On Jan 19, 2022 SafeMoon CEO John Karony joined Dan Young and Scott Paul at The Leonardo in Salt Lake City, Utah for a panel discussion covering a wide range of topics in the crypto space.
TRANSCRIPT
Scott Paul: This first panel is basically about crypto and we don't have a lot of doxxed founders of crypto right here in Utah outside of John.
I met him three or four months ago and I could not believe it. So I went to his office and thought, "What? SafeMoon's in town?'' I go to the office in Linden, I take a photo and I put it on LinkedIn, and for some reason this photo started just going crazy.
On LinkedIn, of all places, there is no real virality but everyone starts liking and sharing this photo - "I'm like who is this John kid?" And sure enough, there is a 3 million people-strong army behind SafeMoon and what they're all about and it blew my mind and I haven't been able to stay away from it since.
I've been sucked into this community and we have it [based] right here in Utah! *crowd whistling* Yes, yes! So I have since gotten to know John really well and what he believes in and what he's trying to do with his token, with his coin, with SafeMoon, we're going to talk about it, it's a lot more than just a coin. I mean it's a company, it's a tech company.
So I'm gonna let this just kind of flow here for the next little bit and we're going to talk about crypto in general, I want to know how Dan got into it, why it sucked him in, and then let's make some predictions, let's make some sanity checks. A lot of people here are probably thinking that this is insane, maybe it's a meme coin. What's Utah? How's Utah really going to rise up and be in the epicenter when we've got Miami and San Francisco and Switzerland and Malta? Let's talk about all that today, and let it go back and forth, so I'm just going to let it free flow a little bit.
Dan Young: All right, let me give you a little premise here to give you guys a kind of overview. Not a lot of you guys/girls are advanced and some of you are brand new to it, so I just want to give a little thesis on where I think things are going.
Crypto is like the stock market opportunity in the '40s after the major crash. Imagine being able to buy a Ford stock back in 1940. Back then it was really hard to get into but crypto opens this big opportunity. So now is your chance to really claim. As you've seen, tech stocks like Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft were really volatile. John and I were talking about this and in the early years, there was a lot of doubt, as in are they able to make it happen? We're in that time period right now. Some big news though is that big Institution money is going to be pouring into crypto. You're going to be able to go to your Wells Fargo Account and Bank of America and seamlessly transfer and your Wealth Advisor will be able to move your money into crypto as well.
So, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and major banks are at the brink of major adoption and the biggest news that John and I were talking about yesterday, Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, mentioned that a well-regulated, privately-issued stable coin could coexist with a central bank's digital dollar.
Jonn Karony: Well I mean, it was a little bit shorter than that. Somebody asked him that question and he just said, "Yes". It was just a very simple yes.
Dan Young: Wait, the Governor said yes?
John Karony: Yeah, the Senator asked the question and then the individual just responded with "Yes it can".
Scott Paul: Wow.
John Karony: Nothing to expand on, it's just "yes". It's a very simple answer because crypto can live alongside normal fiat.
Scott Paul: I mean China's doing it right now. Aren't they very much trying to make a central bank coin?
Dan Young: They have theirs now, yeah, and so we're going to have ours. But do you guys need to take some notes on this because we're going really fast because we all suffer from crazy ADD.
There are three stages I just want to tell you about: first, there's resistance, then there are lawsuits and then there are regulations. So we're right in that stage to go into regulations.
John Karony: Yeah.
Dan Young: So that's a huge thing. And this has been happening kind of behind the scenes for some of the ecosystems such as Disney, Adidas, major companies such as Marvel. If you look at the VIVE ecosystem, you're allowed to actually buy a lot of these NFTs in an App Store ecosystem. That's becoming huge so it's a slow steady indoctrination.
So, those of you that are old like me and Scott here, do you guys remember when people were scared to put their credit card into America Online?
Scott Paul: Or online banking. My mom doesn't do online banking - still!
Dan Young: So, this is where it's going to go. It's a big thing and then John's innovating some cool stuff to solve these problems.
John Karony: Yeah. One of the first things we noticed is we understood regulations were coming down and it's better to play nice and so we're about to finish up the filing of our EU e-money license. So that gives us a lot of opportunities and a lot of growth areas to go into and do it within compliance. That's something that we've focused heavily on at SafeMoon. So, rather than just release an exchange and hope for the best, we're actually going through the compliance steps here in the united states and in the 167 different jurisdictions that we work in.
