocurrency space is that cryptocurrency will replace banks, will replace the existing financial services system, will replace credit cards. And your mantra? In some places, it may. And in other places, it definitely won't. No payment method ever goes to the graveyard. Absolutely. We're still using the barter system. We're still using checks? We're still using checks. And there are some things that checks do really well that digital currency can't. So they will continue to exist. The question in my mind is, where does cryptocurrency play best? What are the use cases that its unique attributes do better than any other payment method? Or what are the use cases where no other payment method serves that cryptocurrency can't? What are the entirely new business models? What are the entirely new use cases? So that passion is that what drove you to leave the normal Wall Street world? Why would you leave such a great area, such a great industry at that time, right? So this unknown Wild West world? Well, there were a lot of reasons, both, well, personally, philosophically, as well as just practically opportunity-based that I saw at the time. And, look, there were pioneers way before I took that leap that were quitting their jobs and joining cryptocurrency space, launching businesses within cryptocurrency, launching coins. You made your money on Wall Street. You made millionaire, billionaire, zillionaire, thousandaire? Well, I was working at a hedge fund and had been for a number of years. And prior to that, I was a consultant at McKinsey for seven years, focused on financial services. So I had a comfortable position and with most people that look to achieve in life. This is where you were at that point. Yeah. And so a lot of people thought it was very crazy that I'm both from my professional life as well as my personal life that I'm leaving an environment like that to go to a cryptocurrency startup that could afford to pay no more than, you know, $700 a month. And you are well into the cushy, well-off world of the McKinsey's, the Cyste. So I wasn't hurting, but I really did believe that this, when I evaluate the technology, I'm looking at it and saying, this has the ability to revolutionize a lot of the payment space. Not all of it. I'm not, you know, looking at it through rose-colored glasses, but there is a real practical set of use cases here that it can carve out much bigger than a niche, but an actual substantial portion of the financial system eventually. And I want to be a part of that. I was looking for projects. Dash was very attractive to me because they were really doing a lot of innovative things. They were the first to market with the concept of a masternode and incentivizing more than just mining. They were the first to introduce a treasury system. And as I got more and more involved in Dash and in the community and working with the founder, Evan Duffield, you know, I realized that there were many more things that could be done with these, the masternode concept. You're essentially creating a private network run by these masternodes. And a lot of those services can be consumer facing that solve a lot of these issues that were barriers for the cryptocurrency cryptocurrencies that exist. Did your founder, the co-founder, your founders and co-founders really pull you in? And we don't know a lot about your founders and the co-founders. Tell me about them as well. Yeah. So Evan Duffield basically started Dash over a weekend. He ported Bitcoin's code base and made some changes to it. Cryptographer by heart? No. Well, he's a programmer by heart and has worked in a number of different industries and had been programming since he was 15 years old. He got the bug and, you know, saw that there were a lot of copycats of Bitcoin at the time. Most cryptocurrencies weren't doing anything really innovative. They were changing the output or they were changing the mining algorithm, but they weren't fundamentally playing with, yeah, they weren't really challenging what a cryptocurrency could be. And he tried to get involved in that space and make suggestions. And what he found was he couldn't even get in touch with the main programmers that were responsible for integrating the code. They just weren't willing to talk to community members like him. And maybe that was a capacity issue. Maybe that was, you know, a lack of structure around it. But the fact remained, he couldn't, you know, see his influence in the main project. So he decided to launch his own, mostly as an experiment to start. And it gained traction. He quit his job in order to focus on it. And there were a number of others who were early investors in the coin who quit their jobs as well and said, I'm going to make this and I like the team and I'm going to turn this into something. So there were far braver people than me earlier in the process that really took it forward to the point where I felt comfortable making that plunge. Were you holding any coin before that decision? Before you decided to make the giant plunge? Yeah, so I got involved with Dash as far back as the spring of 2014. So very, very early on. And I liked what was happening. And so I bought a small amount back then. Were you in the community with it also? You were heavy into the Dash community or you were just playing around with coins? I mostly was a reader at that point. And over the summer, switched to an active participant. I moved to Arizona in the summer of 2014. And the founder, Evan Duffield, happened to be there. Just randomly at? I got involved in Dash, not realizing that was where he was. And later on, I found out, oh, this guy's in Arizona. I had family in Arizona and had personal reasons to