 Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polymath. Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in the Bahamas for Polygon 18, put on by Polymath and Great Capital. I'm here with the CEO of both of those companies who have been gracious enough to let us come in and tap into the bandwidth, tap into the guests and host us here at theCUBE's. Two days of exclusive coverage at Great Guests, Trevor Coverco, CEO of Polymath, really changing the game. Security tokens are really kind of driving great, fast, accelerated innovation, and we have Genevieve Rock-Dekter, who's our CEO of Great Capital, funding it, being part of it. You guys created a great community. Welcome to theCUBE. Great, thanks for having us. So, live coverage, thank you very much. We really appreciate the collaboration with you guys, great guests, but there's something magical going on here. You got a big event, just a couple hundred, 400 people, but it feels like the early days of, when I was in my 20s, the computer revolution, PC, and then the internet came, people are doing deals. This is a very intimate conference. You've got whales, billionaires, you've got entrepreneurs, you've got folks from investment banking companies coming into the sector, young guns, old dudes and gals, like, I mean, this is a melting pot. We have professional athletes, too. Yeah, no, we've really brought together a cluster of different zones, if you will. I come from the world of the Canadian equivalent of Wall Street, Bay Street, and so we've got institutional investors here who don't have wallets, don't have coins, and are learning a bit from the top crypto mines in the world, so it's quite magical. I don't think Trevor and I have slept in 60 days. We literally came up with this idea, it was supposed to be a very intimate setting of 20 or 30 people, and it's ballooned into 600, mostly because Trevor has so many friends and is partnering up with a lot of them on his projects. So yeah, no, it's been a great time so far. And Trevor, and by the way, you're not sleeping because everyone's staying out until two in the morning. It's been great intimate gathering, people are eningling, but they're players, they're not pretenders here. This is a really interesting group. People who are investing their time, it's mission-driven here, people talk about societal change, but there's money-making going on too. You're powering that. I mean, you've got to be exhausted. How do you feel? Hey, I call it the Eye of the Hurricane, and this was like, if you weren't here this week in crypto, you're just not relevant. This is where you wanted to be. And it's all about the attendees. The caliber of the people that came just blew me away, very humbled by the quality of people that we had here. And it's no surprise when you have a beautiful venue, like here in Bahamas and at Bahamar and amazing people, good things are going to happen. Community is a very important formula for success in this world. We've seen this movie before in open-source software. Started as a Tier 2 citizen now, it runs the software's Tier 1 class capabilities. Cloud computing has been amazing growth. Crypto, same model. It's emerged as the money, the value store, technology, enablement. What are you guys seeing as the pattern? Because obviously people recognize that, certainly in the industry. If you don't, then you're going to miss the boat on this. Most people who don't get it will probably miss the boat. But a lot of people are getting it. What is the pattern that's happening? Why is this moving so fast? Is it the wealth creation? Is it the money making? Is it the technology enablement? What's your guys' reaction to the why? What's the why here? I think it's a convergence of a lot of mega trends going on right now, both on the technology and on the regulatory side. If you look at the exciting sexiness of having these liquid tokens that kind of feel like stocks, but are also utilities in the sense that you can use them to do certain things with, that's a big component of it. But I think another reason is just, there's a lot of strangling going on in the capital markets where you have a lot less companies going public. You have a lot more barriers to raise capital in a lot of ways. And this is kind of like light peeking through the hole where you have new ways, reimagined ways to raise capital. So we're seeing just a convergence of a lot of mega trends, I think. And a lot of pros are coming in, and they're either young pros at a learning and growing with this trend, the young guns I call them. And then you've got pros coming in from other industries, whether it's banking and other sectors. This is interesting. So the question I have before you is the security token. This has been a big deal. A lot of companies have seen the ICOs on the utility side, certainly the SEC in the U.S. has been really sending signals pretty radically like, hey, don't pump and dump, but I don't want to see any and watch that advisor stuff. And oh, by the way, show me the utility, how we test, et cetera, et cetera. That the startups who have to build the future, we're trying to rush a utility token out, now have a safe harbor in the security token and existing companies can raise money with the security token that are tokenizing a real business. This is a pretty important point. Can you guys share some color commentary on that dynamic? Do you agree with it? And then if you do, share some color around this whole trend. Yeah, I mean, right now, if you look today, there's two major categories of tokens as you alluded to. You have utilities on the one hand and securities on the other hand. And the distribution right now is extremely one-sided. Security tokens are dominated by utilities. Utilities like Bitcoin, Ether, Ripple, they make up 99% of the total market cap of all coins. So where does that leave us? Well, it depends. Today, it