Ben Kurland - Revolutionize Your Crypto Trading With DYOR: The Only Platform You’ll Ever Need

Full transcript: Ben Kurland on London Real

3:46 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ben Curlin, the former Hollywood actor turned crypto entrepreneur and blockchain expert. For nearly a decade, you advised over a dozen blockchain projects, working with major crypto platforms, high-profile celebrities, and athletes. Before this, you were an actor and producer, most notably appearing in the five-time Academy Award-winning film, The Artist. Earlier this year, you became the CEO of Dior, an all-in-one trading and analytics platform that is pioneering a new era for decentralized finance. Dior plans to be a next-generation command center for web3 that is democratizing finance, championing fairness, and offering everyone an equal chance to succeed. Your mission is to cultivate a community where everyone has the power to influence and benefit from the upcoming DeFi revolution. Ben, welcome to London Real.

4:44 Ben Kurland: Brian, thanks for having me.

4:46 Brian Rose: Great to have you here. I want to start by saying that Dior is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media-powered investment firm, where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting-edge web3 and AI companies, while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network. We are super excited to be working with you

5:21 Guys, so let’s just jump into it. What is Dior?

5:24 Ben Kurland: Dior is a common acronym in the space. It stands for Do Your Own Research. Surprisingly, this was not taken yet, and we thought this is an incredible opportunity to really leverage the popularity of this, and what we’re building is an all-in-one platform. So right now, if you want to do research, if you want to do analytics, if you want to trade, if you want to track somebody’s socials, if you want to kind of do any of these types of activities, you might notice that you start end up having 10, 15, 20 tabs open at the same time, and we thought really this should all be in one place, and so we’re consolidating all of those things. We’re bringing them all into one single pane of glass, and we’re making something that is very customizable, so that there’s a personalization to this that doesn’t exist right now. Really, everything else is you go there, you kind of have to sift through a lot of different information. We really want it to be an access terminal that everybody is able to really personalize and make sure that they’re getting all the information that they want and none of the information that they don’t want. That’s just taking up space.

6:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, so let’s talk about this, because this is something we all struggle with in this industry. You know, I teach at Crypto and DeFi Academy, where for four weeks I take people with like no experience, and I walk them all the way through. They set

6:48 Up centralized exchanges, which they hate doing. They do their first DeFi trade. They do hot wallets and cold wallets, and they’re always asking me like, Brian, like where do I get my information from, and how do I do this, and how do I do that, and there’s no all-in-one solution, and each one of those things I mentioned all have major flaws, right, from the centralized exchanges over to the DeFi platforms like Uniswap, over to the coin market caps, and I’m assuming you guys looked at all that and said, we need to make this better, and you want to bring it all together, and that’s what you’re trying to do.

7:25 Ben Kurland: Yeah, we’ve been in the space quite a long time. I’ve been in the space personally since 2016, and we just kind of felt like these tools were broken, right? They were designed for developers, you know, designed by developers for developers, not for the average user. They’re confusing. I remember when I first got into this having, you know, to cross both my fingers and my toes every time I pushed a transaction through the network, let alone a large transaction, because you really felt like there’s some danger in this, you know, there’s some uncertainty in it, and we wanted to kind of demystify the whole process for the average person. At the same time, you know, you brought up this idea that there’s all these centralized exchanges, and we’ve seen over the course of the last three, four years, what happens when you

8:14 Entrust your assets to an unregulated third party? It does not go well. Part of the reason that blockchain exists is for this very reason, which is this kind of universal distrust of central entities that don’t have your best interests at heart. And yet, we were so eager to have that ease of use that we just willingly handed over our assets to these companies. And so we’re trying to bridge this gap here because on the one hand, you have these untrustworthy third parties, and on the other hand, you have these very confusing, complicated, decentralized applications.

9:00 And we thought to ourselves, why can’t it be both? Why can’t you have the benefits of ease of use with the security of knowing that you maintain control of your assets at all times?

9:10 Brian Rose: I’m so glad you’re building this because I literally deal with these struggles every day. You know, again, I teach these people. I’ve had an 85-year-old grandma and a 15-year-old high school student and everybody in between from countries all over the world, and they struggle with everything you’re talking about. You know, they struggle to plug that hot wallet in with the Chrome browser plug-in, and when they go send a transaction and then nothing happens for 18 minutes, they freak out. Meanwhile, when they go to a centralized exchange, they get angry because they have to upload a utility bill and an ID, and they thought this was blockchain, and then their bank blocks them from using their own fiat money to buy crypto, and they’re frustrated, and then they see things like FTX happen or Mt. Gox that happened 10 years earlier, and it’s gonna happen again at the future. These aren’t crypto companies. These are old school stockbrokers that are doing the same thing they’ve been doing for a hundred years. I used to work in banking. I know the game, and now they’re just doing it with blockchain assets, but there’s nothing blockchain about Coinbase. They’re market makers and middlemen for a new asset class, and nobody necessarily understands that, and so you guys see

10:23 That. Can you start by talking about what is wrong with centralized exchanges like a Binance or a Coinbase or a crypto.com, or at least what are their limitations? Because not everyone knows that. I mean, they saw, obviously, FTX go wrong, but what are some of the things that aren’t in the interest of the customer when it comes to those platforms?

10:46 Ben Kurland: I think inherently there’s just a misalignment in general. You have these companies who are heavily incentivized to try to have as many assets on hand as possible, and then they’re leveraging those assets almost as though they were a bank. We saw with Celsius, for example, and that whole debacle. I, unfortunately, was one of the unwitting victims of that as well, because it’s inspiring this idea of de-banking, and it’s inspiring this idea of, you know, and it’s a great narrative, right, on a surface, which is we’re just doing what traditional banks do, which is we’re rehypothecating, which is a fancy way of saying we’re loaning out the money over and over and over again, and as a result of that, the yield that we’re able to generate off that money is meaningful, and the banks are giving you these teeny tiny little interest rates. It’s kind of changed now because the game has changed a little bit, but, you know, once those federal rates come down again, they’ll be back to next to nothing, and so it was a very enticing idea. The trouble is that these companies knew

11:57 That their models were completely unsustainable, and when it comes to the centralized exchanges, their business models are somewhat unsustainable as well, in terms of the fact that they’re constantly trying to churn out new customers and new customers, and because the narratives that have been created, because of all these hacks, because of all of these bankruptcies and defaults, there’s a real fear of holding assets on these exchanges now, which was really, in part, a lot of their main business model is, you know, we want to be able to have access to these assets so that we can leverage them and we can do all these things, even though they don’t really have permission to do those things, and under normal circumstances, if this was regulated in a more traditional fashion, they wouldn’t have the right to, and so there is this big misalignment in terms of, you know, what they’re after and what their intentions are, and there’s not much interest in the average customer other than, you know, trying to convince them that, you know, hey, we’re the safe one.

13:04 Brian Rose: You know, I try to explain this to my students, and it’s really hard, because unless you’ve worked as a market maker in like a Wall Street firm, there’s all these, there’s all these tricks of the trade that Wall Street has been, been kind of, they’ve been making even better and better over the last 100 years, and once you’re in there, you realize you can front run your customers. You can, when your customer is asked to move from one asset to the other, they don’t know the real price, so you can gouge them for chunks of P&L, and these are things that the banks on Wall Street have been doing for a long time. Your average person doesn’t know that, and so they’re like, well, Brian, why would I use Uniswap when Coinbase will switch my Ethereum, you know, to Chainlink the same way?

13:45 And I’m like, yeah, they will, but if you’re not paying attention, they might take a big bite out of your neck while they do it, and you’ll never be any of the wiser.

