How Blockchain Is Transforming Transaction // Mark Monfort

Mark Monfort stands at the forefront of the Australian Web3 movement as co-founder of the Australian Defi Association and venture studio Not Centralised.

As a Tradfi native turned DeFi convert, he remains pragmatic about the mainstream adoption of decentralisation despite bearing the tounge-in-cheek monikor Captain Defi on Twitter & Discourse.

On Season 2 episode #6 of The Digital Village Show, we sit down with Mark to discuss all things Web3, regulation in the space, the crypto naysayers and the ‘modern renaissance’.

Transcript

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Welcome back to another episode of The Digital Village Show, where we tackle issues that impact people, the economy, and the planet from a technology angle. We're back, New week, new episode, and a new cohost. The voice that you would've heard during these intros and outros each. So myself, Chris, and Luke will be, uh, welcoming Mark Mumford in today's episode. He is a data technologist with the background in capital markets and more recently all things Defi and Web 3.0. Co-founder of the new Australian Web through 0.0 focus, business not centralized, and co-founder of one of the rapidly growing community groups. OSD five, focusing on bringing Web three Bruno communities together here in Sydney. Welcome, Mark. In today's episode as. Explore how blockchain tech is reducing the inefficiencies of modern day transactions. Enjoying Welcome back to another episode of Digital Village Show, Take two. Isn't that right? Yes. We tried to record this a couple weeks ago, but we were met with a very thunders outdoor reception with Jack hammering and yeah, I don't know, just sounded like there was a Jack Jack Hammer's road works the whole deal. Yeah. Jack needs to not hammer at those times. It wasn't fair, Jack, if you were out there front door. It's incredibly rude of him. I'm like, we went outside, we said, Hey. Calm farm and he just looked at us and continued jacket. He continued indeed, actually got closer to us. He did All the time. Yes. just inch closer and closer and closer, and it's very engaged. Louder and louder. Well, we're here now, so we're here now. We, we had a good rhythm of conversation. We looked back at the audio. It was, it was pretty much unusable with everything going on. Um, Mark, thank you for your time coming back to join us for a take two. Um, good to be back. Yeah. So Mark, I'll do, you know, I'll go through the intros and stuff again, even though you know it is take two of this thing, we've done it already and you know, those moments where I wanna hear it again, Chris. Well, you know, those moments where you're prepared for the podcast. Yeah, in the last one. Mm-hmm., you've got everything memorized. You'd have a good rhythm and you're like, Oh, it doesn't work. We've gotta do it again. You come back the week later, but you did not put in the same amount of you until preparation effort. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. I know it all. You didn't. I I, No, I did not. I mean, you don't have, I mean, you live and breathe this, don't you? Yeah. We've been busy living and breathing this really, So it's all good. Um, but welcome Luke. Uh, Thank you for joining us. Um, I am, uh, I'm filling in for Paul who is still traveling wildly overseas. Our, our normal, incredible. Um, who partners alongside Luke for most of these, most of these shows joining himself in the Greek Islands. Wow. Yeah. Just so jealous. Some of the things that he's doing over, I wish I could be there right now. I can tell you that we're going there straight after this. Oh, yeah, That's, Oh, you booked our apply to us. Thank you. Awesome courtesy. That's got him on it. It's in the Metaverse. I mean, that's just as fun and just as good. We'll talk about that. We'll, Um, and call out to the location here at the Macari. Guys, thanks for the location. Thanks for the equipment. Amazing venue. Yeah. Much easier to set up shows now than, yeah, than we've been able to do in the past. Um, but today, Mark data technologist background in capital markets. More recently, some really exciting things to do with, uh, the odds Defi. Yep. Events that we've been running, I've been helping you along with. Um, you've also got not centralized, which I got a really sick jumper for, um, yesterday, which I've been loving and wearing religiously. Oh, right. And I've been pushing now Digital Village to, to get the same swag. So much about swag, huh? Yep.. We've gotta get on it. We've gotta get, um, uh, but mate, you took a step outta the corporate life. Mm-hmm. startups. Um, and to enter this sort of growing market around, I guess Web three and, and, uh, and defi in itself, um, Co-founder, uh, of the Australian Web three point no focus businesses not centralized co-founder of the rapidly growing community. I was def a as mentioned before, focusing on web three communities, um, bringing together here in Sydney and all. And even most excitingly, you're now all over the country. Yeah. Five states. What the heck, How that happen? That's in the last couple of weeks as well, right? Yeah, last two months. Really amazing. And we just hit, uh, a thousand plus people, members on our disco channel alone. Very engaged members. So it's uh, very exciting. Yeah, they're very engaged, very fast community. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All about community. They got something to say. Absolutely. Tell us a bit about the disco channel. What's happening there right now? Uh, a lot of regulatory talk because of tornado cash and the OFAC sanctions and seeing that holy crap, developers can go to jail for writing code. What does that mean? Yeah. What does that mean for the thing I'm building? Where do I base myself? All of these things are being discussed. The whole censorship discuss. How much we need to centralize versus decentralize, and it's just a very interesting debate going on. But the point is that we're moving the conversations forward. It's being done in the public eye, and it is just something that we need to engage in if we're gonna go anywhere, because we can't just sit in our little bubble and expect the whole world to revolve around us. It doesn't work that way and a great medium to have those engaging conversations. Like it's, it's been pretty amazing to see. Involved. Everyone is in that space. In it. Yeah. You were an early member. I, yeah. I remember when it was only like 50 people. When you first poured everyone over from a WhatsApp group, It was, uh, We were a crazy WhatsApp group. Yeah. With