Adam Blumberg joins Crypto Office Hours with Tyrone Ross and Jay Coulter.
Office Hours are hosted by Jay Coulter and recorded LIVE on all FinancialAdvisor.TV social media properties.
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Transcript:
00:02
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Crypto Office Hours. My name is Jay Coulter, and joining me for this project as always is Tyrone Ross. Today, we're going to talk Bitcoin as always. We're going to talk a little bit about WorldCoin. We're going to talk DOWs, maybe even get into the exciting world of compliance around crypto assets. And we have a special guest today, Adam Blumberg from Interaxis. Tyrone, before I bring him in, and I'd love for you to introduce him. I know you guys have a long relationship. What's new in your world?
00:33
Oh man, so much new in my world. So starting in reverse, reached out to the SEC yesterday as Mr. Gensler wants all the crypto hippies to reach out to them before building. So I have something I'm excited about. And before we start building, we wanna engage with the SEC to get their guidance. My birthday is Wednesday. So I've been on a very, very strict diet for the last.
01:02
eight weeks, I'm down almost 20 pounds. So I look forward to lots of fatty foods and putting it all back on for my birthday. Got some really cool things happening on the on the turnkey side, which will be coming soon as well. And that's it. Going to try and take some time off next week for the first time in my life. I'm going to try and take some time off. What are you going to do? Never do.
01:30
So I'm gonna try and take some time off. What are you gonna do in your time off? Do nothing. I like literally, I'm just, I'm not gonna work. I'm gonna take some time to just chill out and read and work out and eat. So I don't believe you. I don't believe you. You and I are wired the same Tyrone. You're not gonna be able to do it. I look forward to breaking it down afterwards. Yeah, absolutely. You wanna introduce Adam? Absolutely. So
02:00
A few things that I want to say about Adam. One, before getting into anything crypto or anything like that, just very much a best in class human being. I consider myself on a peer with the richest people in the world in terms of my network of having very awesome people that are responsive, that are thoughtful, that are givers. Adam is very high on that list.
02:30
Um, like myself has been at this a long time and, and never has wavered, um, in the crypto space. I think he and I have been angered at some of the bad actors. If you want to call them that, I think there's worse words to call them. That have tried to destroy the work that he and others have put in here. Um, but he's, he's been a great steward of his gifts. He's educated a ton of people, hundreds of people at this point, thousands of people at this point. Um, but one of the best people in the space.
03:00
Um, and lastly, I think a lot of people don't understand he and I, again, I think it was either 17, 18. I don't remember at this point, but been at it a long time. Um, and originally just connected on frustration and then United on solution. Um, and now we're back at frustration. So the circle of life. So, um, wow. That is, uh, that is quite the intro. I appreciate it.
03:29
I appreciate that. You know, again, the friendship first and foremost, and then the the, you know, being in the trenches, battling, whatever we want to call it, the highs and lows that bears and bulls and all that. And as I told you on LinkedIn, my wife pointed out the other day that I've gone gray really quickly and I don't know if it's the kid or the crypto and I'm pretty sure it's both. They both behave the same. So they do. They do both behave the same. I definitely might.
03:57
life at home goes through Baron bull markets on a daily basis. Well, there's a whole lot to unpack in that introduction. That was incredible, Tyrone. And you got nothing on me when it comes to gray hair, Adam, just wait a few years, my friend. Just wait a few years. Let's get started. Adam, could you tell viewers a little bit about what you do in the crypto space to set the stage for anybody who's not familiar with Interaxis in your work?
04:22
And viewers, if you're watching this live and you'd like to ask Adam or Tyrone a question, simply go into the comment sections, whether you're on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn or Facebook, and we'll punch it through to our guests. So Adam, tell us a little bit about your work. Sure. Thanks so much, Jay. So, you know, like Tyrone, I well, not like her. I was a financial advisor and no longer a financial advisor had an RIA for years. I'm still a CFP. But I
04:51
started understanding crypto years ago and said, you know, I want to explain this to Everyone but more than anything I want to explain it to financial advisors I know the frustration that we as financial advisors have had in, you know Learning new asset classes learning new technologies and for some reason Crypto and blockchain everything kind of clicked with me So I wanted to try to explain it and so we started a company myself and Ron Dix and my partner started a company called Interaxis
05:19
We eventually partnered up with Steve Larson as well. And we launched a course called the Certified Digital Asset Advisor course. And so our role is one, teach you the basics. If you're an advisor, teach you the basics of crypto, DeFi, blockchain technology, all of that, and then doing what we're doing here, which is once you know the basics, we got to keep going. We got to understand what's happening with regulation and how that affects you. And what's happening with WorldCoin and how that affects you, what your clients are going to ask you about, how to have those conversations.
