Dan Roberts - Introducing The World’s First Crypto-Compatible Insurance Marketplace

Full transcript: Dan Roberts on London Real

2:06 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dan Roberts, the award-winning entrepreneur, blockchain expert, and tech founder. You have spent much of the last decade running startups across a broad range of industries before discovering the world of blockchain technology. In 2019, you co-founded NAMES, the world’s first crypto-compatible insurance marketplace, in order to address one of the biggest issues in Web3, access to insurance on the blockchain.

2:46 Your goal is to create a bridge between the capital markets and over $1 trillion of uninsured tokenized real-world assets. NAMES uses traceable smart contracts built on a trustless system and is creating a flexible digital infrastructure for insurance companies to build a digital version of themselves on-chain. Ultimately, you believe insurance will become one of the biggest use cases for early institutional adoption of digital assets. Dan, welcome to London Real.

3:15 Thanks for having me. Good to be here. It’s great to have you. I just want to start by saying that NAMES 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.

3:39 Dan, we are super excited to be part of this journey with you, so let’s jump in. What is NAMES? What is NAMES? Well, it’s been lots of things over the last five years, but the mission remains the same. We’re a market for insurance and reinsurance, so as with every market, there’s two sides.

4:01 On the supply side or the capital side, capital markets can deploy into insurance risk as an asset class, so they’re getting access to basically the exposure that comes with backing insurance claims, and there’s a pricing process of that in the insurance space through an underwriting process that hopefully leads to positive returns for those investors. And then on the demand side, your buyer’s side, you have those that are looking for cover. More specifically, in our industry, it’s reinsurance cover.

4:39 We try not to dictate too much, so you can do primary insurance, but more often you’re having insurance companies looking for reinsurance, so looking for ways to transfer their risk onto another balance sheet, which is the market of NAMES. And so there’s a common identity crisis that players such as NAMES and others that are doing similar things have, which is that we’re providing digital asset cover, which is in some part true, but it’s not exclusively to that. We’re a broad market for property and casualty. PNC space is a $2.7 trillion industry, and that can cover cyber and some off-chain risks and travel and catastrophe, hurricanes, earthquakes, et cetera.

5:31 So it’s really providing the mechanism in between capital and risk that is the most efficient, open, transparent way of connecting the two. Okay, so you’re not just ensuring digital assets, you’re ensuring all sorts of risk, but it is on the blockchain ultimately. Yeah, so blockchain is a core component of the infrastructure underlying this transformer in the middle between capital and risk. I would say we might get into this, but blockchain is becoming what hopefully most people see as a good end for blockchain, which is this underlying infrastructure that people don’t really care much about.

6:11 There is a fundamental positive output of blockchain, and it’s a huge, huge list. Some people don’t care about 90% of that list, some people really, really care about 100% of the list. Not many people care about 100%, but some people care about one thing only, but that is unbelievably powerful and has built, had entire communities build around it. So yes, we use blockchain for a plethora of those reasons. That’s not to say that we’re not able to accept dollar capital as investment and work with traditional asset managers.

6:48 It’s not to say that we’re putting everything on the blockchain in the risk transfer process. What we discuss is that the power of blockchain in this sense is money in, money transferred and money out. How are you transferring value, which is the ultimate use case, as a step beyond the internet’s transfer of information? But it’s not the entirety of the infrastructure, and that’s not to shy away from its utility. But yeah, for sure, part of the selling point of what we’re doing is allowing an asset class to be accessed by a capital pool of people who don’t have access to that class.

7:28 And that’s not just an accessibility thing saying, well, at the moment you need a million pounds to be able to deploy, and now you can deploy a thousand or even less, although that’s a nice story and one that we have seen happen on the market. But it’s also saying that if you’re in the on-chain world or you have digital assets, you actually don’t have a way of getting this kind of exposure. And maybe you didn’t think you cared, but there is a growing part of the market now that wants to be able to manage its treasury or manage its assets or manage its clients’ assets in ways that can be tapped into some of the more sophisticated asset classes that are available to them now.

8:13 So yeah, blockchain plays a key role, and blockchain also has this phenomenal power of changing how people who are working on it think. You really do have a fresh new start on problem solving. You’re not held within the same kind of confines as you might be if you’re just iterating in the web2 space. And the caveat to that is sometimes I think we can overplay the difference between web2 and web3. They have fundamental philosophical differences, and that extends just beyond the philosophy, obviously.

8:52 But at the same time, I think we will start to see blockchain or start to not see blockchain. You have to have an application that actually makes sense for the end user ultimately. The reason the early adopters came in was because they actively wanted to be working on the blockchain. They wanted to be down at the protocol layer in this peer-to-peer space. They wanted anonymity. They wanted self-sovereignty.

9:20 And the masses aren’t coming in for those reasons, but they’re coming in for other reasons. There’s sort of a long list, and you can debate the pros and cons of all of that. But there have to be solutions that service the whole chain. We can’t be so tied. We can be led by the ideology, but we can’t be tied to it at the cost of innovation, of progress through these sort of stepping stones.

9:50 I don’t think anyone’s working on an end goal here. We’re just working towards it. And blockchain is a very, very clear, well-established here-to-stay stepping stone as we progress. Yeah, I’m getting flashbacks to when you came to present to our group and you showed us what you were doing. And it was kind of mind-blowing because my students, they’ve all graduated from our crypto and DeFi academy.

10:14 They know kind of where they can go to get yield. But I don’t think any of them ever conceived of the fact that they could get access to other types of risk. And it was really interesting to see on your platform that you could. And some really interesting yields and other types of risk just by being on the blockchain. I know that’s probably only one of those use cases, but it was a real eye-opener for a lot of us.

10:36 And it seemed really innovative and something I hadn’t really seen put into practice yet in this space. I think a large part of capital allocation is you’re wanting to put it to work within some different expertise other than your own in a way. There’s a tie between money and AI, I think, whereas AI is this humanless intelligence. And money is a humanless intelligence. It just has to be put in the right sort of place and can work 24-7 and can know more than you just by you putting it in a certain place and can work tirelessly to that end.

11:17 And that’s what’s powerful. So we’re just one of a number of these options now where people can take the capital that they’re earning and that they’re growing and so forth and can put it to work in these intelligent places. And that’s one of the more core obvious benefits of this kind of online digital world now is that these are all available through a very thin application layer. You don’t have to know the industry, have a buddy, play golf, build a whole network.

11:55 You just have to be engaged online and they’re all available through clicks of buttons. So it’s a very different user interface than that. That’s one of the paradigm shifts, I think, to finance 50 years ago, even today in some regards. Especially insurance, which is kind of behind finance. And I want to get into that.

12:12 But right now, practically, if I had 10 grand or 50 grand in a digital asset like Ethereum or stablecoin, I could literally plug into names and get a yield by taking on some type of risk that I wouldn’t find on an Aave or a liquidity pool or anything. I might get a real world type of risk that I can plug in with a smart contract and get paid for that, right? Yeah, exactly. And what we’re trying to do at names is cater to an entire curve of where people sit on the kind of trad-fi to defy curve.

12:41 So, yeah, absolutely. You have different options. One option is your highly sophisticated insurance-specific knowledge that want to run your own program. And you can do that. You can capitalize it and so forth.

12:55 The middle one, as we talk about, is really just leaning on the expertise of our team and an underwriting process that plugs into this sort of single pool. We call it the senior risk pool. So you can just deploy there. Like a diversified bit of risk. On a longer basis.

13:14 Yeah, you capture a whole range of different exposures. You don’t necessarily need to understand. This isn’t to put people off trying to understand it as much as they can. But you’re getting a range of exposure across the market. And then we have the name token, which is your way of being able to participate in the performance and the governance of a much more open pool that takes positions and provides liquidity across the market.