move there. And so I moved there in the summer and I just reached out to him and I said, hey, would you want to grab a drink somewhere? Is that why you guys, you're working with Arizona in the institution in Arizona State? There are a lot of reasons we're working with Arizona State. One is certainly proximity. It helps being physically there and physically able to go and meet with the dean or the director of the program that we sponsor, meet with some of the students that we are providing scholarships for, etc. And so it benefits us being physically right there. Were they in blockchain and crypto before you engaged them? Was their pool, a community bubbling, just waiting? Oh, definitely, especially among the student population. There were several groups that coexisted focused on Bitcoin or blockchain or cryptocurrency groups and they eventually coalesced into a larger organization. Did that add to the swing at a certain time? Can you see the parallels to the price of that going up to that gelling of the relationships on the college level? Well, I think there were a lot of things happening all at the same time, so it's really tough to draw those correlations. What I can tell you is that Arizona State University is a top research institution in the United States. It's been voted three years in a row the most innovative college by US News and World Report. And that's the only three years that they've had it and they beat out Stanford and MIT at the number two, number three spots. So it is a place where new technologies are actually applied to society and so that was something that was very attractive to us about it. And they're open to looking at new technologies and so when we sat down with them and explained what we were working on and how we might partner on research, on scholarships, on some of these other things, the partnership was very natural and went very quickly. Are you going to replicate that with other universities with maybe some of your partners in this new ecosystem? We're in talks with several other organizations, including non-academic research groups. Should an academic or non-academic, should they reach out to you? Absolutely. So we co-sponsor research with other groups and we're looking into some options there. Do you have an initiative to fund those groups? Well, Dash has a treasury system and so it really is up to the masternodes to vote on those proposals and determine what gets funded. Now we've brought- How do you get a masternode in the long run? How would your scale getting a masternode? Yeah, so anyone is free to download our software, run a full node on the Dash network. Similar to Bitcoin though, that is a volunteerism type of activity. You run a full copy of the blockchain and relay messages around the network but that is altruistic. You're donating your server and your connectivity. In order to become a masternode, a prerequisite is proof of ownership of a thousand Dash. Now right now that's between $250,000 and $300,000. It's a significant sum. But if you sign a message out to the network with the private keys that are associated with that thousand Dash, that enables you to upgrade your full node on the network to a masternode. Masternodes have special rights and privileges. They do get to vote on proposals so they have an influence over how our treasury allocation is given out and to what projects. They also get paid so they're paid to run that infrastructure. The protocol is just a set of rules and the set of rules for Bitcoin say 100% of transaction fees and 100% of new coins that are created are all given to miners and so they heavily incentivize miners and don't incentivize other activities on the network. In the case of Dash, we recognize that that should be split and there is more than one need to running a healthy network. So 45% of our block reward and 50% of our transaction fees go towards mining. The same allocation goes towards masternodes and then the last 10% goes towards what we term treasury. This is anything else. This is legal work. This is software development. This is marketing. This is all of the functions that you would need to run like it were a business and so Dash Core Group is one of just many entities that receive proposal funding and utilize that for our operations and we basically act a lot like a business arm for the network doing business development, integrations, these types of things. There are other entities that sit alongside of us, other groups that create wallets that offer a different set of services than ours do, other people out there doing marketing, other people out there doing business development and so this is all happening in parallel and no one organization truly controls Dash. And it seems that you've taken on more than just a payments, obviously a payments company because what do you see, how do you see yourself in this sector akin to a different sector in the financial services industry? Right now you're not blockchain, you're not Ethereum, right? You sit alone in your entire world. What is that akin to again in the alternate and basically financial industries? You're having a masternode and being able to vote on different services, correct me if I'm wrong, it's like you're bored in a certain respect. Well I think it has some aspects of a board because they weigh in on specific decisions but in many senses they have attributes of a shareholder. They own a portion of it and so they have a vested interest in doing things that result in a good outcome for the network. It's almost like shareholders that have much more granular and frequent voting rights and get to weigh in on the strategy itself and so it's some hybrid of those two things