05:48
And that's what we do. And that's what I enjoy doing. And that's why there's, you know, good times and bad times and trying to, you know, suffer through parts of it and then being, uh, you know, kind of exalted and loving other parts of it.
06:02
Well, you already brought up my first topic. So this show is for financial advisors. What do advisors need to know when they get calls from their clients or prospects about WorldCoin?
06:15
I'll take that first, Adam. Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. My first thought is don't do it. And that's totally my opinion. I apologize for that, but there seems to be something a little off about scanning your eyeball and then having that somehow tied to your identity. But the idea of World's Coin, I guess, is trying to... The idea behind it isn't that bad, right? Trying to create this...
06:42
worldwide online identity. Here in the US, you have your social security number. That is pretty much your identifier. That's your identifier for pretty much everything you do. The world doesn't have a social security number. And in the crypto world, you don't want the government deciding what your identity is or what your identifier is and having access to that database. So the idea of WorldCoin is create some sort of unique worldwide identifier that is on chain that I can use.
07:10
to create wallets, to prove who I am, to prove what I'm doing, to prove my data, all of those things. And the way that I'm going to be unique is there's going to be these orbs that are going to scan my eyeball, my retina, and that's my uniqueness. That's going to essentially be the equivalent of my social security number. That's going to be stored in a cryptographically secure way on chain. And in so doing, I get this cryptocurrency called World's Coin dropped to me.
07:39
Right. So there's some sort of financial incentive to it. Um, all that sounds very much Lex Luthor like to me or pick, pick your Batman villain, whatever, whoever you want your superhero to be, it sounds very, uh, it sounds very super villain like w which is what bothers me a bit about it. Uh, and that that's where I'll leave it for now. I haven't investigated enough to go way deep down the, the cryptographic rabbit holes, but that's just a
08:08
kind of a gut feel of like, I'm not going to scan my eye and have it be in the hands of by the way, the same guy that created AI, you know, created open AI. Tyrone, thoughts? I'm still sifting through the rubble here. From an advisor side of it, right? You probably are an advisor and have clients that use clear in the airport. So
08:36
Very much similar to that. Definitely get the feel of WorldCoin and UBI and that whole thing of what Sam is trying to do here on the bigger picture. I find that compelling. I do align with my fellow crypto hippies here that the core crypto folks may be a little hesitant.
09:05
if not outright obstinate about doing that. But I think we are in a situation now where a lot of worlds are converging a lot. There's a blending of narratives that I think you got to look at. And when that happens, I think if it's the thing where an end client of an advisor is like, oh, this is the thing that makes crypto work and this is the whatever, and they just kind of want to.
09:34
walk into it, I think advisors need to be prepared for that. No, you're not going to log in the Y charts of Bloomberg or wherever and see WorldCoin there or be like, that's not where this is. But for the purposes of I think what we all do is advisors of conversation and being aware of what's happening in the world. I think that's where it begins and ends for advisors right now. For the novice, can either one of you explain to me exactly the differences between that and Bitcoin?
10:03
And so when the client calls in and they're reading everything and seeing the new stories about WorldCoin, there is a distinct difference. I'm not very good at articulating it. How should an advisor articulate how it's not the same thing?
10:19
Anyone take that? Sure. One, Bitcoin's been around a while. Bitcoin was not funded by venture capitalists. It's not a company. It kind of sprung out of this need in 2008 and has been completely decentralized since the first block was mined in 2009. Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, little b Bitcoin, is the currency of the.