13:39 And that might be your retail investor and you’re out in the world really benefiting from the composability of the token model. Put tokens here. Over collateralize alone. Take the loan token from that and place it somewhere else. We can engage in that composability, that more DeFi model as well.

14:03 So there’s a real whole curve. I mean, you can be traditional. I have dollars. I’m going through a KYC process to put meaningful amounts of capital in versus I’ve got $100 lying around for a period of time. May as well be at work.

14:19 You can come in on that curve. Okay. I could put it in the senior risk pool or by the names token. Yeah. And you can even dive down and look at the individual lines or the individual programs and back those individually.

14:31 If you see a particular type of risk or you meet a team that has one of their programs on the infrastructure, you can get to know them and you can back that specifically. That may be capitalized in part by the senior risk pool. So maybe you just want to get the whole range. But yeah, it’s just flexible infrastructure. So at its core level, names is tokenized transforming vehicles.

14:54 That’s the structure. It’s segregated accounts out of Bermuda. And we’re fully regulated as an insurer and as a digital asset business under that jurisdiction, under the BMA. And so this tokenized transforming vehicle structure can be used for so many different reasons. That’s the challenge or the temptation as a startup is you can boil the ocean, do it all.

15:18 And our challenge has been really finding the first step is do individuals, digital asset managers, do they care about the real core underlying risks that are bringing premium in? Or do they want exposure to the asset class and they just want a single place to do that? It’s probably the latter at this point. So yeah, but it’s very, very modular. And that’s why I said you can use it for primary insurance, reinsurance, retro, really just bringing capital markets direct to that activity.

15:49 In the traditional space, the linear risk transfer model is insurance, reinsurance, retro capital markets, sort of gets passed along the chain. The digital asset world, I think, has the capabilities to be able to come and participate at any stage in the chain and can cut out a lot of the middlemen and the inefficiencies in administration and reporting. All these very boring things that don’t get the headlines but are just stripping out so much of the lethargy and the cost in the process of transferring risk.

16:26 So there’s lots of flexibility, but we’re trying to take it one step at a time. What type of returns are kind of available for like a senior pool or even some of the other risk specific? I mean, they can be significant, right? And that maybe stands out for people. Obviously, there’s risk with returns.

16:41 Sure. I mean, yeah, you can sort of pick a number. For us, we target around 12% to 15%. So it’s an interesting asset class because it’s very, very uncorrelated. It’s used as an uncorrelated asset class in the traditional space, but in the crypto world, it’s like insanely uncorrelated to bull bear market.

17:05 It makes no difference. So this is probably more of a bear market asset class where you’d see sort of ironically way more adoption in the bear times, because it’s one of the asset classes that doesn’t suddenly miraculously disappear when everything takes a turn for the worse. Because people always need insurance. Yeah, exactly. And the source of the return has no bearing on like a hurricane happening or a car crash or whatever it may be.

17:34 It has no bearing on the macro world. So even if you’re backing an insurance company’s balance sheet, sorry, not a balance sheet, if you’re backing them, you’re purchasing a stock, it’s still related to the markets. The markets still have this exuberance and it still has speculation. You can have the CEO end up in a scandal and the stock price falls down. Whereas capital markets have direct access to insurance exposure. So the actual claimable event.

18:03 And so it’s just totally uncorrelated to bull bear. It doesn’t matter. And we’ve seen an interesting dynamic with ETFs coming in where you hopefully theoretically, because there’s more liquidity, there’s more people in, you would see a smoother trend in the markets. You know, things do drop. You’ve got way more people to hold the price up and have their own trading methodology.

18:27 And in a way, this is kind of similar, whereas you now have an asset class that winter or the peaks of a rational exuberant summer is just going to be still doing the same thing. And that’s another smoothing dynamic or smoothing force for the space. So that’s an exciting one. I mean, 12-15% is pretty exciting. I mean, who needs eigenvalue?

18:50 Yeah, exactly. There’s still speculative developments to these things. One of the enjoyments of tokenization is that you get this very seamless tradeability dynamic where you can work with. You can have market makers providing trading pricing and bidding offers around these individual programs. So yeah, we sort of target that. You can create, again, very quickly, you can create these sort of lower attachment point industry loss warranties.

19:20 So what that means is if there’s an industry-wide hurricane event, if it’s above $10 billion as a global event, let’s say it’s US windstorm within a particular year, then the contract will pay out. And you can create a lot of these contracts within a single portfolio to get diversification. But if the trigger is at 60%, it’s much less likely to be hit. So the rate would be lower. And that’s just one of the parameters of essentially choosing what kind of returns, you know, just market determine.

19:58 And even that process can be inefficient, you know, closed doors, people figuring out what the numbers should be. So there’s an opportunity with this kind of technology for that pricing discovery to be more interesting and less opaque. But yeah, in terms of the risk, we want to sit in kind of a place that’s exciting and interesting enough for people wanting some form of stability and access to the asset class without plenty of speculative crazy things you can go and do if you have a higher risk tolerance.

20:31 Yeah, well, I mean, if you’re looking at the yield for Ethereum staking, maybe around 4%, you know, this looks really interesting. And now I think, again, I’m having flashbacks to your presentation where everybody was like, wow, there’s some really interesting risks. Again, non-correlated, not correlated to bear and bull. It’s been an industry that’s been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. The tranching is interesting. It reminds me of mortgage-backed securities, which I was kind of looking at back in the 90s, where, yeah, you could choose, you know, what level of the prepayments you get.

21:00 And you can do a AAA piece or you can do like, you know, double B rated piece. One of the big trends, I think, in the insurance industry, regardless of, you know, the tech enabled and blockchain solutions to it, is really for the insurance industry to continue to be competitive in the sort of global capital market space is to make sure that its underwriting efficiency is really, really high. And by that, what I mean is that capital is going behind best underwriting.

21:34 You know, I don’t have a huge amount of expertise in how AI is going to, you know, sort of revolutionize the underwriting process. There’s a lot of excitement there, which we can sort of lightly touch on. But really, it’s just about saying if you have 100 underwriters or you have one good underwriter and they’re covering the same book, you may as well have all of the capital covering the one underwriting. As long as it’s got this broad range. And you can even have these tracker funds where you’re essentially getting a slice of all of the broker’s business, which is even more diversified because, you know, if you’re an underwriter at an insurance company, you’re backing all of the insurance company’s risk.

22:13 Whereas if you’re getting a slice of the broker, you’re getting a slice of everything that the broker writes to all of the underwriters. And this is a model that, you know, I think 10, 20 years ago was kind of really came together. You had Aeon and Berkshire Hathaway kind of set the stage there, and that kind of model remains today. So a lot of it’s called follow form. My capital is just backing lead underwriting, and most of the insurance slip is just that capital that’s following through.

22:42 And capital markets are very happy to do that. Why would capital markets want to put all the operational cost and underwriting and expertise and so forth into that process when they can take a scan of the market and deploy it in that way? So we’ve become another market that enables that follow form piece as well. And then obviously we’re sort of taking a forward-looking view on how that can go even one step further to backing, you know, people as insurance companies that have their own ways of figuring out pricing.

23:18 But these things take time, so it’s sort of a step, step, step. RWA, real world assets, is a huge buzzword in Web3. What does it mean to you guys, and what is the future of this, and how does it relate back to what you’re doing at names and insurance? Yeah, it’s a funny term because it’s just, yeah, they’re assets, tokenized assets. You know, real world, I mean, isn’t everything in the real world?

23:47 It sort of implies that there’s sort of a fakeness to what’s going on. It’s all real, and it’s all great innovation. Yeah, real world assets, RWA is, you know, there’s a rebranding exercise that the space does as it goes through the different iterations of what it’s building. Some things don’t work, and they need to fall off, and, you know, these are just ways of compartmentalizing people’s understanding. So, yeah, real world assets, it’s saying that, you know, there’s lots of capital coming in, lots of institutional capital coming in.

