 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Market Talks with me, Ray Salmond, head of markets here at Cointelegraph, where we discuss the latest in what's shaping the markets, along with valuable insights and comments from industry leaders, traders, and influencers. Today's guest is Bud White. Bud is the chief product officer and co-founder of Tassin, a US-based software company that's developing compliance software for well-regulated crypto space. Bud focuses on daily market action and prices. He also helps companies across the crypto space launch their own tokens and their own Web3 DApps. He's very passionate about solving issues in the financial system with the use of blockchain, smart contracts, and distributed ledgers. Let's look at a short video to learn a little bit more about Bud. Welcome, Bud. How are you? Hey, Ray. Thanks for having me. What a great day to be with you with all the market movement. I know it's interesting. Prices are up. But given what we went through last year, whenever I see prices up, I get a little bit apprehensive and nervous. I've gotten used to prices being down. I'm comfortable with prices being sideways. Like, at least there's a reason. If prices are down, you know why. You can go on Twitter. You can turn on the news. And you can find out immediately what FUD, what scam, what DeFi rug, what FTX implosion, what it's Gary Ginsler done to shut down something in DeFi that needed to be shut down. Like, it's really easy to find out why prices are down. But when prices are up, it's harder to determine why. And that actually makes me feel quite nervous. So yeah, I guess we should start with that. Why are prices up today? And your opinion? Yeah, well, I mean, so the big news over the last 24 hours was the Fed releasing their interest rate hike. The last interest rate hike over the last month was 50 basis points. And what they announced yesterday was another increase. Again, another increase, but this time of only 25 basis points. So I think what all the guys on Wall Street are pricing into their models right now is that the Fed thinks peak inflation has taken place and that we're seeing some reduction in inflation. And even though interest rates are going up, which traditionally means money will move from equities into fixed income, that the slowing down of this is the positive signal in the market that everyone's running wild with. So we've seen at least the tech equities and following double digit increases in price at opening bell this morning and looking at crypto. And again, we have to remember that as a Web3 builder, I hate this, but crypto prices are pinned to tech equities right now because they're both viewed as risk assets. So when we see stock prices go up, then we see what bitcoins up 4% overnight, Ethereum almost 7%. I'll take it. But we have to remember that it's on the back of news that there is an increase in the Fed rate, even if it's just a slowing increase in that rate. So it's a situation where bad is good and good is bad. Like bad right now, bad news is somehow good within equities markets and within crypto markets. But then the good news, there is no good news really, except that prices up. But one thing that you said that I tend to agree with, I just bought a car and it's a collector car. So I didn't go to a dealership and get a 2.99% APY. I didn't want to use my crypto because obviously I believe that it's going to be worth more in the future. So I took a loan from a collector lending firm and the interest rate is silly. It's something that I definitely want to pay off fast because the interest rate is not in my favor. So seeing interest rates go up 0.25% doesn't excite me. That's going to trickle down to my eggs and my bacon and my milk and some of my unfixed loans being more expensive in the short term. And like you said, tech is the canary and the coalmine for what the wider equities market may or may not do. So sure, Facebook's up today, Apple's up. All these other tech companies are up off of this assumption that inflation has been conquered and that the interest rate hikes are going to get smaller and then eventually go away. But at the same time in the background for the last four months, including this week, we've seen significant layoffs from high tech companies. And Bezos and others have come out and said, we're headed for a recession. Save your money. Don't go buy anything crazy. These guys are saying that Goldman Sachs and other brokerages or banks have spun down their earnings expectations. And we're seeing layoffs in tech, which is a canary and the coalmine type indicator, similar to how crypto is Bitcoin's a canary and the coalmine also for risk assets generally. So what's your take on that? What should we think about? Should we think that Powell has made sufficient progress with combating and capping inflation and that things are going to get better going into Q2, Q3, Q4? Or should we look beyond this short-term good news and be more worried about what's around the corner? Yeah, let's unpack that. One sub question at a time. So let's first establish why the Fed is doing what the Fed is doing. Essentially, you, me, everybody else in America has too much disposable income. So whether it's luxury goods are all the way down to basic necessities, travel, and rent, whether it was the money that was printed during the pandemic or a steady increase of the stock market and people's general wealth. We see inflation because people have much more capital to be able to spend on necessary and unnecessary goods. So what the Fed is trying to do is increase interest rates to make it a little bit more difficult for people to purchase everything so that prices of products don't spiral out of control because people have so much buying power. So what we're seeing right now is a bunch of layoffs with these large tech firms. The end goal of the Fed is to bring the overall hourly rate for a worker in the United States down so that they have less disposable income, so they, again, to curb inflation. So we can't go to everybody in America and say, hey, will you take 20% off the top of what you're making? It doesn't really look like a continuous function like that. It's more stepwise, which is the 18,000 layoffs at Microsoft or was it 12,000 layoffs at Amazon. So what you're seeing are a number of the operations or perhaps engineering sides of these firms that have seen pay increases over the pandemic of 50%, 60%, 70% I've seen with