10:47
Bitcoin network. I know I'm not really explaining it very well from that perspective, but it goes back to this. There's no company behind Bitcoin. There's not a lot of kind of ulterior motive there, in my opinion. It is a cryptographically secure network that has its own currency in Bitcoin. Worldcoin obviously has kind of a motive. And again, whether the motives are really good or really bad or there's really good motives that maybe you're not.
11:16
being delivered to my head very well. I don't know, but the idea of world coin is, is this kind of like a UBI. Everyone's going to have this. Maybe it's, it's more like a dollar. Maybe it's more like a Bitcoin is somewhere in between. And I'm not quite sure whether world coin is based on the value of, of the company, the world coin company that's being funded, or if the world coin, the the asset is based on some sort of dollar.
11:44
metric, it's based on, you know, a number of dollars or whatever, that I'm not quite sure. Bitcoin has its investment theses, right? There's only ever going to be 21 million of them. They're created in blocks every 10 minutes and there's no company controlling. I guess that's a little bit of how I would explain it. WorldCoin is VC funded. I'm not quite sure where the value is.
12:10
For me, I would keep it very simple. Mr. and Mrs. Client, WorldCoin is essentially digital ID. Bitcoin is digital money. Yeah, yours is much better than mine. Right, okay, but that being said, WorldCoin, I mean, you see charts, right? You saw the charts where the value of the coin went up. Now you can't, again, you can't find that necessarily on Coinbase, I don't think, or anyplace else you would trade it regularly or easily.
12:40
But if the client comes to you, just like they did several years ago with ICOs and just like they did a few years ago with DeFi tokens that all of a sudden are flying up and two years ago with NFTs and the client's like, okay, I've missed out on these others. I want to make it. Can I do it on World's Coin? Is this going to be my 100X? Right. And you can say it's digital gold or digital money versus digital ID. For the client, it's okay, but why does that digital ID have a value? Like, why is someone trading this?
13:09
And is this going to be the one that goes up 100 X because digital ID seems awfully important. Yeah. So I will not push back, but I'll say this. I think the majority of the public doesn't even know there's a coin attached to it that has any value. I think in the name, right. I think you're accurate. I could, that's what it seems like to me. Right. So I think, yeah, I think there's a subset that realizes a coin attached, but I think, Oh, that's just the name. And then
13:38
everything you see online is people doing this, right? Like you don't see people with Bitcoin, everything is the gold coin spending and people buying, right? So still in 2023, like there's no gold, like Bitcoin would be on it, but whatever. So it's like, you see that all the time. So I think that's where it is right now. So I think as you know,
14:00
abstract any complexity for advisor, keep the conversation simple, right? And then yes, if the client goes well, it's trading on such and such or whatever. And then that's where the advisor goes, all right, kind of out of my circle of comments is here, let me watch crypto office hours and get back to you next week. Yeah. If, if, if there's some advice to be had, it's stick with the big boys that have been around for a while, stick with Bitcoin, stick with the ETH, what it like. When in doubt, go to the two big boys. Yep.
14:27
Yeah. And I tell you, you guys have been on different shows that we've had on financial advisor TV over the past four years. And both of you have been very consistent with that. Stick with Bitcoin, stick with ETH. And boy, that that has worked out well for most people at where the other coins might not have. My concern about this world coin is exactly what you guys said. It just seems like an ID system where maybe there is some value behind it. And what I just learned is there isn't a fixed amount of coins behind world coin the way there is Bitcoin. Yeah, that even someone
14:56
Well, okay Jay and to be fair, there's not a fixed amount of ETH either, right? So Bitcoin is one of the very few that has a fixed, this is all there will ever be, right? Several other, you know, several of the DeFi tokens do have a fixed amount. So I don't want that to be the delineation there. There's a fixed amount. There's not. There are monetary policies for ETH. Like the Bitcoin monetary policy is you'll have a halving, like there'll be fewer coins produced every four years.
15:24
Right. And the limit will approach is 21 million for ETH. It is there will be, you know, coins produced every 15 seconds or so some will be burned or taken out of circulation. Some will be put in into circulation and there's a policy there. What you're saying Jay is there's really not a monetary policy around WorldCoin kind of like the Fed. Oh wait, I say that out loud at this point. Let's just drag Jay into the MEV discussion and just ruin the whole day.
