Hey everyone and welcome to the first official Actuaritech podcast now Actuaritech seeks technological solutions for traditional actuarial problems and in this episode we're looking at blockchain technology and how it can be applied to the actuarial problem of managing investment funds. So joining me today is Jonty from Invictus and Louis from Revex and I must say thank you guys so much for giving up your evening to to be part of this. So maybe should we start with some quick introductions on your side. I don't know if you guys can job give me your age, what you studied and what you did before crypto. So Jonty shall we shall we start with you? Okay thanks thank you very much for having me I appreciate it Michael and looking forward to discussing further Louis. So my name is Jonty I am 28 years old I studied at University of Ceylon Bosch I did a Bachelor of Commerce in Economics with a side minor of philosophy and my interest has always been around different approaches to economics specifically incentives for individuals and obviously like individualism and libertarian philosophies and so reconciling that the sort of like our complex world that we live in where we need like socially scalable systems and things like that to accommodate like the big challenges we face in things like education, healthcare, sustainable energy and development, solving crises like poverty and other kinds of conflicts around different ideologies and resource constraints and things like that and as a result I've been looking into various kinds of exponential technologies since my undergrad I did that in between 2012 and 2014 and I've basically been looking into everything from biotechnology, space technology, seeing our good friend Elon Musk working hard in the SpaceX and you know various technologies specifically in the startup space where individuals can come in and pull something interesting. So I became aware of Bitcoin when I was actually looking toward using it as a means of payment for charities obviously the big one was WikiLeaks but another one was sort of an interesting juice case but Bitcoin at the time was looking to help raise funding for sort of like unpopular or like un sort of like contrarian charities. One of them I was interested in is one called Sense Research Foundation. They're funny enough, Vitalik donated $2.4 million toward they basically do rejuvenation biotech for ending age-related diseases so some pretty sort of far out things there that can't get funded by peer-reviewed science. So long story short that's sort of what got me interested in crypto sort of saying hey this is quite interesting sort of like unsensurable payment sort of pseudo-anonymous and just sort of global and really cool and obviously like most people think crypto initially sort of doesn't make sense like I immediately saw that news case because you'd be surprised how scared people are to like even if they're like billionaires to like donate to these charities because they're worried where people think of them or like their spouses or colleagues or investors or whoever would say about them or even just you know governments obviously in the case of WikiLeaks. Anyway so that's sort of what got me into crypto. I've also got a background in edgitech I worked at a company called Get Smarter and I think I know one of your colleagues Ashleigh Young Oh yes, yes, good on Ashleigh Young.  The funny thing with Ashleigh is I mean you know his name's Ashleigh Young like the Manchester United player and my name being Michael Jordan you know it's kind of like oh Michael Jordan, Ashleigh Young are drinking beer together. So no, fantastic, fantastic. And so literally I started working with him in 2015 and literally on my first couple of days I was working next to him and said hey have you seen the Bitcoin price? And there's something like five files around the Bitcoin. He was like looking back in like 2015. I was like, Jesus, this thing is going in a glazing. So basically I came from a background in edgitech. Get Smarter is an online course provider that works in universities that recently got sold 2017 or $100 million. That is the Paddock Brothers from Rwanda Bosch. So my background really came from seeing how these interesting companies in Cape Town actually scaled to big successes. They got sold to 2U, New York Stock Exchange, Trader Company or NASDAQ, Trader Company. So one of the courses they were doing was called the MIT FinTech course. Ashleigh and I helped distribute that on behalf of the MIT Media Lab. And then basically that was in 2016 and we just saw this huge influx of people interested in blockchain, Bitcoin, ICOs, all this stuff, Ethereum, smart contracts, everything in between. And we basically got in touch with entrepreneurs and investors and a lot of different people involved in different spaces from healthcare to IT and security that were interested in this thing. I was like, what? This thing is going places. So yeah, that's how I got involved in crypto in 2017 and eventually joined the Invictus team. Now that's just myself, but Invictus, I need to give a full on other introduction. So I'll just leave it for there and then we'll go into what I'm doing now as for the crypto side. Okay, perfect. Well, yeah, Louie, do you want to give us your take? It's your... Yeah. Well, that was the question again. So I want to know your age, what you studied and what you did before crypto? All right, okay, cool. Yeah, as you said, I'm not 26. So before crypto, it's like dredging back there. So I studied mechatronic engineering first at UCT. And then I studied in honors and computer science after that. And so I was sufficiently nerdy when I left university. So by 2015, I think, and then I'd always been in some sort of startup from, since I can remember probably high school, ranging from internet of things like before it was called that, 32 point of sale software for like university shops and things like that. So probably by the end of my honors and computer science, I was pretty... Yeah, I was having a good time, ended up spending some time in San Francisco doing a course at the business school at Sanford. That was the last thing I studied. And we had an opportunity to come back to South Africa to co-found two companies, one in corporate communication, which is linked to how I actually learned about crypto in the beginning. It was called, we try to call it Ripple, as in information like an old patient. And it was essentially a hybrid between WhatsApp and Slack, which is now WhatsApp of business, which is a good thing that we can do. But essentially, we were building, we built that up for clients such as SAP, Nigeria, Apollo World, Oakley, but best Oakley. And essentially, we were looking for the dot com domain at that point. And I was like, who is this payments company Ripple thinking they are? What are they doing? Do they not understand? We're trying to like change the world of corporate communication there. The first thing, when I started looking at it, I was like, wow, this is quite interesting, actually. And then the second company there was a company called Carey School Payment, which we essentially eventually, short partnered with Net Bank on. And I did that last two years ago in one story. Essentially, that was my first touch point on payments, the industry in general. And that's kind of where the two meant, like having a look at this Ripple web page while working on payments with Net Bank.  From there, crypto was just the next kind of wave on that. We had a look at launching an Ethereum on-ramp, probably in early 2016, never managed to get around to it, got a bit busy. But since then, probably in the last year, beginning mid-last year, co-founded Revix, which is basically a digital asset management platform, as we get more into the classical financial space, but at the moment, we basically fund investment products in the crypto space. If you answered your question, not quite sure. You've got to keep us to task yet, because of the last year. Maybe something I could just jump in there. Funnily enough, we know Carey, my colleague, who actually dug a while back from Carey as well. And I also saw there, you had a run-in with Knife Capital, right? No, Knife Capital. My partner at Revix, Sean Sanders, spent some time at Knife Capital. Oh, yes. I was actually going to say, our founder was actually funded by Knife a while back. Yeah, I did a profit, yeah. So we've got such a small, data science plus fintech, and K-tiles in Africa are small, but as we've learned, the rest of the world's quite big. Okay, that's interesting. Well, guys, let me maybe start off with a difficult question, maybe one of the hardest question, and then the rest will be a little bit easier. And the reason why I do this is because, Johnty, you spoke about how you studied philosophy. And both of your companies that you've created make these crypto funds. They let you manage and hold cryptocurrencies on investors' behalf. But now, isn't one of the core philosophies of Bitcoin, one of the core philosophies of Bitcoin, that people should be in control of their own finances, their own assets? You kind of see that slogan on a lot of the wallets, be your own bank. Now, by having someone else hold your Bitcoin, doesn't that defeat one of the big reasons for adopting this technology in the first place? You want to get right into it. So, yeah, I don't want to know who wants to go first. I'm happy to. Well, you said you studied philosophy. I'm happy to go out as Louis has an initial thought. So, this is a very interesting one. We get this question from time to time. So, just a bit of background. So, we created an index fund. Just for clarity, I'm not one of the co-founders. That would be Daniel Luke, his brother, and their quantities, Matthew and Ray. So, there were four co-founders that created crypto 20 in the middle of 2017, and they did an ICO. So, they tokenized that fund and raised $40 million for it. So, crypto 20, the idea behind that was sort of trying to meet that problem halfway. The one thing is that crypto 20 allows you to