Encrypted

We are live! We held a live podcast at Gitex and discussed an awesome topic ‘The future of programmable money’!

We had two great guests on the show: Gabriel Abed from Bitt.com and Aruba Khalid from the Dubai Future Foundation. In this episode, we discussed:

This was another amazing live panel we hosted as we discussed the real problems and questions surrounding programmable money and what sound money looks like.

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word and hitting that subscribe button!

Special Guests: Aruba Khalid and Gabriel Abed.

Interested in hearing about how a young 27 year old is building a crypto empire?

Ahmed is in one of his favourite places in the world, Shanghai, for the Shanghai Blockchain week. In this episode, he caught up with James Wo, CEO and Founder of Digital Finance Group.

The two delve right in to talk about James’ incredible ventures as well as latest topics in the crypto world including:

All of the above and more is discussed on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word and hitting that subscribe button!

Special Guest: James Wo.

Ahmed jetted off to China for the Shanghai Blockchain Week and in this episode, he is joined by an old friend of his, David Johnston. David is literally an OG in this space getting involved as early as 2012 and has contributed in more ways than one since joining. He is currently the Chairman of Factom and the Managing Director of Yeomans Global Capital.

Ahmed reminisces the first time he and David first met, remembering a quote he would never forget; ‘Everything that can be decentralized will be decentralized’. This was jokingly described as Johnston’s law when David first introduced this at the Coin Summit in 2014. Great, things will be decentralised but when and to what extent? David does a good job showcasing how and when certain processes and use cases should be decentralised.

The two dig deeper to explore what use cases we are seeing today that is both decentralised and has some credible adoption behind it. Other than Bitcoin, of course, David goes onto explain how Factom, a decentralised blockchain that anchors into bitcoin and ethereum, has secured hundreds of millions of business records and cites a couple of uses by real companies using Factom as a way to record business documents. This is where the amazing TikTok Baidu case was revealed by David. You definitely don’t want to miss this interesting court case story, oh and the supreme court of China was involved too.

Ahmed shifts the conversation to see David’s opinion on which jurisdiction is the best for blockchain and crypto. In his words - ‘Switzerland. Hands down’. Ahmed, a bit shell shocked dove in to understand why David thinks Switzerland is the hotspot for blockchain and David urges blockchain projects should consider moving to Zug, which is dubbed as Crypto Valley.

David further shocks Ahmed when Ahmed asks him Bitcoin or Ethereum. David chooses Ethereum for a number of reasons - Do make sure to listen to hear why!

Before the end of the show, the pair go off on a completely random topic - Homeschooling. As David mentioned he was homeschooled, Ahmed was intrigued to find out what is homeschooling about, hows it different from public schooling and why parents make the decision to homeschool their children.

All of the above and more will be on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on iTunes and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word!

Special Guest: David Johnston.

In this episode, Ahmed sits with Pranav Sharma, Founding Partner of Woodstock Fund.

Woodstock Fund is a new and emerging crypto fund based out of India and Pranav delves into how their fund operates, in particular, their 3 core focuses, which include:

Pranav shares his experience of co-creating creative solutions in sales and distribution and how his learnings through creating this led him to create the fund he is running today.

Ahmed sets the theme for the episode which focuses on the right investment vehicles behind cryptocurrencies and assessing the optimal token models that make sense.

Starting off with public chains, Pranav explains their thesis behind the investments they made in Holochain, Casper Labs and Elrond. From a decentralised finance perspective, Pranav shares why this emerging sector is not just important for the new value it can bring but how it’s solving problems that currently exist in traditional finance. Web 3.0, according to Pranav, is all about being more human and unbundling of the human potential wherever you are in the world.

Pranav expresses that the right economics has to come into play before any consideration of investment. Ahmed is intrigued about what is the right vehicle when investing in these projects as the investor can invest in equity, tokens and convertible notes. In the past two years, countless projects used tokens as a way to raise money without necessarily thinking about how token economics will play and pan out in the future.

