 Oh, now we're live. Hey. What's up, guys? All right, guys, we have a really, really good episode for you today. We've got two amazing guests. And let me first tell you guys our bios. We have Jack Leonard. He's an Irish entrepreneur, product designer and developer. He likes to distill information and data into powerful heuristic stories. He's passionate about information and operational security, intuitive design, and simplifying complexity. His work has been featured in Wired Forbes magazine, Mattermark, and the Irish Times. He's an IDI and AIGA accredited designer among the youngest recipients of the multiple design awards. Now, our second guest is We Chi Men, which comes from startup background. She dropped out of university to start her own business. She accepted on Ireland's national accelerator program, Enterprise Ireland. And she's coming from the product development. She moved on to invent management side. And she's actively involved with startup community of being a mentor and organizing hack-thons with TechStar. She hosts Providence events in different cities around the world, which aims to teach teams from startups and enterprise about building blockchain technologies. She's passionate about innovation, education, and diversity. Guys and gals, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thanks for having us, Amir. It's my pleasure. We've been talking back and forth a little bit about an event that you guys are planning out. And it's pretty exciting. And we will get into that a little later in the show. But what I'd like to do to start off with the show is, in your journey, how did you guys come across both, A, I would say Bitcoin, because I say, I think most people come across Bitcoin first. And B, how did you get involved in the blockchain space? Jack, do you want to go first? Yeah, so I mean, I have an easy answer to this. And I think my biggest, the biggest part of design in my past was when I was working with a security startup. So I actually used to work with security analytics, design for security analytics, this, like, deep level of information-based design. And one of the similarities that we see through designing for security and designing for blockchain is that there's an inherent complexity, you know, and that complexity needs to be instilled. And the same problem is ultimately presented across the two industries. And I think as blockchain distills itself down from an emerging technology to a technology that is tangible and ultimately human, then there is a huge design problem there. And it's the same design problem we encounter in the information security world. So where I fell into, where I fell into blockchain was really in taking complex products and taking non-tangible, unintuitive products and making them intuitive through a strong user experience-led position on them. So I think we talk about design thinking, product design strategy, and that's really where I fell into blockchain. Yeah, and I guess for me it was working as a producer for a tech conference. I was looking for wristbands that could essentially pass data from one attendee to another. And I came across the startup festi that was featured in Silicon Republic at that time here in Ireland on my LinkedIn and reached out to the CEO, Graeme de Barra, found out a little bit more about what they're doing with their wristbands. And it turns out to be a wristband for festival goers where you can load it with cryptocurrencies and you tap and pay with your wristband. So it ended up with them poaching me onto their team to do their events in blockchain. And then I guess my skill is in event management. So not knowing about the industry of blockchain itself, it was a lot for me to learn. And over the past few months, it's been a great journey traveling to different cities and meeting people in the industry and seeing what projects are out there. Okay, thank you guys for sharing. So even the last like a year and a half has been interesting in space. We've had many new so-called Ethereum pillars come out and we have interesting launch nets procedures going on such as EOS. That's a very fascinating case study. And we have all these different people screaming out there. The blockchain is going to solve everything and they're trying to shut down this technology or I would say technology chasing the problem is the other way around. Where do you guys currently see the industry at? Like, you know, you guys are coming from a European perspective. Do you see Europe a little bit different from the rest of the world? Or like, what's your current take on the whole space? I think, I mean, my perspective is less localized and more generalized. And I think that because blockchain is an emerging technology, right now when we look at the ICO landscape, when we look at the pre-sale landscape, we're looking at a very marketing heavy, much less product-focused dynamic where we're kind of making people want things. And I think as we move towards blockchain, not being an emerging technology, but being a stable technology, we're moving towards this product design-led kind of dynamic of making things people want. So we're almost flipping the industry on its head and right now we're in a really exciting place because we're right in the middle of that. And I think that divergence, that kind of transcendence of state is where blockchain is really starting to become interesting. It's something that we saw with artificial intelligence and machine learning many, many years ago. Yeah, it's like the new buzzword now for the past year and continuing on. And we see different projects arising in this space, like Jack said, that are very focused on the marketing and business side of things, especially with raising investments with ICOs without having a product built. And that's