13:55 Ben Kurland: Here’s what’s interesting about that, too, is that not a lot of people realize that zero fees isn’t zero fees. If you think about platforms like Robinhood, they make their money off the spread, meaning whatever their price quoting you is different than the spot price of something, and that difference is their profit, and it’s, it’s wrong, you know, it’s, and it’s, it’s also, it’s manipulative, and it’s duplicitous, and you know, blockchain is supposed to be about transparency, and it’s, it just never seems to actually be about that, and and what’s interesting, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned front-running, and what tends to happen is that, you know, you think you’re protecting yourself by going on a centralized exchange. The front-running is happening in lightning quick speed, and it’s happening, you know, internally as well, you know, they have all this data and information, and they’re the ones controlling and facilitating those, those trades, those exchanges. On the flip side of that, you’ve got actual issues, especially on things like the Ethereum network, where you have MEV bots, you know, front-running and sandwiching are prolific issues, where there are these bots that have been set up to beat you to the punch, and what’s, what’s actually happening on a blockchain is that when you go to

15:14 Process a transaction, that transaction is sent publicly into a queue, and then it is presented as something to bid on for a validator, and what happens is that somebody bribes those validators using these sophisticated bots, and allows them to buy whatever you’re buying before you to get in at a better price, and then sell it after you’re done, that’s what a sandwich, sandwich attack is, and so we wanted to kind of eliminate all those things. We’ve got a number of different partners that are helping us in that way to create custom private networks, and what those private networks do is that instead of broadcasting those transactions publicly, they sit privately, and then they’re processed instantaneously, they’re bundled up together, they’re ordered correctly, and therefore you’re getting the best possible price without being attacked or being victimized by these, these bots.

16:08 Brian Rose: That’s amazing, and this is so important for people to understand, and if you don’t know what front-running means, it just means if you’re gonna go buy some crypto, someone else can buy right in front of you, and then your trade pushes the price up, and then they can sell right after you, and they can take little bits of your trade, and over time that really adds up. Now you mentioned Robinhood, Robinhood in addition to, you know, charging something slightly off spot also sells all of your data to the high-frequency traders, and you know, a lot of people don’t know that, but you

16:43 Know, our Robinhood, you know, steal from the rich and give to the poor, is giving all your information to the rich, and so, but people aren’t aware of all these nuances, and I always give an example where I ask people, have they ever exchanged money at an airport, and they’re like, yeah, you go to those tiny little kiosks, right, and you change a hundred dollars before you come into London, and how many pounds they give you, and they’re like, well, you get sixty pounds, and you’re like, it seems about right, but there’s no fees, and you get your sixty pounds, right, and let’s say you don’t use it, and you come back to the same airport, you bring your sixty pounds, and they give you back ninety bucks, and you’re like, wait a second, where’s my hundred bucks, and they’re like, well, you know, this is the opposite exchange rate, but there’s no fees, so you just lost ten dollars in that transaction, ten percent of your asset value, but there’s no fees, and so it’s exactly what you’re saying. There’s all these little nuances that the average person doesn’t understand, and it’s important that they do understand it, because this is happening every day with all these actors that don’t have, you know, aligned interests with their customers. That’s the centralized exchange side. Well, what else do we need to know or make clear about centralized exchanges, besides the fact that they’re making money off of your volume, off of adjusting prices, anything else people

18:03 Should know, besides the fact that holding your assets there in custody isn’t the safest thing to do either.

18:10 Ben Kurland: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really the key, is that, you know, I’ve been in the space for so long, I’ve seen so many of these exchanges come and go, they’re not regulated, they’re in countries that, you know, you think you’re dealing with a country that may be familiar to you, somewhere in Europe, somewhere in North America, you’re not, and these things are popping up left and right all over the place, and some of them are just overnight, and I can’t, you know, if you ever have a subscription to Netflix or Amazon, you know, all too well that there’s just so many documentaries that have, you know, listed this record of, you know, it’s not just the big exchanges, it’s not just the FTXs, which are so prominently featured, it’s, you know, there’s obscure exchanges out of Canada, and there’s a documentary about that, and there’s, you know, there’s ones in, you know, all over Eastern Europe and through Asia that there’s a lot of bad actors, and they’re effectively these spiderwebs, right, they’re just trying to suck people in, collect as many funds as they can, and then run out the back door, and there’s really nothing stopping this from happening at this point until there’s actual regulation, and until there’s, you know, some oversight that allows people to have trust in these companies, but even then, the whole point of this is

19:39 Really to get people used to the idea of self-ownership. I mean, that is a really big part of this evolution with blockchain, is this idea that your data is your data, your assets are your assets, and the idea that you’d want to have someone, you know, saying, you know, hey, trust me, I’m gonna, I’m gonna take good care of you, I’m gonna do all these things for you, I think is wall comforting, you know, and everybody likes to feel warm and fuzzy, and you know, these things are being handled on my behalf or for me, there’s a real price to pay for that, there’s risk involved in it, there’s high fees involved in it, and at the end of the day, what you believe to be yours is no longer yours.

20:26 Brian Rose: Yeah, almost the opposite of what we’re trying to do with blockchain. So, alright, that’s the centralized exchange side. The flip side of that, and there’s only two choices, it seems sometimes, is fully decentralized, and so again, I have a lot of experience trying to teach my students this, and now you’ve got a completely different experience with no touch points, no hand holding, no security.

20:52 What’s wrong with the Uniswap side of it, and all of the plugging my hot wallet into something like that, because that’s what a lot of people end up using in decentralized finance.

21:04 Ben Kurland: Yeah, there’s a couple of inherent problems with a lot of these companies. So for example, you know, we have a competitor, I won’t name names, but they had a third-party decentralized exchange as part of their platform, and that decentralized exchange very publicly got hacked for roughly, I want to say, 50 million dollars. The hacker turned out to be a bit of a trickster and effectively said, you know, I have some demands. First of all, I’m now the new CEO of the decentralized exchange. It was pretty wild of an experience, but it just goes to show you that it does matter the level of security of a lot of these things. On the flip side of that, you have something like Uniswap that has been around for a long time now.

21:52 It’s effectively a legacy exchange. However, it’s run by an effectively decentralized group of individuals that will vote on changes, and if you’ve ever run a business or know anything about business, that is a terrible way to run a business, because what ends up happening is that you’re very slow to make changes. You’re very, it’s very hard to come to a consensus about a path forward or what should be implemented, and what you’re left with is kind of this really janky process in which you get so frustrated, you know, by even the littlest things not being changed. I remember using Uniswap for many years and thinking, why don’t they have a comma separator? There’s tokens that have, you know, a max supply of ten trillion, and it’s really hard to decipher as a user, especially if you’re trying to do something quickly. Am I buying ten million of this? Ten, a hundred million of this? And as a result of it just being a string of numbers, it’s really hard to ascertain, and it’s the simplest thing to just add those comma separators. It’s like one line of code really, and yet it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t there because it wasn’t voted to be there. And that’s a real problem, you know, it’s a real problem. I’ve often said that while blockchain should be decentralized, the products and services that are facilitating and supporting blockchain should not be decentralized. They should be run by a competent group

23:32 Of individuals that have good support. They should be run like proper companies, and this notion that we should have everything in the world be decentralized, I think is kind of missing the plot of it.

23:44 Brian Rose: Yeah, so when I first went heavy into this space three years ago, everyone was talking about DAOs, and everyone was talking about this is the future of governance, and a couple times I said, well, wait a second, you know, would the iPhone have been developed without a Steve Jobs, you know, who famously said, you know, my customers don’t tell me what they want, I tell them, and like, you know, there’s a place for leadership, and there’s a place for accountability to a small group of intelligent people to make innovation. I love the concept of, you know, web3 and ownership, but I was always a little bit skeptical whether it could be used to take companies and keep them leaders in their field, so that was an issue. Uniswap has gotten criticism over the last maybe 12 or 18 months with the fact that the fees it was charging was not going back in the token, and so a lot of people are saying what’s going on here, TVL is going up, but the token isn’t going up, because literally they’re taking all the cash from the fees, and it’s going to the company, it’s not going back out to the token, and it was a probably a pretty reasonable critique of that system, you know, what did you make of that, but it also shows something that looks purely

24:57 Decentralized, it’s not really that.