that result. And so I think that I think it is unique in not just cryptocurrency but in financial services in general and I think that part of that is due to the technology. It would be impractical to hold a shareholder vote every single month if you were running a public company. The level of organization, the audit requirements and everything in order to hold a vote means that they only get to weigh in about once a year and on a very limited set of decisions and this technology may enable a far more granular and frequent interaction with the people that are holding these assets to have input and it might be a much healthier governance model. Dash has been out of the media lately and two things I'd love to talk to you about why is that and being removed from the exchange, how has that impacted you and how are you guys recovering from that? Are you referring to the JFSA? Is that what you're referring to? Okay so I'll cover both of those. First I don't think we've been absent from the media. I can tell you that if anything my allocation of time towards the media has been going up as has a number of other team members and there's a lot more projects that are engaging with public relations firms and so on and so I think it's just a more competitive environment. I think secondly there's a little less interest in general when you look at trends like Google searches for terms like Bitcoin it has been declining. There's still a great deal of interest in the media though and so I think that there's a lot happening there and I can tell you that the level of media that is interested has been becoming more mainstream in our project that you know I did my first national television interview last month and there's far more interest and callbacks from larger media outlets so I think that it's just changing. It's just changing. On the second one on the Japan FSA what happened there the background is that they put some pressure on the exchanges operating in Japan to remove privacy centric coins. Can you walk me through when you finish with this explain the layman they need to know what is a privacy coin and how is that different. Sure maybe I should start with that so a privacy coin is a coin that incorporates some type of privacy feature to the benefit of end users and there's a lot of different varieties of that that range from complete obfuscation of any information about the transaction who sent it who it went to how much it was for all the way over to complete transparency where you can see every transaction on the blockchain and you know follow it through from from coin to coin know the amounts etc and there are degrees in between that. Dash is first real consumer facing feature that that we deployed was a feature called private send and private send is simply a a way to obscure your balances and introduce uncertainty into where a transaction came from. Okay so you know where I'm going with this yeah why the people that would use that probably fit a certain mold but wouldn't always yes did the media did you find that a certain group of folks did you find that crypto anarchist did you find that anyone took advantage of that feature that you offered. There's a philosophical position that we've taken that people have a right to privacy and so let's start with the why why is this important well it's really important for companies to have financial privacy for competitive reasons it's also important for individuals for safety reasons if I send you a transaction you should not see that I just received a hundred thousand dollars back in change that puts my physical safety at risk. Do you think that that led to just that very small one percent right one percent of overall transactions do you think that that led to 90 percent of the negative impact the negative media that was associated with it. Well I think that people have not gone deep on to the reasons why and they haven't gotten deep on the technology itself to understand that there are differences there are differences between a coin that you can't even analyze and one that introduces some degree of uncertainty into the transaction but can nonetheless be analyzed risk score you can see that they use this technology and you can evaluate your risk as you know a financial services provider say an exchange or something like that. So even having that little bit of risk is better than the companies out there that have raised money and that still haven't put you have actual data to say if this is a negative or a positive integration. Let me give you an example of why the nuances matter. Dash's protocol is identical to bitcoins not similar it is identical in terms of what gets recorded to the blockchain. You can create identical private send transactions and the same transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain and both of those are valid transactions that would get you know that that can be mined into a block and so at a rule set level they are identical. The only thing that we've introduced is made that more convenient for the users and safer they don't have to turn their coins over to someone else to perform these types of transactions and in in so doing we've we've not changed the protocol itself or the rules that dictate what gets recorded to the blockchain and so it can be analyzed the exact same way that it can with Bitcoin transactions you can see when these transactions occur they actually happen pretty infrequently less than one percent of all transactions on our network are private send and so there is no legal reason why that should be treated any differently. Now I suspect what happened was that the FSA looked at a list of coins that were supposedly