some types of engineers and DevOps employees. We're seeing those jobs just get canned. And when they reenter the market, they're not going to be able to get such a high salary that they had before. So what we're seeing is not a gradual decrease in everybody saying, I'll take a little bit less money so that inflation doesn't go crazy. We're seeing some of the highest paid jobs that may have increased the most over the pandemic, getting wiped out and people coming in at more reasonable wages. At least that's my take on how, I mean, obviously the reason for the layoffs isn't specifically for that point. The reason for the layoffs is when the interest rate goes up, operating capital becomes more expensive, companies have to run more lean. So we're seeing that, but it is having the intended consequence that the Fed is looking for, which is companies lay people off, they come back at more reasonable salaries, everything gets reset. And then ideally if it gets reset low enough that the Fed can reduce the interest rate. So you and your car loan can hopefully re-buy at maybe a single digit rate instead of a double digit rate. But that the problem of disposable income and savings can kind of be curtailed. Right. So correct me if I'm wrong in this assumption, rates get higher, capital costs and operational costs and the cost of borrowing goes up across the corporate landscape and consumer markets and then layoffs occur because of high cost, capital costs, operational costs, borrowing costs, then prices remain high, consumer demand goes down, prices eventually come down and then the Fed can stop with all the crazy interest rates inflation begins to go back down to their target rate, which is 2%, which right now seems impossible. But then the knock on effect there is that companies earnings take a hit, stock valuations take a hit, crypto's correlated to equities markets, therefore it corrects also. So doesn't it seem a bit short-sighted to think that even if prices may have bottomed across the crypto market that we are not yet like in a trend change or in bull market mode again, like it's a bit early to make that conclusion, isn't it? I think it is a bit early. I'm not sure if you follow Michael Burry, I think everybody's following Michael Burry on Twitter these days, but he's been drawing a lot of attention to the signals we're seeing in the market right now and not the recession we saw in 2007, 2008, but the recession that we saw in the mid-70s into the early 80s, where there were actually three cycles of inflationary period and the way that the Fed increased rates to bring inflation down, they led off too soon and it had this bullwhip effect where the next cycle inflation spiked even higher than it was before. And that became an issue because I think, geez, my parents tell me stories about having savings accounts at banks that were paying 18, 19, 20% interest in the early 80s and that was a direct result of the interest rates being played with by the Fed. So I think the question is in the short term, let's look at like the next four weeks, I think we're gonna see a mini bull run, this can mean crypto goes up like it has over the last 24 hours, but what is uncertain is from a macro perspective, are we in a 2007 recession or are we in a 1970s recession? If it's 2007, then the Fed did what they're supposed to do and this easing is working and we'll be able to bring it back down to 2% inflation or are we doing it too soon? Is the Fed reducing the increase of the rates too early and not putting enough pressure on the capital markets and will that have a bullwhip effect? So I mean, I'm not a broker, I'm not an analyst, but I do think we're gonna see rates or prices of tech equities and crypto go up over the next couple of weeks as we're all rallying around this good news, right? And at least what Wall Street analysts want you to feel is good news, but the looming question and the one that Michael Burry is asking of people is, is it too soon? Because we're going to see a worse bull market. We're gonna see a worse recession than what we're currently looking at if it is too early. And I mean, I don't have all the data on that but I think that's what you need to start to think about as maybe you're starting to take your savings and put it back into the crypto market or taking your savings and putting it back into the equity market. Right, thanks for explaining that in such detail. I agree with you on the whole three wave inflation theory and the similarities of now to the 70s. And even my mom like two weeks ago was telling me the same thing. Like I remember when bonds and checking accounts were paying like crazy amounts but then mortgage rates were also really high at the same time. And she was saying those times could come back and how are you gonna navigate that? So, okay, outside of just the short term that you've kind of explained on what you think the markets will do in the next four weeks or so. What are you looking forward to this year in the crypto market? How is 2023 going to differ from 2022 in your opinion? Okay, well, I mean, the elephant in the room is FTX and Sam. What happened in November, December last year I think is very foundational to how we move forward as a Web3 community and a DeFi community. It's become very obvious to retail investors. It's always been obvious to institutional investors but it's become very obvious to retail investors that like giving custody of your digital assets to a centralized exchange has risk associated to it. You look at some of the biggest exchanges and they have trust licenses. They're regulated entities that have regulated auditing firms making sure that all of the deposits are in the accounts that they say that they're in. But what we saw with FTX, then being a US group that decided to domicile in the PAMAS is that the accounting and the auditing isn't as robust as we once thought it was. So the reaction of the market, all of the biggest centralized exchanges in the US and abroad have been to kind of combat from a marketing standpoint, how you explain to your traders, your users, that your funds are safe. I think you remember, it must have been late November, early December, there was an article written where Vitalik and I think the CEOs of Kraken, OKX and Coinbase said that we're going to start doing cryptographic proofs of solvency of all of our depositor funds, we're going to prove that they're in one of N wallets so that we have a continuous audit so that depositors can feel good that when they want to make a withdrawal that there are assets there. I think there's a fundamental risk and kind of like an obvious misstep by our community to even allow centralized exchanges to be able to have custody of assets. If you think back to the ethos of crypto, Bitcoin just celebrated its 14-year anniversary at the first of the year. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network of transferring value, unidirectional value, like I can send you Bitcoin for whatever service or whatever we agree on. It was only when we wanted to do a bilateral transaction on different blockchains. So what's the earliest? Probably Bitcoin for Ethereum that you had to deposit it into a centralized exchange to be able to do that bilateral transaction because there wasn't plumbing built in the community to be able to synchronize these transactions and we can get to solutions in a minute. But I think it was Mt. Gox was the first, people were okay depositing it in, using it as an on-ramp to get your US dollars or your fiat money into an exchange into the ecosystem. But this whole idea of having to trust, we saw it with Mt. Gox, whether it was a Ponzi scheme or a hack, there are many different stories happening there. In 2018 with Quadriga in Canada, we saw that that in fact was a Ponzi scheme with FTX. I mean, we're still unwinding with all of the trials that are gonna take this year. But what we know for certain is that depositor funds, trader funds were taken out of the accounts and used for lending and or personal use. So it comes down to centralized organizations are run by one or a team of people that you need to inherit and trust. People aren't pricing in the counterparty risk of depositing in these centralized exchanges. And us as retail traders aren't the only ones at fault here. I've spoken to a number of institutions, funds that have not only crypto venture funds put together but also liquid asset funds that had accounts at FTX and are still kind of sitting on their hands right now to see if those assets will ever come back. So Ray, going back to your question, what are we gonna see in 2023 with crypto? Well, I think there's a change of mindset around how you manage your crypto. So we talked about there being retail users. I like to separate retail users into two different groups educated and uneducated about crypto, right? You can think of, I don't have the exact numbers but I know it's over 90% of the Coinbase users have never withdrawn their assets to a wallet. They kept it on the exchange the entire time. Everyone who I know in the Web3 community who understands how wallets work and has like a good use of a mobile wallet or a browser-based wallet has very quickly taken all of their assets out of Coinbase, out of Kraken, out of OKX, out of Binance to put it in their own wallet. At what cost though? Price discovery, price movements we saw in the last 24 hours prices go up. I know a lot of guys who have their crypto sitting in cold storage right now who have to take it out of the closet, dust it off, connect it, do a transfer into an exchange in order to sell something that they might wanna sell based on current prices. There are solutions and one of them is what we're building at Tassan where we offer a solution where you can keep custody of your asset and still be able to have that orders on an order book to be able to take advantage of price movements. But it's a mindset switch, right? I think the average crypto holder, not user, not Web3 individual but the average person who's buying crypto is gonna tend more towards being comfortable using a mobile wallet, whereas 2022 and prior, they were treating it like a Robin Hood where I deposit some US dollars, it all just sits on a mobile app and I don't really understand the technology behind it. So I think 2023 is like a reformation year for us in terms of education. I mean, I've been doing cryptography since 2009 and blockchain since 2016. So I get it and sometimes I forget I'm not the average user of crypto anymore, right? It's become much more investment oriented rather than use case oriented in the DeFi world or Web3 worlds. But yeah, one thing I'm very optimistic for and looking forward to us building and everybody else in our community building our solutions for people to be able to take back custody, take back control of their assets and have proper self sovereignty of wealth, which is the original dream that everyone has sold on with crypto is be your self sovereign nation of one, right? No one can block you from transacting, like no one's gonna block me from sending you one ETH, right? And no government can block that as well even though there have been instances governments trying like the Canadian government with the protesters in Ottawa, but let's not get into that today. Exactly. So I like that you said 2023 will be a year of reformation. That's a good way to phrase that like it's been a year of reflection. It's been a year of looking at what mistakes were made the absence of best practices, the need for transparency and the need for like more pragmaticism to come into the space. I totally agree with you. I've been doing crypto six years and every time I need to go to ledger online and connect that nano S whether it be through like Bluetooth or with the USB cord and then like copy some address, put in a whole bunch of numbers, click this, this, this and this and then try to send it to Coinbase which is like the only off ramp into fiat for Americans, right? Maybe there's some others but this one's always been pretty secure and God forbid they lose their charter or bank license or however, whoever's agreeing to make that conversion and offer up God forbid, the SEC or CFTC goes in and yanks that and removes Americans ability to offer up out of crypto or on ramp into it or for institutions. But I agree like it's very frustrating and time consuming. It takes an hour basically to move assets off of a ledger or cold wallet or Trezor onto exchange. And of course you can do it quicker but like you wanna be careful. Sometimes you wanna send a test transaction. You don't wanna make any mistakes. So it is definitely not convenient to offer up and one thing that I was gonna ask you but I think you've kind of answered it so we can explore a little bit more of what Tassan does but everybody wants to know like what might be the catalyst that brings institutional investors back into crypto