Fortune Teller Podcast

Today on the Fortune Teller Podcast, we are speaking with Matthijs de Vries, founder and CTO for AllianceBlock.

AllianceBlock seamlessly brings DeFi and TradFi together. The future of finance is an integrated system in which the best of both worlds can work together to increase capital flows and technological innovation.

The AllianceBlock technology solutions and product suite solve challenges in the industry, like interoperability, compliance, and access to liquidity.

AllianceBlock focuses on three layers, each serving a specific need in DeFi. They are: the DeFi layer, the Data Layer, and the Regulatory and Compliance Layer. Alone, they help DeFi projects grow and traditional financial institutions invest in DeFi. Together, they make the future's financial structure.

AllianceBlock offers cross-chain access with the AllianceBlock Bridge. The AllianceBlock Liquidity Mining as a service provides access to additional liquidity and volume, and the AllianceBlock DEX.

AllianceBlock Fundrs provides a peer-to-peer funding protocol. AllianceBlock Terminal provides a comprehensive dashboard of data analytics and information for DeFi strategizing.

Several international jurisdictions’ regulations are written in machine logic within the smart contract. Actions within the network will be pre-authorized and automatically compliant at all times. Regulatory amendments are validated by oracles serving as Proof of Authority nodes.

The ALBT token is a tool to be used as the primary medium of exchange, reward for participants, and to pay network fees. ALBT tokens will be the reserve currency for the reserve pool and governance token for voting and power delegation.

The ALBT token utility and scarcity is achieved via deflationary features: node staking, liquidity pooling, and both quarterly revenue-based token burns and activity-based token burns.

AllianceBlock is creating an ecosystem of stakeholders across both traditional and decentralized finance to create a fully decentralized and globally compliant capital market.

Industry stakeholders and service providers become nodes within the AllianceBlock Ecosystem. They can then propose their services and be compliant with multi-jurisdictional regulations while plugging into legacy TradFi systems.

The AllianceBlock Ecosystem enables its members to issue, transfer and own tokenized and/or digitized assets. It allows any entity to create assets and applications without the need for approvals from centralized authorities. It uses human and machine intelligence to make use of the wisdom of groups in decision-making and governance.

AllianceBlock lets developers build products to leverage user data, in a secure manner that provides privacy to investors and users, while allowing them to have control over their data.

To learn more, visit: https://allianceblock.io

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The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today, we are talking with Philippe Bekhazi, the CEO of XBTO.

In 2015, we were the first to provide institutional-grade liquidity to major trading platforms. Since then, we have made significant efforts to create stability in the cryptocurrency markets. We continue to grow and shape the industry through our extensive technical knowledge of market infrastructure and investments in market-related blockchain technology companies. XBTO consistently ranks among the leading traders by notional trade volume.

XBTO offers global access to crypto finance. As fintech entrepreneurs and investors, we constantly unlock new opportunities by anticipating the rapidly changing needs of the industry. We use advanced technology and proprietary algorithms to trade cryptocurrencies and crypto derivatives. We are active in platform trading, over-the-counter (OTC) trading, asset management, venture capital, and cryptocurrency mining. Not only that, but we are also developing cutting-edge solutions for stablecoins.

We build relationships with industry leaders and help set the standards for this dynamic, fast-paced market. We seek to provide the industry with best-in-class quality, security, and reliability.

XBTO identifies and unlocks trading opportunities while minimizing risk. We have global access and focus.

Off-exchange trading combines market liquidity with discretion, accountability, and negotiable terms. Traders can execute large transactions promptly without the price slippages and order book visibility of exchange trading.

Most banks, initially, will look at Bitcoin. The next area they will most likely consider are stablecoins as they are fairly easy to understand, compared to other, more volatile, crypto. Some banks may start with stablecoins first, due to their stable nature of being pegged to assets they are more familiar with.

Banks are starting to converge towards crypto exchanges, and the crypto exchanges will become like banks, as Kraken is doing. USDC-Circle is another exchange that is exploring the option of becoming like a bank. As many, like Coinbase, begin to offer debit cards, they become the hubs for customers to do their spending for non-crypto based transactions. Coinbase offers direct deposit for their employees, so employees can have their money go directly into their Coinbase account, and then, spend it with their debit card.

While there is the software side—blockchains, DeFi exchanges, like UniSwap—that is not regulated, you then have the other side that has all the regulations, when it comes to directly dealing with the exchange and transferring of money, which in the US, can cause innovations to proceed at a slower pace than in other parts of the world.