How do you define the right instrument when building out a project? Pranav argues the business model should drive this decision and currently, in this cycle of the crypto market we are seeing more projects using the right instruments during fundraising.

Running a pro token investment fund, Pranav gives many suggestions to the above, from a dual equity-token structure, or raising through an STO which can then be converted to a utility, or the project themselves having to bootstrap the project until they find minimum viable utility where a token is the right instrument in this case.

Tokens as a unit of trust

Someone can create the best technology ever, but if the ecosystem is small and there is zero to little adoption, then what is the point? Pranav also shares a technical-economic response between demand and supply and how the right economics should facilitate more adoption in a perpetual enforcing cycle.

All of the above and more will be on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on iTunes and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word!

Special Guest: Pranav Sharma.

It’s our 50th episode anniversary!!! In this episode, Nic and Ahmed are back to co-hosting together, and for this special milestone, we have a special topic in store.

We are joined by Amin Elkholy, Siddiq Farid and Matt Hamilton to discuss all things economy, crypto, sound money, pending recessions, global reserve currency and much more!

The first topic is all about crypto or fiat, examining traditional currencies and what sound money could look like in the future. Amin and Ahmed look from a historical point of view whereas Matt and Siddiq look at this from a technological perspective.

Since currencies and money are tied with central banks and monetary policy, the conversation diverges into the role of central banks in the future, how credit, leverage, and distribution of money works, particularly the distribution of money into private banks, and ultimately why the tools that central banks use today could be totally disrupted with transparent distribution of money via the concept of central bank digital currencies.

The conversation then goes into the pros and cons of central bank digital currencies, the impact of removing cash and China’s plans to be the first country to issue a central bank digital currency.

Amin gives fascinating ideas around how commercial banks can possibly innovate when central bank digital currencies do become a reality. In this scenario, will consumers be in the driving seat if there is an efficient allocation of money and capital from the central bank to the consumer and then the consumer decides which bank they can deposit their money, effectively leading to dynamic and competitive interest rates and pricing?

As a limited supply of a currency can bring certain stability to that currency and an economy, Nic argues that leveraging has created an enormous amount of wealth and is thus a key factor in the economy. However, we see huge amounts of inequality in wealth and income distribution with only a tiny percentage of the world population managing to amass most of the generated wealth. Amin sees it from a different perspective where the distribution of money supply is not distributed properly and thus income and wealth inequality can arise.

As the economy is globally slowing down, the gentlemen speak about an impending recession and look at history lessons to try and dictate the future. Matt speaks out against negative interest rates and explains how the U.S. is currently experiencing it and what he expects the Fed’s reaction will be.

Nic then asks the guests to predict what the future will look like in 15 years! Check out what they had to say.

All of the above and more will be on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on iTunes and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word!

Special Guests: Amin El-Kholy, Matt Hamilton, and Siddiq Farid.

Ahmed sits down with Fredrik Haga, co-founder of Dune Analytics to discuss crypto and blockchain adoption rates and exploring why these adoption rates are still so low today!

Fredrik is focusing on making data on the blockchain more accessible to project founders, investors, and individuals by analysing and aggregating public blockchain data. The two talk about the right types of metrics needed to measure the right levels of adoptions and how to measure the success of a product and its market fit.

Extraordinary data they showcased in Berlin shows that there is 1 Ethereum address for every 110 people. Only 1 in every 110 people! But is this the right metric to measure for success?

Of course, retention rates are top in priority and Fredrik explains a certain case they’ve been seeing within the context of the MakerDAO project. He argues that although the macro data for MakerDAO are positive but when you dig into the data, there are many surprises in store. Surprise surprise, retention rates in crypto-related products such as MakerDAO are still super low!

Fredrik also goes into his enterprise experience, working for one of the largest Norwegian media companies which looked to implement blockchain in their operations. Going into the infrastructure of trust, particularly in a jurisdiction like Norway where people trust their government, the pair really explore if blockchain, privacy by design and all the things this industry stands for matters for these types of institutions and countries.