markets and how can they avoid the same risks that crippled them before? Which was one, risk management, two, leverage and three, custody and like risk management, okay leverage, okay those are easy to answer but the whole custody thing's an issue because if you're a fund you gotta set up hedges if you have like spot long positions and setting up hedges means using a regulated exchange and the one that we can't use as Binance, the one that investors in the previous cycle could use was FTX and we were led to believe that it was legit. So a lot of those institutions that you talked to that have gotten wrecked or lost their funds or customer funds had funds up there so that they could hedge, right and that they could use those futures contracts and manage their risk and now there's no option to do that because Coinbase doesn't have leverage or that option. So in your view, what's it gonna take to bring institutional flow back into crypto and how does maybe Tassin solve that problem? Yeah, I'll make a quick comment on leverage because looking back to FTX I think at their peak it was what they offered 101X leverage on the certain asset classes, that's wild, right? In the traditional markets you only ever see leverage that high on things that really, really do not move like super unvolatile trading pairs like currency, right? You would never see 101X even on like traditional equities like sitting on the NASDAQ so sitting on the New York Stock Exchange. So that was wild to begin with because crypto is already more volatile and to give people the tools to trade on leverage like that was basically giving people tools to go bankrupt, right? Retail, right? If you have infinite cash or a huge pile of money like institutions, sure. There's definitely the time and the place but I think the question that you wanna get to is, yeah, okay, let's say that you're a liquid assets fund and you got into Bitcoin, what's it trading at right now? 23.8, so let's say you got in a couple of weeks ago at like 22,000 and you've got, you wanna sell when it hits 24, okay, great. You can't have your Bitcoin sitting on a ledger, right? You have to have it deposited in an exchange with a limit order sitting there so that when it hits your target price, you can liquidate it and or have a more complex order type so you can like cascade different types of orders to meet your investment thesis or what you're comfortable with your risk tolerance. So if you're an institution that's playing in this way, your options are, one, deposit assets into a centralized exchange and hope and pray that they're there when you need to withdraw them or two, a lot of institutions are using traditional means of trading which is just calling up an OTC desk and getting a spot price for an asset over the phone and settling up later, either netting at end of day or netting at end of week which has its own set of risks for counterparty insolvency. And when I learned capital markets, I learned it from some of the best that were at JPMorgan during the 2008 credit crisis. So I know a lot about counterparties going in solvent in the middle of a deal and we've seen this in the crypto market on both sides already. We've seen trading firms and exchanges go in solvent at the rate three hours capital and FTX and Voyager. So the things I'm talking about aren't unheard of, they're things that we've seen in the last three months. So doing deals on trust is not good. Depositing your institutions, remember as an institutional trader, you're beholden to other laws, right? Like coming out of 2008, there were a whole set of laws, I think the Dodd-Frank and a few others, that require you to do certain things like hold capital against risky assets and all of these things so that if your counterparty defaults that you do have enough operating capital to one, keep the lights on and two, be able to pay back investors in certain ways. And we're not seeing that if you're depositing all of your assets into an exchange that take full custody and does whatever with it, right? All of these proof of solvency initiatives within the exchanges are good, but they still can't prove that there's an action where a bad actor internally does a huge withdraw or that like with what we saw with FTX that a loan has been made with funds that weren't allocated to be lent out. So okay, I mean, that's kind of the state of the world. There is no good way to be an institutional trader. So what we're trying to bring to the market with Tassim is a way for you to take your crypto, put it into a smart contract that is under your custody and your custody only, lock it in that smart contract when you put orders up on an order book. So let's take the example, right? You've got some Bitcoin, you bought it at 22 and you're trying to sell it when it hits 25. Imagine being able to have that Bitcoin in your custody at all points in time until the order gets matched as a trade and then the lock comes off and the transaction happens. So we're allowing for these tools where we're allowing institutional and retail traders to be able to trade in the way that they want to trade, keep custody of your asset the entire time and still be able to do complex trade types, interact with a central limit order book in the way that they would with any other asset class. The other important thing and I think a lot of the educated viewers here are saying, well, why can't you do that on a dex today and bridge assets from different chains? The answer is you can't, right? I mean, you can bridge your ETH to polygon, you can do all these things. We've built it without bridges, right? So this is a layer one to layer one settlement, no bridge risk, bridge hacking risk. We're doing layer one to layer one settlement with our decentralized settlement layer. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Macha has something similar to that where you can go and do your DeFi thing and set limit orders, but they don't have any limit sales. And then DYDX is somewhat similar, right? Where it's all MetaMask based or Web3 wallet based and you're trading directly from your wallet. But I think you're still depositing assets at the exchange with DYDX, aren't you? So you're saying with Tassan, it's more like GMX where it's smart contract based. It's not like, I don't need to put one ETH or three ETH into DYDX and then it's on their platform. Is there a difference? Like I haven't used DYDX since the geo tag, you know, I'm banned from using it. So I don't, I could be thinking wrong, like do they take custody of your assets or is it still on the wallet? I don't recall. I believe they don't. And I don't know the architecture too well. I do know that they have fantastic user interface. Design for bringing those uneducated retail investors into being able to trade more assets. But the way we do it at Tassan is you have your wallet and imagine a smart contract as like a smart wallet where you are still the only named private key that can do a withdrawal, but there's an additional functionality of locking an asset when you wanna enter that asset into an order so that you can't withdraw that asset and double spend it, right? So it's essentially in traditional capital markets, it's like marking something in your bank account as encumbered because it's to pay accounts payable at the end of the month, right? Right, and then like you have an order book that everyone can see, but how can I be sure that there's enough liquidity on your side as like the market maker or the other side of that trade that my trades will always be filled. Like how can users know that, okay, this platform has a TVL of like, I don't know, $5 billion and if I wanna cash out 200,000 right now when Bitcoin hits 30K, that order's gonna get filled. How do users have that confidence? That's a really good question, right? Cause you're thinking about it like a dex and having liquidity pool, people staking in liquidity pools to make sure that there is enough total value locked so that you're not gonna get huge slip jump price. So the difference of doing it with a central limit order book is that you actually have a real order book, right? Not an AMM approximating how price movements work when one asset gets depleted and the other one moves up. So if you see it on the exchange, it's there, right? There's actually somebody else who has an asset locked under their custody somewhere else that is going to be a counterparty to your trade. So we're not using the dex model of having yield farmers put capital into LP pools or liquidity pools. They are, it's actually an order book where you can have traditional market makers that you would see in, well, actually any centralized crypto exchange or any other traditional asset exchange. So they make money by selling for a little bit over and buying for a little bit less, right? And they've got their spread. So they're in there providing liquidity. So when you log on to our platform and you see how deep a book is and you say like, well, I've got a million dollars of the Bitcoin I've gotta get rid of. What's the price slippage gonna be on that? You can see it upfront. There's no question about it. And that's one of the benefits and that's why we've went through this painstaking process of making sure we can still have a central limit order book while keeping custody separate because you get better price discovery, right? You're not getting into a situation where one, as a trader, price is gonna move huge because there's no liquidity or two, if you are an LP for an asset that becomes unfavorable and you're 50-50 goes to like 99-1 and you're left with like 99% of an asset that's worth nothing anymore. And we all have friends, right? We all have friends who started to dip their toe into staking and they found some obscure pair. Remember like two years ago, there were all of those like Ponzi and economics tokens and people were like, just stake it, just stake it. I know a lot of people who lost their shirt staking it on Dexes. So both traders and stakers. So tasks, like you said in the intro, we're regulation first, we're a software company, we're trying to build good consumer products that meet the current and future regulations here in the United States. So the idea of us being able to have this central limit order book is for best price discovery. We want people to be able to trade in the way that they can trade on a retail or institutional method but having custody the entire time, right? Custody is key, right? Well, I mean, all my Bitcoin OG friends, right? Not your keys, not your custody. That's what they'd always say to me, right? No matter what service I was using, whatever we were building, doesn't matter what it is. If you don't have control over the keys, then it's not your crypto, right? You are just a account on somebody else's ledger and they can do whatever they want, right? And if it comes down to what is and is not possible, I'd rather be in a situation where it's impossible for somebody to take my money rather than them staying in their terms of service, right? Like, I mean, we saw the screenshot so the FTX terms of service all over Twitter in December. It said, crypto in your account is your crypto, we will not touch it. Was that true? Far from it. I mean, we'll let the folks decide, but we're... Yeah, Celsius was even more explicit saying assets in Celsius custody belong to Celsius. And users were not aware of that. I didn't lose anything in Celsius, but I get PTSD and I have a reaction when I'm in the grocery store and I see that energy drink or at some sort of sparkling water called Celsius. Whenever I see it, I just shudder and I'm like, oh, it reminds me of the whole Machinsky and Celsius thing and how it turned out to be a Ponzi and just like the more drip that comes out of that, the more dark and disturbing it is. And for people that lost a lot of money or everything, that's just gotta be traumatizing for them to see that drink in the store. So, yeah, custody is going to be paramount. Looks like you wanna say something? I'll give you another example, Ray. Yeah, so, we're kind of on this thread of what's coming out this year, right? So, we're solving custody on trading. There's other companies out there that are trying to replace the whole that was left by Celsius and Nexo and BlockFi. There's a company called Moon Mortgage. It's backed by a coin fund. So, they allow you to take your crypto and put it up as collateral for a mortgage on a house or as a collateralized lending product. But they're kind of the addition to what they allow you to do is not only do you put your crypto in to essentially like get a loan on the back of it, but it's sitting in anchorage, right? It's sitting in a trust license holding entity and they allow you to trade your crypto that is sitting there as collateral, right? So, this is like, we go from Celsius where you literally just like take it from your wallet and you put it in their wallet and you sign a user agreement to hopefully it all works to moving that to a place where, I mean, if you don't want to custody your own asset on a hot or cold wallet and you do want to use a service that is regulated, I would suggest using something like Anchorage, right? Where they do have the proper audits happening in the background, but we're already seeing the next generation of lending products come, right? After all of these kind of mysterious, double digit yield products have all came back to bite people. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's another thing I'm optimistic this year is transparent products, right? Transparent products that are saying, we'll give you this, you'll get a certain yield or on a loan, you'll pay a certain rate and these are the guardrails that are set up, right? You can withdraw your crypto or use it to trade as long as you don't fall below like a margin call level, but yeah, I mean, this is just one example of a whole new generation of, I don't know, let's call them responsible DeFi products. That they're coming out. Right, that's a good segue to the next topic because there's a company in Austin, Texas that also allows you to upload Bitcoin or USDC and take a loan on it for a mortgage and I'm familiar with MoonPay and the one thing I was wondering is like, what's the LTV on that? And with like, when they lock your assets, when they're using a custody or a trust to lock your assets so that they don't have access to them and then you don't also, there's Primetrust and like, I can't say anything bad because we don't wanna get sued but SWAN, SWAN Bitcoin uses Primetrust to custody customer assets and they encourage all people who are DCA'ing or buying Bitcoin through SWAN to remove them from Primetrust ASAP and self custody because self custody it's part of their model, keep your keys and to yourself, don't leave them anywhere even if it's like a regulated trust that has them but as markets went crazy and like FTX was blowing up, Prime was unable to process all withdrawals in a timely fashion. I don't know if they eventually were able to meet all of those I assume they did because if they didn't, we and all other crypto media would have eviscerated them and wrote a story about it, right? They had a hang up there and I'm in Texas and SWAN has now kind of had to pause the DCA sort of service that they were offering and then I know Nexo has also got a cease and desist on offering interest and custody and lending borrowing in Texas and like other states also. So that brings me to regulation. What role should regulation play in crypto especially with centralized exchanges and eventually in DeFi? And where are you located? Who can use Tassan? Is it a US based company? Can people that live in the States use it? Yeah, so we're US based and the exchange is a US based exchange. We are still pre-launch. We do have our testnet open for testing right now but Q2 will be the launch of our mainnet exchange where you can trade. Regulation, I'm for regulation as long as it brings consumer protection, right? There is a point of regulation that is kind of like a cliff. You can walk up to it but the point of going over the cliff is surveillance, right? Being able to track trades like what we're seeing with China's stablecoin being able to surveil what people are doing use it as data collection. That is bad, right? That is government overreach, regulation overreach but it's obvious that we need some sort of regulation to be able to make sure that consumers are protected. One, from like an investment standpoint, right? Like an SEC style, we're out there to make sure that people who are alleging investment opportunities are good people that intend to fulfill what they say they're gonna do and two, from a money laundering perspective, right? What you don't wanna have happen is for you to be matched on a dex with somebody and for that money to be coming from Iran or another sanctioned country and for your assets to eventually be seized in the future for participating in, you know, laundering money, right? You don't want that as a retail investor and you 100% cannot have that happen as a regulated institution when you talk about institutional investors coming in. So, okay, what does good regulation look like? So FTX gave us a very good example of what good regulation can look like, right? We all remember, well, maybe we don't, but I'll tell you after Sam bought LedgerX out of, I think it was Chicago, right? A crypto futures exchange that is regulated not by the SEC, but by the CFTC. When they went for their license to be able to be a futures market, and I know this because I listened to the chairperson of the CFTC speak about this specifically. They went through and said, like, you know, these are all the things that you need to have to run a futures exchange, but because your asset class is more volatile, there's a few other things that we need you to have, right? So there was the classic, like, you have to take an entire year's worth of operating capital, put it in an account that you don't touch in case the exchange implodes that you can still keep the lights on to be able to unwind any trades, but they also impose, and whether you consider this regulation or not, they said that all trades on the exchange have to be fully collateralized. That essentially means no margin trading. So it meant that in times of turmoil that there wouldn't be this huge cascading effect of people getting wiped out for being over-levered for other things going wrong in the market. So this was an example where they took the existing regulation for like a traditional assets futures exchange, added a little bit more because the asset class was known to be risky, they issued a license, right? And how did it work out? Well, if you look at the chapter 11 filing for FTX and the web of companies underneath of it, there's an asterisk that calls out. I think it's like a handful of companies that are not filing for bankruptcy protection. One of them is LedgerX, right? And the point that the CFTC was making is that the reason that that part of the FTX empire is still alive is because they had all the checks and balances in there to make sure that regardless of if the people running it were corrupt or they engaged in corrupted business practices, that they had to prove at all points in time that there were a reduced risk in the way that they were trading as well as a reduced risk