15:52
We will do that. We'll try to keep it simple. But I just want to make sure that that wasn't the delineation that advisors like, oh, well, on crypto office hours, they said that because Bitcoin has a finite amount, therefore it's the winner. It's more about having a monetary policy you can see that makes sense than a fixed amount. And as you said, I don't know if WorldCoin has that monetary policy set right now.
16:21
And again, I haven't read enough about it. I it's creepy enough that people are getting their eyes scanned, right? I've seen Minority Report and that that's enough of a turn off right there. But then again, I haven't done all the I haven't done enough research on all you movie watchers. Yeah, so Tyrone's had a saying for a long time educate before you allocate. Adam, like Tyrone, you have been living that you've built courses and designations for financial advisors that want to learn about the space before they get into it.
16:50
before advisors even get started, what are some of the misconceptions they have about adding crypto to their practice? And what do they need to think through? One, you know, some of the misconceptions are one, it's, you know, they think that it's 100% speculative, right? That, that, you know, you're just guessing and you hope, hope things go up, there's a huge misconception that there's going to be like one crypto winner.
17:17
right? Like one crypto asset is going to be the one. Why should it be Bitcoin or why should it be ether or whatever? I think that's a pretty big misconception there. It's possible for both, right? It's possible for gold and Microsoft to both do well or to not do well for one to do well and for one not. So I think those are a couple of popular or I don't say those are a couple of misconceptions that we see a lot when advisors come in.
17:45
I think another misconception, and then I'll let Tyrone talk a little bit. Another misconception is that it's all about the crypto assets, that crypto is an asset class, and while the crypto assets are an asset class, there's an underlying technology and system behind it that is actually meant to be utilized for certain purposes, and some of those purposes are financial. Some of those purposes are as with WorldCoin is doing ID related. Some of it is just storing data.
18:15
right? And it's hard at storing data. But this idea that, you know, all crypto is speculative, or there is going to be X amount of dollars poured into crypto, and it's just going to be disseminated among certain crypto assets, and therefore there's going to be a winner or a couple winners. I don't think that is necessarily accurate. I think that the way to look at it is more along the lines of what happened to the internet, which is
18:42
Early on you had internet stocks and we're all in this room old enough to remember the days when internet stocks were flying, even though no one knew what the internet did. No one used it. And eventually we're going to get to that point where we use it. And I think from an education standpoint, if you understand where the use cases come from, that's going to help you understand a lot of where the value comes from. Right. So there are, there are problems to be solved. Crypto is solving them.
19:10
there is a difference between Bitcoin and ETH and Aave and Maker and all these tokens. There is a difference and understanding the tech helps you understand the difference. So I'll start there. I'm 100% certain Tyrone's going to have a much more simple and articulate answer than I am. I will say this, and this is a new one for me, and I got asked a question yesterday about why the Fidelities and the Schwabs and the Pershings...
19:39
and de-geminize in a coin basis or whatever, just don't do whatever they need to do to make sure they are full-on regulated, qualified custodian by the SEC. And this leads into what I think the biggest misconception is for financial advisors now. And the biggest misconception right now to me, and I've evolved on this, is that financial advisors think that those in crypto care enough to change their minds or educate them on this. They don't.
20:08
Me and Adam are a small minority of folks who care about bringing us into the wealth management space. The platforms, the aggregators, the custodians, the CFP board, the American college, they don't care enough to convince advisors that this is something that is meaningful enough to put into a practice. And what I mean by that is you hear this.
20:35
these clamor or this narrative from advisors that everyone is like out to change their mind that it's an asset or it's a safe haven or whatever. And I saw a lot of that earlier on because you did see that if your financial advisor didn't do this, then you know, buy you Bitcoin, you should fire them. That's stupid. That's always been a stupid tweet. Right. But I think the biggest misconception now is that advisors think that everyone is trying to turn and convince them that it should be Bitcoin and not gold or it should be ETH and not, you know.