Scott Paul: John, before we go into all the cool stuff that you're doing, tell the crowd how long SafeMoon's been around and what's happened in the last year or less than a year. Look at the crowd, pick the mic up and just tell them what just happened in eight, nine, ten months.
John Karony: Yeah, so we kicked off in March 2021 and quickly grew to around 3 million holders. We created our own wallet, we have our own decentralized exchange. We just keep building products - we're a tech company.
Scott Paul: So, what were you doing a year ago today?
John Karony: I got out of the military and then got into business and started a government contracting company but realized I didn't like that at all - too much paperwork. Then I did import-export and then I started a video game company because I wanted to tell stories and narratives, stuff like that.
But March hit and an opportunity presented itself to really go deep into cryptocurrency and I've kind of always been around it but not from the trading side of it, more from the technology side and what it can do.
So, we kicked off SafeMoon and rolled from there. But the biggest thing that we learned was - it's about the community and it's about communicating with your community, involving them in the dev process. And because we've been able to involve them in our development process - we've seen astronomical success. Even down to the wallet that we launched in September, minus that rocky start of that launch but, we launched in September and we're almost at a million users in under four months.
So, I credit a lot of that to having a really good team and what you've seen in the nine months is our team and company evolving to be able to handle it. Ryan Arriaga, our Global Head of Products, has been a key instrumental player in that realm. So, it's building the right team around it.
Scott Paul: I want to say something. For 10 years, I have been on a search for what company will come out of Utah and be the first household name globally. And that means that you could go to the streets of Italy or France or Mongolia and say the name and maybe 10% or 20% of the people in those cities would be like "Yeah I know..."
For the last several years Utah does not have a household name that you could do that with. People try to argue with me online, that we have: Qualtrics. No sorry guys, outside of people that work for Qualtrics or live outside of Utah, nobody knows what it is!
So, let's be honest, a household name, that's like Nike, or Netflix, or Facebook. [I've been on] the streets of Malta, France, Finland, Ecuador, all in the last three months and without fail, I can bring up SafeMoon whether I'm in an airport line or I'm out hiking on a mountain [or] a volcano, I can bring up the word SafeMoon and somebody has heard of it.
I think we might have a household name, globally right here in Utah that's emerging and that is a telltale sign. And I can go anywhere in the world and that's happening.
So, give it up for SafeMoon.
*crowd claps*
Crowd:
Pineapple pizza!
*laughter*
John Karony: Quiet, quiet, quiet. It's 8 thousand until 1 million. I don't have to eat it just yet.
Scott Paul: So I just had to tell that little anecdote. Dan is organized with the notes here so back to you.
Dan Young: Let's talk about Utah a little bit here. Clark Stacy, he'll be speaking later in the NFT thing, we're collaborating on a project called Cinder.io which is pretty rad here.
Raise your hand if you have played World of Warcraft. So, who here owns virtual land or NFTs...okay. So, the interesting thing is that most of your NFT ecosystem and virtual land ecosystem is pretty garbage. It looks terrible right? I mean even though the valuations are going up. So you got to really look at what Clark's doing. I think it's pretty amazing with Cinder.io because it integrates Triple A game quality with an ecosystem.
So, in World of Warcraft, if you guys have played it, you could have PVP, player versus player zones. Imagine being able to use your entities to actually have huge guilds, huge empires, that are worth millions and millions of dollars, having an epic opt-in battle, where if you win you split the loot.
Like you guys have done raids, so imagine that for like 20-30 million dollar bags. I think it's pretty cool. I think it's integral as far as the key to getting the younger people into the ecosystem. It's going to get them interested because you can actually win real money. And if you don't want to be combative, you can go into the player versus environment zone and just have a good time and build like the Sims.
So, I think that's just an amazing new thing that's coming out of Utah. You've got John's thing and of course, a lot of other people here are going to be speaking today, so some pretty cool stuff.
Scott Paul: I see some congestion in the back, there are seats up here come forward, this is the time to do it, don't be afraid. Whatever you're wearing, it doesn't matter. Look at me! Walk in the front, people...