For more on XBTO: https://www.xbto.com/

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The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today on the Fortune Tellers Podcast, we are talking with Alex DiNunzio, CEO of Jambb, a digital marketplace that helps fans acquire epic moments in live comedy as NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens).

One of the main buckets is novel content that the audience has not seen before. For example, someone recorded an old show on VHS. One can take it to YouTube, and get many views, but not necessarily generate any real revenue. The return on time invested, for most artists, simply is not there.

The second of the two main buckets are for fans who repeatedly watch an artist’s content, such as a favorite part of the overall content, that is watched, again and again. Fans can own a piece of that moment, to share with others.

For many people, they have collected physical items, such as Pez Dispensers or baseball cards. Recently, there has been a shift from owning and discussing physical objects to the digital. Today, fans share many of their favorites digitally.

One of the things that digital ownership comes with is a perk. For example, a comedian may give a fan who owns an NFT of their work tickets to shows, redeem it for memorabilia, or other mixings, to attract the fans.

Instead of short-term goals and fast exits, Jambb looks for creators that are interested in the long term. This is a fan acquisition strategy for years to come. When recruiting content creators and people to the advisory board, this strategy is what we want these people to think of.

How value is created, regardless of market cycle is that in addition to the NFTs, the content creators have commercial rights to make dollars, put on YouTube, or resell it. It holds value, no matter the status of the market. Currently, the commercial rights are for the one specific NFT. We are continually experimenting with the DAO and community, such as owning multiple parts of content.

How the owner of the NFT, with the commercial rights, benefits the content creator in that they have new distribution systems. We don’t know the creative capabilities of the buyers, and what they can do with the assets. This is experimentation, where they can get some money upfront, and benefits them by providing the content creators with new audiences.

The NFT helps fans and comedians find new content. In addition, when fans buy the NFT, they have the hope that it will increase in value over time. Not only will the NFT transfer, but the rights will, allowing the new owner options in how to promote and profit with it.

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The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we are talking with Jan Stockhausen, chief legal architect of Etherisc, a decentralized insurance protocol with products to protect a variety of assets anywhere from crops to crypto wallets. Users of Etherisc also have the capability to request or build an insurance product of their own.

Ideas of governance, insurance, financial services compliance started coming up around 2016, where we realized that this concept of programmable distributed systems was real and could be brought to life with Ethereum.

In the DeFi space, there is the ability to lend, to borrow, to earn you governance tokens, utility tokens, to really be a participant in the network. I think we've now started to see the next evolution where people actually want to work in the network. They want to participate in voting or proposals or governance. These worlds combining start making a really nice hub for what will be the needs of insurance.

All these people, the insured, insurance companies, and regulators, need to trust each other. Insurance is very centralized, very highly regulated and therefore also fairly slow industry and slow moving. If you take blockchain technology and the trustless network it offers, you see the possibilities. You can put all these actors together, rather than having a centralized insurance entity in the middle.

With the help of the regulation that provides the certainty that everyone will get what they signed up for and the blockchain can solve the problem in a decentralized and a much more efficient way.

We are at the stage where there are many applications that are crypto native, and a lot of the financial instruments that are emerging in the DeFi space.

We're also working on insurance for crypto wallets, for example. It's fair to say we're spearheading this breakthrough of blockchain technology into the real world, into where blockchain technology is used to solve real problems of real people in the real world. We have the opportunity to show that this is possible and that blockchain is here to stay.

In Sub-Sahra Africa, only about 3% are insured. It’s hard to be profitable in these regions with traditional finance. Blockchain can help, especially with regulation issues. Technology is the way to unlock insurance for the uninsured. Innovation will be the key. Blockchain offers faster and fewer fees than traditional methods.

Learn more at: https://www.etherisc.com/

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The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

​​Today’s guest is Barron Solomon, the founder of Solo Music, a global music marketplace. Solo Music uses smart contracts and NFTs to create digital music assets and connect artists, fans, and the industry at large. Barron’s background is in the IT space, where he worked to help small to medium-sized businesses migrate from a physical infrastructure to a virtual one. One of his big endeavors was introducing businesses to cloud technology when it first came out. As part of his job, he had to stay up to date with the next wave of technological innovation. That’s where he stumbled upon blockchain in 2014. Since then, he says he’s done nearly every job you can do in the space, from working in a commercial mining facility to DAP analysis and production.