means all the action is in utilities. There's more upside, they're faster, they're simpler. I'm very bullish on utilities. But what's even more exciting to me is the mega trend, the tsunami of real world financial assets migrating to the blockchain. And that's what I see as the next kind of part two of the second wave of crypto is real world tangible assets, tokenizing and migrating to the blockchain. And you know what? I think the SEC kind of gets a bad rep in all this, but the rules are there for a certain reason to protect investors. And I think that this industry is in the beginning. It's a nascent. And, you know, which Trevor's company, Polymath, introducing the securities token, literally I think you coined the word, it's growing up. It's an industry that has to, it's going to have some red tape too, right? And I think working with the regulators and Trevor's company has done that, befriend them and be open source about it and communal. And there's certain aspects about the regulations that are not good and we don't want communication and the communities that have formed. Telegram's a great example of this. So there's a lot of these chat rooms that I'm in and literally people are sharing information about companies and teaching each other and learning and that's great. But you know, there is an asymmetry of information sharing that at some point, you know, we have to rein that in, but we don't want to lose the positive aspects. You could choke the innovation if you put too much regulatory on it, the innovation won't grow. So you have to have a balance. I mean, if you're saying, right, I mean, you got to get through it, but redefine a new era. And the SEC is not in the US has not been too bad. I think they're just sending a signal and I think they're not, they could be hardcore. They could be harder core, I think than they are, but thank God they're not. I mean, you want to let these startups figure out what to do. All right, so I got to talk about liquidity and funding. So Great Capital, you guys are involved in investments. Also, you're enabling partnerships at Polymath. A lot of people, you're connecting into your system. We had one on earlier. The funding environment, certainly a lot of investors are here. I talked to probably at least a dozen actively investing, different profile, make-up, some go hardcore protocol under the hood, some are more business looking at decentralized apps. Make-up, persona, trends, can you share? You know that world. Eight months ago, so I'm from Toronto. I'm from Canada. Eight months ago, there was literally no publicly traded blockchain company in Canada. And now there's probably, I think, 70 new one every day, name change, but yeah, there's been a lot of equity raised. There's two companies about to go public, actually, in Canada, Hadid Mining, who's their sponsor here at the conference, and Galaxy Digital, Michael Novakratz's company. And I think between the two of them, they've raised almost half a billion dollars in capital, or market capitalization when they go public, probably about 250 million in actual capital. But that's huge. Those checks were written not by just high net worth people, but actual institutions. And those people that are here today, they're good with writing equity checks, ICO checks, and that is going to come. And I think the securities token aspect of it will give them a lot of comfort that they can write checks in those kinds of things. How's Great Capital? Talk to me about Great Capital. Yeah, so very simply, we introduce companies to capital holders, investors. So I was a portfolio manager for nine years. And I like to say I was in the no game for nine years, because when you're portfolio manager- Now you're in the yes game. Yeah, you're goal tending. You're like trying not to let bad deals in, and that wasn't really conducive to my personality. And now I'm in the yes game, I like this company, I'm going to invest in it, but I'm going to introduce them to these other capital holders, and it's a positive experience. How much is community involved in what you do? Because we're seeing obviously the pattern of kind of paying it forward, which is great culture, but also people are, help scratch my back, I'll scratch your back on deal flow and also participation. Seems to be a big part of the current rules of engagement or implied protocol. Is that going on? Yeah, look, I think this is a very collaborative ecosystem, and it has to be because by definition, open source communities are powered by the people that make it up in you, and it's all about volunteering, about helping, about giving back, and it's one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about this space. I think you should probably talk about your fun that you just announced that you're launching, and it probably plays into, so Trevor's network is global, it's extensive, he has deal flow coming at him all the time. So what's the news? Yeah, and what do you do with that deal flow? You hold the news back, you got a bit of a brain freeze. So many announcements out there. Yeah, we're doing a lot of exciting initiatives right now, and part of what I'm excited about, and also slightly intimidated by, is that there's just so much opportunity, there's so many key components of this new infrastructure that need to get built that aren't in existence yet, that it's easy to get carried away, but for me it's about prioritizing and finding out the real kind of high leverage initiatives that are going to help us achieve our goals. And so you're putting a fund together to invest in the ecosystem, or is it for financial investment? Is it as a crypto fund, or is it like, what's going on? One of those initiatives is a securities token focused venture fund. This would be the first one that I know of that exists, and it would be to help our ecosystem get financed, and that's a big