due to a bull string of operating capital to make sure that in the case of a high watermark of fraud in the market, that they would be able to survive. So, okay, I mean, that's one example of how like one regulator put one, not sanction but one requirement on one company and it worked out in the benefit. But what I will say about regulation is like there are a lot of other things that can be done to protect the consumer. And a lot of it comes down to custody. I think custody like 2023 is the year of education and the year of understanding custody fully. So I'm not sure what's going to happen. I am a part of the blockchain association which is a DC based lobbyist group that is trying to make sure that all policy being passed within the blockchain community meets the needs of the creators and the needs of the consumers. I mean, most of DC is tied up with the FTX trials right now. So I'm not sure if we're going to get any new policy made but anything that comes through, I think needs to be one not focused on taxation to fund other endeavors within the US government but it needs to be focused on consumer protection, right? Like my father always asked me, hey, I want to buy a Bitcoin. Like, well, one, I have to go through the whole education process for showing him how to do it. But two, I mean, until we get a lot more until we can trust centralized exchanges, right? Or educate people to get into like a hybrid exchange like what we're building a Tassin. Like we're not going to see mass, mass adoption of digital assets and crypto. And that's kind of where I want to see regulation step in to make sure that like what happened with LedgerX, right? Everybody was made whole, right? That was trading on LedgerX, right? There was no loss incurred. So I want to see more of that and less surveillance or blind taxation in policy. Thanks for sharing the inner workings of that. I wasn't aware that LedgerX was basically solvent at the end of all this. So that's good to know. It sounds like simple regulation is needed. Also, when I like think of as an American, where do I do my regulated trading outside of Coinbase? I can't really think of anywhere that I'm interacting with. So it sounds like people that got wrecked were basically in sandboxes that were unregulated playing with products that were built outside of the US or domiciled outside of the US. And that really people in the United States should not invest in cryptocurrency until there's better products built. And those better products might come from like Fidelity and JP Morgan and Robin Hood, which seems really counterintuitive to the whole ideology of crypto and getting rid of these middlemen and these fee creators, right? But on our own, we've not created products that are robust or safe enough that would kind of become sticky enough to get people to mass adopt crypto on their own. So it's a conundrum, isn't it? It is. And you touched on something I like talking about is the evolution of who's developing on blockchain and with cryptocurrency. And as much as we don't wanna see it, like the banks are tooling up, right? Think of like, who are the two traditional custodians for fixed income? It was JP Morgan who got out of the business in Bank of New York, Mellon. JP we know has a huge crypto influence, right? They forked Ethereum and did that whole chain project and I'm not sure what they're doing with it now. And Bank of New York Mellon has a custody product. What does that tell you? It tells you that they're interested in building applications in the blockchain space, right? They've set the groundwork, right? With BMI Mellon having their custody solution. What's next? Well, they can build anything, right? Like we see it with fidelity, right? Being able to add crypto to your retirement portfolio. But I think when we talk about trust, right? And we talk about there being a lack of trust, right? So Tassin is an exchange, actually it's funny. I got my marketing hat here, right? We say, trustless, right? Like don't trust anybody. But if you have to trust somebody, you should, I mean, there are a lot of parameters to trust. Like how long have they been around, right? Who else trusts them? Do you trust the people who trust them, right? When you think about how is the common investor going to get into crypto as an asset class, are they going to trust a new company that comes about? Or are they gonna trust a company that's been around for a couple of hundred years that they know if they have an issue with? One, it's going to remain solvent. And two, that they have a way through the legal system to have any sort of problem resolved. So I think that banks are logical developers in the Web3 ecosystem, right? And we're seeing it. I first got into crypto with digital asset holdings, which was building private blockchains for banking applications. So I know they're interested, but if you need to trust somebody, there is definitely a hierarchy when you're making a decision with your finances, right? You could think of it like picking a bank, right? When I came to America, I had to pick a bank and I thought, well, what's important to me is like, well, I want one that's big. I want the one that has branches everywhere that's been around for a long time and has all of the services I want. And I think people are gonna think the same way about crypto, right? And when we think about new players to the space, they're kind of uncertain and people want somebody to trust. So I think long-term, these evil institutions, right? These centralized institutions might actually be able to offer a really good consumer experience and onboarding experience because they already have the relationships built with retail consumers. But the thing I will say is there's a difference between using centralized institutions to do, let's say onboarding versus using centralized institutions for custody, right? People in the Web3 community say, like blanket statement, centralized bad. And I don't think centralized is bad, right? Centralized is bad for custody if you're not taking responsibility for managing your own crypto. But there are a lot of things that centralized institutions can do better, right? So I mean, I think it's, well, one, it's overcoming that stigma. And two, I don't know, empowering these institutions to be able to create better, right? I love that Fidelity is offering crypto in their retirement accounts. Why? If Fidelity is buying tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of