privacy centric we don't call ourselves that we say that we have a privacy feature and we were user experience centric and we're providing tools and use cases that people will find valuable. Private send just happened to be the first of many services that we've deployed to our network. So if I if I walk out here right now how would I use one dash period we're on Wall Street in New York City right the home of the home of FinTech in a certain respect how would I use it walking down right down the street in a coffee shop and how would I use that private feature in the balance of my day on a Friday in New York and New York City. I think this talks to the use cases what are various digital currencies really good at. For Dash we have two things that I think are really important the first is really fast transactions these are we call them instant send they're nearly instantaneous transactions and lock in between one and two seconds as fast or faster than credit card authorization that makes these transactions viable at the point of sale without risk to the merchant. The second is that it's incredibly inexpensive to use typical transaction is under a penny instant transactions or something like two cents and so I think that the question isn't can you use it everywhere the question is what are some of the good use cases for technology like that and also where can I use it yeah right now where who are your cryptocurrency friends yeah right who are your crypto friendly community groups yeah right that I can transact with so the main use cases for Dash number one you can buy gift cards with it at a discount and so you can right now purchase Amazon gift cards at about a 15% discount and you can use those to transact on on on Amazon we've got a number of other gift cards coming which we'll talk about um you can earn rewards with uh Dash so you can shop at rewards.com they have 7000 merchants integrated everything from Macy's to hotels.com you can get 5% cashback on hotels.com just as an example right there are lots of different merchants involved and you can receive your your benefits in the form of Dash and coming this fall you will actually be able to get gift cards at around a thousand of those merchants with that Dash that you've accumulated or by transferring your Dash to rewards.com to make a purchase of those gift US and Europe and worldwide gift cards are available they have worldwide merchants okay you know that that yeah yeah so some of those brands are international um you can use it for money transmission like uh to friends or family overseas so if you are an expat here and and living living abroad it is a very cost effective way to get money back to family and friends how's the user experience with that barrier to entry compared to a western union or money gram or it's quite easy and and just using a service like Uphold as an example Uphold is a lot like Coinbase um you basically sign up for account connect a debit card or a bank account to your account do a transfer and you can you know send Dash to anyone anywhere for you know fraction of a penny and if I don't have Dash when I receive a notification in my email saying you have just received five yeah you you uh you can uh sign up for an account with with Uphold as well and do bank transfers to your own bank in a number of countries around the world sounds like a PayPal-esque architecture yeah almost um you're able to do these types of international transfers very uh cost effectively and easily and there are no barriers in terms of you know certain countries don't allow incoming or outgoing PayPal transactions or don't allow transactions between specific countries and things like that so instead of multiple hops that you might have to go through today in terms of transferring money around you can you can go anywhere it's a peer-to-peer technology from anyone to anyone in the world how are you navigating the legal climate in the united states with securities utilities how are you navigating that entire landscape and how are you also positioning your colleagues your partners to do so well both Evan Duffield and myself have a background in financial services we have certain licenses um and so you mind took those licenses you mind telling you what those might be like uh you know series 63 and you know series 70 these we have a number of these different qualifications I have an MBA um worked on Wall Street for many years so we're familiar with what the rules of the road were and we designed Dash to be compliant with those rules um this truly is a peer-to-peer technology we never held in ICO um there is no giant pool of money sitting anywhere that you know we generated your own over great um everything that we do is authorized by the network all the funding we receive is authorized by the network and so we have done extensive research into this um and created the legal arguments for why we are not a security um I feel very comfortable with the legal argument that is there and the SEC this week came out with some rulings on Bitcoin and Ethereum um I think if Ethereum is not a security very clearly we are not um and so I believe that we will uh get a green light uh eventually uh from the SEC that that we also fall in that same category so I think we're in very good shape now uh where the regulation comes in though is for our partners so the exchanges the brokerage services the merchants the entry and exit points to the network and and for for those people they do they do have a need to meet compliance requirements um do you think the compliance will uh get you in better favor with Japan and and so they clearly understand where you are well we we have compliance services that