do is to hold a token that is effectively allows you to redeem for the equivalent value of the underlying fund back in Ether using a smart contract. So, it's sort of catered toward crypto enthusiasts because they're like holding their coins, so to speak. Now, the tricky thing is, as people have realized and probably got the companies like Coinbase have really capitalized on this. Right now, yes, in layer one, people should be in control of their money, so to speak, but really layer two, layer three, and upwards of the payments and the financial infrastructure system, people want a simple interface and they want to pay for the and give up responsibility and autonomy and control of their private keys and the money in exchange for convenience and a great user interface. So, I think where we come in and say is, look, we understand that. So, especially when it comes to managing a portfolio of 10 to 20 crypto assets, and you have to manage staking masternodes, really weakly rebalancing that we do and also avoiding scams like BitConnect like we did and people sort of blamed us for doing that at the time that we're happy we did avoid it when they crash, things like that. So, people are willing to give up some form of control. That being said, that doesn't attack the fundamental thesis of Bitcoin and crypto assets and cryptocurrency, which is at the layer one in terms of how money is created and distributed and what money we use as a society and that settlement layer, that is something that can and should be decentralized and the infrastructure that's built on top of that or on the side of that, that can be a different story, case in point, Coinbase and various other exchanges and payment unions. I'm sure Invictus and Rebix also falls into that category. So, that's sort of our response. It really depends on what layer you're looking at. And Louis?  Yeah, look, I think, I think if your question is more philosophical one, I mean, the technology, I don't know what audience your podcast is for, but I'm not going to explain it, but essentially, there are a lot of different technology providers that are aiming to make it holding or crypto more mainstream, right? That's kind of half the battle right now. Philosophical point of owning your or being your own bank is great. Don't give me wrong, but it is, is implausible right now for a lot of people from coming from a more institute, not an institutional but from a from a technology, financial technology background, so in payments and those kind of things. Just understanding the improvement that having a shared ledger, basing or a shared fabric of ownership tracking for financial assets, right? So I'm talking about cryptocurrencies all the way through to any digital asset, like a share like approvals of any of those like right now they're like six or seven layers storing these things. You work custody providers at the bottom working through exchanges with basically brokers, dealing with financial intermediaries, dealing with your financial planner who then has a dashboard and then sends you a PDF, right? They are like eight or nine layers and even if you look at the classical financial space now, you know, that's a bank only has like, let's put it this way, to hypersimplify the retail bank as a ledger with a number on it, which actually is only given credence by the fact that the reserve bank has a ledger that says that this bank has that money. So how many layers deep does the actual ownership of a digital asset go? Just to secure the ownership of that digital asset. So my argument with crypto really is you don't really have to be a guy who has your own like ledger and like stores it in your cupboard really to see the benefit on the entire industry that this is actually forming. Something like Revex, you basically could with one layer do everything that the whole financial system does currently, right? Obviously in certain cases other cases not. So there will be improvements on that, half key recovery works and all those different things that maybe one day we'll get there. But right now we're cutting six or seven layers out of the storyline, which I think is good progress. Okay, cool. No, I like that. I really do appreciate these answers. And I mean, one thing, Johnty, that you said, which I do agree with is around the staking of coins. And it's one thing that being in a crypto fund, you can get the benefit of doing, you know, if I want to go and stake coin now for Dash, or even NEO, where it's the barrier to entries a little bit lower, just that whole process of trying to set up a coin to stake it and, you know, doing all that type of stuff. It's saying that these crypto funds can group all the money together, they can provide the collateral and they can get the benefit. And it reminds me of, you know, back two years ago when crypto kitties first popped out, a group of us decided to instead of us each buying our own crypto kitty, we decided to give all the ether to me, finally enough. And I went and I bought all the crypto kitties. And the reason why we bought them all in one fund was that because by having them all in one fund, you could make the breeding opportunities better because the cats can't breed with their brothers. So the more cats you have, the more diversified you can have your breeding thing. But of course, there was, there's another problem though that this brings up. And that is, I could have taken all of these crypto kitties and run away with it. You know, I could have, once people have given me their crypto assets, I can disappear. And this was something that we kind of saw with a few of those scams with ICOs and, you know, some of the stuff that happened. What, what protection do investors have when they come to Invictus or when they come to Rebex and they say, you know, here's my money, you're buying crypto, but how do I know that I can withdraw it at a later stage? So, Louis, seeing that I have given, you know, seeing that I have put some money into Rebex, what are some of the guarantees that I will be able to put it out at a future date? You didn't have to set up a whole podcast to ask me about this. You could have just asked me. No, so that's an important point that you raise. I mean, like us, all the scams that basically occurred over the last two years, or case in point of, and I think what a case in point in these kind of things, I mean, the Ethereum Chamber of 2016 being my favorite. And that is the danger that everyone always leads to with centralized systems, drive centralized control. A lot of the response to that has been to try and do everything on chain. So have it kind of, what I say, very auditable, kind of, let's say, decentralized in the sense that no one party can actually do that, right? Which I think is a noble concept. And I think it is where everything is going, eventually. At Rebex, I mean, we try and merge the classical financial world just from a usability standpoint, worth a lot of these new technologies, right? So, I mean, we have been invested in the service, we've been on the stock exchange locally, and we're working on our next round at the moment, which I mean, late June. But essentially, a lot of the kind of trust that is required in the market like this, I mean, the same thing with Alan Gray. I mean, why do you think Alan Gray is not going to leave the money? Because, you know, there is a team behind it, they're for brand, they've got those kind of things, right? So what we're trying to really do is, regardless of technology, because usually your BTC customers in the man on the street, I mean, are you going to go audit someone's smart contract? Or are you going to trust that smart contract is audited? I mean, all of these different things come down to trust at the end of the day and brand. So we fully believe that the way that we actually prove and audit are auditable with the asset kind of custody will evolve over time. But right now, what we really believe is important for mainstream adoption is really, is playing the same game that the rest of the world plays when it comes to trust and institutional trust, right? So, and that's one of the key things that is required in the next bit on how to pick it. So John, to your question, Michael, the money's gone, I'm kidding. I mean, really, he's diversified. He's diversified, but then it is gone. I'm kidding that. No, I mean, that's just it.  Because at the end of the day, we've got to marry between usability and obviously transparency. And that's the kind of game that we're playing at this point. And others will take different approaches. And I think everyone will end, I guess, where they end.  The two different approaches you're taking. So you guys are onboarding South African Rand directly into these bundles, as you call it, basically the index product. And you so underlying that, you've actually got the cusp, like you're saying, the seven layers of the custody is audited and regulated essentially for South African investors, right? Do you really take me? Yes. So, yeah. I mean, it's very similar to you guys. I mean, the main difference I would imagine between our two platforms is that your guys' fund is smart contract run, as far as I'm saying. Yeah, our initial fund was, we're in the process of setting up instant, well, we have regulated constructs and Cayman Islands set up like US dollar fiat onboarding for accredited investors. But obviously, our initial user base was retail investors from around the world excluding South Africa Cayman and US investors. So obviously, sort of like on two different sections. So we're doing similar things, but actually it's two completely different directions, which is fine. I think both of them will end up needing to sort of merge toward, like you're saying, a situation where you've got those seven layers of the financial system. So you've got an easy user interface, you've got the custody solution. It's ideally regulated and they're therefore insured, which is what will bring in institutional money. And you sort of have to get all these things right. And it's not going to be very easy. I mean, insurance companies aren't offering fully insured, full insurance on digital assets under custody. I think that they've launched the fully insured product right now.  