 It isn't difficult today to gauge the grim situation of the crypto verse. The prices of tokens are similarly unendless pitfall with no positive knees on the horizon. Now the second biggest crypto exchange in the world has never fallen to become a lump of rock before and the devastation caused is close to 50 billion US dollars directly and indirectly. It takes special courage today to reiterate that cryptocurrency in itself is infallible but these men-controlled aspects surrounding it are all the cause of concern. How do we find a silver lining with regulation and decentralized financing? Welcome to Business Insight and Plus TV Africa. I am Justin Akadone. We'll begin with this report on business growth and strategies. More often than not, businesses are fixated on growth. However, expert attacks and entrepreneurs on orders to ensure healthiness of their ventures these came up on the sidelines of a strategy growth conference which held in Lagos. Take a look. Not conducting regular health checks at business can have severe consequences which can lead it to lack behind the competition instead of dominating. At this conference, the focus is on getting useful strategies to ensure a healthy business and growth. Author and entrepreneur Ezekia Solesi who wants participants not only to network or get inspired believes an understanding of the macroeconomy as well as strategy is paramount. For example, what happens is that most people think about business growth and they're really thinking about growth at any cost is good. But cancer is growth, right? You could grow to death. The idea here is to make sure that as we're growing, we're positioning, we're auditing, we're making sure that we're actually healthy. With 70% of entrepreneurs developing from the street, their needs need for caution. As experts say, their survival can be measured after they have survived 10 years. The guide for any businessman, knowing for a while that no matter what you do no matter how much you have in your bank account you must have the 10-year strategy in mind. 5 years, 90% of the business that start would die and then the 10 that survives will go through another 5 years and then 90% of the 10 will also die. That means 100 businesses that start, only one will survive after 10 years. The first thing is the mindset to know that whatever happens in the economy your business can thrive. And then the second thing is to go out there and find the knowledge, find the strategy and be courageous enough to execute on whatever is you found. As some businesses guess for survival, other strategists advise entrepreneurs to have a successor plan while envisioning the future of their ventures. What is your plan for that business? So I think that it's important that people begin to think about it long term. Yes, sometimes we're looking at the situation and then there's this mentality of founder, owner, chairman. You know, I want to be the founder. You can still be the founder but not necessarily run the business. So some doctors, you know, you could be a doctor, you are a surgeon. Doesn't mean you have what it takes to run a hospital. You must have an administrator. First of all, look at the areas you thought or the areas you didn't do well. That is where to start from. Build on those ones and upgrade. Then the ones that are already working, those ones are just the water. More like give it a breath of life and you know, it will keep growing. And this is where the healthy business comes in. Every business has an evolution time or different demands for different places. However, to achieve results experts say it has to look at the execution of key priorities including building capacities and individual effectiveness of their team. Your job is to be able to think and strategize. Moving on now, what went wrong with FTX? It had nothing to do with the cryptocurrency failing or with blockchain technology letting people down. It was all because of the people involved and their greed. So this gives greater ground for something that's blockchain related but without any direct involvement of people that's deafie. It is everything great about cryptos and blockchain without any human intervention. Joining me now is a certified Metaverse expert, Romare Dominic. Thanks for joining us on the show Romare. Thank you very much. I'm grateful. It is indeed a pleasure. Let's start by understanding what happened with the FTX falling. What can you really tell us Romare? You see, when people actually put faith in individuals and then they idolize them. We have things happening like this particular FTX. Things like Terra Luna, things like theory AC. And this is where things actually goes out because you see in 2021 a friend of mine actually who is an investor in this crypto crisis stuff, borrowed a lot of money. And he thought that right now in this 2022 by the end of this particular time he will be a baller but today he's a mechanic and you see FTX right now it actually affirms the decision why the faith on just one single person is not good and why we need education so much more in this particular crypto space because you see this cryptocurrency talks about decentralized finance which means my keys, my funds, my money, my funds. We actually did put trust in a particular centralized entity and that has actually made us to lose a lot of money generally you see if we had actually put this particular type of money in something like let's say a decentralized finance particular type of exchange we might not have had a lot of this type of heart breaks that we're having right now and then let's say okay if it was a decentralized platform we could have said before this particular money all goes out we can unfreeze our money and then I say okay each and every one of us that have unfreezed our money instead of us to lose every one of our money we may lose just about 12% and that particular mistake has cost the world so much more than what they actually planned for Alright women let's try and bring it back