too hard. To keep track of like all the messages you'd leave for a day. There's 200 messages going on. Yeah. So we needed to do something different. So Chris was gladly a part of the, the whole discord whilst we were still figuring it out. And, um, yeah, now look at us. It's been great. Um, but we've got a great topic today, mate. Uh, something that, you know, we've, as we've mentioned, we've been working together in a while. You've been at it even longer. Um, and despite some of its recent pa uh, recent pains that we've been experiencing in the market the last six months, um, Conceptually what it means for, but conceptually what it means to business as we know it. Mm-hmm., how we trade, how we communicate, how we engage, and even alternatively experience, um, that it opens up from the arts, um, from culture down to the personalization, identification aspects of things. Um, so web through and o blockchain, Dows, NFTs, and cryptos, um, it's. To many people, like it's one of those things that sort of sits in the background, right? Like you hear about the news, we have all the scams, controversial scams activities that happen. But you ever get to hear about the bad things, don't you? Yeah. Yeah. The internet had the same thing as well. You know, Facebook and all these things, MySpace, they all had the negative kind of things before they became mainstream, and we're always evolving. But if you get involved, like you realize how engaged and how helpful the community is with those things, which is what's, You gotta look beneath. Yeah. Under the hood. Beneath the headlines, whatever the analogy is, you just, it's doing research, right? Like it's it. There's so much free information out there as well that um, it just takes a little bit of effort. And some people won't do that and that's okay. Cause there's always anything. You guys know this as the early adopters before it becomes more mainstream. And then by the time it is mainstream, people won't even realize that there's blockchain tech underpinning some of the stuff that they're already using it, They're already using it, They don't, no one cares about, Oh, what chip have you got? Or maybe some people do your computer, your phone and all that, but Netflix, What software do they., guess you just use it. So there's gonna be that tail end or maybe not tail end. The majority that'll just not even realize it's, and it'll just be there. But it's up to us now to build, This comes into the sort of space that I live and breathe in, which is, it's, it's more about the user experience than it is about what it is that sets it gets done. Right, Exactly right. If the experience is good, if it's a seamless engagement between the, the, the desired outcome and how they get there doesn't really matter what the tech is. Right. For example, yeah. Get to watch my shows. I don't care how it. So it's an interesting point. If it is about the experience more than the tech that's underlying it, then the obvious question would be why web three? Yeah. Um, well, in terms of that experience, people, we've wondered like, why are we trying to do things on the blockchain? And there's a really good, uh, there's a couple of infographics that showcase this, but they show that web one, the early days of the internet, which funnily enough was decentralized. It was, we, you know? Yeah. It wasn't all centralized back then. We had to go from decentralized where it was only read only, and sure people obviously could put things onto the internet. Mm-hmm., but there weren't tools readily made for that. We didn't have blogging sites or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube. But when those things started coming out, that was the dawn of the age of Reed and write. And people became influencers and famous for good or for worse. Yeah. With your content out there, easy. Right? Much better. Much easier to write and share. Um, but you were the product yourself. You, Yeah. Sure. Some people get paid. You know, we see YouTubes get paid good amounts of money if you're popular, but in other channels, TOS, link, Instagram, they all have sort of paid services in other, in some of the global markets. And you might not get paid necessarily from that app itself, but just by be being there and having such a large following, you can get sponsorships and stuff. So people monetize the profile, right? You might times right, but you still are not the owners of your data. I can't just pick up my data off Instagram and then I want to take it and all my followers and put it on like another app, and it's just too hard. You are the product and when something is free, people need to realize that you are the product. That's what's happening to you. But Web three is shifting that further because it's all about continuous improvement. It's moving it from the read. Then to read, write, and now it's read right and share value. And what that means is that people can become owners of a more decentralized protocol. So imagine an Uber where, yeah, you are a user of Uber and maybe you drive for Uber as well, but you can own tokens which are effectively kind of like shares where if that company or that protocol is doing, You actually get to see the upside from that as well. So there's some people that might buy tokens and don't actually participate in whatever it is that that Uber type thing does, but they can participate in being a part owner and being able to vote. So right now you've got shares where we can vote on who goes on the board. We can vote on other major things like that, but we don't get to vote on things like, Well, what research should we do? Or what um, kind of software should we use? In a decentralized kind of organization, they call them Dow, decentralized autonomous organizations. Being a token holder means far more that you are able to do. In a utopian kind of world, there's still a lot of web self theoretical in itself. You have so many self theoretical, varying blockchains, so many experiments going on right now as well. So these things, um, we are still very early in the space, so it's funny you critiques, critics and critiques that they bring are very well deserved. There's no denying them, but there is so much more to it because we're still very early in the space and a lot of experimentation is being worked out now and it's being done publicly so that we can make better very quickly. So yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I think that's the, one of the most interesting things, right? Is that all of this is playing out very publicly. Mm-hmm., um, and very transparently, and I. You know, I