It's something viable for fund managers. I mean, right now that's like for super high native individuals, we just want to sort of like Exactly. I mean, like the thing is that I think that the key difference, I think what what you were kind of alluding to, Michael, is is the centralized almost ability to be scammed, you know, having a centralized part of the system that somebody could up and go. Right.   I would imagine if you have smart contract based on Ethereum, you would have to be tokenizing Bitcoin to actually store it in your smart contract. And that would be quite complicated. So I'm not quite sure you guys do that at the end. But there's always going to be some sort of random loop at the moment, right? Obviously, the end game is for, I mean, I've seen a quite a few projects like token sets and things like that that really do great work on fully decentralized and automating the fund management process. And I know just before we started here, Michael, you were mentioning the team from the hackathon that were, what do you call them, SAP? They were doing the auto rebalance, you know, Ethereum based fund. I mean, those things are all kind of the starting points of the fully decentralized version of what I think crypto 20 and graphics are doing. And we're just approaching it from different, different customer bases. And also, just me system to its own, it's going to be different. But when the regulation does come in, and we are really looking forward to being regulated, I mean, it actually just brings a whole bunch of credence to the market. And it's really something that we're trying to bring in that trying to be in line with, in all jurisdictions that we operate. And so, like I said, our view on the market is just that to be a very compliant, even pre-compliant and kind of look around the corner and start building that trust from an institutional, not institutional, but from a BPC brand, really, that we are not going anywhere. Okay, well, I was thinking, I was thinking, maybe we can chat about, because I think this is maybe one of the big differences between your guys two funds. And what's actually like, I guess, the core of the conversation is the compositions of the assets that you hold. Now, I know, Invictus, you've got quite a lot of different offerings. So let's, I don't know, maybe we focus on crypto 20, because I think that's the one that most people know about. But feel free to talk about the other ones. I just don't know that much about them. I know you've got crypto 10 as well now, and you've got something called Hyperium. Well, that's a venture capital fund. Yes, which is a little bit on a different side, but maybe you've got. Yeah, so we can talk that from now. But I think let's maybe talk about crypto 20, because I did go and look at the composition before this podcast started. And I see that you don't have an equally weighted allocation to each of the coins. You've got, I think Ethereum is the heaviest. And I think ontology is your lightest. Now, yeah, can you maybe talk a little bit through about how that distribution is decided? And then we're going to jump to Louis afterwards, who's got an equally weighted index. So yeah, Johnty, over to you. Sure. No, thanks. So this sort of brings in a topic I should have brought from the beginning. It's our specialization is our team has come from a background strongly in data science. Hence, we talked about data profits company Daniel Schwarzkopf co-founded back in I think was 2014. And effectively, that background allowed us to build the methodology behind the rebalancing as well as the composition. So the composition is, as you pointed out, market cap weighted with an asset cap of, I believe it's, in theory, it's supposed to be 10% per asset for the most part, except for obviously the value of Ethereum skyrocketed. So we were holding less than 10, 10 minutes skyrocketed, 12% of the total holdings relatively. Now, what that means is, is that where do those numbers come from? Well, if you read the white paper that we put out at the end of 2017, that acted as our white paper for the ICO to seed the fund. The idea behind that was we use a variety of back testing on different types of methodologies to work out what makes sense from a fund construct perspective. So really, when Victus comes from is for the retail investors, in terms of what they can get exposure to, and how easy it is for them to get exposure to things, we want to give them the most sophisticated fund construct without necessarily having all the mechanisms necessary. So then we can onboard US investors with fiat. So yes, they can buy and buy a smart contract, Ethereum, etc. So that's where the background comes in. So that's actually dynamically rebalanced on a weekly basis. So what I'll do is, for reference, anyone can actually go to the performance page. So you can actually see what the live figures are. And then obviously when it gets rebalanced, those numbers change based on what our rebalance algorithm determines. It's a rules-based strategy. It determines what makes the most sense to rebalance things. Now, obviously, when you're rebalancing, when you can be like we do, you can run into liquidity and slippage issues. We also put algorithms to minimize slippage in terms of like we can actually input. When we do those rebalancing ourselves, we make sure that we minimize the slippage based on the different orders we're placing, and that's based on a rules-based strategy for so. So we've built all that on the data science piece. Now, I'm not a data scientist, so I can only throw around buzzwords, but I can just speak to sort of, if you want to go into the more depth about it, you can take a look at our white paper that's publicly available on the website. And then the other similar fund, Crypto 10 Hedge, which we just launched, similar idea. Now that the market has sort of changed, we've actually updated those figures. Now we have an asset cap of 15% in Crypto 10, still a weak year of balancing, and also a dynamic cash hedge. So it actually allocates into cash according to different timings in markets. Most importantly is to protect investors from downside risk. So where are we specializing is the actual underlying fund construct. And where we sort of made sure it was affordable for investors is cut costs using smart contracts, technology, and obviously make sure it's at least audited. So we have a KPMG audit Crypto 20 on the operations because we do self-custody. So that obviously brings on the cost, but then obviously for the retail investor, they had to put a lot of trust in us, as you correctly mentioned earlier, Louis mentioned. So it's not completely decentralized, of course not. Like we basically have our reputations on the line. It's fund managers built up with like a track record of 18 months now. But long story short, the data science piece is where we specialize and sort of put our name behind in terms of the backtesting and the results we've gotten thus far. Okay, perfect.  Yeah, I think we took an altogether different approach, right? I think if we just take a step back and actually just have a look at the kind of customer bases that I reckon the respective projects are trying to open. I mean, there is, if you look at the space of Crypto right now, like there's so many points. The actual like the correlation between the assets is, everybody knows is quite high. So already when you're looking at why you would diversify Crypto, you're looking at what we believe is actually just mitigating your downside risk on an individual asset, something going wrong. In the nascent industry, that's really one of the biggest value points. I mean, if we take a look at the performance of Ethereum, just with, I would say, the project-based risk and how they've been handling it over the last bit. I mean, the performance of Ethereum, I'd like to use the exact numbers, but as performed worse than Bitcoin over the last six months, by probably two or three times. And that's just something that, I mean, they are actual, like people out there running these projects who have different, you know, are doing well or not doing well, the same way that you would have a stock exchange doing the same thing. So we kind of see the main benefit of diversification in such a nascent market is more of protecting people's assets from something like a sign-off occurring and you being in the wrong one, then really maximizing your performance, right? So that's kind of one of our main views on this in such an early market. At the end of the day, the asset class has such asymmetric return potential, right? I mean, if you actually look at the use cases that it could be used in, eventually you're looking at massive growth possibilities. Obviously, there is the risk that the whole asset class ain't acknowledged, which I think everybody in the group probably doesn't think, but there are people out there that say that. And the real battle that we've identified is really opening up the opportunities of people, because I mean, crypto is probably used by less than 100%. I could be honest, like it's tiny, right? The market cap of crypto is tiny compared to the entire financial market. I'll give you a quick stat on just how small the market cap is. I think it's currently standing at $177 billion, which we think sounds like a lot, but you look, there was that oil company in Saudi Arabia, who, it was, yeah, this month, earlier this month, they said, you know, we want to raise, raise some money on bonds. And they got orders of $100 billion in orders, you know, and look, they just wanted $10 billion, but $100 billion popped up like that.  