21:04
the PE portion of the client's portfolio. No one cares that much to try to convince them. So I think there's this microcosm that needs to be broken, this microcosm of thought and nuance that needs to be weaved through in order for advisors to understand. It's a very small portion of us to care. They really want to make this a thoughtful part of the conversations, but the broader space doesn't. Yeah, but I think that's changing. I've had three conversations in the past two weeks with the clients.
21:34
breakaway advisors that want to associate with aggregators that have digital asset capabilities and and specifically people making a decision between Schwab and fidelity and fidelity getting an edge because of their digital asset platform in your conversations have either one of you found this starting to come up to the top more often. So I want to be clear what you just said. Here's what's important about what you just said. The advisors are asking about the aggregators. Why that's client led.
22:03
I didn't say the clients aren't trying to change their advisor's mind. It's all of us. When the clients start saying, hey, right, change your mind or I'm leaving or get access or I'm leaving, then everything changes. So I just want to make that distinction. But you're absolutely right there. But Adam, I'll let you take it. Well, and along those lines, right, when you have people at the top, when you have Larry Fink talking about not only obviously with their
22:32
spot Bitcoin ETF, which you and I are likely not going to debate here. But then when you have him going further and saying, this is a, not just a global asset class, but a global currency that's going to be used. When you have him talking about the idea of utilizing blockchain technology to tokenize assets, and this is how we BlackRock are going to be made more efficient. And other companies like us, other asset managers are going to be made more efficient.
23:01
I think that's when you kind of have advisors taking note and going, well, if the founder of the largest asset manager in the world sees the value in not only Bitcoin, but the value in the technology, maybe it's time to start looking, like maybe it's time to start paying attention. And therefore I want to go to potentially a custodian who's paying attention, who's ready to help me make that a part of my practice. I think that's
23:30
I'm seeing more of that just in the last couple of months, obviously. It hadn't been that long since that bomb was kind of dropped when BlackRock dropped that. And all of a sudden, we went from Tyrone and I have talked about this. All of a sudden, we went from being total doom and gloom in the RIA financial advisor world with crypto to having a great deal of optimism. That guy doesn't come to the table. He doesn't come to bat without a pretty monster swing.
23:58
Right. He knows what's coming. And I don't necessarily, I don't know if you want to get into that topic, but I think it's really important. Uh, I don't know about the ETF part, but I think it's really important to note that he, he doesn't come not educated. He doesn't come say things because of FOMO or because it's a fad. He's not going, Hey, you know, black rock's going to let you trade NFTs or something like that. He's going, we think the technology behind it is important enough that it's going to make us more efficient.
24:28
and we're looking into it. We're gonna figure out how to make it work.
24:33
Yeah, that's very valid. Yes. And I think that's where folks start to sit up and pay attention. Sure. So Adam, before we move on from education, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about your designation and how it can help advisors that are heading down this path. And literally for for a minute, two minutes, explain the value for an advisor going through your program. And also spend 30 seconds of why I don't have an honorary CDAA.
25:00
why you don't have an honorary CDAA. That's easy. You're well. You know what? I will gladly explain why you don't have an honorary CDAA because no one has an honorary CDAA. So when we launched our course a couple years ago, we thought, you know what? We need to have a designation attached to it so that an advisor will know, so that a company will know, anyone will know that their financial professional understands crypto and doesn't just understand it from the perspective of how many
25:29
me understands the technology behind it because five years, ten years down the road, as Tyrone and I have said, we are going to be much more focused on the blockchain technology. You're going to have to understand how to do due diligence and how to understand how to keep your client's assets safe and what wallets are and all of those things, which you may not get right now. So the CDAA, the idea of it is you not only understand the investment theses behind the assets, but you understand the technology as well.
25:58
And so the CDAA, Certified Digital Asset Advisor, the designation is managed by a group called PlannerDAL, which we started, because we wanted the designation to not be Adam's designation or Ron's designation or Steve's designation. That doesn't hold as much water. So PlannerDAL runs the CDAA. We have people teaching courses towards the Certified Digital Asset Advisor designation in Europe.
26:21
In the middle East in Turkey, we're starting in Brazil pretty soon. Someone's working on a course in Australia. They're teaching their own courses, not mine. So that's what the CDAA is. And the reason why Tyrone doesn't have the honorary one is because you actually have to go on chain and you have to go through certain challenges. And you have to, to prove that you know how to use crypto in order to get the CDAA and we built it in a way that I can't short circuit that process. You have to go on chain.