24:17 They, you know, need to still understand that, you know, this is a place that isn’t, it’s not creating necessarily totally new things, you know, new shiny ways of doing the speculative, you know, investments, for example. But actually, it’s just an underlying infrastructure shift away from centralized models, away from, you know, bank accounts, which are very slow and inefficient to move funds around. You know, there’s an abstraction, essentially, of value that allows this real seamless flowing of capital, you know, capital velocity.

24:57 So, you know, real world assets is just there as a sort of signpost to say, kind of, once you’re comfortable with the underlying infrastructure, which more and more people are becoming, you have everything that you already knew, you know, in the traditional space to be able to engage in, as well as all of these new exciting models available to you as well. You know, this is what we say about the name token is that’s our way of having a model that is aligned with some of the more innovative new models of composability and tokenization that the more early adopter, you know, crypto, you know, anarchists are used to. But every other institution coming in wanting the same kind of treasury management and capital management strategies have that available to them as well.

25:46 You know, that speak the same language as the technology that they’re now a part of. So, yeah, obviously, you’ve got real estate and commodities and, you know, all these other things that are coming in tokenized stock. Treasury bonds. BlackRock’s making a big push with that, right? Yeah, exactly. Money market funds are a big piece. You know, you mentioned the, you know, staking as a service or, you know, e-staking is kind of the risk-free rate in the crypto world.

26:13 And, you know, you now have tokenized risk-free rate online as well. And again, it’s this idea of eventually people won’t realize that it’s the blockchain. You know, no one says like, oh, I think I’ll, you know, use the Internet today. It’s like no one talks about the Internet. You know, everyone talks about what’s being built on it and for it.

26:34 And, you know, what I’ll pause on quickly is that when blockchain came out, there was this explanation of a flip from thin protocol layer, fat application layer. So what that was was, you know, the protocol layer, the HDTP, the sort of underpinnings of the Internet had no value capture. And you had these grand, you know, sort of enterprises that were built, empires that were built on the application layer, your Facebooks and Googles. And blockchain kind of flipped the narrative to say you had thin application layer.

27:05 So just, you know, anyone could build a simple UI to be able to interface with the protocol layer. And that’s where all the innovation was. And that’s where the value capture was. And that value was spread through tokenized models. And I think what could be happening is that you have, you know, call it medium fat application layer and medium fat protocol layer, or just fat fat.

27:29 It’s like both of them have their own utilities and they’re both being built on top of each other. An example we have is, you know, companies can now build on blockchains and get a benefit of all the innovation that’s going into those blockchains themselves, which have teams and so forth. They’re not purely, you know, ideological, decentralized, you know, ethereal enterprises. It’s like you have people building solutions on the blockchain and things like KYC attestations that are coming.

28:04 You’ve got blockchain abstraction, which is a big piece of you won’t know that you’re using it. You can interact wherever. And so that’s amazing as a startup, because if you’re building a web to business, if we define it as that, you have to build everything. You have to build all of your security measures, a huge, huge cost if you’re starting to scale. Whereas now in security is just one example, you can build on these protocol layers that have all of these pieces done for you.

28:34 You know, your way of handling personal identifiable information or your way of handling KYC or whatever it may be, have already been solved at the protocol layer. And there’s a whole roadmap of innovation going on at the protocol layer. And you can go down and work on that or you can build applications on top of that. But HTTP kind of didn’t change. And that was like a perfect pure decentralized model that wasn’t touched and that had a huge utility.

29:01 But what that did was put all the power in the application layer, which became sort of problematic in lots of different ways. And so this combination of fat, I think, is quite a good evolutionary way of thinking about things because we don’t have to necessarily be so ideological about centralized. There’s a distinction between authority and control and then expertise put out in the world for people to take or not. And then companies have this huge array of opportunities of building on these blockchains now that give them so many of the things that they now don’t have to build.

29:38 That leads to this real virtuous circle of innovation, I think. And it’s all along with the open source sort of method in the space. That’s why it’s moving so fast. Everyone says it’s moving so fast. Well, that’s why.

29:53 Because you can build a company and you can have a whole security stack and a whole transparency and a whole governance mechanism that’s already been built and you can have that on day one. So it’s really powerful as a way of building businesses. Yeah, I’m glad you really pointed that out because it doesn’t really get articulated well in this space. People either just say, oh, it’s the blockchain and it’s transparent and it’s trustless. But there’s all of the innovation you can build on the back of everybody else.

30:20 Everything is de facto open source, all this stuff. And like you said, it’s real innovation is all out there. This is why I think there’s a real distinction between blockchain and let’s say the Internet and AI is just like three real peak innovations that we talk about. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a difference between the early adopters of blockchain and people who are using it now. Whereas there wasn’t a difference between the early adopters and the masses in Internet and in AI in a general sense.

30:51 It’s like the early adopters of the Internet, we’re using it for information transfer, passing scientific documents around. Everyone is using it for that reason now. And with AI, it was the same. And it’s just people are more curious in the early adopting stage. Whereas the masses understand the origin.

31:10 And the problem that blockchain has is that the masses don’t understand the origin. So there’s this disconnect between the two and that’s why it has such PR problem. Such a PR problem because people like anonymity and self-sovereignty and down with the governments and they want convenience and there’s just this big barrier between the two. And that’s been difficult to navigate as a space, obviously. And FTX is a massive centralized company that was fraudulent.

31:38 It’s got nothing to do with the technology and so forth. The space has created these gray areas of opportunity for bad actors. Because that narrative changed so much over the last 10 years. It was one thing and it became something else. It became something else.

31:55 It struggles from a real PR narrative. Then it had bad actors that had nothing to do with the blockchain that were just brokerage houses. It was modeled from 100 years ago. There’s an ideology that is dangerous because you want the whole world to see how you see. And that’s a pretty heavy moral responsibility that people can get very passionate about.

32:18 So the early adopters wanted, in a way, the rest of the world to work like that. And instead it should be that the early adopters are the leaders of new ways of thinking about things. And implementing them on these test use cases. And the test use cases have become unbelievably valuable enterprises. Again, the value has shifted to these communities.

32:42 And that’s part of the leadership. But at the same time, the world’s going to have a hard time trying to convince a gran and whoever to come and work in this kind of way. Come down, dig down into the actual technology and interact with it in this raw way. It doesn’t work like that. And people need to detach themselves from needing the world to work like that.

33:11 But it has been interesting to see. There was a great question, a conference I was at recently, that was if Satoshi, if they could see what this had become now, maybe they’re still around, would they be happy or sad? Well, we have lots of centralized businesses doing XYZ. And we have lots of bad actors benefiting from these gray areas of opportunities, just like the traditional world. And I don’t have a good answer to that.

33:41 The adoption is there, so there’s a real benefit of that. But, yeah, I wonder what kind of future they saw and whether we’re going in that direction or not. Yeah, maybe their opinion doesn’t matter. It clearly doesn’t. Maybe they would say, you know, my opinion doesn’t matter because they were creating something that is going to exist on its own.

34:03 You know, Michael Saylor, who runs Michael Strategy, has about $14 billion in Bitcoin. He gave a speech in Madero, Spain recently. And it was really interesting because he was on stage, spoke for an hour. And in the midway, he took everybody in the audience, obviously hardcore Bitcoiners. Maybe they’d been there away for 10 years.

34:20 And he said, look, it’s no longer us versus them. He said there are two types of people in the world. There are those that understand Bitcoin and those that don’t yet understand Bitcoin. And I think that was his way of saying that it’s everyone’s individual responsibility to bring people into this ecosystem. And again, when you see Larry Fink, BlackRock, you know, on the news talking about Bitcoin and it’s this asset and it’s this global asset.

34:43 And, you know, he’s trying to explain it to Jim Cramer or sell it to Jim Cramer. I think you have to. I think that’s good. I think anyone that helps establish an instrument of freedom, which is what I think Bitcoin is, is a good thing. And I don’t think we need to evolve from this narrative of, you know, banks are evil, central institutions are evil.