offer analysis on our blockchain and there are actually several of them at this this point okay um and so I believe that you know exchanges and businesses should have no problem acquiring the services that they require from their regulator um and so I think that we will see a reversal at least a partial reversal on what the JFSA came out with um once they understand better the technology I think literally what they did was they looked at a list of coins with privacy features and said we incurred we encourage you to remove those from your exchange and I don't think they've gone any deeper than that I think when we uh are able to better educate there will be a differentiation between oh okay I I understand that this is more similar to that than it is to this kind of time frame you think I know this is a wild one to even guess because it's not in your hands right yeah if you if we looked at all of the factors just kind of pulled a few down what do you think it would take to to coin check Japan to get in better uh graces with them where you continue to be the leader well I think that first of all Japan has never been a big market for us we haven't had any of the major exchanges uh with Dash in the first place so it's not like we got removed right so this did not have any type of immediate impact we certainly don't want that to be a precedent and so we at this point need to go uh build those relationships and uh so that we can do the education and I believe that any rational person evaluating the actual technology will come around to to our argument so I'm not terribly worried about it I think it is a matter of time and effort and that requires participation on both sides so we'll see I don't think these things move quickly so um you know we'll work on it over the course of this year and see where we're at but I think we'll manage to win over any skeptics or just ill-informed the biggest markets for Dash number one is the United States number two is actually Venezuela hyperinflation there has driven a lot of people to our solution we have a couple 100 merchants in the capital city that accept Dash as a form of payment there are a couple brokerage services that serve a stash in Venezuela and so I think that there is a growing and and very strong community there that's developed and the legal challenges though right now with Venezuela the United States how how how are you dealing with that in in more of the business sense and politically how are you as a very challenging time right now so the the traction that has been gained in Venezuela is um really a grassroots effort it's been locals who have driven a lot of that adoption they have used the Dash treasury system to put up proposals to host conferences they've actually opened a Dash office there to provide end users with onboarding and customer service so they can come in have their questions answered come in get a wallet set up learn in small group setting how to actually use it and so this is a set of passionate people who really believe in Dash going out and educating their countrymen right and so I think that it is an incredible story that is playing out in Venezuela now we've you know as an organization realize that Dash core group can also help support there and you find it that's a challenge because of the political climate and well I don't think we're not actually selling anything I'm not I'm not going and and selling a product I'm not selling a service I'm not I'm not as an organization you know operating my network it is end users that operate the network there is no law against going anywhere and educating people about a technology there's no law about helping them to integrate into that technology this is open source technology anyone is free to download and use it and so there there is no law to be broken here it's a deeper philosophical statement it's it's underlying in which you're saying and how you're giving access to tools they could end up liberating certain exactly so this is where there's not only not a conflict of interest but there's actually an alignment of interest there around helping a people that are living under a very oppressive regime that confiscates property that violates civil liberties that is destroying what was a healthy economy and providing the people with tools to combat that I don't know anyone on the planet who's heartless enough to say that that is a bad thing and so I would not worry that you know someone would come along and be concerned with what we're doing there actually I kind of would say the opposite because you're giving them something that is they can't take away you can't take away education you can take away your property you can take away the food you can take away the treat take away a lot but once you're educated that's probably the most deadly weapon that anyone looking to take a group of folks and keep them underprivileged yeah well education is the best protection against weapons right you know it is you know you can term it a weapon but I mean it is because of this type of oppression that in the first place that these people need to be armed with the information armed with technologies that can help them because the tools that are being provided to them are are destructive and you know I hate to say it but the leader of that country is a truck driver he doesn't understand economics does this fall under more of your social cause personally or is this is an alignment within my personal goals I would love to see dash be adopted first in some of the poorest and most financially oppressed markets in the world so that as dash grows we bring those people up with us and that would be the best possible outcome is that