Before the pair sign off, Fredrik goes into his takeaways from Berlin Blockchain Week. He sees usability and real use cases are coming to front and center instead of fancy tech stuff taking the limelight.

All of the above and more will be on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on iTunes and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word!

Special Guest: Fredrik Haga.

Ahmed is in Berlin for Berlin Blockchain Week, and as part of this short Berlin Blockchain Week series, we are super excited to have Dr. Gavin Wood, who is the President and Founder of Web 3 Foundation and notably known for being one of the co-founders and Ex CTO of Ethereum.

Ahmed dives into Gavin’s value system and tries to understand why he is pursuing the path he is currently on. Driven by curiosity, we learn that he helped to code the ideas that Vitalik drew up for Ethereum and is increasingly curious about what else he can create next!

Ahmed, curious about Gavin’s experiences, wants to find out the challenges he faced in the past 6 years as a prolific tech leader in the field and most importantly how he discerned the cynical from the authentic.

We also get some interesting opinions on a few topics:

On one of the last things advocated by Gavin is a push for reducing the need for trust in the world; less trust, more truth.

Music Credit: LAKEY INSPIRED

Track Name: Warm Nights

Music By: LAKEY INSPIRED @ https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired

Original upload HERE – https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired/warm-nights

Special Guest: Dr. Gavin Wood.

Sponsored By:

• CBX : CBX is a digital asset trading platform dedicated to providing users with safe and professional digital currency trading services. The company has independent operating teams in UAE, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the London, other countries and regions.

Richard Muirhead is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Fabric Ventures. Our host Ahmed recorded this episode in sunny London at the Fabric Ventures office.

With an established career in engineering, entrepreneurship and investing, Ahmed was intrigued to find out Richard’s core and to see what influenced him to become the person he is today. Richard shares parts of his childhood experiences when growing up and how his post-university experiences, particularly in building companies, has built much of who he is today. This led him to believe that developers and computer engineers are the primary driving forces behind successful businesses.

Moving onto Web 3 and its construct, Richard talks about why Web 3 is his focus touching on the intersections of easily architecting software that is easily interwoven in our lives, how the world currently works and how start-ups succeed.

As Fabric Ventures are currently fundraising, Ahmed was intrigued to find out how Richard and the team are trying to convince the wider investor community and traditional LP’s to invest in this new wave. The ideas surrounding Web 3 are great, but how can you rally traditional investors to back you? Richard articulately lays down the the things that get the investors excited and things that they should avoid.

Ahmed shifts the conversation to the types of entrepreneurs that Fabric will typically back. If you’re a Web 3 entrepreneur reading this or listening to the podcast, make sure you listen to what Richard had to say!

Enterprise and tech titans - how are they looking at this and will they be adapting? Ahmed and Richard discussed whether or not the current incumbents will be able to change their business models to the new world of Web 3 and the new value chain that will emerge as a result. Richard draws interesting comparisons from history citing the move from IP to cloud (around 10 years ago) created lots of software applications and resulted in huge value creation. He argues we may see something similar when we move from IP to an architecture whereby people and companies all hold their own data and share it at their will in an interwoven system.

Finally, the two touch on regulation to see how GDPR and Open Banking will be able to aid this nascent industry in moving forward!

All this and more is discussed in the week’s episode of Encrypted!

Special Guest: Richard Muirhead.

Richard Ma is the CEO of Quantstamp, one of the leading smart contract auditing firms in blockchain space

In this episode, Ahmed and Nic speak to Richard to understand what on earth Quantstamp do and why their smart contract auditing solution is so crucial to the development of this space.

Richard starts off with his background and how the idea of Quantstamp evolved. Using industrial techniques he picked up as an also trader, he and his co-founder wanted to apply those techniques to provide smart contract auditing services to the up and coming projects which are all based on smart contracts.

Nic dives straight intp addressing key concerns associated with smart contracts such as coding a simple mistake and how would a reissue be implemented. Would it be done through contract modularisation or would a fork have to be implemented?