component of this marketplace is capital. It's investors, it's demand, and we just want to channel all that to the best deals. So, the ecosystem's important to you guys. Polymath, that your ecosystem is strategic, right? Yes. How do you see that playing out? What's your vision? What do you hope to unfold in your ecosystem? Obviously, people connect in the variety of things that you can help people with, and vice versa. How do you see your ecosystem rolling out? Well, part of it is I want an arms length organization that has its own kind of mandate, its own charter. And the way I look at it is if you look at Ethereum, which I'm very familiar with, being from Toronto, and knowing this guy's kind of since day one, they opted not to do a venture fund, but if they had, it would have been literally the most high performance fund ever in history. Yeah, just mathematically speaking. So, we don't want to lose out on an opportunity like that, and in the process of building another potentially profitable entity, we want to also see the ecosystem and help projects that we're excited about, get the first check. Who are you looking for in your ecosystem? Is it developers? Because I would see Ethereum, we're Ethereum developers, we are at ERC20 token. We love it, it's easy to work with, smart contracts are easy to work with. So, it's clearly a developer market on that side. Are you guys looking for the same? Is it different kind of partner? What are some of the partner makeup that you hope to attract in case they're watching now? Why should they work with you? Who are they? Describe the persona of your ideal ecosystem partners or partner. For better or worse, we have a lot of verticals that we have to build communities with it. So, those are the business community. We want leaders, we want action takers, we want people that can structure deals. We want legal professionals. That's a big component of the security token landscape is the regulation, is the exemptions and the offerings and the memorandums and all the legal stuff. So, we need a legal community and then finally and most importantly, we need a developer community. We need multi-faceted profile basically. Just like any other decentralized projects. So, that's what my full time job is when people ask me, is building communities within our broader community? Well, I can tell you give you props one because I know you're super busy and drinking from the firehose at all levels and certainly the event's been great. I think a breath of fresh air, a sigh of relief from the world when we see entrepreneur, at least from the perspective of the entrepreneurs and the markets, is that security token. Finally, someone just made a decision. Let's just use the security token as a way to get the funding and get set up and not foreclose the option for, say, a utility token. Why Russian force a utility needs to be built out and a lot of these utilities have really missed out because they had to run so fast to write code funded by a utility that has a test. So, I think you guys are doing a great service. I want to give you props for that. Thank you. Yeah, I would, whole heartedly agree. I think a lot of these so-called utility coins are actually securities masquerading as utilities. Yeah. And I think that's the game everyone kind of is realizing. Okay, great, now you have the platform. So, what's the update on the platform, the company? Take a quick minute to explain to the folks about polymath. We are inundated and overwhelmed with demand right now and we have thousands, tens of thousands of signups on both the investor and issuer side. And kind of my goal right now on a day-to-day basis is to scale our onboarding process so we can take all of these issuers and give them a secure and robust token that they can fundraise on top of. And we are in the process of availing our application layer that's going to make that kind of self-serve process exciting and scalable. Well, congratulations and great capital. Genevieve, thanks for connecting, great to connect with you. Shout out to Bill Tye who made it happen. It was for Bill Tye and Genevieve. The queue would not be here and of course, polymath supporting us as well has been great. So thank you very much. Thank you. Great event and we'll keep on following you guys and thanks for coming on, Sharon. Success, final question. Craziest thing that's happened here this week, one, two, three, things that might have won. Craziest thing that's happened. It could be good, bad, or ugly. Did someone fall in the pool? Oh, I got it. Did someone found on the beach, share a funny story or two? We found a mermaid. There was a mermaid, yeah. It's a real live mermaid. We actually found a mermaid and we put her in the pool for the cocktail event. And we almost put Trevor in the pool as a merman, just to balance it out. Merman, we're a mermaid neutral company. Merman as well. And geez, what else? We had a friend of ours decided to get the jacuzzi sweet at the top floor and I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Scarface. There was a lot of opulence going on, which was a little more than I bargained for. And then Jen Villa being the celebrity that she is. What do you think? I mean, there's been so much. Like we've had literally 13 side events within the conference. So drinking from a fire hose is an understatement, I would say. There's still more to do. We're going to command a pool party now. So maybe, I think there's going to be a bull there. Stampede security bull there. Oh geez, is there? Yeah. And maybe the SCC, no. Just kidding. Well hey, congratulations. You guys doing a great service in the industry and I love how you brought together the inner circle, major players. Really, the community really admires that, so appreciate your help. Okay, this is Cube Live, covers here in the Bahamas. More interviews after this short break. Stay with us.