24:59 Ben Kurland: Yeah, so this is that and actually a very interesting point, something that we’ve put a real focus on, and there are two kind of pieces to what we’re building, right, there’s the research side of things, but there’s also the native decentralized exchange, and the decentralized exchange, we wanted to make sure that this was truly the fastest, the best decentralized exchange that currently exists, so we use the best technology, and the development of this actually precedes the development of the research platform by about 18 months. We’re doing it in conjunction with our sister project DiamondSwap, and the concept behind it, you know, and the reason that they use the term diamond is it refers to the diamond standard, which is a protocol that allows for upgrades in place, and what this effectively means is that if there were, God forbid, a hack, a bug, any kind of exploit, that instead of having to redesign everything or shut down the system entirely, you could simply basically update it like pushing a patch, if you think about a bug on your iPhone, in a very similar way, and that’s not to say that you can update or fix anything, so all the core elements are still retained, all the integrity is still retained, however, if there was some kind of minor exploit that somebody could potentially take advantage of, you could resolve that very, very quickly. The point that you were making about the fees and how

26:35 They’re used, is something that really bothered us personally. It’s such a misalignment. These are meant to be tools that help foster innovation and growth, support these projects, if you’re going to be listed somewhere and hold liquidity somewhere, that should be a place that is a benefit to you as an organization and that community as well, and what ended up happening, from my understanding, is that the fees are collected in both, the trading pairs are, if you have a liquidity pool, it could be XYZ token coupled with the larger layer one blockchain, so something like an Ethereum, and we’ll use that as an example, so you got your XYZ token in your Ethereum, and every time a trade is facilitated, 50% of the fees are in Ethereum, and the other 50% are in XYZ token, and what happens to that XYZ token is something that nobody really thought about before. We came to understand that right about every quarter, you know, and a quarterly decision was made, let’s dump those tokens, let’s sell them, they’re of no use to us or of no value to us, and of course, what happens when, you know, you have accumulated over the course of three months, all of those fees in that native token, is that the price is going to be devastated, you know, it’s going to have a huge impact, a huge negative impact on price. One of the things that we thought about early on was, we don’t want that to be the case, instead we want to offer the same fair competitive pricing, which means that we

28:18 Will receive half of those tokens in native, you know, half those tokens as native tokens. We want to make an offer, we want to reach out to those projects and say, instead of us selling those tokens, let’s give them back to you, but let’s do something interesting with them, let’s have an airdrop campaign to support your community, let’s create a reward system that benefits other people supporting your platform, and in return, show us some love, you know, whether that’s getting your community to help support us, help create more awareness for us, but there has to be some kind of communal participation here, so that these interests are aligned, and it’s just not something that these legacy exchanges are interested in.

29:12 Brian Rose: Now, has Uniswap fixed that, or are they still nowhere near where they need to be, when it comes to aligning their revenues with their token holders and their community and their DAO?

29:25 Ben Kurland: Not to my knowledge, I don’t know that it’s been fixed, and frankly, I don’t expect to see it anytime soon. In fact, Uniswap just introduced new additional fees on top of the regular fees, so when you’re using their platform directly, I want to say it’s an additional 0.25% now on top of the on top of their base transaction fee, so it’s ironically, it’s actually cheaper if you create a direct access to their smart contracts, it’s actually cheaper to trade than it is to trade on their website, or using their their app.

30:04 Brian Rose: Well, they’re now kind of a

30:06 Monopoly, right? I mean, they now get all the market share, and so now they can kind of command the type of fees that they want, you know, and so, all right, so we’ve got these tale of two cities, these extreme worlds, you know, one where you’ve got these kind of broker dealers that aren’t aligned at all with our customers, and the other one you have this decentralized finance part, where again, incentives aren’t aligned, you know, what do you guys bring to the table? Also, there’s no customer service, there’s not much of a customer experience on those DeFi platforms, and I always point this out to my students, I’m like, you know, what was it like when you were there? And they’re like, well, it feels pretty bare-bones, it’s like the Ikea of websites, you know, there’s no, there’s no hotline, there’s no chat, it’s like either you get it or you don’t, and then if not hit the road. You guys are big into personalization, and I think customer service is a big part of what you want to do as well.

31:10 Ben Kurland: Yeah, we want to make this accessible to the average user. It’s not just about these super users that are highly competent, highly technical. This is not going to succeed in terms of mass adoption, unless it feels, unless these products and these services feel like the typical things that people use every day on their phone, on their computer, their banking apps, their grocery shopping apps, their Amazon apps, they need to feel like you can get things done at the touch of

31:41 The, you know, at the touch of a tap, a swipe, what have you, a click of a button, and right now they don’t, and they’re scary, and what makes it scarier is the idea that if something goes wrong, if you’ve made a mistake, if you’ve done something and you’re not sure what you’ve done, who do you, you know, who do you call? You know, Ghostbusters, I guess, is who you call right now. It’s, you’d have to, or a seance or something, that there’s, there’s no actual customer service, and that part was mind-boggling to us as well, is this idea of how are you running these, you know, businesses that are generating tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, and yet you don’t have a support team, you don’t have anybody that’s going to support your customers, I mean, even the centralized exchanges were woefully underprepared for the level of questions and requests that they, and queries they were making. Coinbase was notorious for having a lot of these issues earlier on, and people thought, you know, this is a publicly traded company. The idea that I can’t get somebody on the phone when they’re bringing in all of this revenue, it, again, is just another large misalignment, and really what it boils down to is this notion that, you know, these companies have long felt that because they were first to market, that no one’s coming along, you know, to take our, to take our lunch. Well, we’re

33:12 Coming.

33:12 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s that classic innovator’s dilemma. I mean, they don’t need to innovate, so they won’t, they have the market share, and it takes someone like you to come in and say, wait a second, we’ve been doing the same kind of thing now for three, four years, you know, swaps been pretty liquid now for four years, you thinking we got to rethink this and really think about the customer, and I deal with customers that are confused every single day. They’re confused on their centralized exchanges, they don’t understand why they can and can’t do things, and then they’re super confused with their decentralized finance protocols, like they really don’t get it, and the only reason I’m able to have any success with my students is because I’m literally there teaching them live every week, and they’ve paid a tuition to do it. Your average person, I don’t know how they ever learn this stuff.

34:01 Ben Kurland: Yeah, I don’t think they do, which means they walk away from this amazing world of decentralized finance, which I really think is the future.

34:09 Brian Rose: Talk to me about something like a stop-loss order, okay?

34:12 This is something I try to teach my students in the fourth week, and it’s this concept that, you know, when you put a trade on, you limit your losses by leaving an order with someone to basically reverse your transaction, so you don’t lose 100% of your principal, maybe you lose 2% or 5% of your principal. The problem I have is that all my students complained and said, but Brian, you told me not to leave my assets on a centralized exchange, and you know what I told them? I said somebody’s working on a DEX that has stop losses, but it’s not built yet. I guess I was talking about you guys, right?

34:50 Because you’re planning to build something like that.

34:54 Ben Kurland: Yeah, it’s one of the main reasons that people want to use a centralized exchange is it has all those tools and features that traditional traders are used to, stop losses and things of this nature, because, you know, the old way of working through a decentralized exchange was you’d literally just sit at your terminal and just stare for hours and hours and hours, you know, because if you got up, and these are very volatile assets, and you disappeared from your computer to go get a sandwich or a cup of coffee, the price might, you know, have gone down or sort up, and you might have missed that window of opportunity that you were looking for, and I mean this is no way to go about your life, and so it is a bit of a complicated thing to do because, obviously, without that centralization, everything needs to be automated, and it all has to function through these relatively sophisticated smart contracts. The hardest thing about these smart contracts that are put in place for something like a stop loss is that there’s a limited amount of memory when it comes to, you know, so it’s not just, it’s not just coins that are being transferred, it’s actually data that’s being transferred, you know, across these blockchains, and so, and the size matters in terms of the fact that you can’t send too much data over the network, that kind of bogs it down, it gets heavy, there’s specific block sizes for these

36:25 Things, so there are limitations, and so the solution to that has been to create these really cumbersome, complicated smart contracts, and they work, however, the more complicated a smart contract is, the more expensive the fee is to facilitate that transaction because of all the things that have to be checked, all these little boxes that have to be checked, you know, the sort of if-this-then-that manifesto, and as a result, the the pre-existing complicated things like a stop loss have just been way too expensive for the average person to really use this thing, the amount of money that you would have to put into a system like that to justify the spend on the fee, on the gas fee, it just makes it out of hand for the average user. With this diamond standard, it allows us to have more memory, more information, utilized through these transactions, simultaneously reducing the gas fees, and it’s just a step change in terms of what we’re capable of doing, and because of how these other smart contracts are constructed with legacy decentralized exchanges, they can’t build something new. They would literally have to shut down those exchanges, those swaps. They have to remove the liquidity in order to do that.