your main would you classify that and the umbrella as a social cause a charity a charitable cause where I don't think it is a charity I think that these are the markets that are most amenable to the solutions in the first place here in the United States you have a lot of good options for transacting you have dollars in your pocket you have credit cards you have bank transfers and all of them work pretty well they're reliable they're relatively low cost certainly to you and and there's nothing fundamentally broken there where you're like I have to switch to something else because this is becoming unusable that's the situation there and so I think that we can prove our use case in countries like this and we can gain our first real adoption in countries like this most easily with the least amount of effort that's just a good business decision I like I look forward to seeing the case study on it as a side benefit you are helping these people that can benefit from it the most and so I don't think there's any type of conflict in my mind as to you know where this is is going to help the most that doesn't mean there aren't opportunities elsewhere that we won't pursue what are you pursuing else in social cause besides this initiative what would you consider under the umbrella of social cause well it's not a again not a project that's being run by dash core group but there's a project called cuva cash that just announced at at Money Conf in Dublin this week they demoed their product for the first time it is aimed at the Zimbabwe market and it is powered by dash and so it is a you know electronic money transfer network that will operate in in the country compared to M-Pesa well so the the main difference is they're actually setting up kiosks and bodegas and and and business entities throughout the cities with the ability to get in and out of physical cash it sounds like it sounds like that's physical where they walked along the routes of the people to make sure that they were physical establishment set up for fiat exchange and and this is a much lower cost option so typical transaction is something like five dollars typical transaction fee is something like 50 cents and mobile network operators throughout africa are the primary operators of these types of networks and Pesa is a fantastic example of it they are making a fortune off of their financial services and so there is a lot of excess margin there that they are that that could be saved through the use of digital currency and so when you're talking about this size of transaction and the in addition all the financial restrictions that these people face they can't withdraw all their money from a bank account they go queue up at six o'clock in the morning and they're not allowed to withdraw any more than a certain amount every day is a complete waste of human resources it's a waste of time and it's just inefficient and so if we can improve the efficiency and reduce the costs for these people that has tremendous impact on their lives you save me 50 cents it isn't going to change my life you save someone in zimbabwe 50 cents on every transaction that is life changing for that individual and so I I believe really strongly that this is another project that that's going to have a great deal of financial a great deal of social impact now that there's other ways to have social impact too in the United States we have a project going with a payment gateway called alt 36 they're focusing on digital payments for the cannabis industry this is an industry that is all cash cash handling costs are 15 to 25 percent in the industry and there is risks associated with that amount of cash there's physical risk that it could burn there is risk that of robbery violence and other types of attacks that how are you mitigating that risk how is dash mitigating the cannabis industry these the merchants right how are you mitigating the risk in those companies when you have physical cash obviously this risk exists now you can deal with that risk in a number of different ways you can increase the physical security around it you can transport that physical cash to a more secure location more frequently so that you're holding on average less but ultimately all of those solutions cost a great deal of money if you can get the consumer to switch to digital currency they can come in transact with you they can even pay ahead of time or order online which is not a possibility today and that incoming digital cash can be held securely and can be set up in a way where it can't be robbed and you can use that to then pay your suppliers the cannabis industry needs help they have tons of cash as you mentioned on deck i've watched folks within a certain group physically harmed you know and i know of these who these folks are personally so i'm waiting i haven't undertaken the the task of looking at the overall architecture of it but what is dash doing to help the cannabis industry and the challenge of dealing with the federal government and local governments in the banking industry i believe that there is a extraordinarily strong use case here for digital currency but i don't think it's been executed very well off of the attempts that have been tried so far they're just trying to do payment and there's much more to a transaction than the payment itself and this is what alt 36 is doing particularly well they are building an ecosystem of services that they bring to bear and integrate directly into the cannabis point of sale systems what would that be so they include tax reporting the ability to calculate your short-term and long-term capital gains on cryptocurrency holdings sales tax calculation and submission the ability