 Live from NASA. Live from NASA in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polymath. Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage live in the Bahamas for Polygon 18. This is where all the action is. Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, blockchain, you name it. Token economics, a paradigm shift of epic proportions. This is a decentralized internet. It's impacting the world. Missions, technology applications in all sectors. Our next guest is Sean Owen, CEO of Salt Lending, serial entrepreneur, killer idea, so simple, so stupid, simple. No one's doing it, he's doing it. Lending cash for Bitcoin and currency. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, it's going to be here. You know, there's two things that I love. The crazy ideas that everyone says is the dumbest idea on the planet. That becomes billion-dollar opportunities. Then something that's so simple and obvious that no one does because either a baggage or dogma or other interests. You're in kind of both. You've got the simple idea, lending. Take a minute to talk about Salt Lending and your innovation that you guys do on the business side. Yeah, you got it. So, you know, everybody here at these conferences are hopefully people that are watching have some interest in cryptocurrencies or blockchain and probably accumulate some value in that currency or the asset class. So once you do, then you have options that you can either continue to hold that or you can sell it. We're opening up a new market for the ability to see that as property and borrow against it. And in fact, the technology makes a perfect form of collateral where you have all this ability to program in smart contracts. You can write in the rules. You can make it highly secure. Yet nobody is doing it. So it's one of these simple things that as this market emerges became kind of obvious as a pain point, which is, you know, I go to the bank and I show them my personal financial statement and they look at Bitcoin and scratch their head. Somebody's got to bridge that gap. So we're building technology that ultimately could be used or should be used by banks or financial institutions to bring this together to where you have the ability like you would with any other type of property. You know, if you look at any other type of property you can lend against it. Somebody's figured out how to, whether it's minerals, whether it's land, whether it's cars. So really now we're doing that for cryptocurrency. Salt Lending stands for a secured, automated lending technology. So it's very much a technology driven company. Yet it's foundational and lending is just very simple to understand because it's the oldest business known to man. Yeah, you know, we cover cloud computing from the day one and it's interesting. Automation wins the day. So we're seeing a lot of things where, you know, automating M&A process. We talked to those guys at Legsit. You're doing something here with lending. It's just so simple. Now, here's the question. If I have Bitcoin, and there's a lot of whales walking around here, people billions of billionaires, millionaires. A lot of people have made money over the past couple of years. Certainly, if you were in it 2011 after you're a whale, they got value. I put it up and I get cash. Is that how it works? That's right. So everybody has assets that they want to hold on to. And they're precious to them, whether it be gold, heirlooms, art, Bitcoin. And then they have currencies that are things that they want to spend quickly and or just don't even think twice about it. I'll pay for a cup of coffee, a bottle of water, whatever. And as the world moves into the blockchain era, as all value can be recorded on distributed ledgers, in blockchains, you have this new way of thinking about everything. So you can imagine a wallet where you have all the things you really care about, and you can dynamically decide what your currency is based off where you're traveling, where you want to spend, what you think is happening with inflation, depending on what your interest is, right? And maybe it's video game points you want to spend in the future. And however, having that scale and saying at any point in time, I want to hold onto this and I want to spend more of that, well, there's a partnership, right? So a really easy way to think about that is how can I leverage what I have, which is portfolio lending or any type of lending, into more of the currencies I need, whether it's I need to go buy a house, I need to buy a car, I want to buy more investments. So we see it as a very powerful tool and almost a necessity, but then on top of that, just extremely cool in how you can imagine the future of finance in this world. Yeah, it's a total game changer. I love what you're doing. And I think getting the fiat conversion really gets immediate liquidity in a currency that people can spend. So if someone says, hey, I don't want Bitcoin, great. I want to buy a boat or start a business and I need to get some fiat, I pledge up my coin. That's right. Now you get valuation issues. So I'm assuming you have math behind this that says, hmm, what if Bitcoin drops? Yep, yep, that's the thing. So we really solve a couple fundamental pieces of the blockchain that at its core are difficult for people to do well. One is security and the other is user interface. So when you wrap that into a product and you kind of build out the user interface and the