38:03 It would be a very complicated, difficult task, and it’s not something that they’re likely to do, and so our advantage is that we’re newer, where we have the ability to make these upgrades. We have newer, better technology to be able to do that, and therefore we are going to be able to provide things that are going to make that decentralized exchange feel like a centralized exchange without having to risk handing over your crypto to a third party.

38:35 Brian Rose: Wow, so I’ll be able to do stop losses on a DEX, is what you’re saying?

38:40 Ben Kurland: You will.

38:41 Brian Rose: Man, that’s music to my ears, man. All my students are going to be super happy about that, and no one else is doing this now, because like you said, they’d have to completely re-engineer their legacy platforms. They’re already making money, they already have market share, so why bother? And you guys are looking at it from a completely different way. You have a very serious team of developers behind you, don’t you? And I was explaining to you to somebody here on my team today, and I said, the reason we like these guys is because they bring an entire development staff that has experience building projects in Web2, and when you guys speak about something, it has a different kind of a gravitas than a lot of DeFi projects that come my way that are, you know, five dudes and a dog, or six girls and a cat, you know, that are just gonna whip this thing up, but you guys don’t do that. And again, you mentioned Diamond Swap, you know, I think we’re an investor in that as well, and the reason we said yes to that is because I think it’s the whole infrastructure team behind that as well.

39:41 So I think you guys do things in a different way than other people do, and you develop in a more robust way than what I typically see in Web3 projects. Is that right, the way I feel it or see it?

39:55 Ben Kurland: Yeah, I think it’s a testament to the the unique team behind all of this. You know, we’ve got, you know, myself, I have a very unique and interesting background, but my business partners as well, one of them is an attorney by trade and a serial entrepreneur who had come to crypto very late and really is taking a unique approach to this. He’s not crypto-native, he’s native to the world of entrepreneur and marketing and sales, and we bring that type of traditional experience into a realm that, you know, typically is devoid of that simply because the people that know about crypto, the people that are developing these projects, tend to be people who come from just a very different walk of life and don’t have those experiences. And unfortunately, and this is kind of the the conundrum in the space is you have these really talented marketers that end up partnering up with, you know, not as strong developers and vice versa. You have these really strong developers that are building these amazing products, but nobody’s ever heard of them because they don’t have a really strong marketing plan or team behind that. And we were very fortunate. We lucked out. You know, I met Hank Wyatt, who is our CTO on the Dior site. He’s the CEO of

41:23 Diamond Swap, and he came, you know, built in with a development group, a group of guys that, you know, he founded that company, that development company, when he was, I want to say he was 10 years old. You know, we’ve nicknamed him Boy Genius internally on the team. I know you’re gonna be speaking to him as well, but he’s an incredibly well-spoken, highly intelligent individual who has managed to assemble this really whip-smart group of individuals that hail from all over, you know, North America, also in Europe, some in Asia. Their vetting process for determining the quality of these developers is grueling. I know because as we were scaling, I said, you know, can’t we just, you know, can’t we, you know, we got to scale up, we got to get more developers, and they were like, we’re not going to compromise our vetting process. We’re not going to allow somebody, you know, a wolf into the chicken coop here, or somebody who’s not going to be competent, they’re not going to be building these things, you know, we’re going to do this the right way. And I’ve been so impressed with their processes.

42:36 His uncle, who’s also a part of the team, worked for several Fortune 500 companies and built up some of, you know, those kind of traditional software companies from a very small group of software engineers to, you know, a hundred, two hundred software engineers. I mean, these are old-school practices that are being implemented in this new-school way. And I think that’s the difference, is that a lot of these guys were, you know, that created these things to begin with in this space, where these kind of rogue players who didn’t really have that traditional experience, and, you know, that there’s, I think there was a bit of a lack of hubris there, you know, it was a, I know better, I can do better, I am doing better. And in the onset of this, when there was no competition and nothing existed, it was easy to kind of get away with that. I think the space has matured a lot, and I think it’s now time that these more traditional, you know, protocols and procedures are put in place so that these things can actually be built for real.

43:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, and in that world where your team has been developing in the past, I mean, if there’s not a product market fit in the Web2 world, I mean, you die. And yet in the Web3 world, like you said, it’s like you kind of got these guys that like to tinker, and they come up with something that looks cool, and then they go on a rampage to see if anybody really wants it, and no one really needs it. And again, this is like the state of

44:05 Web3 gaming for a long time, you know, they were like, here’s a game and you get tokens, but it’s not a lot of fun. And like the equivalent was kind of happening in some of these DeFi protocols where it was like, yeah, but does anyone need it? And is it really built in a robust way? Are you actually listening to what the customer wants? No. So it feels like the second evolution where you’re building products that are really happening, and we’re thankfully starting to see Web3 games that are actually fun. And, you know, it’s like the second coming now, and this is what the market needs. And you have a, you know, you have an investment wing of your company and your organization. I’m sure you guys have read at this point, hundreds of white papers. And I’m sure a common theme for those white papers is it’s a solution that’s looking for a problem.

44:53 Ben Kurland: You know, and we had a problem, and we’re building a solution. Beautiful.

44:57 Brian Rose: I love that. Talk to me about this concept of end-to-end, because you’re not just thinking about a small, medium, or big user trying to find the best way to deal in a decentralized manner. You’re also thinking, I believe, about those issuing the tokens and who might be using the back end. Now, this is something we deal with a lot now. I mean, we’re at like 55 investments, 13 million dollars. I got some weeks tokens going out of my eyeballs and ear balls, and you know, everyone’s trying to manage them, and they all have different platforms, and they’re trying to release them, and it’s all super complicated. It hasn’t been solved. And the crazy thing is, is that everybody really wants to use the same platform, but they’re not. You go somewhere where they’re unlocked here, and then you got to take them somewhere else and go to an exchange. I have tokens from protocols that say I have to go to a centralized exchange to do anything with them. I don’t want to go to a centralized exchange. I want to do this on a DEX. So talk to me about how you’re thinking about this, because this is needed badly.

46:00 Ben Kurland: I think that’s the whole point of having the all-in-one. It’s not just to allow these traders or potential investors to be able to do their own research and then be able to execute trades. That is an important part of this, but the larger picture here is that there really does need to be an alignment between all the parties

46:19 Involved. And the way we see it, there’s really three, right? There’s kind of three tenants to this. There’s the investors, there is the token issuers, and there’s also the influencers. And this exists, by the way, in every type of exchange of value. This is not unique to blockchain, right?

46:43 The same is said of the companies that are issuing stocks and the people that are promoting those stocks. It all kind of goes hand in hand. And what we don’t have right now is an alignment between these three parties. And so what we really want to do is create this environment where they all come together. Now the question is, how do you do that? And this is something that we’ve put a lot of thought into. There are inherently a lot of issues, and one of the reasons that we started thinking about building this in the first place was because as we had advised and worked on a number of different projects over the years, we found that the same pain points that we experienced being in those positions were the same things that were being experienced by other people that were issuing tokens or part of teams that had issued a token. Things like, how come when I want to present my project to the world, I have to go through some strange third party, pay them an exorbitant fee to try to do something as simple as change my website on someone else’s platform so that it’s the correct and appropriate website. Why is it that they don’t want me, their users, to have the correct and accurate information? And I think it boils down to one simple thing, which is money. Why would we allow someone to change something when we could profit off of the inaccuracy? And we just don’t think that that’s right.