26:50
and prove that you have it. And once you, once you've proven that, you know, what you're talking about, once you've proven that you know how to use it, you get your CDAA certificate, which by the way, is an NFT is a non-fungible token that sits in your wallet. So thank you, Jay, for allowing me to talk about that as well. Tyrone, I, you have the opportunity to go through the process without going through the course. I think you know this stuff. You just got to go through the challenges and you're there.
27:15
No, just teasing, man. I'm teasing. I love again, been a huge supporter of it. I think it's been great for the space. And will continue to be so fierce advocate for so we've had some questions come in, but they're not flowing through from Twitter to the dashboard here. One was from Eric Smith, your partner Tyrone, he said, how do you address folks when they talk about crypto assets, and want to know about the fundamentals?
27:44
of crypto and how to analyze them. So I'm paraphrasing him. But how does how does an advisor address that question? Shocking that Eric would ask me the guy that that I know goes deep, deep into the fundamentals. And I what I would tell people is there are fundamentals, right? We talked earlier about monetary policy about how tokens are issued, you can go into the fundamentals of for any crypto asset, whether there's Bitcoin or ETH or any of the
28:11
the DeFi tokens we might talk about, Aave, Compound Maker, anything like that, you can go into fundamentals of how many tokens there are, just like you can look at how many shares of Apple there are. So you have those fundamentals. You can go behind the scenes and look, the crypto is tremendously transparent. Blockchains are tremendously transparent. And I know Eric goes deep down those rabbit holes of looking at what's happening. You can look and see how many people are utilizing a particular protocol, a platform.
28:40
You can look at how the money is flowing. There are cash flows within these protocols, right? People are trading which might effectuate cash flows. There, people might be borrowing and lending. That's where cash flows might be. The cash is not dollars that might be in your pocket or my pocket. The cash is USDC or DAI or some other stable point. So there are fundamentals. You can look at what's happening in these protocols. You can look at it up to the second is tremendously transparent.
29:09
So when people say what, you know, what, there aren't fundamentals behind this. All of these have fundamentals. They all have a monetary policy that you can go look up. You can look at the smart contracts. You can go look at any moment and see what's happening on the protocol. You can determine from the white papers, how is the, the action, the activity in that protocol flowing through to the value of the token, you can go look that the, the DALs or the decentralized organizations that manage these protocols.
29:36
are extremely transparent. You can go look at their governance. You can go look at their forms. You can go see what they're chatting about at any point. So there's a whole lot of fundamentals. There's probably more available information on any crypto asset, any protocol, than there is on any publicly traded company in the US. And it's up to the minute. You don't have to wait for the quarterly report. So my answer is, this is tremendously transparent. There's a ton of fundamentals. And that if we wanna go back a step.
30:03
This is why I think financial advisors, any financial professionals have to understand this because they're going to have to help their clients understand where the what those fundamentals are in the future. They're going to have to understand why someone like Eric has looked at the fundamentals and said, here's what I think this might be worth or here's where I think the value might be going up because we're seeing more and more, you know, to throw terms out there. We see more new wallets utilizing this protocol every month. And here's what I think that will mean for the value of the token. Those are.
30:32
there's fundamentals, there's analysis that we have not been able to have for traditional assets that we have on chain. And so there's a tremendous amount of fundamentals. You just have to know where to look. And I know Eric knows where to look.
30:46
Yeah, and Christopher Snyder piped in on LinkedIn and said, yes, do not do world coin seems to be a pretty popular stance. You wouldn't know that watching crypto Twitter for sure though. All right. So could you tell viewers a little bit about the planner Dow, what you guys do and why somebody might want to consider looking into it? Sure. The planner Dow is again, the organization that we started back in the heyday of Dalles, right? When everyone was starting at Dow.
