 Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Coin Agenda, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. Hello everyone, welcome to SpecialCube Coverage. We're here, exclusive conversations at Coin Agenda. We're just at Blockchain Unbound. Puerto Rico is where we're at and we're covering all the trends and latest news and analysis in cryptocurrency, blockchain, decentralized internet. My next guest is Dan Bates, founder and president of Impact PPA. Dan, great to have you on. Thanks, John, glad to be here. So one of the trends I'm noticing is a couple things. Flight to quality on the ICO side, first of all, a lot of the deadwoods being pushed aside by the community, still some stuff out there that might not have a business model, but good entrepreneurs doing it. Then you start to see real use cases emerging. I interviewed Green Chain, they're disrupting how produce grains move in between suppliers and buyers, and other impact mission-driven stuff. How do you solve the energy crisis? We're in Puerto Rico, the grid's half alive, everyone knows that. You're doing something really compelling. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing because you have a token up and running. What are you guys doing? What's your value proposition? So what we do is we've created a system by which you can now have renewable energy delivered to developing nations and we've taken the intermediaries out of the equation whereby the World Bank historically would take years to fund a project. If they would do that, their big trepidation was how do you get paid at the end of the day? So what we've done is we've come up with a solution that allows for generation of energy, using renewables and track it all the way through to a payment rail, if you will, that a user can now prepay for energy on their mobile device. It's M-Pesa. If you know what M-Pesa is in Africa, 70% of the transactions in Africa are done on a mobile device. We are decentralized M-Pesa for energy. So okay, mobile app, I get everyone can think about Uber and all the benefits that Airbnb brings, you just have stuff happen. Talk about what's under the hood, what's actually disruptive about what you guys are doing, give some specifics, because you're tying in devices that are generating energy, you're using the blockchain, you have a token, how's it all work? Okay, so what we do is in the ability to fund a project, getting the World Bank, getting USAID out of the equation, what we now allow for is the community. Typically we are very liberal or tend to skew liberal, right? We actually believe that climate change is real and we want to help support these economies and these new types of, you know, betterment of the planet, right? But we don't expect that to be a philanthropic effort. So people will buy the M-PAC token, which will fund projects that will then create what we're doing right now, it's an ERC-20 of what we call a gen credit, not a secondary token, it's a credit that allows people to access the ledger. So a guy will go down to the store just like he does right now and he charges his phones with more minutes or with a data plan, it's fiat to a plan, a digital currency, we do the same thing. It's now fiat into a gen credit, we call it, that allows them to transact with the blockchain so we get identity, we get reputation, we get trust and honesty about those transactions using the blockchain. Okay, so where does the energy come from? Because the energy sources now are interesting because you're seeing people do amazing things, solar panels, wind farming, and they see an Asia top of the apartment buildings with a lot of wind. How do they move that power into the market? All right, so what we do is, right now we're using wind and solar, rooftop or microgrid. For instance, we just finished a project in Haiti doing 150 kilowatts for a town called Lesewa. They haven't had power in two years, Hurricane Matthew, prior to Hurricane Maria coming through Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico's in a similar situation, right? So we created this microgrid using their existing infrastructure like transmission and distribution. Then we put smart meters on the home. That smart meter connects to the blockchain and now people can have power at their homes pay as you go. Awesome, so what have been some of the hurdles you guys have had? Obviously to me it's a no brain or energy being tokenized, so that makes such sense. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Obviously there's regulatory issues that are incumbent, legacy, dogma, or and or specific legislation, paperwork, whatnot. Where's the efficiencies being automated away with the blockchain? And what are some of the hurdles that you guys have gone through to get to this point? All right, so we work in the emerging economies of the world. Oftentimes there is not the kind of regulation that we have in the US or in the developed world, like the EU or something like that. So when we go out to remote places like Kenya and Ethiopia, Latin America, wherever it might be, we don't have some of the issues that you would have if you were trying to set this up in Palo Alto. I don't have to worry about PG&E and interconnect and an offtake and all that. So what we do is that we'll go out, set up a microgrid. We're giving power to people who may have never had it before. So all those regulatory layers are stripped away. They're grateful for it. They can they pay for it? Yes, they can't afford to go buy a solar panel and a wind turbine and batteries and inverters, nor would they know how to hook it all up. But they know that if they can buy power on a cell phone like they're already doing for other goods and services, now we've got a game changer. Dan, talk about the token economics. I get the payment rail piece, mobile app, no brainer, I get that check. Okay, easy to use. Now I want, as a buyer of energy, there's a token, I get some token there. Where's the other side of the marketplace? How does that token economics work? Can you just take us through a use case and walk us through that