48:20 It doesn’t serve the end user and it doesn’t serve the token issuer. So for the first time, we’re providing control back to these token issuers. Instead of us gatekeeping, instead of us deciding what information is presented on our platform, we’re going to allow them to provide information to the world about their platform, their website, their social information, all of that, you know, all of that type of biographical information so that people can learn about them and get to know them. But we’re taking it a step further as well because what we really want to do is we want the forward facing side of our website to be an extension of their brand, to be an extension of their website. How do you do that? What you do is you create a system that allows them to integrate their telegram feeds, integrate their Twitter. If they have a live space is coming up to have a banner that displays that and advertises that to the public. To be able to provide information in the form of, you know, almost like articles or blogs where they can insert a photo and have a blurb and have a link to something else that takes you away from our website to something that they want to show you. We’re happy to provide that for them because ultimately that is the proper alignment that supports these token projects which allows them to want to bring their user base to us and in turn it provides the correct information and allows us to be a place with the most

49:57 Accurate, the most up-to-date information of any website of its kind and then you have this kind of third prong which is, you know, the influencers, the key opinion leaders, you know, and they also have an obligation to their audiences. They have an obligation to try to do right by the people that are listening to them. They hold high influence here and instead of having this kind of us versus them mentality, there’s a real opportunity to realign this such that yes, you know, these influencers like in any field are going to get unique opportunities.

50:42 That is true of any industry because these are first movers. These are people who are taking larger risks and therefore the risk reward is different. However, we wanted a scenario in which they could gain intelligence about their audiences. We can provide support to them but we can also have a certain level of reciprocity whereby there was more transparency here. You know, are these people serving their communities? Are they doing right by their folks? And because of the data that we’re going to be receiving, we’re going to be able to present that. And unlike other companies that are data companies and really any technology company ultimately is a data company, instead of us monetizing that, we’re going to provide, we’re going to be providing it to everyone. The data should be everybody’s. Everybody should be seeing, you know, how well is this person performing? Is this person doing something, you know, altruistic or not altruistic? And I think that as a result, it’s not just an all-in-one in terms of convenience. It is truly a reimagining of how this whole system should work. And in turn, it’s actually a form of self-regulation because it is going to allow projects that probably shouldn’t be in existence to kind of fall by the wayside and to not get as supported and to have their visibility not be a scene and for strong projects to emerge.

52:22 Because now the incentives are properly aligned such that the token issuers are going to do everything in their power to be as transparent with their communities as possible because it’s going to create more visibility for them. The influencers are going to do everything in their power to really make sure that they’re voting with their money and with their influence to support the right projects. And we really think that there’s a good opportunity to redefine how all of this is done through this.

52:54 Brian Rose: I’m thinking now, I mean, you have to go to four different websites and try to piece this information together. You’re bouncing from X to CoinMarketCap to some DEX to some exchange and trying to piece together a story. Maybe you dip into Discord and it’s a mess right now.

53:11 Ben Kurland: It is.

53:11 Brian Rose: And it could all be in one place, right?

53:14 Ben Kurland: It should be all in one place.

53:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, I know. Talk to me about data because you’ve talked about, you know, having access to a Solana pool of information where you can get data to people quicker than other people. And I mean, this is really innovative stuff. Tell me if I’m right on that and how do you get access to something like that when other people can’t have access to something because speed is very important when it comes to data.

53:43 Ben Kurland: Yeah, it’s crucial. In fact, you know, there’s this old story that I’m reminded of where there was a group of individuals or a company. I’m not exactly sure what the specifics of it was, but they were building a fiber optic line from, I want to say it was like Kansas City or somewhere in the middle of America all the way to the New York Stock Exchange. And it was only so that they could have, I want to say like a two tenth of a millisecond advantage, some minuscule amount. But that’s all the difference in the world, right, when it comes to trading. And it actually matters far more in the world of crypto where you have these low cap tokens where there’s extreme volatility.

54:29 Right. So there’s a lot of incentive here. And I think that’s the, I lost my train of thought there for a moment.

54:39 Brian Rose: Well, you were talking about high speed data. And again, I was asked the data pool.

54:46 Ben Kurland: The data pool. Yeah, there we go. Forgive me. So we have developed a very unique relationship with another group of developers that were very influential in terms of building out a lot of the Solana ecosystem. I want to say roughly, you know, 40, 50 percent of the ecosystem. So they built out a lot of the major decentralized exchanges. They’re providing a lot of the data for the top one or two research charting platforms in the space. And all of those other individuals are on a data plan with them.

55:30 And those data plans have various rate limits. Because of our special relationship with this company, we have a fire hose that is tapped directly into their data lake. So we’re getting instantaneous data and information that is faster than everyone else when it comes to Solana specifically. It’s something that we’re extraordinarily excited about. And we expect that as a result of us being measurably the fastest, and the breadth of data as well, compared to anybody else, that people are going to very quickly realize that there’s a new sheriff in town, so to speak. And that this is if you do trading on Solana, this is where it’s done.

56:20 Brian Rose: Wow, that’s super powerful. Talk to me about blockchains.

56:24 Do you think Solana is going to be a huge portion of your volume? Where do you think it’s going to break down on those layer ones, at least maybe in the first six months of your operation? Also, I’m kind of curious, is your token, what blockchain is your token going to be based on as well?

56:45 Ben Kurland: Yeah, so I think that’s a good amount of our focus is going to be on Solana simply because of this unique access that we have to all this data. In fact, we’re also building out right now. One of them is finished. One of them is near completion to telegram bots. And those bots allow for even faster access to trading and information. And one of the things that we’ve created is really a novel tool, which we’re really excited about. It’s a result of the fact that we have so much data and information. It’s not just that it’s the fastest, it’s that it’s the most comprehensive, specifically again, in Solana, that we’ve created something called smart money. It’s very cool. We went all the way back to the Genesis block, and we have tracked every single transaction that has ever occurred in Solana. And every single wallet that has ever been built and used in the Solana ecosystem, and we are able to identify who’s in the money? Who’s been most profitable? What are the winning wallets? And as a result of that, we can cross reference that with all of the new tokens out there to say, how many of these smart money people are in this particular project? That’s incredibly valuable information,

58:09 Right? Coupled with that, we’re going to be building out smart callers where people are able to kind of call out, hey, I think I’m liking this project or liking that project. And the data and information off that will reveal who are the best people, who are the people that are making the best calls. And then we get to marry the two and say, I’m now getting information about a particular project. How many of the top smart callers have called this project? And how many of the smart money wallets are in this project? Now, you’re starting to get some very interesting information that wasn’t possible before. And this isn’t going to be limited to the hedge funds and the institutions and the insider traders. And this is going to be accessible to everyone. And that’s something that’s really exciting.

59:07 Brian Rose: That’s super exciting. We just invested in our first meme coin and it’s on Solana. And it’s been doing pretty good. And they just announced it went from 6000 to now 7000 holders of this token and maybe it’s 8000 today. But I would have loved or would love to know if what those what those wallets look like, I’d love to know the breakdown. And they would love it as well, because they love talking about unique wallets. And I think it is an important metric, new wallets, if you’re, you know, a meme coin, but imagine having that kind of data. Yeah, that would be huge. And right now, the DEXs on Solana aren’t the best they sprung up, I think really to service a lot of the meme coin volume. And so they’re okay. But they’re not as advanced, I don’t think, as the Ethereum ones. So it feels like there’s a real need for that.