So I mean, that's the reason why I'm kind of saying, like, let's take a step back. Like, we're not actually, we're not actually that, I mean, we've got an equally weighted strategy on all of our bundles. We've gone more for a thematic narrative phase, where we take themes in the crypto market, so payments, privacy and platform. And then our top 10, which is essentially very easy to understand the real battle here, in our opinion, like actually looking, I mean, service being from the classical financial market side, most of the people we interact with being from that side, the real battle here is actually just trust and understanding from the classical financial market on a tech stack that is more efficient at storing and trading and, I guess, custodying all of these different assets, right? That's the real battle we're playing. So for us, you know, the strategy of exactly how the assets are weighted in a market that either is going to grow by 10,000 times or disappear is not really the main concern. But I want to talk to you about, you've got the different bundles, because this is one thing that I don't confuse me a bit when I went to go and put my money in, in on Revex. One of the whole things is, you know, you're going up to one of these bundles, like let's say crypto 20, crypto 20, it's like, I don't know which coin to buy, crypto 20, take my money, they can deal with it. But I come to Revex and I see you've got the payment bundle, you've got the platform bundle, you've got the top something bundle, and you've got the privacy bundle. Doesn't that go against the whole idea of simplicity? People coming here and they almost like, I want to be in crypto, take my money, invest it for me. Whereas now I'm coming to your thing and I'm like, oh, which one do I do? I mean, I eventually just put a quarter of all my money in all four. You know, that's how, because I don't know which one to choose. I really didn't know which one to choose. I mean, it's good product feedback. Thanks.  We launched the public with our offering probably only two weeks ago. We've had some great feedback. But you're right. I mean, at this point, we were engaging with, I wouldn't say institutional investors, I would say the classical financial hierarchy of your financial planners all the way through to your like discretionary fund managers, all of those kind of sites, kind of shopping around like what is of interest. But at the end of the day, what Revit really represents and where we're going over the near future is essentially a direct indexing platform, basically going all in on the fact that assets and currencies and derivatives and bonds and all these different wonderful things are more efficiently stored on blockchain rails than they are in the existing world. So as regulation catches up, and as, I mean, kind of appetite for these types of products move forward, we'll be launching more and more, I would say, either theme bundles, moving into space, possibly overlapping on Hyperion fund, we've got some plans over there, but more in the classical VC space, looking into alternative assets through kind of credit swaps, looking through all of these different, how would I say, things that would normally, I mean, there's a couple of interesting projects around the way, so I'm not actually going to get too deep into it, but at the end of the day, what we are really after here is product feedback, thank you. And lastly, essentially just a kind of a new age of investing, let's put it that way, a way that we can get individuals at a B to C level to get cut down three or four of the layers between them and actually the cold place of investing. And in that way, a lot of cost at the time. Okay. And now, I just want to come back to John T., you mentioned something about backtesting, and like I was telling Louis earlier, I went to this Ethereum hackathon, and there was a team that built, you know, rebalancing portfolio. And one of the things they did was they did some really cool backtesting. And they said, look, you know, when you apply the strategy on historical information, look how profitable it was going to be. And I know data scientists love backtesting. But from my background as an actually, you know, we've always been warned against backtesting and technical analysis and all that type of stuff. So I did go and I got a quote from a guy who's a professor at MIT. Andrew Lowe, he said this, you know, two years ago in Bloomberg Business Week. And he said the following, just because he says it much more eloquently than I could, he says, the more you search over the past, the more likely it is you're going to find exotic patterns that you happen to like or focus on. But these patterns are least likely to repeat. And I guess it's something that we see in the traditional financial markets is fund managers always have to say to potential investors, you know, past performance is not an indicator of future performance. And it's one of the things that backtesting relies on is that the future will replicate the past.  Is that something that, you know, Invictus considers? Like, do you also consider some of the fundamentals around some of the cryptos? Or is it a purely backtested strategy that you guys go for? Oh, Junty, we have, yeah, we lost your audio there for a bit. Sorry. That's an excellent question, because I guess that's one of the fallacy or classic fallacies behind any kind of data driven approach. It's a sort of like over-analyze using only a regression analysis using historical backtesting as a way to rationalize your strategy. I think a backtested strategy to represent what the work you've done behind an algorithm you can do just based on previous history is just a way to represent something that hasn't been launched yet. So, I mean, unfortunately, you have to do that. The nice thing about Crypto 20 is that it's got about 18 months.  And if you're on Crypto 20.com, you can see the underlying net asset value of the token. So, it sort of operates like a tokenized ETF fuel. This is traded on an exchange. It's tokenized exchange, traded product, right? So, what I would say is there's a couple of things you do on the dynamic side. Things with the weak year of balancing. That's why we do a combination of number one, when we weak year of balance, we do actually take some active decisions. In the case like I mentioned, I think I did mention, I'm sure I did, but we chose to exclude BitConnect just because it was a blatant scam. So, we didn't just blindly follow the market. In some cases where we not sure, as a new coin enters the top 20 or top 10, if it makes sense, there's various things we take into consideration on a qualitative basis, whether or not we actually include a coin. Tazos was one that we took a long time to make a decision on as well as when a coin falls up. I'm not going to go into the specifics of that, but basically it's a qualitative as well as quantitative. I think the most important thing, though, is you're giving diversified exposure to the upside in crypto, while in some means we're shaped for protecting investors from downside risk, right? And what we've done is if crypto 20 was initially giving people exposure to the upside, the staking, the masternodes, then most people then bother like with voting on EOS and like the block votes and things like that, right? So, we took care of all of that. So, that was like the product mission. Now what you're shifting toward is doing exposure to the upside in terms of a dynamically rebalanced strategy on a week-by-week basis, plus a dynamic cash hedge to allocate into cash in times of market strikes, right? And the idea there is, first of all, the back test on that looks amazing. I'm not going to quote this you know it's on the website and all that, but the point is that we take into account that rare events can happen. We also have been exploring and making use of options for rare events that cannot be predicted like we saw in the last couple of months when someone bought what it was like a hundred million dollars worth of bitcoin on an exchange. It's not something that I'd correct me if I'm wrong, but the point is that you can take those into account. I think the single most important thing that we still fail to mention is bitcoin has done a 10 million X, am I right? A million to 10 million X in the space of 10 years, right? Since inception, I think what is like a thousandth of a dollar and the exchange was like 0.1 cent USD and now you know it reached a peak of 18 and drew down. Now the point is is like you know all these sophisticated fund managers out there, how did they miss that? So our decision with the index fund is I'll say let's not make that same mistake again. If bitcoin, if you're a bitcoin maximalist and it's a 15 cap you're going to get your your your amazing gains if bitcoin turns out to be the global reserve currency plus you know all the benefits of some other crypto assets and blockchains that come like these massive platforms and I agree I think it's quite cool to have platform bundles and potentially privacy bundles like we're doing at Rivix, right? I think the problem is we don't yet know if one or two if not just one blockchain and one one cryptocurrency just sort of absorbs the entire markets cap, right? I mean that's that's something that's still up for debate. Obviously we towards like not necessarily maximalism but these are the things you've got to take into account that that testing is simply can't do, right? That testing didn't predict bitcoin, that testing pretty much didn't predict Ethereum and that testing would predict massive dark falls and these kind of things. What you have to do is you have to take some kind of a combination of a traditional data-driven and some kind of sophisticated like approach not just like a sort of a back-tested approach. I mean that's a straightforward answer, right? Because this was the thing is so I was speaking to the guy at the hackathon and I said to you know I asked him this exact or what I said to him and I'd lose to your whole thing about how one coin can become dominant and I said to him I said one thing that these rebalancing funds do is they sell the winners and they buy the losers you know let's say Ethereum is doing really well like you say it holds more than 10% in your rebalancing you're gonna have to offload Ethereum