guess one of the things that happens is we get to hear all the bad news stories and they're, they're very, Anything that challenges the market, challenges the norm. Like front, front page. Yeah, exactly. Other person gets hacked. Yeah. But so does everyone else on their normal bank accounts. Yeah. Um, trade, fire, Well, traditional fighters is what they call, uh, trade. Fire has, uh, a. Percentage of money laundering. Two to 5% of traditional finance GDPs, uh, goes to, to money laundering by United Nation Estimates. I I was gonna say, it's, it's the established paradigm cuz that's all you had before, right?? Yeah. You wanna do money laundering you had to do Yeah. Talk, talk to us about that. Exactly. You, you're a trad find native mm-hmm. in itself. Like what do, what are the key distinguishes differences between that sort of tread fire in, I guess the, the defi? Yeah. Well, the aspect of things. The whole point around centralization. Um, in traditional finance, you have a lot of things. The, the data, the how that is all put together and the ownership of the pro of, you know, we've got protocols in the real world, like protocols to make payments, pro protocols to do transfers of funds all around the world and to ensure people. But all of that, imagine if one day your bank goes belly up and we've seen this when there are, um, Economic crisis. And, uh, people have bank runs where they're trying to get all their money out, but then they can't, They get stopped from doing that. Or there's war like in Ukraine and Russia and people are getting stopped at the borders and they're not able to take their funds out. So that centralization and power, which is okay, people are fine with it until a problem happens. People were fine with MailChimp until they decided as a company that they're not gonna allow anything related to crypto. People were fine with GitHub and are still fine. I still use GitHub, but the fact that they can just switch off someone from there is a bit of a scary thing and people are realizing more and more that we need to look. Uh, different ways. And I'm not saying that everything needs to be decentralized cuz there are some things that it just doesn't make sense. There's definitely a, um, a spectrum of this. It's not black or white, but people need to realize that there's, um, dangers if everything is just centralized into certain kind of powers. Yeah. There's like a, a real dichotomy between, I guess, in attitudes towards these things, right? Because at on one hand we, we do have private companies, Um, just saying, No, we're not gonna do that. Um, and on the other hand, we have like established banks, insurance companies, federal banks, all really looking and into like adopting blockchain technology. BlackRock, one of the biggest, or the biggest asset manager in the world is diving into it with a private trust. Yeah, no doubt. That is their first thing that they're gonna do and offer to clients, and it's just bitcoin. Major coins, but they're gonna do so much more. It's the first step. Like we see mainstream coming into it for sure, but I think it's gonna be these trade offs. Like some will say no because they don't want to bear the risk of ofac, um, the Office of Foreign Assets and Control, um, basically coming down on them, or whether it's ASIC here or the FCA in the UK and other jurisdictions. Um, there's gonna be a balance, but I feel like there's gonna be more net. In this space, just from what we've seen as technologists by background, having worked in traditional finance and seeing the ups and downs of, uh, technology being adopted and evolving and being too young at the time when Facebook was coming out to take advantage of that wave of web two, um, and inexperienced, but now being more experienced and able to do something and make my mark in this space, you know my name, pun intended. Um, I feel like this is like a really interesting time and. All walks of life in this space. The interesting thing I see is that people, uh, no matter what their background is ha, are all seeing in some way, shape or form how they can contribute., if they're in marketing, if they're in operations, if they've just got ideas. There's a lot of different ways that people can come into this batch because it is so early stuff as well. Yeah, it's, it's early and it provides a fundamental layer of functionality, doesn't it? That becomes suitable to like many kinds of activity. It, It does, and the interesting thing is in going back to the whole centralization versus decentralization. When you work in other spaces, you just join a startup. You join like one of the pay type startups after pay, early pay before pay. I don't remember all the, the names and stuff. There's a few of them, right? Prepay, prepaid, prepay, never pay, whatever. Yeah, whatever. It's gonna pay later. Um, but all of those, and I'm just using those cuz they're prominent, right? Yeah. Um, so respect to them, but. You, you normally just join those. You don't think about regulation, you don't think about, um, uh, decentralization and philosophical kind of motives around being in this space. But in the web three space, because it is trying to shift the paradigm towards more decentralized ownership. And I don't think, you know, it's funny cuz the, the name I wear in the, the web three space is Captain Defi. Yeah. So on the Twitter, on the Discord, i, I go by that name. Um, but it doesn't mean that I'm not pragmatic about how this works. Cause I've come from the other side and I've seen both sides, the extremes. And I think it's gonna be somewhere in the middle. Yeah. So do you think a, a certain level of centralization will be re required or helpful? Yeah, purely because, um, there's gonna be some things., you don't want to be out on a public chain, as in medical records, for example. There are certain things that may be in aggregate, it's okay to put out on a public chain. I used to work for a software company that used to do the, or maybe they still do, um, the census data that would get collected by the abs and they would make sure that you can't mix the census data with other different data sets to try to figure. If you are the one doctor in a correlations town to do correlations and figure out, and you are the one that Dr. Not that we have this data, but like you are the one that drives red Ferrari. We can figure out your medical kind of records, but you could potentially bring data sets together to figure stuff like that out. So it is kind of dangerous, but that's why, um, in centralized world, they do certain things to the data to make sure that that