1:00:01 Ben Kurland: Yeah, this is this is why we put so much of a focus on this in particular is because a lot of these meme tokens and these low cap tokens, all of the volume has migrated in this market over from Ethereum, and from BSC where it largely was in the last cycle to Solana, all of the action is primarily on Solana right now. And those service providers are very limited, and there’s not that many of them. And as you said, they just kind of sprung up because they needed to facilitate this need quickly. And we’re putting some thought into what these things should really look like. In addition to Solana, we plan to kind

1:00:41 Of capture the whole market, but we have a really good strategy, which is we want to kind of have this be a bit of a domino effect. Let’s start with something where we have a competitive advantage like Solana. And once we really capture and dominate that market, now let’s start to think about which other blockchains we want to go to, saving the best for last, if you will, or the largest for last, which is Ethereum, which is going to be kind of the last frontier for us.

1:01:13 However, there’s actually one that hasn’t really been talked about, which is even bigger than Ethereum. And this is probably the thing that we’re going to be doing next after this Solana takeover, which is BSC, excuse me, which is BRC, right? And it’s very new. So people, a lot of people are very excited about it, the ordinals and being able to have meme tokens and other tokens sitting on top of Bitcoin. And Bitcoin has the largest audience, the largest untapped audience out of any blockchain in the world. And yet, because this is so new, there are no charting tools for it. I believe there’s maybe one decentralized exchange that’s available right now.

1:01:56 Brian Rose: One and a half.

1:01:57 Ben Kurland: Yeah, one and a half. And this is uncharted territory. And we’re going to be first here. And this is something that we’re really excited about.

1:02:07 Brian Rose: Do you just got you just became, I became a super fan of you guys. Yeah, because we just got our first BRC 20 tokens for an amazing company called the ordinals bot that we invested in. Toby’s the guy that runs it.

1:02:21 They’re basically a SAS solution for anybody who wants to inscribe ordinals. They have an amazing product. But oh my God, trying to do something with those BRC 20 tokens. I mean, this thing isn’t even a DEX. It was the most painful user experience. I felt like I was back in 2013 trying to buy a Bitcoin. I mean, we’re so spoiled with DEXs on Ethereum, even in their limited current manner. On BRC 20 and Bitcoin ecosystem, there’s nothing there. And it’s so bad. It’s so bad that if you think most people struggle with DeFi on Ethereum, I mean, forget about it. There’s no way they’re going to touch that. And like you said, it’s the biggest network in the world, and it really needs this innovation. And BRC 20 will lead to runes and they’re a little easier to deal with. But man, we need a DEX real bad, real bad. So I can’t wait for you guys to go there. And I’m so glad you went in on Solana, but you guys made this decision a while back, right? Six months, 10 months ago. What does Wayne Gretzky say? It’s like you want to go where the puck is going. So you guys called that really well. And I believe Solana is going to continue to massively appreciate versus Ethereum over the next 12 day, two months. And I’m not the only one that thinks that, but it’s just got so much innovation. And like you said, with these meme coins, we saw something that’s never happened in the last cycle.

1:03:41 In the last cycle, most people got into meme coins through their centralized exchanges. In this cycle, they’re going through DEXs on Solana, which is cutting out that central exchange middleman. But it also means they’re going into these hacked together DEXs that don’t necessarily aren’t really built, you know, for purpose. So it’s a perfect opportunity for you guys. Please get into Bitcoin as soon as possible. What is the plan for your token issuance? How do you give your token utility? That’s another big question. And then what network is it going to be on?

1:04:19 Ben Kurland: Yeah, so we have a lot of big plans for the token itself. We have thought a lot about this. A lot of the advising that I’ve done for projects is tokenomics. I’ve put a lot of focus and effort into that because it is the kind of machine, the engine underneath these platforms and these protocols. It’s also a great marketing resource, which I don’t think a lot of people often talk about. But it’s, you know, when there’s something interesting going on with your token, the price is going up and these types of things, it’s a real boon because it gets people talking about you and your company, your organization. And so it’s of great importance to us. It’s something that we’ve put a lot of focus on. There are complications with these things because of regulatory concerns and things of that nature. And so we have to be, you know, very careful in terms of how we construct these things. But our ultimate goal is to try to provide as much

1:05:21 Value for token holders and to correlate that value in as much as we can from the platform and the protocol itself. So there’s going to be a rewards program, and those rewards, you know, are going to allow us to be able to really make a concerted effort to confer some of this value over to token holders. There’s also going to be deal flow. So part of being that all in one is that we’re now going to have new and unique opportunities spring up, not just with new tokens, but with tokens that exist as well that are trying to perhaps create more exposure for themselves.

1:06:03 And so there’s going to be opportunities for, you know, token, not just token issuance and private sales and things of that nature, but also OTC deals, you know, with pre-existing tokens to try to onboard new community members and new holders. And we want that value to go directly and those opportunities to go directly to our token holders. So that’s going to be in the form of deal flow. All of the value, by the way, is going to be for people who stake our token, because we really want that incentive to be correlated with, you know, people who are here to stay and not just traders. You know, it just doesn’t make sense to reward folks for holding on to a token that’s designed to help support an ecosystem if they’re just doing it to try to, you know, margin profit off of it. So, you know, we really are creating this heavy incentive for people to stake and to receive all of these really unique rewards. In addition to that, they’re also going to be allowed to receive voting from that staking of our token. And the voting is going to be a very valuable tool for any of the projects that are looking for greater exposure on our platform. There’s going to be a hierarchical list. You can think of something like a Reddit where things are kind of upvoted and downvoted on a platform to create more exposure and more eyeballs to see those projects and to have visibility into those projects.

1:07:36 And what’s kind of cool about this is if you’re somebody that the votes don’t really matter to you, it’s not really of interest to you. It is going to be of interest to somebody, whether that’s one of the token projects or their community. And so we’re going to create a marketplace where those tokens can actually be transformed into something of value, where if you’re in need of those tokens, and the only way that you’re going to we’re going to issue tokens is to these two, or sorry, the only way that we’re going to issue these votes is if you stake your your tokens. And so therefore, the votes that you accumulate, if you don’t end up using them, you can actually turn that into some, you know, stablecoin, Ethereum, these currencies in the marketplace. And that’s kind of a really cool feature. Typically, the way that it works now is that people are buying votes, you know, through these kind of like, you know, we’re botting it or things of that nature.

1:08:36 Not only does that not give you an accurate count of, you know, really who should be, you know, more visibility, who should have more visibility versus someone else. And it really is allowing people to kind of like, you know, cheat that process. But it also, it also means that people are not able to have an opportunity to kind of get additional value out of out of those tokens. And so we’ve, we’ve kind of done both with that element to it. We, in terms of the the issuance of the token, there was a lot of discussion about this. Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages to every blockchain. We just feel that because of the network effect, because of what we know about these blockchains, we really did want our token to be created on Ethereum. It is, it is the first mover in the space, but more so it’s the largest in terms of the number of developers by by a substantial amount.

1:09:54 And yes, it has lost some ground in terms of some of the trading activity. But it’s still, it’s still the thing to beat. We are going to bridge it over so that we’re going to be on cheaper blockchains. So that’ll facilitate some some lower amount trades and make that more affordable. But for us, it really needs to start on Ethereum.

1:10:15 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think that’s smart.

1:10:17 We, we’ve made a couple investments recently with companies that have their tokens on the on the Solana blockchain, not memes. If you’re a meme, I get it. Okay, it’s just a meme, you’re converting sold to the meme. Okay. But if you’re going to do a DEX, I think you’re making the right call. It still is a most of it’s going to be in the Ethereum space.

1:10:36 And a lot of people just default to that. And if you start telling them, I mean, I had to bridge USDC from Ethereum to Solana the other day. And I hadn’t done that before. You know, I just hadn’t done it before. And I’ve been in the space for a while. So you have to sometimes make a prudent decision. You know, even if your gut says, Oh, let’s put everything on Solana. The truth is, is that you still have to think about where the customers are, for sure. Talk to me about regulation. Talk to me about the state of crypto.