home right now in Nigeria with the FTX falling now if you have to speak directly or indirectly how much or how if affected a Nigerian in terms of money invested per se Nigeria is one of the biggest markets for cryptocurrency investors and I tell you if you say Nigerians are not affected the percentage of Nigerians that might be affected possibly would be up to let's say we have 100% of cryptocurrency users who might say about 40% if our data is correct on that particular exchange because it was the second biggest exchange to Binance and you see let's say for a country like if we have firms again the reason why we need a platform an education like that to be able to see that okay you cannot just trade with only a cryptocurrency platform like FTX you can go to cryptocurrency platforms that are DeFi related and let's say if you had an education like what we offer at Vern where we give people education on decentralized finance how to be able to access smart contracts, decentralized ledger technologies or maybe if you have read some of my books like the one on the left of the blockchain you would have seen that decentralized finance actually has some exchange that are different from this particular FTX let's say a Uniswap now in Nigeria that have been trading on Uniswap Uniswap will incentivize you for providing liquidity your tokens would also go up if you buy this particular tokens on the Uniswap and if you have this particular type of education you might have put all your funds into FTX you might have put it into a couple of different words so education has been one of the major things that has actually made Nigeria's exchange education is a major challenge all right, all right Rume, let's talk about DeFi or decentralized financing which is like a panacea to all of this let us break it down per se and to understand what we really need to do or know about DeFi what exactly is decentralized finance? OK, decentralized finance is just an upscale of what we have with the traditional finance but with better characteristics and the characteristics are lower fees you have automation and you have transparency in transaction and with decentralized finance there is no single failure point just like we have had why we discussed the FTX the FTX was a centralized exchange where as soon as the exchange crashed as soon as people were pumping a lot of money into it as soon as the exchange crashed everything went south that actually is what DeFi comes to so let's say something that happened with the central back recently we had the NERA we had the NERA upgraded if we had a DeFi system maybe we had a DAO decentralized autonomous organization instead of recoloring the NERA a decentralized autonomous organization ensures that people are able to vote on certain rights of what they want to see according to a particular asset or a particular project so let's say they wanted to do the project of restructuring the NERA what they would have done is on this particular DeFi protocol a lot of people would have voted and said we want social and social teams we want this one NERA we want this upgrade we want that upgrade and we would have had a perfect upgrade in that particular voting process so let's say we would have not even used a lot of money to reprint the NERA I mean we used 58 something billion NERA to be able to print 2.5 billion NERA notes that remains 56 billion or 55 billion can vote to pay teams for asset strike would have possibly continued with things like the NERA that were already started I mean some of course like me and you were possibly down there to try out the NERA app which would have saved a lot of teams or a lot of cost in printing out new NERA notes that they just wrote we call it and these are things that DeFi can actually do in normal banking system like what we have and it is actually sad that the education on this particular technology that is needed but in our government sector private sector and educational sector is lacking and that is one thing in my last book that I released an evolution in the metaverse DeFi, NFT and Web Theory you see that all right Ruma, before you go further let's really try and understand I'm sure it has a lot of advantages you know when you actually explore that particular financing but how does it really work does it really work on blockchain technology or how exactly okay so decentralized finance works on blockchain technology and how do you go about it you get a community of people you know how to program you program the smart contract and then that particular smart contract is deployed and say okay we are going to have certain agreements to maybe collate some certain amount of funds and when we collate those certain amount of funds we are going to use that certain amount of funds for social and social purpose maybe the certain amount of funds we are collating we can issue out some tokens to say okay for being part of the people that actually contributed this amount of funds what you can actually have is social and social x y z amount of tokens so that you can have decision making rights just like a cooperative just like you have with cooperatives and you have with the agile system you see if central bank face today those particular those different entities that have their money possibly saved in gold possibly saved in other different assets they would not all they need to do is to cash out they are remaining asset that is with them and they move on with their life because they did not actually put their money into a central bank so it works with the blockchain but it is a community like and more of a safer method because it removes the centralized system of failure that has happened just with FTS and was seen with the central bank it has actually happened with the following era as well alright Rume so does defy as it is now let's try and understand the uses does it really work does it really need a third party to be involved or is just a pair to pair approach really it doesn't need a third