kind of stuff can't be figured out. So medical records, birth certificates, things like that. I just think. There are gonna be things and elements of health and other kind of funky records that people will not want on chain, but there are benefits to having parts of it on chain. So we're gonna work this out. The biggest thing to take away from all this is that we're in a great big global experiment. It's not like Australia's doing their own thing in Defi, in nft. It's all over the world and we are talking with people all over the world. It's the purpose of decentralization, right? Why don't get sleep ? It's apart from events and stuff, there's just no sleep in this space because you get home and there's work to catch up on. There's the stuff that we do here in terms of running events. We had. Um, calls in from Israel on Tuesday and running an event and hanging out with people and stuff after then going straight into calls in the US after getting home and stuff, and then trying to figure out, like, there's no morning. So I do sleep in the morning from about like, I don't know, 3:00 AM to nine and then get into the office. So it's fun, but um, yeah. Are you rock and roll, Mark. Oh, love it. I love it. Without the groupies, unfortunately, or fortunately, who knows? But there's a lot that we need to think about in terms of the philosophy. You know, why are we going to decentralization? Don't do it for the sake of doing it. And when we consult to companies, and I'm sure you guys do it too, you, we are hard on them. Like, Why are you even doing this thing on the blockchain? Why are you even thinking about tokens or decentralization? Why do you wanna do it? As an nft, we can help them discover those things, but they need to really understand the trade offs and the pros and cons of doing it, and not just go into it blindly because that just permeates. The crap that we've seen in the market prior to the bear market. Like it was just a lot of crap projects. And we know that in startups, 99% fail, but because all the eyes of the world are on crypto, we need to do better. Mm. Yeah. And how can they do better? They can talk to folks like Digital Village. I hear they're really, really good Um, and they can talk to, not centralized, but you know, it's coming to meetups, it's joining and being the community side of things. You know, meeting other people, knowing, uh, we've talked about this, right? Yeah. Yeah. In, in going to those communi. in web two when we built startups and stuff before, whether within another company or our own startups we build in stealth, we wait until it's like 70%, 80% there. We might take it to customers and Friendlys and stuff, but we don't go out to the public until it's really right near there. Yeah. If you do that in the web three space, what ends up happening is that people don't get to participate in the upside. They don't get to participate in the journey. They just see a finished product and they're like, Okay, great. I'll just be a user. But you don't get that opportunity to really. A community as much as you can when you've just got an idea and people worry about, Oh, ideas, someone's gonna steer you don't trust either, do you? They don't. Yeah. Or you don't earn trust. But the, you know, it's, you don't earn the trust. It's hard to earn the trust when you don't take people along the journey. And it's a different thing telling people about the journey after the fact, rather than showing them the journey and bringing them along. And what is really eye-opening to us was that we were like, Well, someone's gonna steal our idea. It doesn't matter. Ideas are free. Execution is what matters. And if you are out there building a community and making the connections, it doesn't matter if someone has a better idea or is first to their post with an idea. If you execute better, you are gonna be the one that succeeds. And we are still too early to have competition anyway. Like it should be more about making the pie a lot bigger rather than fighting over the crumbs because effectively we're not a major part of the market yet. We would be fighting over crumbs. What's the. Speaking my language, Mark. I mean, this is exactly the type of thing that we love that I, you know, Luke, what's that? Food? Absolutely. Well, food as well. Yeah. Oh yeah, that's high. That's definitely one of my biggest languages. But the, um, that whole idea of like iteratively iterative development where you take your idea. Give it a trial, give it a test. Start small, start somewhere, bring some people on board. Mm-hmm., then go, Okay, what's next? Then go, What's next? And then take those small steps to release things and phases, always continually engaging your customers or, or your people, or your users. Cause if you go straight to market, exactly what you said, you, you don't have Yeah. This engaged community, you've got an whole idea to sell. Yeah. And like how, how do you bring people on board to something where they don't have any trust? They don't have. Kara, you haven't proven that your product works. You've just gone straight to market with this and what if you built it wrong? Yeah. What if you've gone all that way? Wasted all that time. No validation. I hated spending all my millions that I didn't have.. This is why you're here now. You know, build iteratively. Cause you, you know, on the way to the millions and hopefully all the stuff that we're doing is, is a success. And it's not just for us, like we're trying to help other companies. Get to that promised land of doing really well and bringing, Cuz Australia has so many good ideas. We were such early adopters in the crypto space and not just from the investment point of view. Um, you know, they call 'em ST checks, the stimulus checks in the us Oh. But we had our own version of like the superannuation withdrawals. Right. Our own version of ST Checks that people were withdrawing and investing. So, um, apart from that, like we've got a lot of people in this space, not just investors builders as well. There's so much cool stuff going across all the states. And I guess that's why, going back to it, why osd I needed to be having a presence everywhere. Yeah, Yeah. And you know, there's the Gold Coast, uh, later this month we're in, I went on in September, it's um, oh, we we're in m the Gem now. Oh my gosh. Don gone on . Um, the years just gone by. It's, it's like dog years. DFI years is like, you know, multiplied by seven. Um, but there's the Gold Coast Crypto Conference, you know, uh, there's a lot of interesting things that was just announce old school music heads. Carl Cox