35:02 And we’re the ones that are the rebels. It needs to evolve and become something that everyone uses. And like you said, to the point where we don’t even know the underlying blockchain is at use. Like I’m using my mobile phone right now. I don’t really know all the protocols.

35:15 I know it works really well and I like it. So but that evolution is going to take time and it’s tricky because of the technology itself, right? Yeah. And the process of failure and success will do that for us anyway. You know, Bitcoin is so powerful because the original idea is still the case today.

35:32 Hasn’t had any iteration. So it’s a good idea because we’re still using it for that original purpose, completely untouched. Whereas bad ideas die quickly and hopefully leave space for a slightly better idea to come after it. Yeah, Bitcoin success is that is testament to it being a good idea. This really is that simple.

35:57 And then, yeah, you know, I think what the rest, you know, Bitcoin and then the rest. And the rest is this, you know, more dynamic process of birth and, you know, rebirth and death. And, you know, of all these different ideas to, you know, move in a plethora of different directions. So, yeah, people don’t need to worry too much about, you know, defining what’s good and what’s bad. Because if the idea is still around and being used, it’s a good idea.

36:21 Yeah, for sure. There’s a funny looking, very iconic building, not far from us, maybe a mile away. It’s kind of an inside out building. It’s stainless steel. There’s elevators on the outside and all the pipes on the outside.

36:36 You know, when it was built, I think 30 years ago, maybe more, maybe 40 years ago, it was probably one of the most avant-garde architectural designs for the city of London, which is where the banking history is, let alone London. I wonder if you tell us about that building, maybe a little bit of the history of the business around that building and maybe how that even came to why you guys are called names. Yeah, so you’re talking about Lloyd’s of London.

37:02 Lots of people think it’s really ugly, and I think I’ve said a few times it’s the most expensive real estate in London and the ugliest. But I think that’s not correct. It’s like growing on me in this, yeah, it’s like proud of its difference. Yeah, Lloyd’s of London, it’s 350 million years old. No, it’s not a dinosaur, not that much of a dinosaur.

37:24 It’s a 350-year-old market that started selling freight cover in these small mutuals, Lloyd’s Coffee House, really, I believe, started as a genuine coffee space for underwriters to come together and ride each other’s business. It has gone through an unbelievable level of iteration since then. There’s not many businesses around that are 350 years old. And the main core kind of peak, pivotal, more modern event, I think, for Lloyd’s was around the 80s, where they have these concept of Lloyd’s names, which is sort of the modern, we derive our modern version of our name, which are high net worth individuals that can sort of pledge their capital through their Lloyd’s accounts into the market.

38:19 And they’re called a name, N-A-M-E. N-A-M-E, yeah, you’re Lloyd’s name. And I think there are around 40,000 of them in the 1980s. There was this big asbestos drama where the Lloyd’s names had unlimited liabilities. There were lots of unknown losses that came to the market requiring claims.

38:38 And there’s a great article of how Lloyd’s names lost their shirt or something, where people were remortgaging their homes and being left with these huge losses that they couldn’t cover. And so the unlimited liability names have gone from 40,000 down to a few hundred. And I think there’s about 2,000 Lloyd’s names today. About 95 plus percent of the capital deployed into Lloyd’s is, they’re called corporate members, is all private equity money and large institutional money now.

39:12 But we really love the idea of individuals who don’t necessarily need to be these big high net worths being able to deploy their capital in a similar way. And Lloyd’s has built this unbelievably profound model for layering risk and diversifying that exposure. They have some lines that weren’t hit in some of the world’s most dramatic chaotic events. And obviously down the stack, it pays every valid claim that has ever come to the market has been paid. They have this what’s called the Lloyd Central Fund, which is kind of a backstop to the market.

39:55 So it allows further diversification by being this kind of pool of last resort. I think it’s about two and a half, three billion dollars and so on. And Lloyd’s therefore over 350 years can claim that it’s never not paid a valid claim. And you can insure anything at Lloyd’s, right? Famously.

40:15 Yeah, they’ve got like a museum at the building and it’s sort of satellites and famous people’s butts and stuff like that. What are the weird ones? Are those the weird ones? Yeah, I mean, those are some of the weird ones. Yeah, you know, there’s some great I think like the Beatles have got their slip in there as well.

40:30 You know, the Lloyd slip for insuring. I don’t know what they were insuring, but something to do with the Beatles. Yeah, I mean, it’s one of these wonderful places that has had to digitize and actually is one of the drivers of some of the innovation in the space. But it’s doing so it’s such a grand scale. It does about 35 billion of premiums a year.

40:52 You know, there’s a lot of business that flows through that model. And the model centers around syndicates. These are just segregated pools that are writing their own book of business. And they have all these different ways of getting capital, you know, to be managed within the syndicate and they’re managed by these managing agents. And it’s a very, you know, the schematic of Lloyd’s is this kind of chaotic diagram of the lines here and there and everywhere.

41:17 But yeah, part of their innovation is allowing the syndicates to operate on more innovative models. And, you know, we would say one of our drivers is to have, you know, if we start with USDC, so the leading stablecoin, you know, and compliance and things like that as registered funds at Lloyd’s. So like becoming an accepted collateral source for claims. And, you know, this is completely aligned with the circle guys and should be at all the major stablecoins is having that collateral source as an accepted source for paying claims is, you know, surely one of the biggest wins for the digital asset space that people are just going to be using this to be able to access some of these really mature markets.

42:03 So yeah, it’s got a wonderful history. Insurance is a law of large numbers. It’s a massive space. So it does move very slowly. And that’s why some of the more innovative solutions now are getting good traction because there’s so many people from the inside who want to see these changes.

42:20 And my comment about, you know, some of the boring stuff. You know, this is like the bane of, you know, entire companies lives is that you don’t have automatic reporting or, you know, this premium pairing problem where there’s a counselor left in all different places. They still have physical slips called, you know, Lloyd slips. People are making stamps in 2024 on a piece of paper and then it gets input wrong. You know, there’s a figure behind how much that costs and, you know, bad inputs.

42:48 So it’s just a wildly inefficient space, but that’s not to say anything. I’m not trying to be politically correct, like it’s not saying anything about the space because, you know, it’s so big. So it’s nice to be one of the smaller players working on these different solutions that the space seems most susceptible to understanding now, even more so than five years when we started. Will you ever tap into the Lloyd’s marketplace? Yeah, so we actually have a program on names that can write up to 160 million of cover for DNO, tech errors and omissions, you know, some property for miners, I believe.

43:28 So there’s about 10 or 11 different lines of business that that program will write. They have the ability for about 160 million of capacity or exactly that amount. And that’s a pass-through facility to a Lloyd Syndicate. And we have that now. That’s been approved all the way up the stack by the Syndicate owner, by Lloyd’s, by the underwriter, which is Evitas.

43:50 So that’s a real program that people can buy, you know, DNO cover in USDC now. And that’s just one step of how you can start to see this chaotic schematic of lines reaching over to our mini chaotic schematic of lines. Can anybody go over to Lloyd’s and take a look? Have you been on the floor? Well, yeah, I have a few times. Yeah, it’s sort of, you know, you had the trading floors, which I wasn’t a part of.

44:22 But I mean, I think you were closer to that world in the 2000s, for example, people waving, you know, the market makers, you know, all of that. So, you know, it’s sort of like that insurance is kind of 20 years behind. But no, it’s a beautiful building inside. And I’m changing, you know, my stance on saying I’m out. You’re getting older. You know, I had Grant Cardone here a few weeks ago.

44:48 He owns, I think, a billion or two of assets in real estate. And he came to London specifically to renegotiate his insurance. And he went down to Lloyd’s and was checking it out. I was watching his videos. I actually didn’t know it was a marketplace for the longest time. I didn’t know what went inside that weird looking building.