party for you to actually transfer your money you can still transfer the same 10 billion dollars 1 million dollars that you want to transfer to anyone just like you have done transferring it from an FTX exchange to another blockchain wallet or a Binance wallet or a Lunar wallet or a Burm wallet same thing on your defy let's take Uniswap for example as a use case if you connect your MetaMax wallet or any of your EVM, Ethereum Veteran Machine Wallet your funds is already in your wallet all you just need to do is speak on send and it goes instantaneously to that particular NGISAD wallet and it is only you and the NGISAD that you are sending the money to that will know a better particular transaction it is actually a pair to pair system it is a real vision of such a Poshi this is actually the reason why Bitcoin cryptocurrency blockchain was created all right Ruma lots of things you have said so far but I'm really interested about security and transparency when it comes to transactions on defy let's talk about them for one minute how transparent or how secure are transactions on defy are very secure and transparent you know one of the properties of the blockchain it includes transparency and security now with the blockchain explorer if you take for example let's say you go take on Binance Explorer and you send money to someone I can give you the hashtag of that particular address now and say this is the hashtag send it to you as a text message here you are over there in Lagos you can take that particular hashtag and access that transaction and see it and publish it out there anywhere in the world everybody will see it for security if you send out a particular transaction for that particular transaction one of the properties of the blockchain is irreversibility as well which means whatever is sent out cannot be sent back so you cannot have a system where you send the token out and that particular token what is sent out to you and for you to attack the blockchain network you need to actually roll back all the work that has been done on the blockchain network by 51.5% attack which would take up much more than the energy we have running on our system at the moment alright interesting as it really sounds but I have a bit of concern or fear as it is now because I'm thinking it might be a bit of a bit of a high level of volatility and isn't it prone to frauds and scams Apologies your part of the question I'll take the question again I have a bit of a concern when it comes to DeFi because you have actually mentioned all of the wonderful advantages to it but I'm thinking about the high level of volatility and if it's prone to high risk fraud and scams Yes attacking the high level of volatility you know, currency is the lifeblood of every economy and currency is actually prone to fluctuation this year we have seen the dollar appreciate by over 12% against other currencies in the world and as a fierce currency you can see that other currencies are actually falling against the dollar which has seen currencies like South Korean currency go to almost dust now it can also happen with digital currencies so volatility is something that is constant with every currency regardless of whether it's a digital currency or a private currency but the volatility aspect it also demands on the economic factor the demand and supply factor of these particular currencies per time if we have the US right now undergoing a war there's nothing telling us that the dollar might not experience it so volatility is something that's constant and it's something that's important for the cryptocurrency and the financial market so it is something that must be there and we must experience this now for the security and for the backdoor me and you are having this particular call on a particular technology called the internet we are using it for good to share information and educate people and disperse good impactful knowledge to the world there are other people that can use this same internet which is a technology for bad actions so it depends on the individual who has access to that particular technology or knowledge to be able to use that particular technology that's why ignorance should not be pardoned in the court of law and there should be enough regulation to see that bad actors are actually perpetrated in this particular space that's why I applaud both the justice system and said they are doing to see that they draw a good regulatory framework especially with cryptocurrencies especially with knowing the customers that are sending the money into this particular exchange so if we can actually continue this kind of regulation we might not really have so much more science for the bad actors except the people that have decided to act bad with the particular technology like what we do we are here at Vorem we are obscuring a lot of people on this particular technology to see that they can actually add value in terms of GDP they end foreign exchange into their cryptocurrency wallet working for foreign companies here from Nigeria earning like a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars two thousand dollars per month they are not able to deliver for creators like NFT creators for people that can program on the blockchain EVM, solidity they can be working for these three companies just like we have been pushing on a lot of our social media platforms and you see it is just depending on the individual and the intention it's still Business Insight on Plus TV Africa we'll take a quick break and return with more don't go away welcome back it's still Business Insight on Plus TV Africa DeFi and of course the crash of FTX let's talk for one moment about the issue of regulation because as it is right now it is really not so well regulated as we are aware let's talk about that aspect and of course the future of DeFi where do you see it headed for the future of regulation regulation every investor wants to know the certainty of what will come out of his or her investment so