John Karony: Just so you know, Scott showed up at the SafeMoon HQ in a full chainmail. That was when we first met.
Scott Paul: What did you think?
John Karony: I'm like, "Oh that's cool"
Scott Paul: There was no judgment.
John Karony: No, no judgment there. I mean if I could walk around in chainmail I would.
*laughter*
Dan Young: I think some of you guys came here [to find out.] "How do I buy tokens, how do I stake tokens, how can I make money passively?" So let me just give you the 120 second consolidation of that.
Scott Paul:
Are you going to disclose that this isn't financial advice? Because I don't care, I say "This is financial advice, sue me!"
John Karony: No no, I will not give financial advice [and] I don't get price predictions.
Dan Young: Talk to a financial professional advisor.
Scott Paul: Talk to me.
Dan Young: This is just experiential. Okay, quickly take notes on this because I'm gonna go really fast and I don't know if they'll replay this.
Inflation I believe is at 15% plus right now. Coca-Cola 10 years ago, was like a dollar, then 7 and then 11, it's like 249 now. Divide that by 10, boom 15%. So, obviously, there's gonna be a flood into crypto assets now. There's a rule called the 40-40-20 rule, write this down. The 40-40-20 rule is that 40% [of my assets go] in boring conservative stuff - real estate, some big cap stocks etc. 40% [is] in mid-level risk and 20% in moon shots.
And this has served me well. I do a thing called the 'principal double'. When my principal doubles, I take out my principal and then I'm playing with house money. When I do doubles, I peel off 20% and I shift them to conservative assets. This way you keep dry powder for re-deployment. So, for beginners, a lot of you guys have started on Coinbase, Crypto.com, Gemini to make easy buys, which is great. You also need to look at staking because, for example, a lot of stable coins pay a certain amount. Crypto.com, some people like them, some people hate them, but their CEO reaches out to me and so I like them now.
*laughter*
Some of their stable coin products pay up to 14% which outpaces the S&P, which is kind of interesting. Now, it doesn't mean that it's totally safe. It could get blown up, regulated or something and killed, but according to Jerome that likelihood is low.
Now your second level is going to be MetaMask. Do not use Trust Wallet, I don't like that as far as safety goes.
John Karony: Yep. And that's what I'll say about it.
Scott Paul: In about a month, you're going to use another wallet that you'll meet here today on the next panel.
John Karony: The SafeMoon Wallet?
Scott Paul: Oh, wait wait wait. No no, the SafeMoon Wallet is great, guys. That one's already out, but I'm pretty giddy about the one that's coming out though.
*laughter*
Scott Paul: Battle of the Wallets.
John Karony: Yeah. So, MetaMask is a good option, SafeMoon Wallet is also a good option. We have Wallet Connect and other features coming in. But I would not recommend using Trust Wallet. This was one of the reasons why we built our own wallet because we saw some issues there, in both the security, quality and accessibility side of things. So, we set out to change that and Ryan was integral in coordinating the team and getting it built out. Our dev cycles are ridiculous. The wallet was built in six weeks.
Scott Paul: Are there regulations on wallets issued in the app stores? You're issuing this gateway to owning digital currency, NFTs -
John Karony: I can't comment on the regulatory side of things....
Scott Paul: What do Apple and Android think about these wallets coming onto their platforms that are essentially safe ways to store value digitally? I'm just curious...
John Karony: It's a process to go through their approval but once you get through it the first time, it's a lot easier to iterate after that.
Scott Paul: It's also so new to them that they probably don't actually know actually what's happening.
John Karony: Yeah, it also depends on the approval person that you get as well. So it's kind of a luck of the draw. We did run into some delays when it came to getting our first wallet approved but through the brilliant use of the community by Ryan and his constant follow-up and explaining, "We did it, we resolved the issue, here you go... yeah, we will do that..."
Scott Paul: A lot of people in here are trying to build stuff, submit things, so, they'll love to talk to you about that. I'll go back to Dan...
John Karony: The one aspect is don't collect user data and your life will be so much easier.
Scott Paul: Okay, it's good to know.
Dan Young: All right guys, more hardcore notes. I'm a Vulcan so, I like to give the logical thing here, so, let's just talk about security. This is critical, supercritical. If I add up all my buddies who've texted me in the last 12 months, about 300 million dollars has been stolen.