is gonna play. I dunno if he's physically gonna be there, but he's, there's a being paid in crypto probably. That's, That'd be awesome. There's a cool group that is bringing him, uh, into, I dunno if they're bringing him into town, but they're playing his music before he even gets to play it at, I think whatever stadium in Wembley or something like that for this big album launch, so, Oh wow. It's an exclusive, so it'll be great to be there. I don't know if you guys are going, but you should. Get some tickets. Let's do, Yeah. I wanna take a bit of a step back. There was a, a commentary we were talking about a moment ago. Mm-hmm., it was particularly around the centralization, uh, and decentralizations and then comparison. And you drew a couple of, uh, examples around banks. And if the bank goes down mm-hmm., what happens to you? Cash, people trying to withdraw, you'd probably lose it. All right. Um, how does that have, how do you compare that to say something that's happening in, you know, when you see cryptocurrencies fall or. Um, even just whole chains just disappearing off the market Act actor. Yeah. I mean, the example, you know, all the crashes that happened Celsius that happened, it's interesting however many weeks ago. Yeah. How does that differ to, I guess it's probably only three or four weeks ago, but it feels like it does feel like it is. It's probably It is a while ago. Ago. Yeah. I mean, you know how fast. blockchain world moves. It's like it's pretty three weeks ago. My God, how do they compare? It's ages ago. Yeah. How do you compare that? Because like you're still in that win loss state just as much as the bank goes down. Right? You are, And it's interesting because the Celsius one's a great example that you pull up there because people are like, Well, D five failed. Mm. I would argue that, um, because when that crash happened, it wasn't your Celsius, there were. Protocols out there that basically also crashed and failed because they overlevered themselves. They put themselves into riskier bets with their client's money and because they're not this regulation that we know is coming, um, they were allowed to get away with it. It was a wild west. But what ends up happening when it's centralized and you're trying to claw back funds, just like in the real world, this is what's going on for Celsius. You have to go through courts and arbitration, which takes time, and it's a lot of processes that are involved there. Defi and the smart contracts that they're built on, which ironically, they're not smart. They're just code that says, If this happens, then do this else, do that, blah, blah, blah. Just like your regular contract, just accept auto, accept the legal system on that execution instead of the legal system. These contracts, Would say that if, um, something were to happen and you were to get liquidated, you were to get, um, stop lost margin called all those things. Yeah. That money has to go back to these other contracts and that is exactly what happened, even though it's crap. And I swear, um, it shit that, you know, these things kind of happened. These protocols weren't careful, at least for the defi, the decentralized ones that were more run on smart contracts, not self. They paid back all the lenders, the borrowers didn't have any choice. The smart contracts took care of it for them. Yeah. So in amongst the rubble, there were some positive signs there, because if that was to happen in major, um, crashes, like imagine if Bernie Madoff, when he got liquidated for certain things, instead of that money being wasted and spent or whatever, like parts of it could have at least automatically been paid back. To those that lost the money. So I don't think people were fully made whole necessarily. But at least there was something that we didn't have to go through courts for. So I mean that's, that's the, the joke about margin calls in the traditional finance side, right? Mm. Is cause like, oh, margin call. You see like a phone call, like from your broker, like, Oh, I'll get that later. Yeah. And then hopefully your stock's going back . Yeah, exactly. Well fucking wait then. It's fine. Yeah. Um, or if you Leman brothers or something, then you know, maybe you've got overnight to think about where are you gonna package up and ship those poor. Crappy deals too other banks. That's right. And take action that way. It's deal fact. Yeah. Whew. She's done straight away. Takes care of it for you. So there, there was at least that positive. It doesn't discount the fact that there was a massive mess and we need to do better. The whole crap around tornado cash, which happened. Um, we were gonna talk about like a lot more in detail and maybe we will. Um, it was happening the last time we were doing the podcast. Yeah. It's crap. It happened though because. Tornado cash is a useful thing, I think, right? Because we do need, uh, privacy there and why people go, Well, if you've got nothing bad, like why do you have to hire anything? Well, do you want your web browser history on chain? Yeah. Do you want people to see what you're buying?, understand what your kinks are and crap like that. You don't want that kind of stuff on there. We need a certain level of privacy and we don't realize that we are private individuals already. Yeah. We're not completely public and arguing against. We do. I think we do realize though, even in the web tube ONO space, like the, the discussions and prioritizations around security, it's such a big Oh yeah, you're right. Such a big point. You're right. But um, but you're absolutely right. We're in a decentralized, in a true decentralized world that doesn't exist. Right. There's. That there security in terms of, no one can take it, but in terms of people seeing it and understanding and knowing who you are, like it's all out there to read. You can figure it out. It is alpha numeric, the addresses and stuff. Yeah. But some people have bought into Ethereum name services, which, uh, has these dot e addresses. So you can get Christine Claire dot e for example. Yeah. If you haven't already got it. Right. So you can do that. You've just gotta have this hygiene, this wallet hygiene critic's gonna purchase that wallet hygiene. I've already purchased it for you. I'm gonna sell it back to you for a larger amount. So I've thought ahead. Um, but people have to think about wallet hygiene in the sense that if you are getting paid in crypto in the future, the wallet where you're getting paid to should not be the same one where you are conducting whatever other kind of private anonymous activities, right? Whatever kind