1:11:04 We just saw a former president of the United States address the Bitcoin conference. We just saw a man who is a high likelihood of becoming the next president of the United States say he would fire the current SEC chairman saying that he would look at putting Bitcoin as a US Treasury strategic reserve, saying that he wants to support the ecosystem that every future Bitcoin is going to be made in America. You know, all these things, we’ve got an Ethereum ETF, we’ve got a Bitcoin ETF, and now there’s rumors of a Solana ETF. I mean, what a difference a year makes, that’s for sure.

1:11:39 How do you feel about this regulation? Is this I’m guessing these are amazing tailwinds for what you’re doing?

1:11:49 Ben Kurland: Certainly, everything that was said in that speech was, you know, a boon for the industry. And it is, it is inspiring to know, you know, without getting too political here, but it is inspiring to know that the likely next president supports this industry. And I think that that is the these are the winds of change, right? This is this is how these things happen.

1:12:20 We’ve been talking as an industry about hoping, knowing someday, but hoping that we would get a pro Bitcoin president, a pro crypto president, somebody who believes in the vision and the innovation doesn’t want to stifle it, and doesn’t want to outsource it. And these are the promises that are that are being made very publicly with months to go before this election. It’s, in a word, bullish. And we’re very excited about it. The industry needs these these regulations, common sense regulations. Right now, it’s it’s regulation by punishment. It’s retroactive regulation. It doesn’t make sense. And it’s not sending the right message. And it’s sending folks that should be building things here in the United States overseas, even our company is a company that is an overseas company. And we would love the opportunity someday to bring it home to America.

1:13:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah. So well said. And I, I really hope that this happens. And this new president moves things forward. Some people say, oh, it’s just lip service from a politician. But I’ll take the lip service over the vilification we’ve had from this current administration. And also, you know, his VP pick that we’re talking about President Trump here. So JD Vance, look, he’s a millennial.

1:13:47 He’s 39. We know he has big Bitcoin holdings. Rumor is he’s got a couple big fat bags of altcoins as well. And he’s I’d love to hear what’s in that wall, right?

1:13:58 Ben Kurland: Yeah, that’s pretty interesting. I heard this missing stuff in there. And you know, he’s allied with Silicon Valley, you know, he’s done investing in the past. And I mean, these are really positive things. And if you think about it, I mean, crypto is pretty much the only major technology development that the United States hasn’t dominated in the past 100 150 years. And it’s a travesty. And it needs to happen. It’s shocking, watching some of these congressional hearings over the years, where literally, you’ll see Congresspeople and senators holding up their flip phones and saying this is the extent of my knowledge. You saw it, you know, you saw it when Mark Zuckerberg was brought in front. I mean, these people are making decisions about innovative technology without any type of knowledge or understanding of what they’re talking about. And we’re also basing all of our decisions on a Securities Act that was instituted in the 1930s. This thing is nearly 100 years old, at a time where people couldn’t even imagine computers, let alone some kind of public digital ledger. It’s nonsensical. The technology is sophisticated enough that these aren’t really securities. It’s more than one thing. There’s multiple things going on with these pieces of

1:15:22 Technology. And the rules that are being enforced about them need to reflect the complexity of what they are.

1:15:29 Brian Rose: Very much so. You know, when I moved to New York City in 1993, I had to take my Series 7 exam and my Series 63. And I studied the Securities Act of 1933. And I went out to the NASD and I did a six-hour exam. And when Gary Gensler brings up the goddamn How We Test, I just want to slap him in the head and say, we’re not having the right discussion. Like, I don’t want arguing about whether this is a security note or whether the How We Test applies is the wrong conversation to have. It’s like when I go to a restaurant and you say, would you like red or white wine? I don’t want wine. And I don’t want to talk about this in that frame of reference. The SEC was built to protect little old ladies from getting swindled by these New York City stock issuers and traders. There was no internet. There was no D.Y. and D.O. research. There was none of that stuff. The world has materially changed.

1:16:26 And we need to stop looking at it through that same lens. And back to politicians. I ran to be mayor of London. And like any good politician, when they see an issue that can be weaponized, they weaponize it. I don’t even know if they care about the issue. Elizabeth Warren weaponizes crypto. I don’t even know if she really cares about it, but she knows. She probably has some crypto. Yeah. But she knows she can use it to get people emotional and then to advance her own personal agenda. And you see Washington did all the time and they’re fighting over each other for their own little land battles. Meanwhile, we’re all sitting there thinking, you know, we’re missing out while you guys fight over politics and this should change. So I feel like we’re going in the right direction. And that’s really positive. When can people start using your product? When are you going to start rolling these things out? How can they start using it today? When are some of these features going to start coming in? That’s what I really want to know.

1:17:23 Ben Kurland: Yeah. So we actually just released our public beta. We were at Bitcoin Nashville.

1:17:27 Okay, you’re there. Missed the former president’s speech by a couple of days. However, we threw a launch party for our platform a couple of nights earlier. And it’s been very well received thus far. The components of this are being released kind of piecemeal. And the reason that we’re doing that is because we really want to focus on getting each individual item right. And then focusing on getting the correct amount of feedback from these things. What do you like? What do you not like? Not just from our group of influencers that are kind of a part of this, but also the public at large. We really want to hear people’s feedback to try to make sure that this is the ultimate all in one platform.

1:18:19 Over time, we’re going to be releasing more and more and more. I mean, we have a, I want to say a three or a four year runway of things that we’re ideating on now that we know at this point, we’re just trying to figure out where they fit into the order of things. But there’s so much that’s going to be coming down the pike. Also, we want to make sure that everything that we release is stress tested, thoroughly vetted, thoroughly explored, and what have you. So we’re going to have a pretty rigorous process.

1:18:57 But this kind of aligns us in a lot of ways with Ethereum. I remember going to Consensus back in 2018, going to an event that Joe Lubin was at. And I remember asking, I said, when is, I’m so excited for Ethereum, and I’m so excited for the future. When are all these things coming? And the response was when they’re ready. And the difference between Ethereum and some of the other layer ones is that they’re never going to compromise.

1:19:28 They’re never going to put speed over security. And that’s one of our tenants too. We’re going to go at the right pace. We’re going to make sure this stuff is done right. There’s going to be a lot of pressure. There’s going to be a lot of frustration in that regard. But ultimately, we know we’re doing right by the people who are going to be using these tools.

1:19:46 So people can go to our website right now. It’s live. It’s DiorLabs.com. And what they’ll see when they go there is all the charting, trending. So what’s popular, what’s kind of popping off, daily gainers, daily losers, all of that kind of typical information that they’re going to find in similar charting and analytics platforms. And very, very soon we’re going to be releasing the backend team dashboard. We want to make sure that it has enough of the features that are really going to make it truly valuable to onboard because we know that time is very valuable for these token issuers and for the members of these teams. And so we want to make sure that it has at least an ability to be able to provide the telegram feed and the Twitter feed and make that personalization with the end user happen, such that it’s not just about changing your website or your socials. And yes, those should be free. And we’re going to allow those team members to do those things for free for the first time, which is a huge shift change from some of our competitors who are charging. I mean, I’ve heard numbers, you know, $40,000 to get something listed when we’re thinking that should be $0, that it should be listed. It should exist.

1:21:06 This is information. This is public information. You know, so that’s going to be not just your ability to do that, but also your ability to personalize it and be able to kind of curate your message and curate the information that the public is going to see. And that’s going to be coming out in about the next six weeks. And that is really when things start to kind of get interesting with our platform, where we’re going to be onboarding en masse all of these token projects. I know a lot of the folks that you work with in your portfolio are going to want to use this service. It’s going to be of great benefit. And then the next step, of course, which is going to be really exciting for them is plugins. So let’s say you’re making a partnership and your logo lives on Dropbox or Google Drive, and you’re kind of scrambling to find it through the 60 tabs that you have open, but you need it in a hurry because they need to start putting out this partnership content that’s going to be going up on Twitter, or you’re trying to schedule out a tweet, or you’re trying to tweet something out or whatever. All of those tools that you use to manage a project are going to have third party plugin access. So you’re going to be able to do everything as a member of the team. And there’s going to be an ability to do different permissions. So you can onboard team members to that, you know, team dashboard that you’re building. And all this is going to allow people for the first time in web three to manage their

1:22:37 Tokens and to manage their projects, like it’s a real company. And to do it in a way that makes sense.