something provenance events is aiming to change, is focusing on the building of blockchain technology and building of a product with startups and enterprises who are looking into the system at the moment and how to do it. Hey, let's dive into provenance. What was your ethos for that? Like what was your initial reasoning? I need to create an event organization like this. Yeah, of course. So I've attended since DevCon Tree in Cancun, coming on board with FESTI. I've attended other events in the industry and I've noticed the trends of events that are focused on getting investment or how to do marketing more on the business side of things and coming from a business path and failing from two years of working on the startup to do market validation and research. And I understand how hard it is to raise investment without actually having a product. So these Dell platforms that are now available for people to raise funds easily, they take advantage of it. So you see a lot of products now that are out and they said they're raising a token sale or an ICO or whatever. They don't even have a platform or a product built and I don't think that is right, especially when an investor or someone who will put money into your business wants to use your product and that's why they would invest in it. So what's your goal with the provenance summit? Like what's your main MMO? What would you like people to take away from this? So a lot of the events are heavily focused on one ecosystem, for example, say Ethereum, like with DevCon or AdCon that we attend. My goal is to have a collaboration of these startups and enterprises who have built a product in the industry to teach especially developers but also project managers and designers about the product development cycle of actually building on top of this technology. And another important aspect that we need to look at with this is bringing in government officials to come and talk about regulation and compliance. So where I see provenance events is that it's a collaboration of good projects in the blockchain space and teaching developers how to code on top of the platform or learn more about Jack. We lost you. There seemed to come out there for a second. Yeah. What was the last part that you got? About bringing the platform to developers teaching them to code. Yeah. So it's a collaboration of good projects in the industry. It was essentially what I was saying. Sure. Well, let me ask you this. Because you want to reach out to the government. Someone started talking with them. Where do you see regulation going in this industry? Because you have all these people who are leaving, let's say, westernized nations like Canada, United States, Australia, and they're banning them and they're going after. They're going into jurisdictions, maybe like Gibraltar or Malta, so they can start non-incredited. So what's your view take? Do you think we're going to continue, we're going to see a proliferation of that or I think more and more of these new ICOs are going to be in the regulated camp where the actual token represents some intrinsic value within that startup? I think, I mean my perspective, oh sorry, do continue reaching these. No, go for it Jack. I think my perspective on this is that we will have to come to a stage where security back tokens are going to need to be regulated. And they are loosely regulated right now under the purview of the SEC because they're a security backed, but I think we need explicit regulation around security backed tokens and this is something that we're actually beginning to merge or see emerge in Switzerland and the European Union, it's something that I think is just on the brink of happening. But until we get to that stage where we have black and white regulations around token sales, around raising money through ICOs, that industry is under a lot of money already. But I do think that the European Union has obviously welcomed blockchain a whole lot more than the United States has a whole lot more than the rest of the Western world. And I think really from an industry, from an industry regulation standpoint, the EU is probably having its game here, but I do think that it's only a matter of years before we see a coherent regulation. But I'm sure we should have more to say on that than I do. Do we lose her? Oh, we lost her. Okay. I'll kind of chime in. For the security regulation aspect, it's a fascinating idea. My only worry when it comes to security tokens is it stays the status quo as is, which defeats the whole purpose. As is is fun. I can get incorporated paper. I can make my shares. It costs me almost nothing. It's fast, easy. I don't have to worry about security issues. I have to worry about what's happening with a public key or private key, et cetera. So if people are trying to think that the security token will just replace the status quo, we're going the wrong direction. There has to be an evolutionary process of this where we have to make it 100x better than the current system that we have. I completely agree. I think too many people focus on this concept of trying to be better, but what we're really trying to do with blockchain is trying to be different. And I think, yeah, I do agree. I think that we should really stay away from trying to use old methodologies to regulate new industries. And the kind of danger here is that because there is so much fear on certainly endowed around blockchain, the governments will just regulate this because they're afraid of it. What we really need to see is we need to share a certificate on a blockchain. We need to see ETFs on a blockchain. I was involved in an ICO at the moment. We're discussing this idea about smart, contract-powered ETFs. So essentially security-backed tokens but using new methodology. Fortunately, smart contracts aren't that