We also go on to the topic of enterprise and how Quantstamp interacts with different levels of enterprise clients. One colossal client of theirs is Kakao’s Ground X project (Kakao is Korea’s largest messaging platform) and shares how he has interacted with them and the processes involved.

Ahmed shifts the topic to why Quantsamp is in cohort 6 of the Dubai Future Accelerators program, which is a 12-week program dedicated to bringing in start-ups from around the world to bring innovation to certain government departments. They were paired up with the Road and Transport Authority (RTA) in order to help them build a secure system to sync up the different data silos that exist in the various agencies of the RTA to bring the coordination of data from days to seconds. Richard shares his current experiences with the RTA explaining how welcoming and open-minded they are in trialing these projects, in particular how the government departments emphasize the business applications and benefits these solutions would bring rather than focusing on the hype that blockchain.

Richard touches upon their global expansion, such as their new set up in Japan and Noumura’s recent investment in Quantstamp. Nic changes the conversation to trust and data standardization and given Quantstamp’s global footprint and diverse clientele, what this means for them introducing standards in the industry and becoming the trust anchor. Richard dives deep into the 3 verticals of standards they are working on, one of which is the Smart Contract Security Alliance (which Nomura and Fujitsu are current stakeholders).

When Richard started the company there were 300,000 smart contracts on Ethereum and now on there are 12 million contracts deployed on Ethereum! This led them to think that security audits should be automated with future anticipated demand and theoretically a token can be used as a security and utility feature to secure the system and verify the smart contract audits. The QSP token of Quantstamp is the token that powers this protocol and Richard further explains the viability of why the token economics could work in the future.

Nic further questions Richard if they would implement AI and machine learning into their business! Make sure to listen and find out what he had to say!

All this and more was discussed on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

Also, the legal bits for the soundtrack used in the podcast:

Track Name: Warm Nights

Music By: LAKEY INSPIRED @ https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired

Original upload HERE – https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired/warm-nights

License for commercial use: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported “Share Alike” (CC BY-SA 3.0) License.

Full License HERE – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Special Guest: Richard Ma.

Ahmed and Dr. Marwan Alzarouni from the Dubai Blockchain Center went to Singapore to attend and speak at the World Blockchain Forum.

In this episode, Ahmed and the special co-host for this episode, Dr. Marwan, catch up with Samson Mow who is the CSO at Blockstream, a bitcoin infrastructure company.

Having spent two years in China working for BTCC, Samson reminisces over his time in Shanghai and goes over what it's like working in a Chinese exchange in a relatively early period in the industry. We then move on to talk about Blockstream, and how they are building out bitcoin infrastructure.

Blockstream is known for its product Blockstream Satellite (what the hell does this have to do with bitcoin?!). No, it's not a bitcoin node that they launched into space, but rather a satellite that is in space to allow more access to bitcoin where the network broadcasts the bitcoin blockchain around the world 24/7 for free. This means less dependency on internet access to broadcast transactions and according to Samson, adds extra resilience to the bitcoin network through network stability and cost savings.

Samson then goes on to talk about the Lightning network, what it is and also applications of it in third world countries. The discussion slowly diverts to bitcoin as a digital asset and what form it would take once the lightning network becomes mainstream. If bitcoin is digital gold now, would bitcoin become a medium of exchange when the lightning network goes live? Samson takes an interesting approach saying that bitcoin is everything and has multiple use cases.

Since Samson’s background is in gaming, Ahmed picks his brains on how blockchain can be applicable to gaming and to declutter the hype from reality on what's possible and not.

All this and more is discussed in this week's episode of Encrypted!

Also, the legal bits for the soundtrack used in the podcast:

Track Name: Warm Nights

Music By: LAKEY INSPIRED @ https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired

Original upload HERE – https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired/warm-nights

License for commercial use: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported “Share Alike” (CC BY-SA 3.0) License.

Full License HERE – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Special Guests: Dr. Marwan Alzarouni and Samson Mow.