to onboard your vendors and pay those through the system loyalty rewards offers for the consumer side in integrating new business models like the ability to use one of these dispensary search apps it's one thing to simply find a dispensary but to be able to browse their inventory make a purchase either how that haven't delivered or have it waiting for you at at a pickup window and be able to pay for that for from the comfort of your home not having to walk around with hundreds of dollars of cash all of these things are a benefit to the consumer too and so it's a lot more than just the payment it's about consumer engagement it's about introducing new business models and new ways of transacting and so these are the things that alt 36 is bringing bringing to the cannabis industry dashes the perfect digital currency for it and it's the reason we were selected is because we have instant transactions and very low fees the ability to send a payment at a point of sale and two seconds later be able to walk out with the product that's not possible with other digital currencies so it's a combination of all of these different capabilities coming together that I think are finally going to make it possible for the consumer to really benefit from this for the merchants to truly benefit from it and not have to be reconciling between two different financial systems where their payments are coming from this is integrated directly into their point of sale systems that they're already using and so that's one aspect of it the other is focusing on the business business market that these transfers to growers or to manufacturers of edible products or things of that nature are very onerous right now and dangerous right now most of those transactions particularly transactions between dispensaries they actually trade products amongst themselves is done with duffel bags of cash it is insane and so we're providing greater safety there greater speed another issue people don't realize beyond the cash handling costs is the cash cycle time a lot of these local credit unions are some of the only ones willing to service the dispensaries or growers and they they know this and have a great deal of concern around risk as well and so when they receive a deposit of cash from a dispensary they have a 30 day waiting period many of them before though that cash is credited to their account while they do checks while they do reporting while they do a lot of different things and only then do they allow them access to their funds that eats up one-twelfth of their annual revenue right there in cash holdings in 30 days not having access to your cash how can we walk through how do you mitigate that challenge so with dash the transactions instant they get immediate use of that digital cash that they can use to pay a supplier verify with the master they can pay employees with it they can use a service like bit wage to actually pay employees on a w2 you know and leverage multiple services at that point yeah where they can just leverage that deposit exactly they get instant access to that and so the cash cycle time goes way way down and so there's a number of different benefits ultimately all of this provides much greater transparency over what's happening with the dispensaries there's a great deal of under reporting that's taking place so there's I think benefits to the states themselves there's huge benefits to the dispensaries there's huge benefits to the consumer in terms of a better user experience in terms of lower costs and so the entire ecosystem is just made more efficient by digital payments digital payments just aren't available to them in any other form right now i'm definitely aware of that i'm glad you guys are approaching that who are who would you say is your your top two or three competitors and why are they failing at even trumping you no pun intended um you know i i don't try to position other uh projects as necessarily directly competing or uh you know opine on whether they're failing or not they all have their own unique strategies i would say that dash being a payments focused use case um i would say that it it is most similar to uh bitcoin cash or uh litecoin um and as far as the competitive because they're also low cost uh networks um they are accepted many places similar in in number to dash and so and dash is accepted how about how many places right now it's in the thousands at this point um we have a few point of sale systems in europe that are currently live or integrating with close to 2000 caracas has around 200 physical points of sale and then you have the online merchants we have uh into the high hundreds or low thousands uh number of electronic you know e-commerce type of locations that accept it and then you have the remittance market we don't really know how big that is the metrics that i tend to focus on are transactions um and i try to focus on real use cases not simply speculators that are moving money between exchanges uh i'm looking for actual use do you see yourself more as payments because you talk a lot about that and you're probably one of the first organizations that is so focused on the entire economy and and maybe it's because the way you also eloquently put it um that you're teaching you're educating you're providing you're all of these resources but how much is payments how much is the the time in the core team is dedicated to just payments how much is dedicated to uh like you said b2b yeah so um there i don't see a conflict between b2b and payments so that they can be an r one of the same same same thing what i mean by that so you understand is there's a lot that has to go into the payments world okay then you have