Will Crypto and Blockchain Change Your Business? An Interview With Vandross Idiake

[00:00:00.810] - Dan Paulson

Hello and welcome to books and the biz. I am here with Vandross, idiake, and Rich Veltre. I had enough trouble getting Rich's name right. I need to make sure I got yours.

[00:00:14.530] - Vandross Idiake

Yeah, yeah.

[00:00:15.760] - Dan Paulson

So this is one of our first interview sessions. So up until now, you've just seen Rich and I on the podcast, but we thought we'd change you up a little bit. We've been meeting some interesting people. Actually, I had a chance to be on Vandross's podcast a couple of weeks ago. So this is a nice turn of events where he can talk about something that the two of us know absolutely nothing about. So Vandross expect us to challenge you completely because we don't understand a lot about blockchain and whatnot. Just to give the guests a little bit of background. So you are the owner of Moonboy Capital Ventures, and you specialize primarily in blockchain and helping b to b and b to c companies understand that a little bit better. So from there, I'm going to turn it over to you. Maybe start by explaining why the name Moon Boy Ventures, how does that relate to you?

[00:01:10.680] - Vandross Idiake

Yeah, so I help basically businesses, if they need funding in the web three space, they're trying to launch a project. So from the precede stage all the way up to the series a stage. So I connect them with incubators to help them do that, too, as well. And I also help b, two c clients who want to get access to venture capital groups. Why is this important? Because then you're able to invest in projects earlier before they launch. So say, for instance, the project is launching at a public sale price. Let's say for this instance, one dollars, you would be able to get in at the precede stage of maybe like $0.50. So you're already up two x on your investment before the project even launches. So a ten x from there would be a 20 x for you. So basically, you're able to get your hands on these early stage projects that are building the future of the Internet.

[00:02:01.430] - Dan Paulson

Cool. Well, I think help us from there, because I don't know if a lot of people really understand blockchain and what the advantages are to that. And rich, feel free to jump in anytime, because I'm sure you're going to have the monetary question, because a lot of blockchain for most of us is centered around bitcoin or some variant. We were kind of talking on your podcast, or maybe it was after your podcast a little bit about how would you use this, maybe to finance a company or maybe finance the sale of a company, that type of stuff. We'll get to that further down the road. But yeah, I just want to kind of set the playing field here. So kind of explain maybe to us a little bit about what blockchain is and why companies should be interested or concerned about it.

[00:02:50.790] - Vandross Idiake

Yeah, there's many avenues that we can take, I'll tell you. First, a quick little personal story about me of why I got into the industry and liquidated all of my stocks. So I discovered this technology at the beginning of 2020. And for me, the reason that got me a little bit attracted to it was because my stock exchange, my online stock exchange, basically integrated bitcoin into as a potential asset investment vehicle for you to purchase. And I was just like, okay, what is this? And for me, I'm just too curious of a person. So because of my curiosity, I immediately went to Google, which for those who don't know, takes like 5 seconds to go on Google and search up anything. I know people, the Internet is endless of information. You just have to use it the right way. And what I stumbled across was the bitcoin white paper. And so I read the bitcoin white paper and it blew my mind. It took me about a couple times of reading it to really understand, had to research a lot. And once it all clicked, it made absolute sense because essentially what happened in 2008 with the housing Cris and everything, we won't get too much into that, but basically a pseudo anonymous person created this vehicle in which people could transfer money back and forth to one another, and it evolved into a store of value to protect us from inflation and also counterparty risk of confiscation too, as well.

[00:04:31.110] - Vandross Idiake

And so why this is important is because there's a lot of issues currently, especially right now, with the Federal Reserve basically lowering rates and spending way too much money and putting much too much supply of money within the system, right? And what that essentially is doing is if you're making $100,000 a year every single year, let's say what their rates are, let's say it's 10% inflation in some places and 5%, some whatever $100,000 you're making a year needs to become $110,000, and then it needs to compound. So basically you have to produce more every single year because your wealth is being stripped from you and it doesn't make sense long term. It's not sustainable long term. So I saw this as a really good alternative because there was a fixed supply. And I think the most important thing that I saw was that it wasn't controlled by anybody, right? So it was a completely neutral asset. The whole entire system is ran by code. So to break it down, basically with bitcoin, because I don't want to get into the other stuff, but bitcoin, you have basically a system where miners all around the world, they're anonymous, and they help to join the network, basically download a piece of software, join the network.

