 From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. Hello and welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage here in New York City in Manhattan at the Hilton Midtown for Consensus 2018. Part of Blockchain Week New York. Our next guest here is Greg Landegger who's with Parsons and Whitmore, also known for Bit Digest, investor in the space since the beginning. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So I got to ask you, you've been an investor in a lot of coins and equity deals. Space is now busting out. I mean, first of all, are you amazed by the amount of people here? I'm more than amazed. I mean, surreal. And you now have an interesting culture of new investors in the space coming in. What's it like for you working with the new investors? So, we're a single family office that started originally in 2014 and the way I describe it is for the past few years, I was a loser at the lunchroom. Everyone was making fun of me and then last year all the cool jocks wanted me to sit at their table. A lot of our bankers, all the traditional firms started calling up saying, what are you doing? What is this Bitcoin thing that you've been spending your time on? So you had a nice little cover story there for a while but can't ignore the returns at the end of the day. That's exactly right. Last year was too good a year. All right, so talk about some of the dynamics that you're seeing here at Blockchain Week. What are you seeing? What's the top story? What's the big news that you think is most important? I think the news right now is that there's real development going on. I mean, we're all waiting. The Holy Grail to me is coming up with an institutional custodial project, ledger, while it's announced something today so we're very excited about that. And there's more and more effort being done in that area and that's really what'll bring in more people into the market. Big controversy yesterday on the panel about blockchain washing or saying blockchain, pretty heated argument there. Your thoughts, I mean obviously it's early. Embryonic is growing really fast. I've heard the same arguments when the web came along. Too slow, it's not fully functional but it was still early. Same here, what's your take on all this? As an investor, we'd like it to be much faster but realistically everything's surpassing any expectations. I mean, nobody, if you talk to people early last year, we would laugh about people predicting Bitcoin at 2,500. So what, where the coins, talk about the investment you're making in coins. So we invest- Because that's different than the equity. It is, but we had a learning experience where one of our companies, ICOed, we chose not to participate in it and it was the wrong decision. It really told us we need to be on the equity side as well as the coin side. When was that, early on or last year? Last year, okay. So what kind of coin deals are you doing? What's that profile? So we do a little bit of everything. I mean, we've come up with the term rebel coins which are the top six coins. It's Ripple, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, EO, some litecoin, we like those. Then we invest in a total of about 20 coins. And the blockchain doesn't bother you in the performance and all that good stuff? No, because we're making a bet on the future of different things. It's a long game for us. What's your criteria for investment? Obviously, you get kind of a rebel in yourself but your returns are there. I've seen this movie before on the web but everything happened on the web. And the returns were made really before the dot-com bubble popped around 2000, one time frame. But there's still great returns but the decisions were interesting then. How do you make your choices? How do you know what a good deal is? It's, I'd say 80% the team. Do they have the experience? Do they have an understanding of what they're doing? I mean, I have a lot of great ideas on things I know nothing about and know I'll never succeed in them. So if we find a team that has experience in an area, understands it, has a real go-to-market story. Interesting. That's exciting us. Okay, so it's a classic criteria with a twist. How about running hard? You really got to run hard in this game. It's a fast moving, unlike the dot-com bubble. This thing is highly accelerated. You can't be sitting on your butt on this one. No, you agreed. You've got to be very aggressive in the area but I think with the ICOs, there's more money up front than people typically had and that's really what's changed the market a lot for us is it's not a deal where the venture capitalists go out and give a million dollars to five companies wait to see what happens. Now those five companies are able to raise a lot more money but it doesn't guarantee they'll succeed. Greg, you've become kind of a great known investor. Certainly the Bit Digest is well known for trade following there. I got to ask you the double coin question upon intended, is the good and the bad? Name something that's really good about this industry right now that people should know about that might not be familiar and what are some of the things that you're concerned with that you want to see kind of stopped or bad behavior eradicated? Share your perspective on the double coin side of the life of your in the crypto world. Starting with the bad, I think it's education. People don't understand what's going on. We keep on hearing about Mt. Gox, Silk Road. That's in the past. Bitcoin and I use Bitcoin as a general term at times but it is not a, it's a transparent currency. It's safer than a lot of other things out there. People don't understand that and I blame the media a lot for just repeating the story. Maybe it sells papers but just people aren't explaining what's really going on. That's the ad model for you. If it bleeds, it leads and that's a story. But I think