advanced yet that we can actually do this. But that is something that I would like to see in the future where we're using blockchain rather than using it as a catalyst. We're actually using it as a medium. And as you said yourself, that's the direction that we're going to have to take. Yeah, because the whole point of the technology in the first place is the marketization of accessibility. And it's funny where, you know, some of these new ICOs are coming out and they require you to do a hundred times more KYC than me investing in a regular startup sometimes. It's like, it feeds the whole purpose. I'm like, are you guys are going backwards? Yeah, it's a whole paper's-please approach which isn't sustainable. And I think, as you said, I think we're in a height of ambiguity right now. Until we get back in white legislation, you're kind of on two ends of the spectrum. You either do very little KYC or you can do as much KYC as possible. There's no middle ground because you're either playing it safe or not. And especially in the West right now, it's intrinsically important to play it safe. What do you think, currently, from a technological standpoint, like how long out do you think we are from seeing... Or this question should ask, how long out do you think we are from when people don't even know they're using blockchain as a backbone? I think we're very close to that and I would say that for two reasons. Number one, I think there's a number of really exciting companies that are bringing blockchain to day-to-day transactions in a much more subtle and a much more user-experience-friendly way. And I mean, I'm totally biased but this is something that we're doing at FESTI is we bring day-to-day transactions to consumers and they don't even know they're using blockchain and we interface with bar owners, with festival owners and they're surprised. I mean, they never thought that they would accept Bitcoin for a point of view. But we're doing this and it's subtle but it's pervasive and it's really important. And I think as the industry progresses, we're starting to see a whole lot more of that. But I think... I do think also that that just isn't there yet because right now with the standpoint of the industry where 80, 70, 60% of the industry is ICOing on very little products, no products or all of our products that are two, five, ten years away. And I think there's very few products that are actually going on this kind of user-focused, user-first functionality-focused directive. And I think that until we get to the state of the industry where we're really just focused on users and non-functional products and I don't think that we're going to make much progress. I would say whoever that I'm quite excited about Cardano at the moment and Cardano's kind of application feasibility as well. What do you think about that? I'm not 100% sold. Everyone's trying to dappify everything. Everything needs to be decentralized. Everything in the future is going to dapp. I don't see the unique selling proposition. What's better? I completely agree with you. I think right now there's just a surge of dapp because all of these... I mean, EOS is a very ironic one to name here because EOS raked up so much cash that they're just throwing money at developers to build dapps. I think there's a surge right now. It's like the Gold Rush in California where there's a lot of snake or a gun blend. So we're kind of ending up with a load of dapps. We've dapps for everything. We've dapps for hiring applications. We've dapps for little things that don't actually need blockchain at all. And I think when we talk about product design we essentially talk about three things. You talk about from an operations perspective you talk about the business or the ROI feasibility of a product. From the development perspective you talk about the technical feasibility. And then from the product and the user perspective we talk about desirability. But most of the products that are going out there don't even think about desirability. So they're just thinking about business feasibility and technical feasibility. But no one really wants all these dapps. Do we really consider does blockchain add to this or are we simply slapping it on because it sounds good. It's the same thing that we see in artificial intelligence. I mean the amount of AI fuels startups that were founded in the last 10 years most of them don't even need AI to do what they do. They can do what they do without AI. So I think it's the same problem when you have a blockchain. It's just this kind of buzzword emerging technology. But that being said I do think that there are there are some applications of blockchain using dapps that will make things easier around. Say for example identity verification there's a whole load of applications that do work very well. So I'm switching back to Providence. What's your guys plan with that? I know you've been working on an event coming up in the fall of this year. Yes. So the conference is in South Korea on November 20th. It's one of our it's actually our biggest event. So so far in the year we've been doing community made-ups developer workshops and then our plan is to go on and do more events in this space and also do startup hackathons. So this event is about bringing everybody together in terms of the teams in startups and enterprises from three different perspectives design development and project management. So tie bringing them together there at the event and helping them learn about the different aspects of the product development cycle that Jack has explained and how they can work together from the very start when they're trying to build a build an idea in the blockchain space and whether they need the technology or not. What I like about it you guys are taking a very agnostic approach as opposed