This is from my friend's group and these are people that are very advanced and have been into crypto since 2013 and earlier. So, there's a thing called 'approvals'. So if you've used MetaMask and you connect to a DeFi project or anything, it's going to have you sign for that approval. That's giving your wallet permission to take money out or deploy tokens or whatever it is.
Now, a lot of you guys use Ledgers and different devices for secondary validation and that's always a good thing. I always recommend a separate laptop that you have with really good security that you do all your crypto stuff on and don't carry it around with you - that's kind of stupid. Make sure you have that and obviously a secondary device.
But a lot of people think that Ledger is a total safety net but it's not!
Out of those guys who had 300 million dollars stolen - I had 260 thousand dollars stolen and I thought I was really good at it.
I'll teach you guys how to avoid this 99.9% of the time. There's a website called www.debank.com. Scott and Kurt helped me through some of this. We found this website called www.debank.com and you can connect your wallet and there's a place that says approvals. It shows you a list of all the approvals that you've given, I had 193 open approvals and MetaMask defaults give infinite approvals. So what that means in English is when you, by default, connect to a site and you give it approval, you've given them access to that crypto token infinitely!
So, even if you have a Ledger, it can bypass the Ledger and steal your money, period end of the story. So, what I do is called 'the scrub'. Every day I go through and disconnect any suspecting, unknown projects I don't want to be connected to.
The major exchanges like UniSwap and Pancake Swap, you can leave them open but how it works for me and how I got hacked back in the day, is that I did an approval on this token that got rugged, which was fine. I didn't even worry about it but this approval was left open and as soon as I put USDC in there, 200 grand was gone in five seconds. I wasn't that stressed, it was a good week, I think in four days I had made about 1.7 million dollars on these weird tokens, so it was cool. That's basically someone stealing a couple of chips when you go to pee at Vegas on your poker table. It happens.
Use www.debank.com guys, get very familiar with it. You can also use it to scan other people's wallets. By the way, nothing is private, so if you send someone an NFT or some tokens, they can see what you got. Every transaction.
John Karony: Yeah, this is a common misnomer, especially when I was in The Gambia talking with government officials, there was a question "How transparent is the blockchain?"
It's the worst place to hide money. Blockchain is immutable and it's transparent, so, you can see everything that happens across the blockchain and it's there forever.
It's a phenomenal, beautiful system of transparency and efficiency but if you are sending an NFT or you're sending tokens to a friend, you can see their entire wallet.
Scott Paul: John, put it right up here - the mic and then tell me, what are you doing over there in The Gambia?
John Karony: So, yeah, we're right now working on implementing some of our technologies and it's not just specifically there. One of the big things that we have...
Scott Paul: Hold on...you're talking more than blockchain technologies.
John Karony: Yeah, I'm talking about: macro IoT that evolves into what I call meta IoT, which is the Internet of Things. It's connecting large infrastructure together, whether it be telecommunications, whether it be energy, whether it be a supply chain when it comes to farming. Each one of those can be integrated with each other to create an efficient ecosystem.
Where, for example, you're now being able to pay your bills using cryptocurrency instantaneously and that feeds back to the farmer who just sold some beans to the market and then that feeds back into the energy produced from the wind turbines.
Scott Paul: So, SafeMoon is moving beyond just a protocol and a wallet?
John Karony: So we have. Right now we have wind turbines that we've been developing. So we take a commercial off-the-shelf wind turbine and then we apply advanced nanotechnology on top of it, to essentially be able to extract more kinetic energy from the wind. What does that mean? Basically, it runs more efficiently than an untreated wind turbine. So that's something we've been working on for quite a bit now and we're about ready to launch that and get that to market.
Scott Paul: Do you see this becoming a trend, where a company that is mostly digital, asks itself "How do I have real-world implications as well as physical?"
I see Helium and they're boxes, I know a company here, Gala Games, that do some physical stuff - I tried to get them here today but they're too busy printing money.
Is that going to be a kind of be a differentiator in the future? We're not just this on-chain, no one really sees it but you're bringing stuff to life and you're also like bringing it to the third world.