and you're gonna have to keep offloading it the better it does and when I told him this you know you're selling your winners and you're buying your losers his answer to me was oh but the back-testing has shown that this has been you know the better strategy so that's that's kind of which I did not like that as an answer but I want to I want to come to something else that that you spoke about and and Louis Sean actually emailed me about this as well and it has been something quite big in the crypto space and I just want to ask your guys' opinions on on the three on three following coins and to see whether you include it or you don't include it and those coins are are ripple tether and bitcoin satoshi vision now Louis I know revix has dropped bitcoin satoshi vision and it's been a complete you know chaos in in the market but I want to talk about yeah maybe bitcoin satoshi vision where the owner of a currency does something crazy but also something like tether where I see I don't think you guys include tether which I'm quite surprised by is I know it represents the dollar but it's still a cryptocurrency and then of course ripple is another interesting one because in my opinion and I know I do get a little bit of hate for this I don't consider crypto as a cryptocurrency you know it's it's centralized there's no mining there's you know it's like coins can just be minted and destroyed at will and it's I don't understand it but I see that that is a coin that you guys do hold so that's why talk talk talk me through why you're holding ripple why you're not holding tether what makes you decide whether a token and you're talking about another one tears us what makes a coin not worthy of being part of your index funds interesting okay cool so as you know that we we kind of removed sd which from our perspective is less I mean we're not we don't really play in the discretionary space right I mean we've got a very chair rules based kind of I would say outline as to how we actually manage our funds and essentially we we base our decisions on a few trust bankers like finance like point base all these all the kind of leaders in the market right and like I said our customer base is slightly different to your normal crypto evangelists right our customer base is someone who has a look at the market and see somebody acting a real fishy that would probably get investigated if you were a director of the public company and says like why are we holding that kind of a thing right so from our perspective it was an easy move to kind of remove sd um I think the answer for xlp or ripple is I think down to the point of why we diversify like this a lot of people have varying views on what xlp will do over the future whether it is or is not a cryptocurrency right but at the end of the day the reason why we diversify and it comes also to your point is why you're you know continuously offloading the winners in a in a rebalancing strategy which does well for a trending market and never really predict a skyrocket of an asset but if you look at xlp it has a divide two schools of thought right us having it in our bundle essentially represents the future of where half of the world is right about it and the other half is wrong so for us that's the main key point of why we're diversifying across the 10 top 10 assets in our top 10 and in our payment bundle I mean at the end of the day it could do well it could not do well but right now assuming is basically guessing and guessing right now from a from a passive investment standpoint is not really what our client base wants to do and then tether I mean it's really simple I mean if it's meant to track the dollar a lot of our clients essentially could just earn dollar um so it would basically just be a dampener it would be a currency hedge um I don't know as far as I understand you guys are doing something like that but essentially it would be like holding dollar in our funds which would not really be indicative of the asset plot in general it would just one tenth of our our asset class would basically just be dampened to the dollar which would mean nothing really if we were actually tracking our fund performance in dollar so that's kind of why we've excluded any stable points okay and johnty perfect and johnty are your views well yeah I can let me start with more simpler ones um yeah similar idea with excluding tether um if you know it on one hand obviously it's kind of pointless um on the other hand obviously the the work at the time when we launched crypto 20 there was still like some question marks around it um yeah and at the end of the day as a as a fund where people could liquid so so the point of crypto 20 was people can liquidate via a smart contract very quickly um via our our d app on crypto 20.com right and they can also trade the token on exchange similar to like ETF I suppose and then in that case it's very easy for them to just exit the fund themselves so in a similar way if people wanted to diversify using tether it doesn't really make sense especially remember there's an opportunity cost for every coin you're holding with the token you're holding in an exchange sorry in a in a in custody um in terms of obviously there's a cost to store that um especially in the case like rubik's you know guys using uh you know bank rate bank rate security on certain aspects of your custody um similar thing with our kind of stuff certain aspects of our self custody but the point is is that there's an opportunity cost there so you in a day if you're going to say you're going to make a cryptocurrency fund um I think there's two things you don't be dogmatic about it um so in the case of ruple I mean we all have different views about it and viewpoints and haters and sort of like well it's given great great gains and what but I think the other point is for the purpose of crypto 20 um it made it made sense to include ruple again based on the back testing based on performance thus far it didn't make sense to include tether or aforementioned reason um but coin sv um obviously gets a bit tricky one of the other things which I didn't mention which obviously makes is the same for rivix is some of these crypto assets from time to time decide to do a fork and now you've got a new crypto asset case between cash in 2017 and our bitcoin sv bitcoin abc etc etc and add infinite right obviously a lot of those are going to end up being worthless but some of them aren't in the case of bitcoin sv um sort of like pretty becoming pretty complicated because it's obviously like again different views sort of having a centralized figurehead that's causing all kinds of issues various exchanges have made very very clear opinions about you know their opinion of bitcoin sv by delisting it but the fact of the matter matter remains is that we got those crypto assets in our fund and you know so you were showing me we were either diversified out of or into it based on you know our mandate our fund mandate our underlying fund mandate was we're going to do x with forks um you know it is it's basically income initially um and then after a long period of time sort of becomes it sort of disperses the value exactly a disbursement so you know those are sort of complex things i think the more interesting thing is number one avoiding scams um and then being aware of our regulatory concerns so i think there were a lot of regulatory concerns around tasos um i think there were obvious concerns around bitcoin and these sort of things that like you know just any sort of off with the fund manager can make a decision about and you can sort of say this is in line for a fund mandate this isn't um then you're off after that if you want to do more complex things um then you've got to be careful once you once you're managing over like 10 to 40 million dollars you're gonna you've got to really stick to your fund mandate right i think after that then just trade a new fund say look this is the x fund the the sort of like shitcoin funds excuse my friends or whatever we're going to literally invest in these things and if you want you can invest in that but this is the top 20 or the top 10 or the platform bundle or the privacy coin bundle or the top 10 bundle and this is what this is going to do you stick to that as a professional fund manager right um but obviously sometimes you make exceptions if you're not you don't have to be dogmatic because because i mean this the thing is as this space evolves i mean especially we're looking at you know jp morgan coin and and other institutions you know could could stop bringing things that are these centralized blockchains which i kind of feel is like the dumbest thing ever um you know and that's kind of why i'm a little bit like against ripple because i see ripple's perfect use cases for it to become a stable coin and you know jp morgan is almost coming in on all that type of stuff but but again this is where it does get a little bit you know confusing is what coins you do you include and what coins don't you include and that's why i like what you said because it's a good actuarial term you know stick to your mandate you know whatever your mandate was stick to that um but i must say you have given me quite a good idea i mean if you created a shitcoin fund it would be interesting you know with with all the currencies that you know basically you just got a telegraph for those i mean there's a lot of it just called pump and grub dump goods and we're just investing them if it if it went onto the telegram channel and and saw like stamp back from over a hundred and then just pump one serious thing sorry i had to cut in here and this is actually just recognized i'm really if i'm correct me if i'm wrong you literally spoke about this topic at i think it was like a pwc event in um in kayton with regards to sort of like these corporations that try to sort of like take blockchain and cut it into this corporate hole which is we like blockchain we kind of want to have like this permission part and like we want you know i mean so you can actually speak to this i think it's an