of things you buy into in NFTs or whatever, those future services. But going back to the tornado cash kind of thing, and we were seeing there that there's a whole lot more, um, that people didn't realize that could be done in this space and tornado cash, even though North Korea was like a big part of like being, doing illicit activity on there, and it wasn't the majority of what goes on in tornado cash. A lot of it was just used for a legitimate private purposes because privacy is a natural thing, even in web tour as you said. But just purely the fact that North Korea could take down a protocol just because. It's def I got lazy def. I didn't police itself enough. And it's like, Oh, it's a wild west. We can do whatever we want. It doesn't mean we should be doing the wrong things. If we wanna be legitimate, we need to police ourselves. I reckon we need to create consumer action groups. There's groups out there that try to flag and watch out for and tell people about. Bad potential scams out there. Rug Dock, R U G D C, because there's Rug pool, so Rug Dock is supposed to help out with that. There's other services out there, but in Australia we need like a consumer action group, like a choice. Or something, one of those types of groups that is for the consumer. It's not regulated, it's backed. But um, until we get that regulation, there's nothing there. So we need to do something so, Well, I, Yeah, yeah. In, in the absence of regulation, there's nothing else other than the industry to take responsibility. Right. And we have to, if we're gonna show that trust. Otherwise, otherwise we are gonna get really, um, hard line regulation that is gonna stifle innovation. Australia had a chance to be the silicon. Before, Right. But what ended up kind of happening is that we didn't, and, and look, we, we could do this again. We could make regulations so difficult for people to develop things here that they just move overseas. And that innovation, we lose those minds. We lose that ability to, you know, continue down the momentous pathway that we've been on. So, . I mean, we could go down a rabbit hole of government . Oh, that's another podcast. Is it? I mean, we, we are expecting some regulation to come here, aren't we? What do you think that might, that could look like? Well, what, what would be the ideal, I guess, uh, scenario? It's interesting because since we last spoke, um, if we were speaking about this last time, W without the jack hammering. Um, regulation talk was all about the fact that there was a consultation paper out where the government, the previous government, cuz there was election and before. Um, when, when that happened, um, the previous government had put out, uh, a consultation on how should we regulate. Secondary asset providers in the market and came with a whole lot of definitions that they had created from consulting to the public and stuff. But when they went to the wider public for this consultation, after they said, This is what we proposed the majority of what I had heard and read about, cuz a lot of people like us, we put in a response to it. Um, two of my groups put in a response to it os defi as well as trade flows, which is a protocol we are building and stuff we put in responses. We'd seen others that had put out the responses. The overwhelming majority were saying things that, um, basically there needs to be better definitions. We can't have regulation until we actually define what it is that we're regulating, and we don't have enough of that yet in what's being proposed. So now, in the recent, I think just in the past week, The Treasury has come back and said that they're gonna do a token mapping exercise and it will go out to the public. The consultation's not out yet, but the idea is that not all tokens are built the same. They're not for the same purpose. Some are more harmful or potentially harmful than others. Some are offering more value than others. Should we treat them all the same way? No. And so they want to consult on that. So I feel like we're doing the right thing here. Regulation is coming interest, but I think it's gonna be, they're engaging the right people for that as well. Like if I think about some of the regulations they try to put from a, you know, just, just web, the dividing line risk on tokens could be extraordinarily interesting, couldn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And I think in terms of like, are they consulting the right people? Um, they are talking to the groups, their people come to, uh, the meetups that are all going on all around the space. Advisors there do, um, keep a pulse on the mark from what we hear. And because of that, it is this ability for the community right now to have an opportunity to actually tell government through the mouth of the advisor basically, that this is where the market is heading. And cuz what we don't want, we don't want innovation that. Looks at it from the top down and doesn't understand fully what is the potential. And we understand it's hard. It's not easy when it's not your day to day to look at this space and trying to make rules for it. But we need to work together. It can't be this thing like we want no regulation, just accept the fact that there's gonna be some regulation. If we wanna be mainstream, we have to have some. So if you accept that, where do we go in terms of how this space is regulated? Cuz we d definitely don't want to have a situation where there are certain types. Tokens or NFTs, which have nothing more than just collectability or whatever, and we are just passing it between us. So it's tokens within a protocol for voting and it doesn't do much else. There's no price appreciation for it. But we don't want to, um, regulate those in the same way as ones that are purely more for speculation. They're very different beasts. Um, well, as long as there is clear distinction and clarity between that. Yeah. Because the worst thing you have is you go too far the other way and regulation just stops everything, obviously, like you see in the states, like you see. Parts of Asia, China, India, even, um, where the regulation has pretty much put a stop on complete innovation in that, in that space. It's dangerous. Yeah. The, the most, probably the most politically safe thing that they could do is say, backed by a financial institution, yes or no. And then that, if that was the dividing line, you know who, who outside of the web three community and industry is going to fight against that. I mean, nobody really Oh, exactly. It's, it's like, uh, we heard, we heard a good one the other day when people were, I