John Karony: So one of the things I recognize is that matter can never be created or destroyed and that even applies to the digital realm. So if you have wealth, for example, and go into video games or into NFTs, this has a ripple effect on the real world.
Now, what if you're able to actually tie that effect into the real world and anchor it to real assets. For example wind turbines - you buy a wind turbine NFT, you receive what I call 'reality reflections' from the real world into the game.
So now in this game, it could be a resource generator. And in this game you're receiving more cryptocurrency whether it be SafeMoon, Bitcoin, it doesn't matter.
You're receiving more crypto in the game which allows you to participate more and do more things. Well, if someone comes along and there's this massive opt-in battle that takes place, there's a lot of money that's being moved. That then gets reflected back to the real world and so nobody's left behind. Everyone is actually participating in this metaverse and this meta Internet of Things.
Scott Paul: So, back to your game, when you say battle - you're talking of an online...
John Karony: I'm talking of an online kind of situation, it doesn't have to be that specific example but it's tying and anchoring what's happening in the metaverse into the real world. So there's a positive effect on both sides.
Scott Paul: Wow, and I remember when we were in Malta, we even met a garbage disposal tokenization... this is crazy!
John Karony: Yeah, take your garbage, turn into oil and tokenize it.
Scott Paul: So, we're gonna see this stuff. This isn't fantasyland this is coming to pass, we're going to see turbines.
John Karony: Yes, we have a megawatt on the way and many more after that.
Scott Paul: Okay perfect! I've distracted you once again Dan, keep giving us the notes to take and I will come in and just grab the mic. We're gonna go for about 10 more minutes and then I want to do Q&A from the crowd because I know there's a lot of burning questions for someone in particular on the stage here, not me.
Dan Young: All right. A smattering of data to keep you safe in this new digital world. Phishing links, John and I were talking about that. Make sure if you're at pancake swap or you're at the real site.
John Karony: pancakeswap.finance, swap.safemoon.net. Make sure don't click on janky links, do your own research and make sure that when you connect your wallet to something it's what you're actually intending to connect to.
Dan Young: Very critical. Taxes - I've been audited four times for cryptocurrency every time I've been fined, the first one was the subpoena from Coinbase, I was one of the original guys there.
Scott Paul: High five, it happens.
Dan Young: So they sent seven agents out to scan my wallets, so make sure your CPA is well versed in crypto taxation and exporting your wallet transactions and that you're paying your taxes. You can't hide it.
Scott Paul: This is a shout out, today is the launching of a new company that Derek, my partner [started,] www.moontax.com. You guys haven't heard that [before,] but you're hearing it right now. Moontax.com is going to be taxes for you, Dan. We're going to make taxes fun again.
John Karony: Yeah and then there are a lot of tax providers out there already. SafeMoon has partnered with TaxBit to provide free taxes to our users of the SafeMoon Wallet. There are a lot of great innovations, a lot of companies like MoonTax and TaxBit that understand that this is going to be a thing.
Scott Paul: Wait, TaxBit is a local company. Biggest in Utah. We'll hear from them later today, too.
John Karony: The funny thing, if they were just looking at the blockchain, they don't need to send seven agents to you, they could have just done that from their home.
Dan Young: Old school audits with 40 caliber pistols.
*laughter*
Another thing is never to engage in Telegram or Discord with random people offering to help you if you get stuck. They're gonna typically say, "Go to this site, we can help you and then you're gonna connect your wallet" and they're gonna make you do an approval and you're gonna get rugged.
John Karony: The other aspect is never to give your 12-word passphrase out. It's the same as giving your banking login information out to someone. Giving any kind of username and password, you wouldn't give that to anyone, so why would you give your 12 word passphrase away?
So, the only exception is when you're importing your seed phrase into a new wallet but SafeMoon will never ask for your 12-word passphrase. Scott will never ask for your 12-word passphrase.
Paul Scott: That's not true, I ask all the time. I'll give it in exchange for financial advice.
John Karony: But yeah, make sure you're hitting approvals on the correct sites.
Scott Paul: But this is very real. I've been in the SafeMoon community for a few months now and there are bots, thousands of them, that try to respond to tweets as if their support for SafeMoon, and that will never happen. It doesn't matter if you see a logo that looks like Coinbase. I've had Coinbase phishing things that look so real, perfect pages and logos and they're asking me to re-verify stuff. I'll go look into it and whoa that is an elaborate phishing scam.