Barron says that, in general, people are resistant to anything they don’t inherently understand. You have to break down the barriers with education to show that this piece of technology isn’t scary. Barron believes eventually people will realize that this is cheaper, faster, and better. Blockchain truly can impact the music industry if we let it. Just like the internet made it possible to transport information, blockchain will break down barriers for transporting money. The music industry is a $20 billion industry, which Barron believes is nothing compared to what it could be. He says music is a universal language that we can all connect around.

Being in Nashville, Barron has been around music all his life and knows many people in the industry. He says the music industry has the most confusing contracts, with so many aspects going into how artists earn money. Barron says that many artists don’t even understand how, when, or why they’re getting paid. Barron wants to utilize this technology to give artists more transparency. He also wants to leverage this technology to build a fan club of the future, where fans can have different ways to interact with artists. We’ve worked with artists that have offered things like a one-hour zoom session with them. Up to this point, artists haven’t been able to fully monetize and gain liquidity access to the real value they are providing, which is their artistic ability.

If you’d like to learn more about the Solo Music project, visit www.solomusic.io.

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The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we are talking to the co-founder and CEO of Horizen Labs, Rob Viglione. Horizen Labs is a layer one blockchain-based technology company that focuses on data privacy and security. Horizen Labs was created in 2017, but Rob has been working with cryptocurrency since 2012. He says he first heard about Bitcoin while working and living in Afghanistan, where currency is often unstable. He quickly realized this new currency is needed all over the world. Rob says in the US we’re used to relatively stable currencies, but it’s a different story in most other places around the world. A decentralized finance option was desperately needed.

After working in Afghanistan, Rob went back to University in 2014 to get his PhD in finance. He did his dissertation on crypto finance, and so he got a lot of research into it. That knowledge led him to launch what is now Horizen. While building out Horizen, Rob was focused on value and privacy. They launched as a privacy currency before pivoting to a blockchain operation. Now they’re focused on unlocking a broader sense of things that go beyond money. Rob says with programmable blockchains, the sky is the limit on what can be built on them.

Side chains are Horizen’s answer to scaling. Rob says scaling has been a hot topic since 2014 when people realized that trying to jam too many transactions through a single ledger was challenging. Some people’s answer was to do a bigger block size, but at Horizen they decided to do many blocks in parallel. Their technology allows them to have up to a thousand blockchains operating parallel to each other, and from there you can scale indefinitely.

Rob says people choose Horizen over other blockchains because it is completely in your control, you don’t have to worry about being de-platformed. There’s no convincing other groups to do anything, it’s completely yours. You also capture all the economics of it. Developers can even configure their percentage of transaction fees. Finally, because they have their own dedicated blockchain, they aren’t competing for bandwidth.

If you’d like to follow Horizen’s progress and check out their various projects, visit www.horizenlabs.io. If you’d like to follow Rob, he can be found on LinkedIn or on Twitter @robviglione.

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The Exit - Presented By Flippa: A 30-minute podcast featuring expert entrepreneurs who have been there and done it. The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold a business. You’ll learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits, a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many. To listen to the podcast or get daily listing updates, click on flippa.com/the-exit-podcast/

Today we are talking with BTC VIX, admin of both WallStreetBets and SatoshiStreetBets. He describes himself as part of the core libertarian movement, being very skeptical of the Fed and central banks printing money. It was in this movement that he stumbled upon crypto and went down the rabbit hole. BTC VIX says he hasn’t looked back since 2013. He was part of a group of traders and a community was born out of that. That community then merged into a Telegram group and continues to progress. BTC VIX says he wasn’t a developer, so instead he became more about community building and expanding out trading products.

The WallStreetBets is a movement that was founded on the principle of you having autonomy. Just in the last two years, we have had synthetic products you can trade. BTC VIX calls our attention back to the 2008 housing crisis, where we didn’t see any bankers go to jail. People wanted political change, and you can either do that through voice or exit. People began by using their voice to protest, but that didn’t really work. People then wanted to use their money to get revenge. Finally, DeFi is an exit out of the Wall Street game. VIX explains how the GameStop scandal was a way to stick it to the man.

With a consistent lack of transparency in the current system, an exit into DeFi would equalize the playing field. That’s not to say that DeFi won’t have growing pains associated with it, but the main goal is for DeFi to go borderless. BTC VIX asks why can’t someone in the US buy Samsung stock? It’s about giving access to people that wouldn’t otherwise have access to all these instruments. In DeFi, there is no oppressor. BTC VIX hopes to see a scenario where companies pause and say ‘we don’t want to list on Nasdaq, we want to list as a token’. That’s when things will get a lot more momentum.