[00:05:50.120] - Vandross Idiake

And basically software kind of runs kind of by itself once it's set up. And you can be rewarded in bitcoin, right? That's the incentivization model. And so basically they help to verify the transactions on the blockchain instead of a intermediary doing it, right? And that's how a lot of the fintech companies work, like PayPal stuff, and then they take a cut, right. The problem is that not everyone has a PayPal. Not everyone can get access to it. There's Kyc, all these different types of things. You look at a lot of situations, like if you look at remittance, some of the people are getting destroyed from remittance because every dollar they're sending back home, the remittance systems are taking 20%. If you're looking at a western union or something like this. And so what do I do then? If I'm in, let's say, Iran, right? And I'm a US working citizen or permanent resident, and I'm trying to send money back over to my grandma. But they're sanctioned, right? So how do I send the value over to them in time so that they can eat, right? So same in Russia right? Now, they're sanctioned. So what do you do when you still have a business?

[00:07:09.040] - Vandross Idiake

How do you then receive money? And so this is a way in which you can bypass the current swift banking system, which comes with this counterparty risk too, as well, which ties into, for instance, if you look at CBDCs, right, because it's something. Central bank digital currencies, for those who don't know that, those are what's being proposed in some nation states currently, and to sort of come up with their own implementation of blockchain technology to streamline the process and also make it so where we can transact 24/7 right? Because the current system we have now, the banks are closed at a certain particular time, and it takes longer a duration of time to be able to get your value from one location to another. And so the process can be streamlined through blockchain technology. But the only issue is that the way that the government is trying to make it, it's so that they control it and they have the source code and they can change the source code. And that comes with its own risk because they can, let's say, maybe monitor, implement, let's say a digital identity solution that's attached to, let's say, your digital wallet, which is what is being proposed right now.

[00:08:17.600] - Vandross Idiake

It's public knowledge, the euro and the CBDC fed now, and these sorts of things have already started to be in the beta testing as of this year. And so the issue that you have with CBDCs is the fact that, for instance, say you say something bad on social media or something, they could potentially stop you from being able to transact because of something that you said. I'm not saying that they would do that, but it's very dangerous because there's no other system in place once all the caskets phased out completely. So what do you do then when they stop you from transacting for whatever reason and you need to feed your family? So it's a very dangerous thing and a way to counter that is to have a neutral asset. If you also look at import exports, say you're importing exporting between one country, let's say, for instance, I make the example of the canon shillings and say that they become a CBDC and then you have us dollars and say, for instance, I'm trying to sell a coffee mug and I don't have us dollars and you don't have Kennedy Shillings. And so let's say, okay, I will take your us dollars as the CBDC and basically I'll give you my coffee mug.

[00:09:35.420] - Vandross Idiake

The issue is then the US dollars or the CBDC gets stored into my reserves. And now it's a counterparty risk for me because you can press a button and then turn off my entire operation whenever you want, instantaneously with the CBDC. And this is a very dangerous thing. So to neutralize everything, you could use a neutral currency exchange like bitcoin to be able to minimize the counterparty risk. And it's something that no one can control and everyone has access to. And so that's why this solution came about, because the problem is quite massive when you're looking outside of western nations with people don't have bank accounts. I think in El Salvador, when I brought up somebody from El Salvador that's living there currently right now, that's from the states. And Francesco from moneydelics, he's also an influencer too, as well. And we spoke about the issues in El Salvador, about them not being able to have bank accounts, and it's a huge problem because they have to drive all the way, say they're living in a rural area, all the way to the city, wait in line in the bank to then pay their bills.

[00:10:36.900] - Vandross Idiake

And so they lose time. That's an opportunity cost that they could be using to make more money. Right? And so what Bukelli introduced was to make bitcoin legal tender, because then it alleviates the entire necessity of, okay, everyone needs to get KYC. Some of these people don't even have a digital. You got to think outside of the west. Yes, in the west, everything's more structured. There's Social Security numbers, all these things. If you look at areas in Africa, areas in Southeast Asia, areas in South America, people don't even have identification, don't even know how old they are. They can't even prove any of how. But they still need to be economical, right? At the end of the day, they still need to be able to feed themselves and feed their families. So a way, a solution they can be able to attain value and extract value is through just downloading a digital wallet, which takes no KYC. Anyone can do it around the world as long as you have Internet and send me bitcoin, and then I'll provide you my product or service. And so, yeah, I know it's a pretty huge amount of information I just gave you guys there, but, yeah, that's pretty much the gist.

[00:11:41.160] - Dan Paulson

But wait, there's more. Be sure to check out the other parts of Vadros's interview. We got part two coming up very soon, where he'll talk about how crypto can be a hedge on inflation. So be sure to check that out. See you at the next episode.