There's just no reason to ever give it out. You only give it out when you're trying to do your own work. Never is someone gonna prompt you for that type of information.
So just be careful but don't get so fearful that you don't operate in the metaverse or in crypto or in companies. It's scary but that doesn't mean that there aren't ways to stay safe and make money doing this.
John Karony: It's not necessarily scary, it's just new. You just have to learn: don't click on email links that are sent to you from unknown people, you don't open up attachments. This is just a new way to interact with the digital world and you need to learn the rules and how to work in there safely.
Dan Young: Another thing is 2FA, two-stage authentication. Never use your cell phone as two-stage authentication for any site. You should definitely use an authenticator because they can sim hack your phone number easily and AT&T is really easy. In fact, I had one of my accounting people do a test to see if they could get my cell phone and they got it in an hour.
So don't use that, use Google Authenticator or something to that effect. So the more layers of security that you have, the safer that you're gonna be because it's just crazy, right now. Crypto is like the easiest thing to poach because everyone's so excited and emotionally charged by it that people do dumb things and even friends that I have, have billions of dollars in crypto, they get excited and sometimes you just gotta breathe and sometimes you get there faster by slowing down a little bit. So slow down on any sort of project.
I want to shift gears to real-world utility in the NFT world as well. A lot of you guys have been seeing I've been buying lots of NFTs lately and Veefriends, Gary Vaynerchuk's project, is interesting because it's one of the first projects that [came] out and this is not an endorsement but I own a bunch, that actually have real-world utility and why his really just mooned very well, is simply because you can go to his conferences by buying the token. He charges 10 grand to go to his Vee conference and if I buy one now for 25, 30, 40, I think they're 50 grand now - well at least you can go to this conference for three years. So that's 30 grand in value.
I was talking to Steve Aoki the other day and he said "When I do these drops for my NFTs and things, they can see events, concerts, exclusive stuff and physical merch drops." So you're going to see more and more of that real-world utility in the NFT world and straight tokens and everything.
And John's a pioneer in this. I have a few friends right now that are tokenizing billions of dollars in real estate, so you can own fractional shares of apartment complexes and different things like that. So guys, right now we're on the verge. Once this regulation comes in and actually gets in place, don't fight it because it's gonna turn it from a garage band into mainstream. So what if it turns into Justin Bieber, right? It doesn't really matter, that's actually a good thing. I'm not anti-regulation. I think it's inevitable and a lot of the OGs are gonna be [like,] "This is making it a little illegitimate, we're not special anymore..."
Well, this is gonna be the new people's currency guys and this is gonna help the government because then everybody, poor and rich, you're going to pay your taxes when you transfer that US stable coin and they're just going to tax you on the transaction, right? I mean that's inevitable.
But I'd like to hear more about what John thinks because his ecosystem is definitely going to help a lot.
John Karony: Yeah, I'll expand on the NFT side of things. One of the concepts we looked at was when you mint an NFT can there be a real-world event that takes place and the answer is yes. I'll use the wind turbines as an example. When you buy a wind turbine NFT or when you and your friends buy a wind turbine NFT, a real wind turbine is installed and put into the real world and built.
Now when you hold that NFT, you receive real-world reflections in the form of SafeMoon into your wallet or into the game that you apply this NFT [to]. When there are more of these wind turbines that are put into this game, simultaneously more in real life. And so it's creating this mirror between reality, which is where we all live, and the metaverse which is where we play. So being able to combine both of those [and] anchor them to where they live symbiotically together, is gonna basically allow us not to leave anybody behind.
Because there is a large portion of the world that won't be able to participate in the metaverse right from the get-go. This is a way for them to participate in a way and then evolve and then they will get to the point, where now, they're minting a wind turbine NFT and somewhere else a real wind turbine is being put in.
Scott Paul: This is our last question before we do the Q& A. Do you see crypto or SafeMoon as an equalizer or a way to bring wealth and make it more fairly distributed?
John Karony: It's not necessarily that. It's bridging communities through the development of human-based innovations so that we can build a better and brighter tomorrow. Which means clean energy, fast and efficient internet. A fair supply chain for food distribution. All of these things are easily accomplished via the use of blockchain which is an amazing technology that we haven't been able to tap into before.