think it was one of the meetups we've been through. There's so many. Yeah. But people were talking about, well, NFTs, if NFTs, um, were used by sporting clubs for example, like imagine, Imagine trophies and stuff, and there's a whole lot of work or collectors cards, like we could still have the trophies and they're still good. It's good to still have the physical, We're not all moving to a digital kind of, But could there be a way that entities can be used to support and even enhance what sporting clubs do? They sure can. And so with that, if a whole lot of sporting clubs in Australia are using that, do you think the government's gonna try to take that away? No. They're probably gonna wanna work with it. If it's providing value to the community, this is what we need to do. The bear market that we are in right now is the perfect moment and opportunity. Stay away from not say away, sorry. To have this opportunity to build without all the noise of all the hype and hype, the heat out, hasn't it? And even the cost. Even the cost, right? I mean the cost of doing things Yeah. Are true is one of the topics we talked about. Like, I think which, uh, sort of has come, I come forward in my mind was around, well, one, you have the cost of resources in general, that that has gone up. But because of the lower cost now of. Um, in the web three per a space, whether it's blockchain, crypto, all that type of stuff, the crash, conducting a transaction. Exactly right. It's like lower than it's ever been in quite a while. This is the perfect opportunity for businesses where there has been, there's such a gap cuz there's been so many dropping out of. Due to the drop, due to the fall or table cripping. The table fall. Yeah. Yeah. The fall, Yeah. Would been dramatic. This is the time to enter, right? Right. Do all these new newcomers, all these new opportunities, whether it's absolutely developing video games or whether it's, you know, new blockchains on the market, whether it is defi, this is the time to do it because of that. And also for investment as well. Like investment. Exactly. You think about, um, VC throwing money at projects, um, where money was easier to come by. Mm. Was that a good thing? Because some projects may have overstretched themselves in terms of what they raise because we were in a bull market. But that's not a good thing because if you are not built to be able to, um, if you're taking on say, $2 million, Have you built enough or, uh, is your roadmap showing that before your next raise you are worth and you don't have to be fully worth out? Obviously there's different kind of factors and context to it, but it was evidently bare that you would see these companies that raise so much in a bear market you. Raised so much that they couldn't actually fulfill that lot of people outta jobs and startups now, just because Absolutely. They couldn't justify that valuation over the past couple of weeks. And it's not only in web three, it's Web two as well. Shopify. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Robin Hood in the States, another trading app. Yeah, let go of a thousand people each. I don't know why it was a thousand. Maybe the journals that wrote the article were just lazy. But there was all these companies that had a thousand layoffs, even in Web Street coincidentally, were spot on three zeros. They all agreed there's a cabal and they're all like saying, it's a thousand. Let's stand out thousand one. That guy keeps you. We go 1500, they'll talk about us more and thousand. Exactly. Do another 500 next week? No, no. That got his job back. Okay. Okay. Someone on the books had, you know, adhd. He needed that three zeros. But it's interesting cause like, um, a lot of light was put on like, oh, web three, these people are firing for everyone was It's not just, Yeah. I mean, it was the, it was the VC backed companies. Yeah, all of them. Yeah. Particularly all of. Because they need to do something to make money in what better way than to get rid of staff that you don't, you know? Yeah. That's not gonna, It's, look, it's, it's tough. It's arguable. Um, and I think that, uh, I don't support what was done. It's almost like you need to have thought ahead that putting yourself in those shoes when everyone was, when the tide was rising, and who knew when the market was gonna kind of, um, have the rug pulled from underneath it. Uh, you've just gotta keep on building and forging ahead and plan for these things. But it's tough. It's, it's. It makes people, you have to think about those rainy days. And in this crypto web three space, it does offer that ability to, um, think more about those rainy days because they could happen like, even though we think we're safe, we're in this western society, modern and all that, We're not Russia and Ukraine, but hey, it could happen. So people really need to think about it, whatever it is that you're doing. So, yeah. And what is next? What is next? I think next is gonna be more things where we see mainstream usage of blockchain tech. We see take away the, the whole, It's interesting the, you could argue that if there wasn't all the hype, we wouldn't have all the clampdowns in government regulation if it wasn't all about speculation and price. And it was more about building, uh, and mo mainly on the tech. If that was all it was., we wouldn't have all of these philosophical kind of debates and stuff, but I feel like that was the draw card. That's, that's the ideal state, though. That means nothing's going wrong. People aren't getting scammed. That's, you know, when you look, value is always there. I mean, yeah, nobody's up in arms about the new version of HDP that's coming out.. No, exactly. Exactly. But like Exactly, because we're, because we had that, the argument was like, Oh, we shouldn't have had that. And look what it's led to. The other, the flip side, there's always a sort of lining in everything. Every situation, Well, most situations. And the flip side with this is that it brought a lot of attention. It brought a lot of people into the space that are going to do really good things in the space that would not be here. Had it not been for the speculation, I don't think we would be here. Because we were busy doing our own data consulting work with wealth managers and you know, doing the tra fire kind of stuff. Um, we got brought in because of a gaming project in the space, and it's not something we would've chased or even known about. We, we saw it, we were just like everyone else seeing it in the news and stuff and not looking under the hood. It's because of the speculation that