45:04 And it’s really interesting. Like you said, there’s not many businesses that have been around that long. And it’s a fascinating model. I think it’s interesting for people to know about as well. At the same time, though, it’s not really innovating in a digital sense.

45:17 No, exactly. And I think it probably knows that they spent a lot of money on, you know, digital systems. And they haven’t become truly adopted within the market. And they’ve got the capabilities to do that. So, yeah, I think they’ve got Lloyd’s lab. They’re really leaning into kind of innovation from the outside.

45:36 And, you know, hopefully there’s a nice collaboration between those two forces over time. Let’s talk about that real quick, because, you know, the innovator’s dilemma states that they’ll never figure it out. And like I was in the city, I was actually working as an inter-dealer broker. So I was arranging transactions between Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, et cetera. And I was a voice broker.

45:54 So at the end of the day, I had a relationship with a trader on the other side. And we would complete, you know, derivatives transactions. At the same time, we had an electronic platform that had lower fees and the market was moving there. But, you know, it was never in the company’s interest to go there because we were making money in the traditional way. And so a lot of time it takes a disruptor, you know, that’s all digital that comes in and pushes the market forward.

46:19 And maybe that’s why you come into play. But do you believe that it’s that simple, that innovator’s dilemma? Do you think it takes an outside party to do that? Do you think a big become a conglomerate or a big entity will never be able to innovate? Well, no, I mean, you know, we’ve got lots of examples. I think a big company is making previous products obsolete.

46:39 I think it’s easier when your DNA is tech, you know, the Giants, you know, Apple, et cetera, in the 90s and so forth. You know, that that was the that was their process. They understood that that was their business because the the barrier to entry became lower. Lots of VC capital, you know, telling a person in a garage to go and sing garage now garage to go and, you know, go go go and do as much damage as you can to the status quo and will give you endless amounts of capital to do so.

47:12 I think it’s a little different in the in the, you know, in an industry like insurance, because, you know, for example, you have these more disruptive, full stack insurance companies, Lemonade, Hippo. There’s a whole plethora of them who haven’t been able to prove, as far as I’m aware, the latest numbers that they have a better combined ratio or loss ratio than the status quo. And again, that’s this kind of law of large numbers problem or just, you know, phenomenon of how insurance works.

47:44 So, you know, I think something like AI, for example, they could potentially strip out, you know, double digit efficiencies in the value chain as a percentage have real interesting applications. And you’re starting to see the bigger guys actually lead the way in a way with something like AI, because AI is understandable. We all know chat GPT and we can use it, you know, your day to day person is like, it’s like WhatsApp for, but there’s no one on the other end, basically.

48:16 And so the big insurance, you know, you got to ensure tech conference and you have some of the big insurance companies putting forwards what, you know, how they’re using AI and how this is going to change the industry. You know, obviously, there’s a dynamic of, you know, positioning and how much are they actually doing and so forth. But it seems like they’re actually doing quite a lot. So, you know, it’s a complex dynamic, I think. But I don’t I think some of the real big, you know, Lloyd’s power specifically is, you know, this global, I think, 197 countries of licensing, something like that, basically, you know, every country.

48:54 And, you know, you can’t you can’t disrupt, you can’t innovate around that, you know, it’s taken them a good amount of decades to have that sort of thing. So I think the tech, you know, it’s going to be a nice collaboration between the industry and tech companies, whereas the big guys are going to allow more innovation to come up from the roots. There’s going to be lots of acquisitions, excuse me, whereas, yeah, in tech, I think the big giants, not that they don’t go for acquisitions, but they also innovate internally much more.

49:29 Yeah, you mentioned AI now three or four times. Yeah, I know. Sorry. I don’t have a huge amount on it. But let’s go into it because it’s changing every industry and maybe yours more than anything else, because it’s, you know, I think about insurance, you know, I used to trade, you know, interest rate derivatives.

49:47 I mean, at the end of the day, there’s a yield curve. And, you know, I don’t have weird contracts, weird counterparties, weird risks. I mean, everything’s quite standardized in that industry. When I look at your industry, it seems like there’s much more, like you said, efficiency you can find with the right AI tools. So how will AI play into names, your company, and then the industry as a whole?

50:12 I mean, you talk about double digit potential efficiency saving, that’s massive, right? Yeah, I mean, the big one for me is that, you know, blockchain and AI kind of put together is what’s the collaboration, it’s unclear in most of the cases. For me, it seems like almost one of the most, yeah, one of the most powerful things about blockchain is these, you know, permissionless peer to peer networks. And the problem that the space has had, you know, as I can talk about going to the masses, is that there are lots of centralized functions that need to be carried out.

50:47 For example, a KYC check, or in the insurance industry, you’ve got lots of centralized functions, the role that a broker plays, the role an underwriter plays, a claims admin, a fund manager. There’s lots and lots and lots of different centralized functions that are currently being carried out by big, expensive companies. You know, have lots of people that, you know, need salaries and that’s, you know, employment’s a good thing. But, you know, in general, it’s a very expensive industry because it requires lots of people to do the job.

51:20 And the interesting thing about AI, you know, maybe going forwards 10 years, is that it can be employed to carry out these centralized functions in a way that doesn’t require feeding. So you can then place that centralized function on blockchain infrastructure, and the blockchain infrastructure doesn’t have to, you know, have this sort of slightly awkward mix between centralized functions and its underlying, you know, transparency and permissionless nature. And so you can have, you can almost imagine, you know, an AI underwriter, an AI fund, you know, capital allocator, an AI claims admin, or maybe some parametric triggers there, which are predetermined claims processes, or claim triggers operating on a peer-to-peer network.

52:16 And that seems to be this sort of, there’s definitely something in that is this kind of holy grail of how a risk transfer can work. You have capital on one side, you have people being insured on the other, but everything in the middle is purely automated. And there’s a competition between underwriting AIs that allows capital to be allocated more efficiently and so forth. So, you know, there is, at the moment, AI and insurance is more around, you know, alleviating stress in a claims process for end users, you know, customer service, these bots and things.

52:51 AI underwriting is for sure being spoken about. There’s a few, you know, rumors of, you know, the last underwriter at a kind of $300 million premium MGA, and the states has, you know, retired, and now they have no underwriters. It’s all AI. So there’s starting to be signs of, you know, real active deployment of this technology. And I think that’s in part because AI is much better understood on a, just on a human level than blockchain ever was, which is why the sort of blockchain abstraction is so key.

53:24 It’s just going to become a layer of the internet that you’re operating these sorts of things on. So that would be how I would characterize it, as AI can come in and carry out centralized functions and don’t need to take anything out, strip anything out of the process. So that’s sort of exciting for us for sure. And a lot of it, you know, particularly around AI underwriting will be to do with accessibility for data. I think there could be new data models where there’s an incentive for people to deploy data in return for, you know, getting getting covers and insurance companies or, you know, big capital allocators.

54:03 So, you know, lots of different possibilities there. But yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see how it develops. Nice. Can you tell me a bit about your partnership with Coinbase?

54:13 Yeah, I mean, we do we do a lot of different things with Coinbase. We’re built on base. So we’re on the layer two. And so that allows us to operate in this much more gas efficient environment. So that’s been a really nice collaboration.

54:33 Yeah, I mean, we have a there’s a fund called Members Capital Management that’s just come out of stealth. So they’ve announced to the world that kind of feed a fund onto names. They’re using us to run their own their own programs. So I hope the space will start to hear much more about them over the next of the coming months. That’s a fund owned by Coinbase.

54:55 It’s not owned by Coinbase, but they have a working arrangement with a relationship with Coinbase. That’s been a nice collaboration between the three of us and some other parties. You know, again, more more to come out about that. But but no, I mean, Coinbase are a very kind of supportive force. We were backed by Coinbase Ventures on two occasions on the venture side.