to chase the payment guys got it what stage are you in right now i mean we would be crazy to go merchant by merchant door to door trying to sign them up so business partners are really important to us we do view ourselves as a payment centric digital currency and network it's really two products in one right and um we are designing the entire coin around that use case in parallel we're going out and building business relationships with channel partners that do have access to point of sale systems etc and so when you integrate into a single point of sale system and pick up a thousand locations or 10 000 locations that's far more scalable you're going to reach market faster than trying to get merchants to download a completely separate tool and try to use it alongside their existing systems and now let me ask a better question i'm sorry to rephrase it in a certain way are you the company focused right now on product service development or building out uh or scaling right now with your with your partners so i think that uh we are obviously focused a lot on the product our evolution product is coming out later this year and will make usability for merchants developers and consumers far easier and so in many ways we're pre-product in that sense but we know that there are already good use cases for digital currency that we don't need to wait for that product to be ready in order to start to pursue and build out our ecosystem cannabis is a perfect example what's happening in venezuela is a perfect example it is clear that we can build markets in the absence of the evolution functionality and so we are doing both in parallel i would say there is i don't know that i could break down a percentage but there's a good deal of resources going behind each one of them the developers themselves are primarily focused on product development so you know around half of our staff is developers alone so you know we are putting a great deal of resources towards the product at this point and where it makes sense you mentioned united states venezuela and what was the third area that your your major market so the third market is a close tie between china and russia both our large cryptocurrency markets um china is a larger market uh but we have a a stronger community in in russia and that makes them basically on par with one another um and you know then then you get into europe and you know a large contingency there i think they're just smaller countries so um but there is a concentration in europe as well are there any parts of this planet right now that you'd love to have them reach out to you to work together with you no matter what level it is are there any groups within the states or outside as well that you'd love to speak with and build out further with dash yeah um we're gonna be making a big shift into the latin america markets and um there'll be more information coming on this on the next quarterly call that we hold we hold a quarterly call to be transparent about what we're working on our finances as an organization and all of those types of things so we report out and allow the community the opportunity to ask question and answers of us on any category relevant to the business so on that next quarterly call we'll be um rolling out a lot more information on what our strategy will be what are the markets will be focused on both geographically as well as um you know um from a industry standpoint and um i think that the groups that we want to talk to right now are going to be the fiat access points throughout uh latin america uh because those are going to be critical infrastructure for a lot of the services that we'll be rolling out there um and so we we definitely want to start to build relationships there um we're already doing that and just hired a latin america manager as well as a country manager for venezuela um there'll be more country managers coming in in that region and we'll be putting forward the argument to the community why that is going to be a focus area for us and we'll be putting forward uh the argument as to what specific markets and opportunities we're going to be going after there i i think it'll be well received i think this is us really taking our strategy to the next level uh beyond what are the opportunistic opportunities that we can go after as opposed to how can we proactively shape the cryptocurrency environment and the dash ecosystem and that's the shift that we've really been going through ever since we brought a full-time business development lead on at the beginning of the year so um our business development lead is bradley zastrow he came to us from american express 17 years of experience of business development and so he's really helping us to to put the time and resources into shaping that whole strategy the research behind it and the rationale and and it's been interesting experience to go through so we'll we'll have some some more to say on that soon with an american express experience behind that i can only imagine these these guys are the lead you know arguably the leaders in the in in the payments world so um will i really appreciate the time yeah and thank you for sitting down absolutely it's been very informative very very informative and quite frankly frankly a little geeky from my soul i love geeking out on this stuff so pleasure the metal bore everybody else in the room everybody's sleeping right now but i could talk fintech for another five hours and really get into some of the challenges that we're facing and that we will face um in it so i look forward to a follow-up conversation with you all right all right thank you thank you i appreciate you yeah coin telegraph like subscribe and hodl