brought us in, but now we're trying to, we want to be here and do some good in the space. Is that how you made the. From one traditional finance. Yep. Oh really? We got asked to the gaming project. It was a gaming project to help build out the analytics and help them build out the gaming economic. So shout out to Paul Mos cuz they're the one. Help bring me into the space and stuff. And I opened up my eyes to all the things that we've been creating so far, and they're still, you know, forging forward and stuff. So they're one of those projects that is, you know, actually surviving and stuff. Yeah. Um, where many don't, but if it wasn't for them, we, I wouldn't have been looking at all of this kind of stuff. So it's really interesting how you get into the space, what are the different angles? And then when you're in, if you like me, you go down the rabbit. You look back in history, and I think we kind of talked about the modern Renaissance thing. Mm-hmm. last time, and you know, to catch people up if that short video doesn't go out. Or maybe it does, I can't remember so many things going on, but the modern Renaissance and why they're calling it, because we had the Renaissance where you had the printing press created. So instead of monks being the only ones, very manual writing, creating books. And do you have a monk to write your book? Yes. No. Okay. Well, too, Well, Printing press solved that, right? Yeah. And people could communicate far more. Then you also had the ledger that was created and the Mechi family were able to pioneer its usage. They didn't inventor, but they, um, were very strong users of it and were able to get themselves to reach, but also back a lot of projects, projects being sailing ventures to the new. Creating effectively the mercantile age. And where we went to from there was all new types of art. Oh, NFTs. Well, no, the Mona Lisa and other types of art that probably had their version of hate and stuff. Like, what is this? Oh, there's perspective in 3d. This is weird. And then it becomes accepted, hated, loved, and then can't do without. But then from that, where did it go? And what's interesting is because we can look back. We got to the Great American experiment where people went west and effectively they were all builders. They all went out there and they experiment. It was called the Great American Experiment, right? So if we wonder where we are going back to that other question there. I think we're gonna continue this great. Um, let's not call it American experiment and stuff. Global experiment now. Global experiment where we are failing fast and learning together. How do we share value better? How do we coordinate? Because people are realizing actually that, Oh, Dows decentralized, autonomous organizations, everyone gets a vote. Well, A, not everyone votes, right? B, some things are not meant to be a dow. Some things are not meant to be decentralized in terms of how. Forge things forward. Look at, um, the Wall Street movement like Occupy Wall Street that kind of had. No leaders and stuff. And so it, you know, it was like everyone was like running it. It didn't work. So there are certain things where you do need elements of centralization. It's up to us to see that these things are technology. There is a paradigm shift in how we think about value, but if we boil it down technology, how do we use it to make the world a better place? And that's what we are all about in terms of our defi meetups, in terms of the things that we do in workshops and education and the clients that come in and talk to us. And that we invite more and. We help them understand what it is that they can provide value to if they're doing a shoe project, a basketball project, a restaurant project, or an arts project, or even working with indigenous kind of artists and stuff, like how do we actually help them provide value back to what they're doing, Whatever industry that's in, it's bringing a strong purpose to quite a complex and convoluted market and ecosystem. S Yeah. I just came back from a talk, um, I was at Fishburners before this and doing. And in one hour trying to pack in all the things that are filling in my head. It's difficult. like, I wish we had more time, but yeah, there's so much here. That's why it can't just be, um, us doing it ourselves and stuff. There needs to be more and more people having multiple conversations about this and when they're ready, you know, we're here to invite them in. So, and hopefully you'll see them on your podcast as well. Awesome. That would be amazing. Yeah. Well, Mark, it's been an absolute pleasure having your. Do you wanna do a bit of, a bit of a plug in for Oz Defi and uh Sure. Even not centralized. Tell us, tell us a bit about it. Yeah, yeah. What's going on there? So, Not Centralized is the Venture Studio that backs everything that we are doing, and so we work on other people's projects. We help them from everything from capital raising to creating their financial models and pitch decks and honing that. Doing all the work around smart contracts, marketing, pr, recruitment. We've got partners that do all of those awesome things and we, we have you guys to help us out with that stuff as well. So you guys are amazing. And then one of our biggest and most prominent projects around community building is the Oz d I Association. So that is all about bringing the community together across five states so far. But the discord is open for all. We do have members in Tasmania, in the Northern Territory, in the a c t. We just don't have meetups. Yet, but hopefully coming it's, it's coming by, you know. Yeah. The goal is every state . Yeah. Every city, every major city in Australia A made up to do with the os DFI association and Incredible It will be. And we're getting, so if people want to follow along, you know, we're on Twitter, so a s DFI on Twitter will not centralize on Twitter or defi.org.au. Um, and I'm sure we'll put this in the show notes. Yeah, we'll, we'll show notes for everyone and not centralize dot. Is is the other one. But yeah. Um, feel free to come chat with Village or us and there we go. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. It's been a pleasure. Luke, Absolut, Luke, thank you. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you very much guys. Been wonderful. Thanks to our listeners. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please feel free to check us out on our website, Digital village.network for our past episodes. We'll be back next month, but on the last Wednesday of every month as we are. With more great stories and guests see.