55:14 So just, you know, staying staying close to what we see as a company that’s built, you know, a very good footing and continuing to put out products like base that are really part of this kind of ethos of open finance. That’s a powerful partnership to have, especially in the space of finance, because look, they’re based in America and, you know, they’re potentially going to be the chosen one. And, you know, crossing all the I’s and dotting the T’s or the opposite of that, you know, is a great way to then segue into the traditional financial system.

55:48 And, you know, being involved with Coinbase is very choosy. That’s a great partnership to have. Right. Am I seeing that correctly? Yeah, I think so. I mean, they’ve done a lot of work with the more traditional allocators to get them comfortable with the tooling.

56:00 So just basic, you know, from deploying into Coinbase Prime with dollars all the way up to web through wallets and interacting with DeFi. So, yeah, I think they’ve they’ve been one of the characters that’s been paving the education that’s been needed for these these bigger guys to get involved. And obviously, you know, the initial product market fit was getting your everyday retail user engaging in this technology. And as people know, the rabbit hole, as it’s called, is once you have a way of getting in, that’s sort of easy enough and isn’t so much of a big step, which happens even with the institutions.

56:40 Even understanding something like stablecoins is becoming quite very common and comfortable for these big institutions now is then there’s a whole range of products that can take you all the way to, you know, not your keys, not your crypto and the digging holes in the garden and whatever. And you can go along the whole chain with Coinbase and then beyond Coinbase into peer DeFi. And that’s a nice, you know, option. It gives good optionality for people wanting to engage in different ways.

57:13 Yeah, I also think the U.S. government uses Coinbase to keep the custody of the Bitcoin they seized from the Silk Road. Right. And, you know, and then also a lot of collaboration. Yeah, it’s really interesting.

57:23 I mean, meanwhile, they also have a little bit of a combative relationship with the SEC, but another branch of the government trusts Coinbase to hold the assets and potentially liquidate them. That’s always interesting. And so, yeah, a lot of people use them. Obviously, a lot of the Bitcoin ETFs use Coinbase as kind of their agent. Yeah, I think they were eight out of eleven custody for the ETF. So yeah, very plugged into what’s going on.

57:46 Excellent. And for you, you’re issuing a token soon. So there’s that process of token generation. What’s that process like? And then I’d love to get a little further to what the names token does, because it sounds like yours isn’t just purely a lot of people generate tokens and it’s in a marketplace like yours.

58:05 It gets you access to some premium deal flow, but it sounds like your token itself will be a way to get exposure to insurance risk, which is really interesting. So tell me about what is that process like for you? Only say as much as you can say, I guess. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, the process is you know, there are lots of different parties involved in launching a token and you can put there at the same time.

58:29 I think there were two thousand meme coins launched on Solana every day. So you can take, you know, as hands off or as quick as approaches you like or, you know, trying to get something out there that’s going to be going to be really driving utility across the market. And that’s important for its for its holders for, you know, the years and decades to come is the idea. So, you know, we’re taking the latter approach. We’re working with, you know, a lot of market makers and the listing exchanges and the launch pads and, you know, there’s just a whole plethora of characters that you want to, you know, do your research and make sure that you’re, you know, putting this potentially in the hands of holders who want to know that there’s been a tremendous amount of DD behind it. And, you know, people take the other approach like just get it out.

59:23 But we really do want this to be a core part of our design. And actually, the original design of the name token was like three years old and had just gone through so much thinking of these different cycles. And as we have it now, essentially, it’s really our way of serving as I talk about this curve between traditional finance and DeFi. It’s our way of serving the latter part of the curve is a more open way to engage around the governance of a pool, a liquidity pool.

59:58 We call it the names liquidity facility. And that’s a pool in its own right that can allocate into different risks, similar to the senior risk pool in a way. But it’s open to a different range of backers. So those that are more interested in, you know, open access to a token they can buy on a third party exchange, they can come and deploy directly. You don’t have direct exposure to insurance risk in this model. It’s, you know, the value is derived from the perceived performance of that pool and you’re kind of rewarded from your governance of it.

1:00:36 So it’s a more open model compared to the senior risk pool, which is your KYC sophisticated investor, you’re going in and holding a participation ownership in that program. And that’s very directly you’re on the hook for claims. So yeah, and then the second purpose of the names liquidity facility, which again is governed and backed by token holders, is to provide liquidity. Tokenization doesn’t just lead to liquidity. You need liquidity depth. And we are excited to see some of these funds come in and provide some of that liquidity depth.

1:01:17 So you’re, you know, as you said, you’ve got a thousand pounds, you come in, you’re back to program, you might want to leave, and there has to be a buyer. And so the liquidity facility will be one of those buyers where we’ll be able to place bid and offers on all the different programs across the market. And as you know, the deeper that comes, the more we’ll be able to not guarantee liquidity, but, you know, support liquidity over these different strategies.

1:01:43 Some funds are OK with the year. Some have 90 days. Some, you know, great use cases have seen your instant liquidity or, you know, three day liquidity. So it’s, you know, it’s really just an open way of building a more decentralized insurance pool that then has this clear kind of liquidity utility for the market. That’s such an important concept. And, you know, liquidity, I don’t think is that well understood in the Web3 world.

1:02:11 And I think people get so they get so spoiled with the concept of liquidity. You know, there’s a picture of me on the wall with Max Kaiser when I bought my first Bitcoin in 2013. And needless to say, there were no liquidity providers then. And I remember the mid market was like 85 bucks and I had to pay 100 bucks that day to get a Bitcoin because I had to wait for a seller to decide to come in and sell me one Bitcoin. And when I was on Wall Street, specifically when I used to go down to the Chicago pits where there’s 300 literally liquidity providers in there that are the size of a house each yelling and screaming.

1:02:43 But you get to see the value of liquidity. I actually had to play with some BRC 20 tokens recently. And you quickly realize there ain’t no liquidity there. And it’s like, man, it’s like literally like an order form. And I think Web3, you know, degens and stuff, they get a little spoiled with the fact that they just assume it’s there, like air is there when you breathe.

1:03:05 But like liquidity is something that it’s a huge need if you want an active marketplace. And providing it’s not simple. But once you provide it, that will make or break a marketplace. So it’s really important. Yeah, it’s about incentives. You know, you’re incentivizing liquidity to grow over time. And the market makers that I think have changed, you know, they’ve had a narrative shift to liquidity providers, or maybe the other way around, they get confused.

1:03:35 But yeah, they’ve been some of the real use cases for the space. I mean, you know, we must have met 20 plus market makers in our search for the right ones. And, you know, there’s many, many more beyond that. I think you had some of the bigger guys come in early on. And then there’s been a whole spread of different models that have come after that.

1:03:52 But yeah, there’s clearly a need there. And again, it’s a great win for the lower barriers of entry. I think you can come in and basically be a liquidity provider as an individual. You know, you see sort of the Uniswap model and so forth. Lots of different innovation in that world. And, you know, the order form that you’re talking about, it’s the same in insurance. Or there’s not even an order form.

1:04:21 So, you know, it’s like you take the baby steps to first there’s an order form and it’s a limit only and it’s an on-chain order book. And then you can start making this much more, you know, depth, narrow spreads, build the liquidity pools, build the incentives for the funds. You know, in theory, we were saying you can come in as a fund, you can back the same risks that you already do, but you can also provide liquidity to a demographic of backers, you know, of investors that really put a premium on liquidity.

1:04:50 So maybe you want access to the asset class, but the number one thing for you is liquidity. Whereas a fund, the number one thing for them is, you know, pricing. You know, good priced returns, they’re going to be there for three, four, five, ten years. And they can provide liquidity to the other side of the market who want access to the same pricing as they have, but, you know, can take a small spread or a small haircut to be able to leave. And that becomes a little alpha for the, you know, for the fund that doesn’t exist in the traditional space, really. So, yeah, there’s some nice incentives that we can start to grow over time.