people see the ICO thing too happening, right, they go, okay, there's been some scams on the ICO side so I've heard that story and worried about that. I spent some time in the microcap space. I dealt with a lot of more questionable people in microcaps than I deal in crypto. You mean in the traditional, traditional, yeah, pink sheets area. So I think what's different now, I'd love to get your perspective on that. I see at least observation-wise is you have an open-source ethos kind of community model where there's a lot of self-governing going on. Are you seeing the same thing as there are people talking? It's a tight-knit community, still small, growing. Is there like a special self-governing thing going on in the finance world? There's been talk of people kind of organizing, syndicating pooling deals together, which is natural. But how about the self-governing aspect of it? I mean people, the funds or the actual token offerings themselves, that's not something that needs to be addressed. People haven't done it in the same way a typical equity raise would be done. And a lot of the different fund managers, let me back up, I say this is the most open market I've ever seen where everybody's willing to talk to each other to try and share ideas and make this grow. And a lot of the fund managers are now looking at it, saying we need some more governance. There are things going on today, such as in the ICO mark, if you invest in equity, you never thought that a ICO offering may occur originally and is it a liquidity event and what happens? So we're trying to come up with some governance that hasn't existed, but probably needs to be. But to be fair, the companies that we've been lucky enough to invest with are supporting the ideas. Yeah, so there's liquidity going on. It's a new kind of liquidity. What is that liquidity? Where is the liquidity? It's not just a Kickstarter campaign, there's actually liquidity going on. There is liquidity going on and I think we're trying to figure out how to now take equity that is established in the traditional sense. We talked about security tokens, but the companies that are actually have issued ICOs are trying to determine how to give a dividend or some form of equity to the shareholders and that's a new market. Greg, there's the domicile matter to you where they are located. I mean, I've heard things like special purpose vehicles have always been kind of an analogy. I mean, traditionally I would say no, our attorneys would say yes, but if it's a Cayman, we've invested some Cayman companies, Europe, Asian companies, so that really doesn't bother us that much. Again, it's the team and it's not a deal killer. It's definitely not a deal killer. You prefer obviously security choking in the US, Delaware based would make us the happiest. But if they have a real team behind it, if they have real attorneys, real auditors, we'll look past that. And global reach, that's a big factor. Absolutely. How much is global impacting this world? I mean, we're in the US, we're kind of turning into, incredibly, but I think the one area where we need to do a better job is in expanding it. I mean, there are a lot of foreigners at this market today and this event, but it's, we know the US market really well. We don't know what's going on in Asia. We read the trade magazines and that's how we know what's going on. There's efforts now and even consensus announced today, they're having an event next year, or this year in Singapore. We need to have greater reach to share what's going on around the world versus what a few people- You see that as a big issue. I do. We don't see what's going on in China today. We don't see what's going on in Singapore, the Philippines. And that's where a lot of the effort is going on. Well, I think you're right. I think one of the things, and that's where fake news on Facebook, you know, with the whole election here in the US and now outside influence, whether it's terrorist groups or propaganda-based systems, quality of the data is really important with real time. And the data's limited today. I agree. I mean, we totally agree with the same thing. Okay, final thought. Walk away this week from Big Data NY, not Big Data, Blockchain Week NYC. You're a big walk away here this week. What's your takeaway? What do you take home? We went in the right direction. I mean that this is still developing. We're not there yet. There's still a lot of work to be done. But long-term, whether you believe in digital currencies or not today, this is something that central governments are looking at and supporting. Enterprise is getting into it. And this is the future. So we made the right choice. And is it only going to get better, you think? Absolutely. Yeah, I think stability-wise, technically, and the business models are starting to shake out. Just quickly, before I know you've got to go, thank you for your time. Quickly, token economics. Big part of the business model side of it. Your thoughts and reactions to how that's going and how people should start thinking about that if they can meet their criteria for some sort of decentralized business opportunity. So I think it's looking at network usage. I mean, that's really the way we look at it today. The fundamental model doesn't work, or we haven't been able to determine how to do that. But adoption, it's growth. And that's how we focus things and see where it is. Well, congratulations for all the work and all the work you're doing and that continue to do. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thank you very much. Big-time investor on theCUBE here. Big-time investors with entrepreneurs. We had folks from Europe, Lithuania, all over the world here on theCUBE. We're out in the open. This is theCUBE covering Lock Chain Week, New York City. Consensus 2018, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more after this break.