Scott Paul: I like that, I like that, I like that.
Dan Young: One little last piece about how this is going to save the world. This is hypercritical, so John's working with some Presidents of African countries and I am as well and we'll collab and merge our projects. But if you look at Africa, I was talking to the guy who's gonna run for the President of Mali and he was talking about how the village chiefs don't want to pay taxes because it's used for corruption, right?
So a blockchain is a public ledger and the cool thing about that is imagine someone is trading their goat for bananas or whatever and that it's being handled with a digital transaction. The government would then get a percentage that's taxed fairly and it's fully doxxed and it's disclosed who's getting what, to build schools, clean water, wind turbines and all those kind of things. This is gonna be the evolution. You're gonna see that the planet will change and it's gonna be a better world for everybody.
Scott Paul: Wow.
*crowd claps*
Scott Paul: All right, let's pass the mics and we have about 10-15 minutes of Q & A.
PUBLIC QUESTIONS
Play-to-Earn type gaming. I love video games and I'm a big player of anything first-person shooter or anything where you can party up with your friends and have a casual time with them.
But I've noticed that within play-to-earn gaming there are not really as many opportunities for quite immersive or maybe intense experiences. From my perspective, I'm kind of an outsider, it just looks like click-to-play, like single actions, you don't really get to do much connecting with your friends. Yeah, when do you think that might change?
Scott Paul: You're saying it feels like Atari and you want Xbox.
Yeah yeah, exactly.
Dan Young: So again, you guys should look at, cinder.io, Clark Stacy's project from wild works. It's very cool, FOMOing in and getting into Decentraland and all these different things, which are cool but this next evolution for what you're looking for is going to be there.
The big thing is working the Apple Tax in the App Store and Google Playstore and that's fine, that'll be worked out. But the cool thing is to be able to seamlessly be able to sell your assets, low gas fees, get your money in and out and be able to have real-life rewards. I mean some guys spend 30-40 hours a week playing video games just to have virtual, not worth anything, transactable stuff. Imagine if you can actually make money doing that.
TRUST WALLET
You spoke a little bit about Trust Wallet and how we can not really trust Trust Wallet even though it's called Trust wallet. There's Giddy Wallet and there's SafeMoon Wallet but what makes them safer than any other wallet out there?
John Karony:
Trust Wallet doesn't institute a limit on the amount of tries you can do for logging in and that's one of the big pieces. So brute-forcing is a lot easier. With the SafeMoon Wallet, we do have a limit and we do have other security features put in, even down to the encryption that we're integrating into the platform. It's NIST certified for all of you encryption nerds. It makes it significantly harder and way more expensive for a hacker to do it. Nothing's unhackable per se but if you create the barrier to entry or a barrier to actually hack it to be in the billions, upon billions, upon billions of dollars, well they're not going to go after small wallets and they're not going to go after a wallet that is secure. They're going to go after the other providers that have weaker security.
DECENTRALIZATION
Hey John. My question is the changing landscape and the dynamic of -SafeMoon has had to evolve over time, right? And recently with the shift from v1 to v2, we're seeing a shift from a truly decentralized project to more of a centralized one. Is that a response to regulation and can we continue to expect that?
To expand on that a little bit, what I mean is that, we launched as a Defi project and now we see that the proxy contract gives SafeMoon a lot of additional control over all of the mechanisms of the contract as well as we're seeing obviously the centralized exchanges. So it's a question for SafeMoon, but also more broadly, should we expect more projects to be responding this way as the government starts to take a closer look at some of the larger projects?
John Karony: True decentralization doesn't exist when you have a company behind it. Now what I mean by that is, let's take Oracle for example. They have an open-source JavaScript, which is what I would say is 'decentralized'. But it is developed by a centralized company. So a centralized company can build decentralized tools - if that makes sense. It's not us going away from Defi, it's a company, essentially being able to evolve a decentralized tool or decentralized product continuously over time.
One of the big issues is that you can't predict everything and if a project removes their ability to adapt to a situation like SafeMoon has seen many many times over the past 10 months. It could kill the project right then and there. You can't remove your ability to adapt, but you don't have to give up decentralization.