1:05:27 Yeah, that’s very interesting. How big is the insurance market? I mean, I wonder if you could give people an idea. I mean, you made allusions to Berkshire Hathaway, which is Warren Buffett’s massive fund. And he loves reinsurance. He’s been in it for a long time where he takes the exposure of other insurance companies and it’s a model he loves.

1:05:45 But I mean, I’m just kind of putting in perspective the potential growth of names because it’s a massive market, right? Yeah, I mean, I think if, you know, if you look at the biggest industries in the world, you know, health insurance, health life insurance and property and casualty, you know, both in the top six or something like that. So, you know, obviously one of these core just like staple industries in the world. More specifically, yeah, the Berkshire Hathaway is a good example.

1:06:16 I mean, I think what happened is the hedge fund, if you’re a hedge fund, you know, you’re making really good returns at the lower levels. I mean, these are still obscene numbers, you know, you’ve got a hundred million dollar fund, you’re making 80%, whatever it is. You know, that only happens for a certain period of time. You can’t, you know, 10 billion, 20 billion, you know, these like, and then weigh up. Insurance is something that provides returns all the way up the scale. So you can deploy that amount of capital into the reinsurance industry and you can sustain those returns at scale.

1:06:54 Whereas, yeah, if you build a successful hedge fund, you’re probably going to hit a ceiling on those kinds of returns. And lots of the hedge funds did create these sort of Berkshire Hathaway type models where they become these reinsurance enterprises. So, yeah, I mean, it’s a big space. And, you know, InsureTech has really branched off from FinTech, you know, as of five, six, seven years ago now and is really, you know, a pretty vibrant, you know, active lives space of innovation.

1:07:23 So the insurance industry, InsureTech or an insurance conference, you know, they’re almost hopefully becoming a little more interchangeable now because, yeah, insurance does its thing and knows what it’s up to. And any innovation going on is going to be tech focused. So plenty of room to scale. There’s some amazing sort of companies in our competitive environment that we only hope for success in because, yeah, there’s plenty of room for lots of success and there’s lots of education that they’re going through and that we’re going through that’s helping each party.

1:08:01 So, you know, you don’t want to be too early, particularly with how you’re executing a strategy, but you can be very early in the general space so that you’re considered as some of these early partners that will see successes. You know, Enturo, Re, you know, these are two companies that are really doing some good stuff. Twelve months from now, what does names look like? What are the goals you want to hit? What are those milestones for sizes or, you know?

1:08:30 Hopefully a token out. That would be nice. Will that help your business a lot? It’s a core component of its utility, for sure. This isn’t like a random thing that we’re throwing out and hoping, you know, sticks.

1:08:46 It’s a core piece of how we’re looking to, you know, increase access to different types of backers and bring capital into the market. And then, yeah, we’re launching the SRP and raising capital for that. And so that, you know, we hope will be a decent size. And obviously the capital we bring in, you know, on a leverage basis can write much more in premium, you know, your total limit. So that kind of increased protection, you know, we very much want to be north of $100 million for the space on the side of this kind of $160 million of capacity for these other lines.

1:09:24 Yeah, it’s really getting the sort of education of the model out so that people, you know, we’re simplifying the narrative kind of like the single entry point by the SRP is like you don’t necessarily have to understand all of the stuff behind the curtains. Obviously you can. There are no curtains. But if you don’t want to, it really is, you know, simple there. And there’s an AI challenge, sorry, a UI challenge in there, which I think we’re getting right. And, you know, a number of other things to tick off.

1:09:53 So yeah, 12 months, this is a real I mean, you know, every every year we sort of say this is the year. But there’s so many parts of the jigsaw that we’ve, you know, that we’ve colored in now. It’s and they’ve kind of all slotted into place. So next 12 months is just executing on that. OK, 10 years from now, where his names look like, you know, is this something that might be, you know, acquired by alloys or is since it’s actually on chain and Web three, it can’t be per se like what do you think it becomes?

1:10:22 And then are you still involved or not? Like, you know, what does he think that looks like? Yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, the team will still have me. You know, I said to a colleague that this is the sort of thing that you could do forever.

1:10:37 It’s quite dramatic. But, you know, people there’s lots of there’s a burnout problem, I think, in the entrepreneurship world. There’s lots of people get attached to their responsibility, lots of investors, lots of people kind of looking at you to execute. I think we’ve built certainly a good culture amongst the team where of like longevity, you know, people can have very little turnover. People can stay in these jobs and it’s sort of become a kind of a close knit group of executors.

1:11:06 So, yeah, certainly no, no, I don’t see myself jumping, jumping ship and moving out of it. But 10 years is difficult, isn’t it? Because that’s the idea of, you know, you overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term of just change and exponential growth and things like that. So, yeah, who knows? I think being seen as a core component to the risk transfer stack for Lloyd syndicates, for insurance companies and the company markets.

1:11:38 Just, you know, I think if we can be part of the companies that make blockchains something that people aren’t so radically scared of or even something that they need to worry about too much would be a really good outcome for the space. And then, yeah, 10 years. I mean, I said 10 years earlier about AI. I think that is quite an exciting space to start learning about and building expertise and human resource to try to be another driver forward. That’s where the satisfaction comes from, is that you’re part of a conversation amongst your peers of competitors of like how this should develop.

1:12:18 And then it’s like a fun competition of who can execute better because that’s best for the space. And if the space is big enough, then it’s best for both of you and your users. So, yeah, 10 years becomes more exciting because, you know, possibilities around this. We had this moment of, you know, five years ago, we set out to achieve what we achieved, you know, now, which is five years later. And that’s a nice moment to realize that this, you know, it’s sort of a play the manifestation narrative or something.

1:12:46 It’s like you really can just put a desire in there and really, you know, corral people around that idea and, you know, hey, presto, you got this. So, yeah, I should be careful about what I say we’ll be doing 10 years because maybe we’ll be doing it. But you love this industry and you want to be a part of driving it and innovating it for a long time. And that gives you tons of satisfaction. And it’s such a big industry that this could be a lifelong pursuit in a good way.

1:13:12 Yeah, I love tech and change and innovate, you know, that sort of movement, you know, forward movement. There’s a problem we can solve it. You know, there’s lots of people that, yeah, sadly, sort of just sleep through all of that. You know, there are lots of companies that need people to do a job. And, you know, you hope that, yeah, you can be part of, like, there’s a problem.

1:13:34 And I have the freedom and flexibility to go and try and solve it with a group of similar people. That’s the process. I don’t know if it even needs to be insurance. You know, if we’re looking 10, 20 years, it’s just that process, you know, getting, you know, people around a problem into the same space and, you know, setting paths to correct it. So I can be very, very broad. I actually don’t come from an insurance background pre-five years ago, pre-names.

1:14:04 We obviously have brought in, you know, a huge amount of insurance expertise. So, rest assured, that’s, you know, that’s a great expertise in names. But, yeah, for me, it’s like we had a product offsite last week. You know, there were just nine of us that came together to, you know, solve a lot of problems and set the new path and or set an evolving path. That, to me, I’m in my element in those moments.

1:14:27 That’s nice. And, yeah, it’s fascinating to think that far out. I’m like, what’s actually going to be happening then? I know. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we think like AI, I mean, maybe AI will be figured out in a couple of years and people will be thinking about something else. So none of it will be around at all. And yeah, you just don’t know.

1:14:43 How are you able to keep such low turnover from your team? You know, I know you’re a distributed team. There’s rumors you guys got all got VR headsets. But like, how did you do that? And what are some of the details that allow you to keep a team together? Because it’s not easy.

1:14:58 Yeah, I mean, the VR headsets were voted out by the team after about a year. So, an innovation that will continue to monitor, but it hasn’t got there yet. Too many nauseous people or, you know, you have to do your updates at the beginning. We were doing it every week, but I was one of the two people on the team that wanted to keep it. But, yeah, we vetoed that.