regulation is key for the progress of this particular industry regulation must be done for us to have clarity on what we are doing and you can see because of lack of regulation that is so much in the industry we can find like what happened now with FTX FTX guy traveled back to the Bahamas is there waiting for the next line of action there are no clear processes on what would happen so this is the reason why regulation especially a solid framework that attends to failures like this is what is needed you can see from Nigeria as a country our SEC has actually done well they released a circular a few months back that said that okay you can actually be regulated as a cryptocurrency brand or cryptocurrency exchange what do you need to do pay them about $300,000 you pay the $100,000 penetration fee you pay $30,000,000 for that particular completion of process and then you have like $500,000 in your bank for you to have as collector or for your overdraft that is your own regulation process if you are able to scale across this particular you are going to be able to play in this particular region of Nigeria and then you see that if you can actually do that you are serious to do business and give services to Nigeria and not maybe one day then again very quickly as we round off now what's the future of DeFi in 30 seconds so the future of DeFi is an open source funding project and education let's say you want to be able to establish a healthcare facility for cancer patients here in Nigeria there are so many good health facilities here you can say you create a particular decentralized finance protocol that funds this particular type of facility and would build this facility maybe that DeFi protocol is powered by some NFTs and these NFTs sell and NFTs grow in value and that particular facility is already built generating cash flow and delivering healthcare to this particular woman what if in a case where we have strike all the time in our system as to Nigeria medical association they are always striking we can have smart contracts that particular DeFi protocol and say some of the money is kept on this particular blockchain wallet and all of these lecturers wallet they are on this particular blockchain wallet so smart contract means party A does this party B executes the order and at the end of the month we tell the employer we need to go there those money go to the lecturers wallet, go to the medical doctor's wallet as you hand it back to Nera really give us a solution to all of this all right thank you so much Rumeh, certified Metava expert and he has actually brought useful insights to what has happened what is happening in the crypto verse, we do appreciate your time thank you very much I'm grateful all right and just before we go I'll leave you with this feature on real estate which is emerging trends and going green that's the size of the show for this week I'm Justin many thanks for watching sustainable housing development is a key component of the United Nations 2030 agenda and as the impact of major threats such as pollution and climate change increases there is an increased focus on smart sustainable housing as the living habitat of the future ultra modern housing developments like Louisville indicate growing efforts by Lagos developers to create greener eco-friendly living environments in the densely populated city Parliament in the mind of these builders is how to reduce the impact of climate change building homes that fight against a warming world they believe it is time to get serious about where and how homes are built to keep the family safe while also less than impact on the planet the place where you entertain you live, you work you relax you it's like it's like living in a complete city of its own so that's a city within a city sometimes we call it like that in urban design I'm an urban designer by the way as well so that's why I understand the vision and it fits in with the new concepts of how we should build our cities in the future we are designing it to be edge certified edge is one of those green agencies that help you to save energies, water and power consumption and a Lewisville project is going to be edge certified which means we will have about 30% of savings in energy and in water consumption comparing to any standard building they identify poor access to mortgage financing for project as one major challenge builders face so I think one of the things like I said one of the things I think we need to think about in Nigeria is mortgages how people can access credit to get homes it's very very important we need to think about how to have accessible credit we've been talking about diaspora inflows we need to provide a more what would I say a way where we can access diaspora inflows in a sustainable manner Every industry in this country or the world everybody is posed with different difficulties at different times talk of policies talk of interest rates talk of the environment in general talk of non-professionals that are trying to act or do what you do there are a whole lot of challenges we are experiencing mortgage rates, inflation so many things Another concern to them is increased cases of quackery infiltrating the real estate sector Are they too true? Is the federal government to put policies in place to care up the trend? There needs to be policies in place and punitive measures and not just putting them in place but we have to ensure we practice what we preach we can put measures in place I mean measures, policies in place and not have a tracking system or a monitoring system or a monitoring committee that would ensure that these rules and regulations that these policies are being strictly adhered to have punitive not necessarily punitive measures but these policies and to let people know that if this is not done XYZ will be the consequence of doing all of that The consensus here is that there is a real need now than ever to focus on reducing carbon impact of new homes by adapting the greenhouse revolution