crypto because they have all of these retirement accounts that want Bitcoin exposure, one, that means Fidelity as a single buyer is buying up huge amounts of crypto and basically locking it away. Like we talk about staking, this is old school staking. This is like buying up assets and putting it in a vault. What is that gonna do? One, reduce the supply price goes up. Two, it's sitting in a vault, right? They're not letting large chunks of this go. They might make a transaction once a quarter based on their investment prospectus. So it's gonna reduce volatility as well. So institutions creating products for retail investors I think is not good because institutions getting like long-term like retirement funds getting into this makes crypto better for all of us, right? In terms of volatility and price. But yeah, I mean, we could talk about this for hours but I think it's not good but people have to remember there's a difference between centralized institutions offering products and centralized institutions taking custody of assets. The latter is the bad one. That makes perfect sense. And I agree, we could talk about it for hours. We're actually running down the clock here. So before we wrap up, I'd say the next time we have you on show I'd like to talk more about reducing Bitcoin's volatility through institutional investment. I like the volatility in crypto. It's good if you're a trader or a swing trader, like volatility is great. And that's why you need toss it, right? You need it to keep your asset in the exchange under your own custody so that you can take advantage of volatility. Exactly. But then on the flip side, like as someone who's really into Bitcoin and doesn't want to part ways with it, I am looking for more utility from the asset. It's not just about medium of exchange, store of value from me. I like to have things that have equity potential that can be unlocked like my house or a collectible car or art or Ethereum now has that kind of like utility through liquid staking derivatives and that it's an interest bearing asset. So I'm looking for that from Bitcoin and if that means muted volatility so that it can have a price floor that's like within the 30 or $60 range and it's gonna hold it. And then I can start to collateralize this asset or build off of its value without parting ways with it. Then that's also interesting to me. So I wanna talk about that more in our next show. We can talk about should fidelity absorb grayscale if possible like that 600K Bitcoin that's out there, should they absorb it and then repackage that widow-making trade product which I think that would be good either them or JP Morgan are probably eventually going to do that. And then I also know that you build protocols and help like projects. So I wanted to talk to you in future about like, let's say I have 50 or $100,000 or a million dollars. I have a great idea. I wanna launch an NFT project. I wanna launch a DeFi project that has a token but I have no experience in crypto. So, but a background in finance maybe. So I know that you work with like projects doing kind of like white label. Here's how you launch a token. Like an incubator, incubator. Yeah, yeah, an incubator. So I wanna talk about that next time but imparting the most impacting thing that you said that has stuck with me through this is that this is the year of reformation. And of course, custody is super important but this is the year of reformation. So before we sign off, if you could say anything to anyone who's listening right now regarding crypto and just what's in your mind, what would that be? I would say make sure your crypto is in your wallets. Make sure that you have physical touch over your crypto and that it's not arms length away sitting on an exchange somewhere. And if you don't know how to do that, research how to do that. One, because you're gonna protect yourself and two, because that's the future. Educating people on how to pull stuff off exchanges and put it in something that they have control over. Mm-hmm. Do you think eventually there'll be a like DAP built that I just log into my ledger, click withdraw and to what account it goes to just like your Bank of America app and it does all that stuff in the background for you? Possibly. I mean, it would require an API access to all the centralized exchanges for it to be able to start pulling stuff off. Yeah, I think like, I think the future is using the coin bases of the world as on-ramps and then using all the awesome stuff that's being developed out there. I think we do have to get off of browser-based extension wallets. I think that's a point of confusion for a lot of users that are coming into the space. You know, we mentioned DYDX a couple of times. I would call them the gold standard right now of how to take like a web application and then explain to people how to use like the extension wallet. But it is still very confusing because people don't understand what's happening in the background. And mobile apps I think are a bit better in the sense that everyone gets what a mobile app is. Everyone has Venmo. They know how to send money. So they do like a mobile-based like spot trading application or to start doing like more DeFi work there. I think it's easier to get people to understand it, but yeah, I mean, maybe we can build it out. How about you send a proposal to the incubator and we get you some funding? All right, sounds good. Well, man, it's been a pleasure but it's good having you on. You're deeply knowledgeable. If people want to hear more from you and follow you and just learn about what you're building and your thoughts on what's happening in the crypto space, where can they find you? Yeah, Twitter. My handle is zero X Bud LinkedIn, the search Budwhite. I post equally on LinkedIn and Twitter. And then, yeah, I mean, I do do opinion pieces every once in a while. I think I have one on Cointelegraph coming out next week that kind of dives a bit deeper into like this idea of custody and owning your assets and the history of it as it pertains to like dollars in the bank account like your childhood bank account. So, yeah, give me a follow. I say interesting things every once in a while. All right. Well, man, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for coming on. I'm Ray Salman, host of Market Talks. We're here every Thursday at 12 ET. So subscribe to the show. We always have really interesting guests and I'll see everyone next time.