important topic i think i think i had a bad day that day but i remember it at least i remember what i was trying to say like a raven unit took um no exactly i mean like i always find it quite physical when you hear a bank making a comment about blockchain being or any type of public based cryptocurrency or i would say quote unquote as michael would say be your own bank and say like i wouldn't really see a use case for this right and if you think about it like a lot like a bank is basically just this massive castle that they built in cyber security right protecting basically a sheet of paper that says that john t has this much money and he has this much money right all of that security is duplicated across every single bank and there's like probably a hundred thousand banks of decent size a lot the size of net bank for perhaps or whatnot around the world all of them duplicate the security just to protect the underlying ledger and the integrity of what we call our financial system right which is essentially a patch together hatchet job of tracking who has what money and there are different ways in which people who are preordained right like he's a master card and all these people way back in the day run these monopolies of who can actually trade or actually transact money between each other right and like you really look at the cost of tracking this money and the cost of moving this money obviously there's benefits like oversight from technical banks there's anti money laundering there's all these other things I granted none of that is exclusive from crypto side right so you look at the investment to open a bank you're looking a couple maybe a couple hundred million decent technology and security and regulation and all of that all of the main risk is somebody tampering and creating money and then that money moving to another bank in which case the linkers they've lost because the banks need to trust each other that nobody's creating fake money right so now if you actually think about replacing all of that extra hard work with a fabric a shared fabric of ownership right where the whole world can trans they can actually donate or not donate but contribute a little bit to the actual integrity of the shared ledger you're looking at an overall saving of like an unfathomable amount of money from a financial institution there so that's why like I almost have no doubt that over the next 10 to 20 years we will eventually reach a point where challenger banks empowered by blockchain or financial institutions or derivative platforms or revixes and crypto 20s and that get to the point where based on the groundswell of technology and and how would I say open source IP and all of that you end up competing directly with a bank with three guys you know and you're seeing that happen already with challenger banks overseas just with stick technology then you're seeing okay they still have to get regulated now you're seeing regulatory arbitrage of people being able to provide financial services across the world through different like jurisdictions so I mean that's why I always look at these like enterprise blockchains and they say yeah like no it'll totally work for us between us and our correspondent bank you're just like you're missing half the point but there's no way you can see it from that from that viewpoint you have to almost be outside the bank to look at this big parcel thinking like you don't need it right so sorry for the rent but it's something about it's a good talk also as I obviously remember it's really great okay but but I think the important thing is you're right that they missed the point and I think and this this is taken from an excellent podcast um that uh Antliano Pomp did with um Alex Vachinsky the CEO and co-founder of Celsius um with regards to sort of the wall being reinvented in the form of like decentralized platforms and specifically decentralized monopolies whereby these monopolies just the decentralized platforms are simply more efficient effectively more trustworthy because they trust this and um you know i'm more efficient and we'll just sort of out completely centralized solutions whatever sort of sort of like hybrid or zombie blockchain form they take and what will end up happening is they'll actually become monopolies but they're decentralized so the hope would be is that they still act in the best interests of the coin holders or wallet holders or users um which could just simply shift to another blockchain if that one no longer becomes working in the best interest of the problem is right now is the banks that doesn't work at the banks the banks serve you know the one percent classically um a lot of the unbank will never be served by those kind of services yet they probably will be served by decentralized platforms because again they're more efficient i mean therefore those why those decentralized platforms will end up becoming probably monopoly consult but hopefully again this will be a good thing um as is often said but and that's and look that goes to that's why you should have an index philosophy is because we don't know where these things are no one predicted bitcoin in the way that it happened except for a very lucky few um and very few people probably predict the next thing that that takes the way shape and form is bitcoin you know everything only ever really happens once um in history it's going to speak so i guess it's pretty hard to let's focus on what's not competitive between us i think what we both agree on is whether equally weighted or market cap weighted is obviously like we we want to catch those winners as they enter the market yeah i mean even i mean to Michael's point even if you're unloading a little bit of your maths of winners every now and then you're also you know at the end of the day you are it works well in a training strategy over time you know i mean backtesting for one thing i mean at redex like i'll backtesting we're not overtraining our backtesting i mean we have a very very simple strategy we're not we're not learning the backtesting and we're not overtraining like i just put it that way um so in that case i think we are all aligned i was just going to make a comment just on decentralised monopoly like maybe even in fact saving me 80 years we're all sitting here like somebody else is sitting here talking about some way in which we're going to overthrow the decentralized monopoly or like we're going to be like self-saintient like with blockchains with everybody's money that are like like controlled by like a couple of few people who you manage to you know no no no it's just interesting the whole game i just love it i just depicted to the kind of um it's enthralling i mean like it's a storyline a narrative of its own like the classical financial space how it's set up it's built patches on patches on patches um brand new asset class who knows what will happen i mean this is the storyline investing has played on i mean it is the premise of all vc it is the premise of basically all investing right so at the end of the day both of our companies just attempt to make the increase of value accessible to different people and that's literally the whole story in a nutshell exactly how we go about it the technology all of those things people get really stuck in in who's doing what and how and when and those kind of things but like michael you said i mean the market is less than like almost like what it happened till about a week ago it was less than the estimated net income of saudi aramco in one year so like let's just be real like there's a lot of other things to do from a from a uh getting uh legitimacy of an asset class bringing users to an asset class bring your investment companies to an asset class as an actual investment product are you trying to stop me so that you can say goodbye before we run out of one minute so yeah so we i do i do have just two lost questions to ask you guys so can we do that that annoying thing again just click end meeting sign back in all right i've got two lost questions and then we're gonna wrap it up uh basically just two lost questions and then yeah we can have some closing remarks and and end of this this really great discussion um the first one is about the diversification benefits of crypto funds and then the other one is a little bit about the operational complexity and some of the risks around them um so i don't know if we should maybe start with the diversification one um and the reason why i want to ask this is because in traditional finance we tend to buy into an index fund because it offers diversification benefits um with crypto and it's something that we saw specifically at the end of 2017 is when bitcoin went all the way down all the coins followed with it and we seem to see this i guess in most times in recessions whenever there's an incredibly you know bad shock correlation benefits disappear and we see everything moving together just when we need them to move differently so is diversification a big benefit or one of the big things that you push forward with your crypto funds or is it something that you guys say you know what we're actually not seeing those benefits um you know it's not it's not less risky to hold the crypto 20 fund than it is to say hold a single coin um i don't know if you guys want to just talk about that look i think it's i think i mean you make a good point right the crypto market is highly correlated but i think that you have to make a distinction between the reasons people diversify in an existing stock market and the reasons why diversification would work in such a nascent industry like the crypto space right in the existing financial market like let's say the s&p 500 or any tracking fund like that chopper that's done for the whatnot i mean you're not really expecting one of those companies to go to zero you're also not expecting some of those companies to be i mean i mean there are scanners that come out all the time but the inherent downside risk in those companies with the amount of regulation that is actually applied to them is actually