to a specific approach and kind of bringing all the camps different platforms together different people within the platforms both developers designers project managers etc. and kind of really flattening everything out to see exactly where we are and how we can move forward. Yeah I mean I think I think this is this is an interesting topic and certainly a pardon one I don't know if you know but I'm pleased and how I was just launched a crypto phone. It being that they believe and I know there's a number of investors Jason Katakanis who's a personal friend of mine who kind of share the same opinion is that blockchain as a technology is very very exciting we're kind of seeing this same thing like this internet before the internet perspective but it's all about betting the right horse and I don't think I would be very cautious on betting any interesting technologies at the moment when you talk about Ethereum people are really excited about Ethereum but Ethereum isn't as successful as people think it is or isn't especially from the development perspective and that's why I mean that's why we're talking about Cardano I think Cardano do things very well but nothing really has kind of broken up earlier we really just feel the blockchain technology down to a very simple and very tangible human use case and so I do think it is important at this stage in the development of blockchain technologies to be someone agnostic and to evangelise the technology as a whole and a specific facet of that technology Yeah it's exciting as well doing it in Korea because the mayor of Seoul has actually been re-elected for the third term this month and he's actually one of the person in the government in the government of Korea to embrace blockchain technology and they're thinking of looking into doing their own coin for their citizens there so my plan is to invite him at the conference to talk about how blockchain technology can impact citizens if they were to implement the technology into their current system because one of the things that I do see in their government that is working really well is their transparency so I sent them an email inviting the governor to come and speak that my conference in resmail was public on their website and my Korean colleague on my team told me this so when I did more research onto their website I realised all the correspondence and emails that they have received are actually public so the citizens of Korea can see the work that the government is putting in and that is something that's really interesting and can be applied to with blockchain technology is this transparency of governance Yeah, I think a lot of the government processes should be transparent and a lot of it can be automated too Yeah, that's true, you don't need half the jobs there No, not at all, it's ridiculous, right? I got my passport renewed, I don't know, it was a while ago and I wanted to get the 10-year one because I never want to go back and I'm literally a person sitting there I don't understand why this person is here I don't get it, it hurts my head this person is probably getting paid like 70,000 Canadian full benefits, unionised and all they do is stamp something I'm like this is crazy and why do I have to spend half my day getting a passport, why can't I just go online and log in Astonia has, you can get your passport down in Astonia I think they're trying to put it on the blockchain A lot of things can be much more efficient Yeah, I've met Casper Korg just a few times the managing director of the EU residency program in Astonia I did invite him to the conference to come and speak on how his technology has helped citizens in Astonia and abroad outside of Astonia to make things like applications easier but unfortunately he's busy at that time and it's too far for him to travel so he said no I was quite disappointed but hopefully I can find another country that is like Astonia who has adopted well with this technology and moving with the trends I suppose So if people want to get involved with Providence in this event in the fall, how can I get involved with you guys? Yeah, so our website is up there is form, contact forms on the website to apply for speaking, partnering or any partnership opportunities that we can talk about in terms of brand and marketing recruitment of developers or even onboarding of new users So the companies that we tend to partner with or look at is companies in this space that do have a product or enterprises in this space like Deloitte or PWC who do consulting work with other businesses and then in terms of the companies it could be, so you could have a blockchain product or it could be an exchange it could be a wallet, I don't know just anything with a product Once you have a product and I can see that it works we're happy to work with you Fantastic, and Blockheeks will be there we'll be helping you guys out, we're excited about that Definitely, I... When you reached out and we were talking and you're laying out the ideation of the event, I'm like this is something that I wanted to be doing I'm like this is fucking amazing I'm really glad to have you I really like the educational aspect of Blockheeks, how you're teaching other people online from anywhere in the world, that's the thing with online courses that I really like is that it's not limited to just people with money, anybody can just join and learn more to upskill themselves and Blockheeks is really cool to be doing that in this space of blockchain so that's really cool People want to check out what's that again so they can go through it It's provenance.events So P-O-O-V-E-N-A-N-C-E.events Cool, well thank you guys for coming on I appreciate it and excited for the event Thanks Amir for having us We're excited to work together Likewise, take care guys You too, bye