1:15:20 Yeah, like, you know, because we talk about culture a lot, and I don’t think culture is something that you impose. Culture comes organically by the types of people that you bring in. So you try to hire well, because every person that you hire is an addition of culture instead of someone that you’re imposing, you know, sort of cultural rules. You know, we sometimes think, are we meant to be deriving what the culture is from that organic process and writing it down, if you like.

1:15:49 But, and sometimes, you know, you might have a comment like, yeah, what is our culture? And, but it’s, you know, that’s another really interesting, almost completely unrelated part of growing the business. And it’s all very, very tied together. But the day-to-day things that you’re trying to solve for can sometimes completely, you know, not take into account the fact that the culture as a general shorthand is the thing that makes people stay there and be able to stay there as well.

1:16:23 You know, you do have people that get burnt out and, you know, the company has to shift and, you know, expand for that. So, yeah, it’s more of an unknown. We’re trying to leave it as natural as possible and seems to be, you know, working for the most part. We’re not without our challenges. You know, people is such a core part that has nothing to do with your proposition that people have got to keep sight of.

1:16:46 And I think we do that quite well. And then, you know, my co-founder, our exec team, very, very close, very comfortable having, you know, what externally might be seen as arguments or whatever. It’s like just very comfortable in that world of the messy process of innovation and problem solving. Always have each other’s backs. That does feel like it filters down to the general comfort of being in a difficult place, which is the place of figuring out problems. So, yeah, that’s been a really rewarding part of names.

1:17:19 It’s such a complex, you know, it’s such a complex issue when you get it right. It’s a beautiful thing. When you get it wrong, it can kill a great business idea, a great product market fit, and it can all be over. What’s the state of crypto and what do you think it’s going in the next five or ten years? This has been a really interesting year.

1:17:36 I think we were talking it off camera before. I mean, we’re about to see leading presidential candidates speaking at Bitcoin conferences. We got not one, but two ETFs, which last year, most people wouldn’t think would happen in a potential Solana ETF, even who knows before you’re in, maybe. You got all sorts of forward thinking possibilities, innovations, developments, bull markets. What do you thoughts? What happens next?

1:18:02 Yeah, I mean, the ETFs as a specific example is kind of a funny 180 almost. I mean, I’m not necessarily saying it’s all the same parties, but sentiment seems to change so quickly. So, you know, it’s rat poison and then suddenly an ETF is available and, you know, it’s doing unbelievable amounts of volumes every day. So, you know, where is it going? I would say on the technology layer is your abstraction. So a kind of abstraction, chain abstraction, you know, being able to interact with the tech in a way, as I’ve mentioned, that it doesn’t matter.

1:18:38 You don’t have to be moving between blockchains. You don’t have to be understanding the nuances of the different blockchains. Yeah, that really puts the onus on the projects that are bringing solutions to the users. You know, are the users there because they’re in the first early adopting camp of we love blockchain and crypto, or are they there because you’re actually providing some utility to their life, professional and their personal life. So there’s going to have to be a real, you know, UX, UI proposition narrative product market fit responsibility that will come out of abstraction because suddenly this, you know, when you abstract away all of the complexity, if you like, which the application layer did well with the internet, is suddenly all of these companies that perhaps have some attention because they’re working with interesting technology and not going to have a use case.

1:19:34 So I think that’s one trend in terms of kind of crypto and how people are engaging with it. The ETFs have sort of made it a little bit more of an acceptable asset class now, I think. You know, you don’t need to be an anarchist, you know, that’s that’s burying your wallet to protect your funds to kind of engage with the asset class and then people can just make their own decision on, you know, whether that’s part of the construction of their portfolio.

1:20:02 I think a step beyond that is maybe these different asset classes can maybe start to eat into some of the more traditional asset classes. So Bitcoin is often related as compared to digital gold or gold. You know, will that really become a way where you will use Bitcoin as the same sort of strategy that in the past you were purchasing, you know, commodity. So yeah, I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is because I constantly, you know, baffled at how quickly the narrative changes and the sentiment and, you know, like the evil versus suddenly everyone’s diving in.

1:20:45 And I just think for the projects that are out there that are, you know, focused on building things, it’s is make sure that you’re doing something that’s actually valuable. You know, what’s the quote about the tide going out and everybody you see who’s naked. It’s like that. That’s a real obvious. That’s so obviously manifested in crypto and with these big shifts and abstraction and so forth.

1:21:07 That’ll be that’ll be one of those moments in, you know, the kind of 15 year cycles where it’s so clear that there’s a bunch of nonsense going on. But also like fascinating technology as well where maybe you’ll have the flip side as well where people that are providing these utilities. You’ve had this before, your kind of Uniswap use case. There’s a great quote, Eric Boorhees, who was like, these guys are getting vilified for building these things. They should be given Nobel prizes. It’s like, you know, the technology that goes into enabling these interactions, transactions markets is genius.

1:21:40 And so, yeah, I mean, very, very not even hopeful. It was very optimistic about how the space grows and develops. But I think it’s going to be a good thing for people to be speaking less about, you know, how these things are being enabled and more about what they’re enabling. Yeah. Yeah. It’s the market has changed so much.

1:21:59 I still pinch myself when I see Larry Fincke BlackRock, you know, talking about not only Bitcoin ETFs, but everything’s going to be tokenized, you know, and it’s like and not only talking about it. You know, Bitcoin ETF is an option in your portfolio, but as an important option. And meanwhile, is slating, you know, countries that print money and not just Argentina, but like the U.S. and slating inflation and things like that. And I just I think finally, in 2024, you know, it has been kind of given the blessing.

1:22:32 And I think everybody sees that finally. And they got to allow a lot more players to come in. Yeah. Narratives are big. It’s like a prerequisite to activity and adoption, isn’t it?

1:22:43 So, you know, these narrative can be used, you know, in good ways and in bad ways. But for sure, you’re starting, you know, people are putting their reputations and their company’s reputations behind these principles, these concepts now. So that goes a long way. Yeah. Dan, we are super excited to be part of this with you.

1:23:03 I was very impressed when you came on and presented, but the team actually was equally impressed. And these people aren’t from traditional finance like me. They don’t come from the insurance market. You know, they’ve got some blockchain education. You know, maybe they took my course and they’ve been, you know, investing a little bit, but they don’t really necessarily have the deep expertise, but something really connected with you and your business model to where they all wanted in on this.

1:23:28 And I think that’s something you’re experiencing a lot and you’re going to get it going forward. So, like, congrats on what you’ve built so far. It’s super cool, especially if you’re in the blockchain space and you’re used to, I don’t know, like I said, 4% yields in Steak Heen and 2% yields on Aave and not many other choices, liquidity pool. Maybe you want to go in there, maybe you don’t. And no, you could plug in your wallet and get this really interesting, innovative, non-correlated, you know, risk exposure as an option.

1:23:52 Not to mention everything happening behind the scenes for all the potential providers. So it’s really exciting stuff. And I’m pumped. I feel like you’re bringing me, dragging me back into the city a little bit with this model, you know, when I try to get out. But it’s really nice and it’s nice to know I can still use some of my knowledge of that space to be involved in also the Web3 space.

1:24:13 So I just want to thank you for that. How can people start using names, learn more about it, stay in touch with you guys to keep an eye on the TGE, all that good stuff? Yeah, names.com. It’s not book a demo. You can go on, use the application, have a look around on board.

1:24:31 So names.com is the place to be on the token, nametoken.com. N-A-Y-M is the token and names is N-A-Y-M-S.com. That’s right. Yeah, you’ll see us there. And that’s a great place to start.

1:24:46 Yeah, I mean, very, very excited to see what the next 12 months and we’ll see what the next 10 years bring. That’s going to be amazing. All right. Wishing you lots of luck and thanks so much for being a part of it. Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks. Thank you.