quite low so and because the space is so well developed people are looking for basis points better return with large large large amounts of money um knowing that overall the u.s stocks or bonds or things like that will will differ per asset class over time but the reason why you're diversifying is largely i would say slightly different in the crypto space the diversification benefits slightly shift more to risk mitigation when it comes to certain assets and taking a nose that um so an asset take note that being delisted as you saw bitcoin sb going almost like you know having a bit of a dip something like Ethereum over time that struggles to implement that certain things will take a bit longer or a competitor comes up quite rapidly over a year and actually displaces it all of those things are very very fast moving and from a diversification standpoint regardless of our correlation between good like assets when they're performing well you're going to get dropouts over time and i mean we can note quite a few of them over so i think we're seeing i mean bitcoin cash sb for us was a great example of the value that a diversified portfolio would actually bring um the removal of that asset into other assets um if it starts dropping essentially is the point of what we're doing because a lot of people don't really want to be focusing on this full time right they want this thing to kind of operate on its own and the correlation of the asset costs together to work if be a whole asset cost performance well um that's kind of how we see slight risk decrease on the large you know okay okay and johnty anything to to add on on your side or shall we move to the final question i think there's two really big points the first thing which like if let's distinguish diversification into crypto for someone who hasn't actually died like bought in at all um which i think we both agree and pretty much every fund managers created their own form of showing that it makes sense to diversify into crypto um you know we wrote our own article related to uh to the top 10 crypto assets and we've we've we've everyone sort of pitches that and i think that's really important there's nothing we forget as people in crypto is that it made so much sense to invest in crypto in the last 10 years right um and in some ways it still makes sense to diversify into it now the quick the quick question is how do you convince people to get off zero um again i took this from the great and and to you probably are no podcast you should like start paying us with the rules but that was with um the really famous one you didn't the more uh uh my worldwide of um podcasts uh the ultimate bitcoin arguments and then one question was like or one discussion point was like how do you get these fund managers off zero that have zero exposure to crypto and the answer is any exposure any sort of slight diversification into crypto yielded um a a better efficient frontier in the portfolio performance and better sharp ratio right and um now within crypto the actual coinitization louis covered it all right yes bitcoin's highly correlated i'm sorry all crypto assets are highly correlated with bitcoin performance the key thing is that crypto assets as a whole are decorrelated with other financial instruments which is very unusual behavior it's very unique and one of the key questions we ask ourselves is will that hold in a financial crisis you know like where where the u.s. dollar really um suffers and we have like the inflation and um another financial crisis like in 2008 and that will be interesting does it hold does it uh do people diversify into crypto then uh and then the question is how do you convince them and i think it becomes a qualitative thing to have an index fund it's intuitive people are familiar with it um this is the kind of thing we try to do we try to make our products mimic the traditional financial world similar to rivix and it makes sense you know having those things in place and then these fund managers say listen we want to invest in this stuff but like we want the wrappers and things around and make as much sense as possible and they're used to things like index products they're used to things like customer solutions they they're used to things like um ETFs and these kind of things which we working towards also so yeah long story short i really think it's well how you're approaching and the last thing is right now the crypto markets yes everything's correlated to bitcoin but only for now right um it's it's again how long is that going to hold when does that change and when it changes how big is that impact um you know these are the kind of things you have to take into account these sort of rare events which make having an index fund that makes sense even if you're maximalist i mean even if you're maximalist bitcoin or ethereum or whatever becomes the global reserve currency you're going to make a lot of money just because you encrypt it to begin with okay no cool i like that yeah yeah well i was just going to say coming up to i guess y'all the final question because i think i've kept you guys here for a long time and y'all the nights are still y'all so if you guys want to need to go out and enjoy cape town or louis u in london um but job the the final question the the final question comes i guess y'all this is very much a natural question and it was one that i was able to ask uh vitalik while he was here at eth cape town um of course you you talk to vitalik via tweets not through uh you know speech and and the question i asked him was what is the biggest risk that he sees for ethereum and how does he deal with it and his answer was that we don't develop the platform fast enough and how he dealt with it was when he was not talking on the stage he was on his laptop like almost 24 seven during the hackathon you know doing his whole thing so my question to you too is what is your what is your greatest risk around your your funds and you know how do you how do you go about managing them and they don't necessarily have to be a market risk i mean it could very well be like an operational risk like maybe i don't know you have nightmares of of one employee coming in and sending all the coins to their personal wallet getting on a yacht and you know jumping out the country with with a lot of cash um but y'all what what would you say are your your crypto funds biggest risks and how do you manage them and then y'all i think we'll we'll end on on that question so i don't know who wants to start and y'all who wants to conclude i'll sort of go with the contrarian answer which is i think and look again i should have said this at the beginning all my views don't necessarily represent those of Invictus but y'all i think one of the biggest risks is not having enough money crypto for the next boom and sort of the real ultimate one i mean the the one where bitcoin or equivalent really starts shifting towards being the global store of value where it's beating gold it's beating all precious metals and eventually beating multiple serious fiat currencies we've already beaten to being there's a bubble in dollar and we beat in the what was what's what's in venezuela again it's like in terms of volatility right so you are still volatile really yes that's because it's volatile going upwards for the most part um so that's one thing is to not have enough in crypto and not have enough assets under management um and then y'all of course you know standard things like you worry about catastrophic bugs i mean like every time you send a a transaction you always just stress you know i think it's funny that we we always like again we're always so focused on that stuff but once again blockchain still hasn't been hacked and it was only like 10 12 years ago that we had a massive financial crisis due to centralization of trust in really these these these hugely vulnerable um and and fragile entities that that actually aren't as smart and intelligent as we'd like to think they are and they didn't manage risk well and they didn't find efficient ways of getting returns based on the operational models obviously the banks right the given brothers etc so it's like i think though the reverse is always true i think that we forget how important different crypto is um and then we make some kind of mistake where we actually like abandon the right and that's why i agree with the title basically you should be building developing you know speaking to more people getting more people on board before it's too late and i make the economic system collapses before we have an alternative in place that that's sort of like my contrary answer but again like so we're down to stuff yeah you know we worry about bitcoin going to zero and not diversifying to cash faster now for something like that okay perfect now i like that i like that and and louis i see you've got a big smile on your face uh what are your what are your views what are the biggest yeah i mean i i'm okay completely separate to revix i mean like i i'm not really worried about much because i mean this is the point of the game like we will be here in three years talking about a different problem i will be there in seven years talking about a different problem um and really once you realize that we're all again we like beating the problem we'll eventually succeed at the problem you like dealing with okay that's kind of that wouldn't be doing anything else right um from a revix perspective i would say if you look at the overall market in general i mean we're looking at um you're looking at kind of the the growth of an early stage industry that is attempting to break the bounds of your normal geographic control of governance in a large sense right i mean and you have these different countries who some of them are realizing they're actually not as powerful as saying the corporates right and the way they actually control people in their jurisdiction is becoming less and less we're coming less and less able to do so based on the power of filming like google or facebook or things like that or less and less equipped to