security suddenly becomes a lot easier. So when it comes to the risk mitigation, it's simply over collateralized. We're going to pitch you as a borrower and say, you're already probably storing all this somewhere anyway in a wallet. Why not put it in a secure wallet? Drive the loan to value ratio way down so you're only borrowing what you need when you need it. You don't bring out these giant loans for no good reason, you just borrow what you need. The interest rate becomes a lot lower and then you have extra collateral for the volatility. Ideally, that's the scenario. Now if in a world where it's very volatile and you're at a higher loan to value rate, then that's where we give you options. We say, hey, would you like to sell some of this or would you like to add more? Would you like to prepay your loan, if not? So there's always the option for somebody to kind of just correct the loan instrument, but that's the other really cool part about a smart contractor, a smart written language around the instrument itself, is that you can get a little more creative instead of just having legal paperwork. You can say, let's put this into the code. So it becomes very dynamic in the ability for it to cure the instrument itself to stay course. Yeah, software money, I love this. So let's go down and talk about the token that you have solved. Yep, token. And that's for the borrower or the lender? It's right now the borrower, although it will expand into all uses. So it's effectively, as people say, it's powering the network or it's the gasoline behind it. It's our internal currency. It acts as a store value in the regards of how you would think about a serial code or a serial number. So if I have Microsoft Office and you buy a serial number, that's the key that lets you in. And it tells you how much of the product you have. If you have 20 or 30 of them, you can give them to your employees or you could redeem it for some other value. So we just think that tokens actually do a better job of that recording, because it's now put on a permanent ledger and you have the permanent audibility of it, then just a serial number and a private database. I think you got a great solution because the alternative to not having it is essentially get it liquid on an exchange what some people might not want to do. Exactly. And then also, where do you do it? So there's all kinds of dynamics on the exchange side. That's right. Here I'm saying, hey, I'm long on Bitcoin, but I need to get some work in capital for whatever the project is. So you're there. Now, is there any competition? Is anyone else doing this? There's no competition yet. You know, there's definitely some people that are out there saying that they are and I would be careful. Some of them may be legitimate. We've seen a few that are scams, so always be protected and be wary. Give an example of what a scam would look like for people. A scam would be somebody who says, hey, we're doing an ICO and you start looking at it and it looks exactly like what we've built, except for they're maybe in Russia and you can't actually contact the people and they don't have any banks behind them or any kind of regulatory framework. So they're using your spoofing, your brand. Yeah, we've seen a lot of that. So we've had a lot of kind of phishing attempts and people trying to spoof the idea or the site and that's a little worrisome, but there probably will be competitors. It's a big market. Yeah, I mean, that's gonna happen more and more. You know, more of those spear phishing attacks up too. Yep. Okay, great. And I'll look for you guys. Where are you guys at with the company? Talk about what your needs are, your hiring, what's going on with the operation. Yeah, so we're constantly hiring, looking for anybody who's got great financial background and wants to be in the blockchain space and or developers, constantly looking for blockchain-focused developers, people that either want to learn the space or already know the space, either way is fine. We'd love to talk to you. We've issued $30 million in loans and the states were approved. We're rapidly expanding that genre of where we can lend. We're working to partner with banks. So if you're a bank or your financial institution, there's a lot of capital money at this conference. We'd love to talk to all you guys because there's an opportunity for us to kind of give you an indirect exposure into the market. And it's good for the big whales who have a lot of currency, a lot of value to pay it for in the mission of the community. So they could be lenders too, right? Very much so, yes. Wow, so what states aren't you in? 30 million, that's a good number. What's your top list? The next on the list that we're working towards, we're really close to Texas, we're really close to California, really close to New York, really close to Utah. Those are some big ones. Lots of interest in Puerto Rico, so we're heavily focused on getting there. And it's just kind of a roadmap, a heat map. You know, there's a lot of interest in Europe so we're going over into Europe. Lots in Canada. Sean, thanks for coming on, sharing the project, your success, and love your idea. Again, disruption continues. The Stampede is coming behind us at Polycon, that's their logo. Polymath is the company behind this event. Of course, we're the Cube, we're independent, we're bringing you all the action here at Polycon 18. More live coverage after this short break.