31:16
And the idea was, why would we not have a group of financial advisors organizing and running not only a certification, a designation for financial advisors, but why would we not have ourselves, you know, managing our own industry, helping to manage our own industry internationally? So to be a member of PlannerDAL, you just have to be a certified digital asset advisor and the way we've, you know, we've kind of managed it so far is
31:43
The idea is if you're a CDAA, if you have that NFT, you get one vote, right? It's, it's one person, one vote, one CDAA, one vote. So the goal of PlannerDow eventually is let's see if we can't create some standards around digital assets for the financial professional community. And financial professionals encompasses not only financial advisors, but also CPAs, bankers, attorneys, basically anyone who touches someone else's money.
32:11
the main focus of PlannerDAO is manage the certified digital asset advisor designation, try to make it international, and try to continue to show the value of having that designation. So I hope that helps. Definitely. And where could advisors learn more? plannerdao.com. So P-L-A-N-N-E-R-D-A-O.com. Certified digital.org also has information on the CDAA and then
32:40
among others around the world that teach courses towards the CDAA designation. Excellent. Adam, thanks for coming on crypto office hours. I hope you come back on because you're a great advocate and resource for financial advisors on crypto assets. Well, I appreciate it. And I hope you all will invite me back on and beyond that, I'll be the one watching and, and pumping out questions Tyrone in the weeks to come. So thank you both for having me on. Good to see you both.
33:09
I'm gonna hang up and listen. Thanks, Adam. My Tyrone, there's so many great guests that we could bring on to this show. Adams was one of along with yourself and Matt Hogan, some of the early, early advocates for financial advisors learning about the crypto space. He's a great guest. Phenomenal. Always, always a good time to be around him. And that 30 minutes flew like that. I still have a whole other long list of questions. So I'm sure we'll get to them on
33:37
future crypto office hours. But as always, I want to end with your opportunity to get on your soapbox and talk about what's on your mind in the crypto space.
33:48
So here's what's on my mind in the crypto space at the moment. I kind of alluded to it before, but being fortunate enough to have a lot of conversations in the space with builders, with regulators, with, uh, you know, wealth tech companies, fintech companies, straight crypto companies. I think there are these screaming red signs now that is letting everyone know as NASDAQ pulls out from doing custody.
34:18
Again, as Adam mentioned, Mr. Fink and the intention of BlackRock and what they want to do, there is a screaming need here for getting back to basics. I think there was a study I saw in 2021, 75% of the DeFi projects that got funded have yet to release a project on mainnet, simply meaning they have yet to release their project on Ethereum.
34:46
or any major blockchain for that matter. What does that have to do with what I'm saying? What I'm saying is there's been a lot of time, money, value poured into the space, but yet we have little to show for it. And I'm not talking about multi-billion dollar use cases. I'm talking about for financial advisors, for wealth managers, for asset managers and the like.
35:10
So if you are an entrepreneur, you are a builder, if you are an advisor that is looking to make this a part of your practice in the future, here's an opportunity to engage and give feedback. There are some basic things in our space that still have not evolved. And I'm talking in the traditional space, like fully digital account opening, or to being able to seamlessly transfer a 401k, or reconciliation and performance reporting.
35:40
and file formats and straight API feeds. These are all things that in the traditional world that are missing, but in the crypto world that you can compound those with the steep learning curve. So I think right now as the space is continued to be troubled, the startup space capital is not readily available. Founders are having to sit and really think about the thing that are going to move the needle, but more importantly, keep their companies alive.
36:09
Right now is the time that we can collectively put our arms together and figure out a way to build things in the space, practical real life solutions that benefits clients, that benefits advisors, and more importantly makes the space more accessible to people who want to come in, move money, get advice on their money, manage their money, and work with someone in a way that is convenient for them.
36:37
There's these screaming signs all over the place that this is a need here, but there's so much noise. But when you really look under the hood, there's a tremendous opportunity here for the iPhone moment, if you will, as far as crypto assets are concerned, and the wealth management and the wealth tech space. Tyrone, thanks again for coming on. This is our third show. We're on to number four next month. Hope you have a good weekend and viewers.
37:05
If you're watching this in a replay and you'd like to catch live shows, subscribe to Financial Advisor TV on YouTube, sign up for notifications, and they'll let you know when we're going live again. Tyrone, have a good weekend. You do the same, my friend. See you all soon, everybody.