1:22:43 Brian Rose: Wow, things that no one else has really thought of. And so the interface also, it isn’t just plugging a wallet in, there’s a username and an email and everything, because you want to customize this profile for an individual.

1:22:56 Ben Kurland: Yeah, so for the end users as well, it’s, you know, this is a blend of web two and web three, we love the innovation that’s happening in web three.

1:23:05 But the world isn’t ready to just make the jump yet. And so we want people to be able to set up an account very simply, they can, you know, sign in using Google, they can sign in using their their email, you know. And in that way, we’re making this more accessible to the masses. If you don’t know what a wallet is, it’s going to spin up a wallet for you. If you don’t know how to trade, there’s going to be a little thing if, you know, for perhaps some of your older audience, they might remember like a little guy in Microsoft named clippy, who used to do these little like pop up tutorials, and we’re going to have stuff like that that just makes it easy to understand and help to navigate our website and navigate these these challenges. But there’s going to be a lot of hand holding along the way as well, to make sure that people are onboarded into this in an appropriate way. So that there’s there’s no barrier of entry anymore.

1:24:03 Brian Rose: Nice. Wow, this is powerful. And tell me, maybe one of the last things I’ll ask you, how do you feel about the entire industry? You know, we had Michael Saylor on stage talking about, you know, 13 million dollar Bitcoin and talking about this as a, you know, the apex property of the human race and digital capital is the future. And it was a pretty impressive speech. I mean, I love Michael. He’s been on the show a couple of times and he’s graduated from MIT a few years before me. And it’s incredible. But how bullish are you on this space? You want to be in this

1:24:38 Space for a long time? You know, what do you think is coming?

1:24:43 Ben Kurland: Yeah, I’ve been in the space now for roughly eight years. And in that time, we have seen so many things. China banning Bitcoin endlessly, we’ve seen hacks, we’ve seen straight up massive billy multi billion dollar thefts. We’ve seen every I mean, this industry has suffered the most, you know, and they say the they say death by 1000 paper cuts. This thing’s had 10 million paper cuts, little slices each and every day from every possible angle. And it seems like every time this happens, this thing comes back stronger. And if that’s not enough to convince you that this stuff is here to stay, I don’t know what else I could say, you know, to prove it to you. I think where all this is going is it just it feels like an inevitability, much like the the car replaced the horse and buggy. This technology is just better in terms of what it does. And to put it plainly, and it’s been said many, many times before, but this allows two parties to facilitate an exchange of something of value over the internet without an intermediary. That’s it. That’s the whole game.

1:26:06 A lot of people are very confused about what this stuff is. That’s what it is. But it does it better than anything else that has ever come before it. And the dinosaurs are scared of it. The powers that be are terrified of it. And rightfully so, because when something like this is that disruptive, and that sophisticated and advanced, it’s an inevitability. And all of the advancement of technology throughout the history of our species has proven time and time again that the superior and more advanced technology will win the day. So really, what’s happening right now is that, like any other piece of technology, it’s generational. These things don’t happen overnight. It’s going to take a new generation of people to really understand how it works.

1:27:02 It’s going to take with this perhaps a little bit longer because of the level of complexity here in terms of all of the infrastructure that needs to be built out. But I can assure everybody who’s watching this that this infrastructure is being built out by myself and my team and other people. And we’re here to stay. We want to build the future. And the future is transparent, public, unmalleable ledgers that allow for transfers of value without any form of manipulation.

1:27:40 Brian Rose: So well put. And you’re right, it can’t be stopped. Bitcoin never went to zero. Solano never went to zero. Everything came back. And even though you had the most epic disasters, I always call it, it’s like it’s a biblical proportions. What happens in this industry, in the space of 18 months or 24 months, I mean, literally, in the normal industry, it’ll take 20 years for these highs and lows. And yet it’s back and it’s more resilient than ever. It constantly implements better solutions. And we’re already back here after this massive fiasco back in 22 and FTX and Celsius and all that. And here we are, new innovations all the time.

1:28:21 I’m super bullish. If that didn’t kill it, it was the perfect storm of things. And if that doesn’t kill this, nothing will. I mean, that was a death knell for any other industry. And it’s just a testament to the fact that people are voting for this. They’re voting with their support. They’re voting with their money. We want this. It’s unstoppable. I just had Yatsu of Animoca Brands in that chair two weeks ago. At the end, I said, I said, can this be stopped? And he said, no, not anymore. Not anymore. Can’t be stopped. And we see it. We see all the elements now. It’s going to happen. It’s just going to happen.

1:29:05 It’s clearly superior. It’s a better product and it’s going to happen. So I always tell everybody out there, you can learn this now or you can learn this later, but you have to learn this. This is the future. This is the new paradigm.

1:29:23 Ben Kurland: Yeah. And what’s also kind of fun about this too is you see things like there was the Tom Brady roast and Nikki Glaser did such an amazing job and was teasing Rob Gronkowski and that whole thing of like, even Rob knows me know that’s not real money. And while we’re having a good time with this and all of the kind of jokes on television, this is pretty common for nation technology. First, they think it’s cool, then they make fun of it, ridicule it, and then they adopt it. And the same thing happened to the internet. There’s those classic videos from Good Morning America where they’re talking about and you’re putting your email address and there’s an at symbol and who’s going to use this crap and look where we are today. It’s the most ubiquitous and people do it all day long and this is going to be no different. And if people are missing, one thing about this is nothing ever comes in its backend form. And right now, for the first time really, we’re witnessing a lot of people being obsessed with these kind of backend protocols as opposed to the forward-facing consumer product. It’s bizarre. You’d never have people tinkering with the backend intricities of a cell phone or the internet and yet, because of this price correlation,

1:30:56 People are attempting to for the first time. It’s like, I’m going to get into this thing, even though it’s complicated and dangerous and what have you. What this ultimately looks like is your banking app, your Robinhood app, your everyday things on your phones, on your computers, that’s where this is going. You’re not even going to know that you’re interacting with the blockchain and yet, in many, many facets of your life, you will be because it’s better technology.

1:31:27 Brian Rose: Perfectly put. Ben, congratulations for everything you guys have developed. It’s really impressive. And again, we’re not only all in on you guys, but on Diamondsoft as well, because the team is just so impressive. So this is the product we need. This is the product my students need. This is the product all the people coming in to DeFi need. So I can’t wait to see you build it out. And I can’t wait to see what you’re doing with that Solana data pool as well.

1:31:54 And it looks like you’re in the right place at the right time. And the Bitcoin, please, please, the BRC DEX is so needed. Again, don’t even get me started about that. And it’s so needed, and it will be the big part of the future. So this is great stuff. I love it when a new group of people come and try to solve a problem that looks like it’s been solved. And yet you come up with a different kind of a Y and a 30,000 foot view and you say, well, wait a second, what’s wrong with this product? What are they missing? Why are the incentives aligned here? Because it’s not working. It’s a little broken. And let’s go fix it.

1:32:32 Ben Kurland: Yeah, it’s not broke, but it definitely needs fixing.

1:32:36 Brian Rose: And that’s what you guys are doing. And I applaud that. So thanks so much, looking forward to using this thing and seeing what you guys do with it in the future. Super excited. Thanks, Ben. Wishing you all the best, man.

1:32:49 Ben Kurland: Thank you, Brian. Great to have us on here and thank you for the audience.

1:32:54 Brian Rose: My pleasure, man. Let’s build this thing and take it all the way.

1:32:58 Ben Kurland: Absolutely. Cool, man. Thanks.