NFTs
I love SafeMoon, it's been a great experience. I love my SafeMoon army - it's amazing. So, I have a question. My father-in-law owns over a billion dollars in assets in commercial development. He owns real estate development in Provo.
I want to start pitching to him ideas about providing NFTs, having investors who own NFTs and being partial owners of these commercial real estate properties. Once you have NFTs publicly open in your suite of products, will you have a team that we can communicate with if you're one of the vendors? Just us wanting to meet with you guys and see if we can talk logistics or just iron out details and things like that. Also how soon are you expecting to roll that out to the public, where NFTs will be available with SafeMoon?
John Karony: NFTs are being worked on as we speak, we've scaled that team rapidly. The other aspect you're talking about is a b2b or business development team. We have those in London, we have those in Lithuania, Switzerland and we also have them here in Utah. Hayden, who is our Sales Director and head of partnerships, you can reach out to him and we'll have some BDMs here today. There's one in the back right now if you want to go speak with him.
Scott Paul: So it's safe to say that it is an in-demand, your partnerships team is growing and there's going to be a lot of demand for this type of question and there are some other people here that you need to meet.
So what's your name real fast? So find Carlos, he's got a father-in-law with a billion dollars under assets. I know Realium is probably here, They're doing that in Provo on-chain. Anybody else that wants to crack an NFT problem that we have out here, there's got be a lot of these in the crowd here by the way folks, so that's why we're here to talk and meet
COMPLIANCE
John, how are you doing? SafeMoon Al here, all the way from New York City. I hope my question is good. Recently, you put up a billboard in Times Square. I'm from New York City and it's actually hard to purchase SafeMoon in New York City. So how will my fellow New Yorkers and everyone else who lives in New York who visits the billboard buy [SafeMoon]?
John Karony: That dives into the compliance and regulatory side of things, which is a heavy, heavy focus for my team out of London right now, that's all they work on, those regulatory items. It is a process. I mean in New York and Texas are two of the most difficult areas to work in in terms of regulation. However, we have a dedicated team working on it. We're filing for MSTs, MSBs, other you know - alphabet soup names of licenses that are required, and so they're working on that actively because I do understand that New York, Texas and other areas have a higher barrier to entry to provide products and services in the blockchain space, too. So yeah, we're actively working on it. To summarize the question it's just going through the compliance process.
Scott Paul: John, will we be on an exchange that's more accessible, that's not BitMart?
*laughter*
John Karony: I cannot talk about the exchange that we're working with.
Scott Paul: The question is a great question and this is a real problem. On-ramping your money is not that easy right now and off-ramp it's even harder. These are the technology innovations that are getting built right now: Giddy's underway doing that. We're trying to figure out how to on-ramp and off-ramp fiat as fast as we can.
That's why these first movers like Coinbase and Gemini are so good for that because they've been around for a while, they're doing it, they've got those rails and those banking relationships worked out. But believe me, every single token, coin, company out there, is trying to figure out how to do that faster as there's a lot of money to be made, whoever can do it fast and do it right. So it's on everyone's mind we're going to get you there - New York I promise.
John Karony: SafeMoon will be implementing our debit card/off-ramp system [in] Q2.
Scott Paul: So I've been seeing it, I just thought it was photoshopped, so you've taken over Times Square?
John Karony: 18 story tall billboard in Times Square yeah.
*laughter and clapping*
Scott Paul: All right! That ends our first panel. That was random and that's what you get with a pop-up like this. But we're gonna do a break, we're gonna go and you can meet Dan and John around today. There's a party tonight. The rest of the panels are going to be way better than this one because this was just some friends rifting on stage. Oh god, Dan say something.
Dan Young: Just one more thing, you guys we haven't had a lot of time to give you all the details, so I want these guys to share their social media. You can follow me at Dan's Millionaire Code on Instagram, I read all my direct messages - if you have questions. If you guys could share where people can find you?
John Karony: You can find me on the official Discord, you can find me on Twitter @cpthodl and then for my Instagram it's John_Karony.
Scott Paul: I'm @scottiecoin on Twitter so that's mine for now and LinkedIn's my favorite place to play. Just look up my name Scott Paul.
Thank you, everybody, see you back in just a bit.
Written by Arie Edited by SafeMoon Pulse and MomoKombat