example? Sure. So as I said, the M-PAC token is our base token. That will be the value token that purchasers will buy in order to fund projects. Once we go beyond that, we now have what we call a GenCredit. It may not be a token in the traditional sense or a coin. It's a credit that allows us to transact with the ledger. That way we can know about these people. One of the greatest opportunities that we feel that we have in the marketplace is identity and reputation. You have a billion, two people who don't have a connection. What if we could learn about those billion, two, and understand how they use power and where they use power? So GenCredit is kind of off-chain management that you're doing. You write to the ledger for inter-mutal access for that transaction. I got to ask you about things like spoofing. Why can't I just take your energy? This is where the tokens become interesting because it should solve the spoofing problem. Well, right, and energy needs to be passed down copper. It's got to go on a wire. That doesn't mean somebody's not going to cut the wire and bootlegged and all that stuff. Spoofing's not going to be the problem in this case. It is a physical connection that needs to be made. Our smart meters allow for us to turn on or off that connection by the user, right? If he doesn't pay, he doesn't get it. You know, there's vandalism, there's theft all over the world, and we have methods in place to try and mitigate that as much as possible. You saw our platform that we're building. We're tokenizing our media business. It's amazing. You like it, it was good. Thanks for the plug, there. I wasn't asking for a plug, but I appreciate the plug. And we were talking last night about our, you know, generational gap between us and our kids. And you have your son here and your son's working with you. My son's Alex working with us. We have a young team as well. I want you to talk about someone who's so experienced in the business. You've done a lot of variety of ventures from, you know, film to entertainment, technology. Us older veterans, the polite way to say it, have seen the movie before. They've seen the waves. This is a huge wave, but this wave is going to be, we can surf a few of them, hang 10 on our boards, but this wave is really going to be powered and led by the younger generation. What's your thoughts, share your vision of the role that the younger generation has to take here and what makes them capable in your mind? Okay, so I'm going to answer that question two ways. First of all, I'm so enamored with what the younger generation is trying to do with this disruption. Let's change their existing paradigm and make something better. That's what blockchain allows for all sorts of industries, goods and services, right? It's going to be amazing what these guys come up with. That's one of the things I love about doing this thing, right? I'm an old guy. And I get to hang around these smart young people. It makes me feel young again. But the other thing that we have, and I think you to share it as well, is we have to offer to these young guys experience, right? It's not like we're going to go out into a market that we don't know about and try and explore it for success. I've been in the renewables business for 10 years delivering projects to 35 countries. I got my boots on the ground. I got my hands dirty doing this for 10 years now. And I think the other part of that, building this project and making it successful is the team that we've put together behind it. We have an advisor who advises presidents, Dr. Michael Dorsey. That's really important. That's valuable that he understands the global marketplace the way he does. The other one is Vinay Gupta, who has been in blockchain since the 90s and has always wanted to work in the developing world with a blockchain distributed ledger technology. That's really important. I think I want to just double down and re-amplify that point. This is not a young man's game only exclusively. It's this market's attracting alpha entrepreneurs, older veterans, because as you said earlier, it disrupts every vertical. That's right. So experience and mentorship, bringing people together that can help accelerate the disruption. That's right. Driven by the young guys. Cool, I love that. But it's not like Zuckerberg made this one comment, oh, if you're not under the age of 30, then you don't know social delivery. He got his ass handed to him on that. But in this case, this market is open and willing to learn and the disruption's the mission. That's right. And this team matters. That's right. Experience, the makeup of your board, makeup of your advisors, so there's a role for everybody. Look, experience is capital, right? It is its own virtual currency. Having been in all these countries, having worked with presidents, having worked in the 90s, since the 90s, that is valuable. It's intangible, but it is valuable. Dan, I think we just invented a new category in the ICO category, an advisor choking. There's plenty of advisors. And it's a cottage industry, believe me. They're getting tokens anyway. But imagine if you could actually measure an advisor. Yeah, the quality of the advisor and the roles that they play. Absolutely, it would be great. That's coming up next in our next ICO, right? Hey, I really appreciate what you're doing. I love how you're working with your son, father, son team. You recognize the role of how the generations can shift together. Love it. Love your mission. Thank you. Thanks for sharing. The teams coverage here in Puerto Rico, we've been here on the island all week, getting the best stories, the best people, sharing them with you. We're open content, this is theCUBE, doing our part here at Coin Agenda for one day. We're not going to be here tomorrow. We're going to go to Vegas. Just came back from Blockchain Unbound, great stuff. John, let me give you the URL if you don't mind. No problem, go ahead. Please, if you want to go learn more about us, impactppa.com. Great job, impactppa.com. This is theCUBE live coverage here in Puerto Rico. More after this short break.