BTC VIX is cautiously optimistic about the future of DeFi. If you’re in the same boat and would like to follow BTC VIX journey, you can find him on Twitter @BTCVIX. You can also follow WallStreetBets and SatoshiStreetBets on Telegram.

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The Exit - Presented By Flippa: A 30-minute podcast featuring expert entrepreneurs who have been there and done it. The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold a business. You’ll learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits, a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many. To listen to the podcast or get daily listing updates, click on flippa.com/the-exit-podcast/

Graph Protocol for Blockchain with Pranav Maheshwari by Fortune Teller Podcast

Today we are talking to Rowland Graus, product manager at Agoric. Rowland says while in college, he roomed with 8-10 guys that were really into poker. Bitcoin became big in the poker community, and Rowland was in the perfect place to hear about it. As the years went by, Rowland tracked bitcoin, but didn’t really get pulled in until February 2017. It was while launching a new product for a startup that Rowland’s business partner spoke to him for hours about Ethereum. Rowland was convinced it was something he should put some money into as an investor. After he bought in, he realized he should learn more about it and that’s when he really got sucked in. He started seeing products being built but didn’t see a lot he could do in the space, so he watched from a distance. In 2019-2020, Rowland started to see products that he understood and would use personally. That was his light bulb moment when Rowland realized he needed to switch his career.

Rowland has noticed some differences as well as some similarities between DeFi and traditional finance. When Ethereum first launched, Rowland had a lot of friends asking him what he thought of it and whether they should buy in. Rowland told them he honestly had no idea how to value this new thing. He says there are parallels between valuing DeFi and traditional finance, and NFTs are a perfect evolution of that. Like every business model, there should be a way that money and revenue are generated. It’s amazing to see how far DeFi protocols have come. Ethereum has done $50million in transaction fees.

We need diversity at the layer one level where some are solving specific security systems. That diverse range will bring such a broad ecosystem of users. If you can lower barriers to make it possible for developers who aren’t security experts to do it well, the amount of development you’ll see is going to explode. When it comes to the future of Agoric, Rowland says by the end of next year, he expects to see significant hubs of liquidity connecting cosmos chains in meaningful ways. He says that will be a massive opportunity for developers, and we’ll suddenly see complex derivatives markets. If you’re interested to learn more about Agoric, visit them at www.agoric.com or follow them on Twitter @agoric.

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The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we’re talking with Zach Bronstein, the COO of Endaoment, a donor advised fund (DAF) provider in decentralized finance. Endaoments mission is to encourage charitable giving of cryptocurrencies. Before Endaoment, Zach spent five years at Morgan Stanley in the finance department. Before that, he says his life revolved around non-profit involvement. He found that Endaoment combined those two parts of his life. He was especially excited about decentralized governments and the compatibility of smart contract architecture. Furthermore, he was able to take his skills from being a teacher to both Morgan and Stanley and Endaoment. He found that he could take complex concepts and train others effectively. He says that so much of what he does is chatting with non-profits about what Endaoment provides and introducing them to the cryptocurrency world.

Zach explains a donor advised fund (DAF) as the most tax efficient vehicle for making donations. He says DAF’s are not new or specific to crypto. In fact, they’ve existed for more than half a century and were created by the IRS so that folks with a lot of assets could easily donate to charity. Before DAF’s you would have to sell your asset, pay capital gains taxes on it, then you could take what was left and donate it. With DAF’s you donate the asset directly to charity, the charity liquidates the asset and no one pays capital gains. All big banks have a DAF platform, basically built out of a sister 501c3 entity that they match. The only way to go through the process is to use a DAF that already exists.

When a donor wants to give some cryptocurrency, most charities don’t know what to do with it or how to accept it. They get overwhelmed with having to get set up with a fiat on ramp, learning to use digital wallets, etc. Things get complicated quickly, and Endaoment wants to make it as simple as possible to both donate crypto and to receive crypto as a charity. Endaoment offers two forms of payouts; they can receive funds as USD into their bank account, or they can receive funds as coins and do what they want with that. Most folks opt for the USD because it’s what they’re most comfortable with. Others are excited to have an opportunity to get into crypto, where they can either further invest or cash out.

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The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/