actually regulate breakthrough right and they're kind of slowing things down and i i get why they're doing that because at the end of the day like saab in south africa sent you their only job is to make sure that we don't have a hyperinflation and the whole financial system goes through it right so for them taking ten years extra to figure out exactly how to deal with the currency is like they're like cash chop whatever right from our perspective looking at what what we see is the future of the next 10 to 20 years is a complete rebasing of the classical financial system and and the actual tracking of ownership of assets onto blockchain rails which is where we will be waiting the thing about how long that takes is i mean one of the factors the key factors of how long that will take is how willing and able regulators are to accept the changes in the market right so from my perspective it is literally just the speed and regulation and getting onto that boat as quickly as possible um like i said earlier like i cannot see another way the universe pans out with the efficiencies of the public blockchain versus private blockchain even if you're going to go into i mean even the current system even if you're going to go and throw in everything about identity needs to be tracked because in order that all the building blocks are like on the way i just can't see a different way the only way that you can hold it back is by like limiting bank devices in South Africa and just like limited like and then you have like four big banks or five big banks or seven banks or three banks that are coming now playing for the same market and nobody can really get a go at building a better product which is what we are trying to do okay okay no cool no great answer well guys look i mean i'm just looking at the time and we've hit nine o'clock which means i've kept you for an hour and a half if you include our little you know introduction of which heading beforehand so i just want to say yeah thank you so much for for taking the time to be part of this be part of this podcast um what i'm going to be doing is putting links to both of your companies and both of you to your twitter or whatever social media you want uh you send those to me i will be putting them in the link of both the youtube video as well as the podcast description that we are setting up so that people yeah they can follow you on various social media and you know have a link if they want to invest or get involved further so i just want to say so yeah i just want to say thank you so much guys and i hope you have uh have a great evening and yeah we'll chat soon awesome thanks and we keep up the great work it's great to still see you in the game and i'll see you at another event and another talk thank you so much Michael appreciate it perfect thanks everyone cheers


There must be records somewhere of satellites that have fallen to Earth, and I really, really hope that they're called orbituaries. While I was traveling in Italy recently, I got to visit the Galileo Science Museum in Florence. They have a ton of cool stuff there, including some well-crafted apparatus that Galileo had built for physics demos, this incredible model of the geocentric universe for the Medici's, and three of Galileo's fingers. There was also this telescope that Galileo famously used to observe the orbits of moons about Jupiter. That observation directly conflicted with Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology, which everyone, including the Pope, pretty much accepted as gospel at that point. Galileo believed, quite loudly, that the moon's orbits lend support to a previously unpopular theory published 50 years prior by Nicholas Copernicus, that the Earth was just another planet, and that it went around the sun, not the other way around. Copernicus' theory, which got Galileo into a bunch of trouble with the Catholic Church, wasn't complete by any means. It still used perfectly circular orbits instead of ellipses, and it still required the use of epicycles, these weird little loopy suborbits. But it wasn't just heresy or incompleteness that made the Copernican model of the universe so unpopular in academic circles, it's also vastly unintuitive. Yeah, Earth's planethood is pretty obvious now that we've taken selfies from space, but right when telescopes were first becoming popular, that's a hard sell. I mean, it really doesn't look like we're moving, right? It doesn't look more like the sun and all the stars just sort of spin around us. Don't we call it sunrise and sunset? And the Earth doesn't really look like these little pinpoints of light, at least not from here. Equating those and this, that's quite a mental leap. Copernicus made that leap and provided some testable mathematics to back up that startling idea that our position in the universe wasn't special. Rather than just going along with Aristotle, who thought that the Earth was clearly the most important thing in the cosmos, the anchor about which the sun, the moon, and the stars all spun, he suggested that maybe it's just another thing, like those things in the sky. This general assumption that our observations of the universe aren't made from a privilege or unique position has been instrumental to the development of science as a discipline. It spawned several sub-theories in different contexts, like the cosmological principle or the mediocrity principle, but in general, it's known as the Copernican principle. It crops up in a ton of different places. Edward and Hubble observed that all of the stars that we can see appear to be moving away from us. Either our solar system is special and everything else in the universe is trying to get away from it, or everything in the universe, including us, is moving away from everything else. Maybe we're not special. We can observe natural processes and environmental pressures shaping the development of living things. Either humans are unique and didn't form according to those processes, or we share the same origin as all other species. Maybe we're not special. That's pretty cool. But there's also an interesting practical application of the principle, which borrows heavily from Bayesian statistics. It was first developed by J. Richard Gott and described in his book, Time Travel in Einstein's universe, which is actually a pretty fantastic read. Gott's version of the Copernican principle is used to estimate the remaining lifespan of anything, and it's actually pretty simple. You start with the same basic assumption only applied to time. Assume that the period in which you are observing something is not unique or privileged. Let's take me, for example. I know I just said that the universe doesn't revolve around me, but let's just run with it. Assume that the period in which you are observing me is not special. So what does that mean? Well if I were to die tomorrow, and this was the last that anyone saw of me, you'd be seeing a pretty unique period in my life right now, somewhere in the last 1%. So let's apply the Copernican principle and say that this period in my life that you're seeing right now isn't special.  I mean, I hope. Let's also say that this probably isn't the first 5% of my life that you're seeing right now. But this isn't some weird winding up period before I ascend to demigod status and then outlive the sun and the stars, because that would also be pretty weird.  On the low side, if this is about the 94% of my life you're seeing now, then I could be expected to live another 1.5 years. And the way that I drive, that's totally feasible. On the high side, if this is just the 6% of my life that you're seeing right now, I'll live to be 580, given that seems a little ridiculous, but with the advances of medical technology, if I start exercising and eating right, who knows? So using the Copernican principle in this weirdly specific way, we can bookend what kind of hypothetical longevity I can expect. Yes, the range is large, but that's only because I picked a relatively conservative estimate of what counts as not special. One which would only theoretically be wrong 10% of the time. If I wanted to, I could take a gamble and say that you're probably not seeing me in the first or last 10% of my life. If I wanted to be more conservative, I could say that you're probably not seeing me in the first or last 1%. Now, hang on a second.  First, and most importantly, the Copernican principle lifespan estimation depends a lot on the assumption that the period at which you're observing something is actually a random sample from its lifespan. And that could be hard to justify. I mean, it's pretty obvious that you shouldn't watch the grand opening of a business and then look at your watch and shout, you've got two minutes left. But frequently, judging that the period at which you're viewing something isn't special depends a lot on intuition. It's also a method that has a built-in margin of error. It's totally possible that a jet engine will flatten me while I'm filming and I was just unlucky enough to be in the last 0.1%.  You know how this goes. So it's far from perfect. If you have any data to base an actual longevity estimate on, then you should probably use that. But it's an interesting little thought experiment. And if you don't have anything else to go on, it's actually not bad. Copernicus wasn't the first to think of a heliocentric solar system. And he was wrong about the circular orbits. But he did make a crucial advancement in thought that would be part of the ignition for a huge revolution in science. His theory raised the possibility that the entire universe operated on principles in which human beings were not the most important figures. That maybe we weren't the center of the universe, but merely working parts of it. That may seem intuitive in retrospect, but most paradigm shifts are.  If you've got a minute, do a Copernican principle lifespan analysis on something that's lasted so far, and post it in the comments. Does it seem reasonable? Let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe, like, share, and don't stop thunking.