 From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here, exclusively at the Block Party, at the crypto houses part of Blockchain Week in New York City, Blockchain New York. Also, Consensus 2018 is having a variety of other events. Here with Alan Rothstein is the co-founder of Strategic Coin, also managing partner at Decentralized Ventures. Hey, welcome to this CUBE conversation, Night Party here, exclusive event here in East Village. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, thank you for having me. So, co-founder of Strategic Coins doing some great work in the maturization of this sector, still in the first and a half inning, bottom of the first, someone say, but also Decentralized Ventures, which I love the name because, what does it mean? I mean, it means crypto, token economics, Blockchain, brand new field. Exactly. Emerging very, very fast. And it's global, so it's decentralized. Right now we're in Malta, but we're going all over the world, Estonia, other countries, because that's where this market is going. So for the folks that don't really grok all that, how would you describe it to your friend? He says, hey Alan, what is this all about? What is this decentralized tokens, ICOs, Blockchain? Bottom line me, what's going on? Blockchain is probably the first really global business model that is not controlled by anybody, by any single government, by any single company, by any single industry. It disintermediates all of these industries that are filled with middlemen and which prevent end users and peers from interacting with each other. I was told by some guy I was interviewing in Puerto Rico, you know, the United States just replaced people with all the money went to, because that's where the entrepreneurial energy was and Europe was the entity that was slow, antiquated, all these rules, hard to make money, hard to be a capitalist. He goes, now the United States is turning into Europe. We are the new Europe in the U.S. and all the money is going outside the U.S. into massively growing middle class economies outside the United States and the perfect storm is the crypto token economic model where money is just running hard. Your thoughts on that comedy reaction? I think it's exactly right and more importantly, the roadblocks being set up by the U.S. government are not only sending the economics to other places in the world, they're actually sending the technologies to other places in the world. So I've lived in New York all of my life. I've been on Wall Street. The reason I'm setting up in Malta is exactly for that reason because it is very difficult to work in blockchain and crypto here. We don't know what the definition is. The IRS says that cryptos are property. SEC says that they're securities. CFTC says they're commodities. The Fed says they're currencies. So you have four different agencies claiming jurisdiction and you don't know who to report to. You don't know what the rules are. And all the service providers like law firms and advisories, accountants, they all come to a screeching hall because they don't know what to say. They don't want to get sued. Entrepreneurs give up. This stifles innovation. It stifles innovation, but more importantly, it's really sending potentially the most important technology overseas. And you have other jurisdictions that are grabbing at it. You've got Bermuda. I work with the government in Malta and they are setting up what they call Blockchain Island. They are setting up a crypto-friendly regime. This will be the first EU country with a full set of regulations. It's not that the regulations are easy but you know what the rules are. And at the moment, that's the only EU country that has all these regulations. I mean GDPR is happening this month. I still think that's a shit show in my opinion but we'll see what happens there. This is all these regulations. I get it, but I think as the economy starts to go global, it's a competitive opportunity for a country and nation, to be a digital nation and do it right. And also people need advisory. What the hell is the playbook? You can't just go to the manual. There's no manual for this. There's no playbook. Strategic coin, decentralized ventures, other leaders in the community in the finance side are pushing the envelope to try to lead by example because as you just said, things are pretty much sideways from a regulatory standpoint. Yeah, that's exactly what we do. So strategic coin, we help with the jurisdiction. We help with the regulations. We try and direct companies to understand what they're dealing with. We do deep research for companies. We help them work on the corporate side. We really help them navigate some very difficult and choppy waters. What's the biggest challenge that companies have right now? Is it domicile? Is it token economics? The biggest challenges are two. One is regulation, knowing what the rules are. Second one is banking. Without regulations, bank will not allow companies who are getting funding from crypto to open accounts and accept funds. Once regulation is in place, the banks understand that they're no longer at risk of violating laws because they know what the laws are. So banking in particular is a real issue around the world. What's the overseas outlook? Obviously, age is booming. There's been some sound here and there. Shut it down, build it out. Other countries saying, we're going to be the first global Wall Street clearing out crypto, the fiat, moving it around. This is all up in the air. Who's leading and who's not leading? Right now, obviously, Malta is leading because they're the first EU country with a full set of regulations that they've proposed. Singapore is looking to do this. South Korea is starting to now turn. They were looking to shut down exchanges and they're actually now starting to realize that they're just sending business and technology overseas. What's your story these days? What are you working on? What did you do last week? You fly to South Korea? I mean, are you traveling a lot? What kind of, what are you working on? What are some of the things? Give me a little taste of how your life goes every day. What are some of the challenges, opportunities you're working on? Well, one of the challenges is trying to filter all the business that is actually coming to us with strategic coin and with decentralized ventures. We can't handle the business because we have a lot of the answers that people are looking for. You need to hire people? We are continuing to hire people. What's important with strategic coin is that we're hiring Wall Street people. We're hiring veterans in the industry. Many of these companies out there now are 25 year old kids, mom and pops who really don't even understand what they're looking at. You know, baseball, the old expression of five tool player, what's the equivalent crypto young gun that you look for? What are the attributes that you look for in a candidate that really can handle the pressure? I mean, it's not pressure, it's just more of the pace. It's you need smarts, you gotta have energy, you gotta have the integrity, but also you gotta be able to push the envelope. They have to work about 35 hours a day. They have to have a capacity to really continue to learn very, very quickly to understand, to take direction, and to really understand what this business looks like and where it's going. And good money making opportunities as well. The tremendous money making opportunities as there are in any new industry, in any new technology. Before we came on camera, we were talking about your background, some of the things you've done entrepreneurially and also growth. What's your assessment of the current wave we're in compared? You've seen many waves. Of all the waves, compared, contrast, order of magnitude, this wave versus other waves. What's interesting about this wave is there have been paradigm changes in industry technology and they've taken generations. So an understanding of how that change happens generally is from textbooks. You've had the industrial revolution and the first software revolution. In these generations for people my age or people in their 40s, you've seen the software revolution. Then you've seen the internet revolution and now you're seeing this. So you actually have experience in seeing how these play out. And that's part of the reason that this technology is moving so quickly. I know how it's going to go. I've seen how it's going because I was involved in the internet. Software economics, you've seen software economics before. You know what it looks like. I've seen software and I've seen internet. And with blockchain, we know blockchain is here. We don't know what use it's going to be. We know a lot of these companies are going to fall by the wayside. We know a lot of these companies set up a mob and pop will disappear and we know a lot of these ICOs will be acquired by bigger ICOs who have more experience. Well, you know, just to add two things to that list of awesome commentaries, add in open source software and cloud computing and you got the perfect storm. On top of what you just said, that is the magic. All right, so I got to ask you for the young people out there, what's your advice? Or if you could talk to your 22 year old self right now, what would you say to yourself as walking into this new landscape that's exploding with opportunity change in all theaters? Man, that's a really good question. I would say to try and find mentors, learn from industry veterans as opposed to setting up your own shop, setting up your own ICO, thinking you're going to raise $50 million and you're going to conquer the world by the time you're 25. Alan, thanks for coming on, Chair. I know you had a big party. We're having a great time here. Thanks for taking a minute out of the networking and schmoozing and to come in and speak with us on theCUBE here in New York City. All right, John, John Furrier, we're here at Blockchain Week, New York. Of course, theCUBE's continuing coverage. Go to SiliconANGLE.com, theCUBE.net for all the videos, we'll be at Consensus 2018 all week. More coverage on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE.net. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.