Karnika E. Yashwant - WordPress For Web3: How Forward Protocol Is Connecting Blockchain With A Value-Driven Economy

Full transcript: Karnika E. Yashwant on London Real

2:52 I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Karnika E. Yashwant, aka Mr. Key, the blockchain expert, entrepreneur, and author. You are the co-founder of Forward Protocol, which provides toolkits for the blockchain and has been described as WordPress for Web3. You’re also the chairman and managing director of Key Difference Media, a Web3 incubator and marketing partner since 2013.

3:27 You were named India’s youngest CEO in 2010 and started your first company at just 14 years old. Since then, you’ve led multiple businesses to over a billion dollars in revenues. As a speaker, you are renowned for your ability to simplify complex ideas and technical concepts around education, fintech, DeFi, and Web 3 adoption. You ultimately believe blockchain technology will revolutionize every aspect of our lives by promoting decentralization, equitable wealth distribution, and the empowerment of individuals.

3:58 Karnika, welcome to London Real in Dubai. I am super excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. It’s great to have you here.

4:07 And I want to start by saying that Forward Protocol is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, which is 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 andmies. We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network. Karnika, we are super excited to be part of this journey with you.

4:35 So, let’s jump in. Talk to me about Forward Protocol, this WordPress for Web3. It sounds pretty exciting. Why do we need this right now and what is the state of the union of Web3? I mean, we’re early ’24.

4:49 Bitcoin ETF has been approved. You know, what does the future look like and why is Forward Protocol important in that future? Perfect. That’s a very good question. So, we are at a point in time where the power of blockchain is being known to everyone out there.

5:06 But can people use blockchain? That’s the biggest question. Blockchain was created for people to take the benefit of because it provides transparency, decentralization, all those buzzwords. It all sounds great. But what can you do with it?

5:18 I go around asking people. You’re in blockchain for 3 years, 4 years, 5 years. What do you do with it? I trade. Okay.

5:25 What else? I pay people. Sure, fine. But what else can you do with it? Nothing else.

5:30 Why is that the case? If blockchain is so powerful, it can impact all the industries out there. It should be usable by a common man and there’s a huge gap there. Not only in terms of understanding or learning about it, but being able to use it in an effective form. So I looked at the landscape of how the internet technologies evolved in the early 20s.

5:51 It was great, everything was buzzing around, but there was a time when WordPress came to life. Until that point in time, if you wanted to have a website, you would probably spend $10,000. You would spend a month or two months. It was a crusade. You got to create it.

6:09 It’s a big process. But when WordPress came along, it changed everything. It went to a point in time where people would not write a business plan. They would actually put a WordPress website out there and then visualize how the business looks and sounds. And that changed how the internet is perceived.

6:28 Millions of websites around the world came up and people could just do it themselves probably half an hour, 1 hour, 2 hours. And that changed how fast things can grow. E-commerce websites going on there and all of that. So I looked at that and said Web3 as a journey is not very different. It’s similar to how that changed from paper traditional industries to the world of people having their own websites and representing the businesses online, doing business online.

6:56 So how do we replicate or how do we model something that has already worked? We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I believe the best way between point A to point B is the shortest, straightforward one without having to get too creative about it. So when I looked at it, and I found that things need to be made simple, not just made simple from a knowledge standpoint. It has to be made simple from a usage standpoint.

7:20 So I deep dive into the process and we created a system that is very similar, where a community of developers who are trying to right now service their clients by getting paid for their service. They probably get paid few thousand dollars. Here is a product. I work for you by the time and hours. If they can create products and put it out there and generate passive income, where people could buy their products not having to sell $5,000 to a customer, but if they can sell it at $100 to hundreds and hundreds of customers on a recurring basis, they make more money.

7:54 At the same time, they can spend the time to improve what is here rather than delivering something subpar to a lot of people. So now the quality is increased, but the end users can have something in a simple, tangible manner. So what does that look like for an end user? I’m a business owner. I want to have something in the world of blockchain.

8:14 I come here. I look at all the templates. I can deploy so many different use cases. I choose what I like and I can customize that. Put my logo, put my colors, all of that, like in a front end like Canva, Wix, and all the things that you’re used to, image and editing tools.

8:29 So you basically drag and drop all of that. Everything looks good for you. Now you customize the contract in a simple form. Yes, I want this. I don’t want that.

8:38 This should be the parameter. You put all of that in a simple form. You choose the chain. There are 800 chains. You don’t know what chain.

8:45 That’s fine. You have chosen the template. You customized it to your wish. You click a button. It goes live.

8:51 If you can do that in 5 minutes, not one year. I have a business idea in the blockchain space. Are you going to raise funds from the VC because it’s expensive to hire developers? It’s expensive to do everything and it takes 6 months and a year. By the time you probably lost your vision.

9:06 You don’t want that. The time from innovation, from idea to impact, should be very, very less, and if that’s 5 minutes the risk appetite is very, very low and the number of people who can do that goes up. Only when that happens, more innovation comes to life, more creativity comes to life. People should not bother and be concerned about starting a new venture. If it’s a weekend activity on a Saturday, they just spend some time creating a blockchain application out.

9:36 Try it out. It doesn’t have to work. That’s fine. That’s amazing. That’s how blockchain adoption can happen.

9:42 And that’s what Forward represents. Ability to fail as many times as you want before you find that idea that works. Try to test things at the least cost. The entry barrier to blockchain is basically destroyed with Forward Protocol. This is the classic flywheel of capitalism.

9:58 If you can drop the cost of a minimum viable product, I mean, this changes the entire industry. I mean, this is really kind of a lever that can change the whole industry, because like you said, if you’re waiting for a few people to build something, people might make a little money, but actually everybody can make more money if this barrier to entry is just dropped and the frictions go to zero. You actually gave me a flashback here, because, you know, back in 2021 when we started getting into this, I am a content producer.

10:26 I have a WordPress website and we started getting into this, and I was going to actually create some NFTs from an episode and give them to users. As you know, we have a crypto and DeFi academy, and everyone’s like, well, why don’t you incorporate NFTs? And I was like, oh, I have to build a separate website that they can connect their hot wallets and no. And guess what happened? We never did it because it was too hard.

10:49 And I had a bunch of ideas at the time, and guess what? I can’t even remember what they were because I wasn’t allowed to MVP it. And so all of that was lost, and I could never test it in the moment when all that was happening. That was 3 years ago. And so how many countless business models and ideas were lost because of these frictions involved here?

11:08 And especially the beautiful thing about WordPress is that now people are used to being able to create technology on their own, right? Whereas before WordPress, you might argue there wasn’t an equivalent instrument. But now that WordPress set the precedent, if you execute on Forward Protocol, this can really take those people, which are Web2 users typically, and just en masse, onboard them to Web3. I guess for you, the visionary, I’m stating the obvious here, right?

11:36 But I mean, this is what I wish I had a few years ago. To me, it’s not about the impact it can make on the blockchain space. Yes, it makes blockchain space easier, simple, and easy to onboard. But that’s a small part. What is blockchain?

11:48 To me, blockchain is not a technology. It’s a philosophy. Blockchain represents freedom of choice. It represents a point in history where collectively, as humans, we are able to conduct all this economic, social, and political experiments, millions of them at the same time. We are able to figure out what works for us.

12:09 We don’t have to side towards centralization or decentralization, privacy or things protected. We don’t have to worry about choosing it. The businesses in the blockchain space are giving that choice for people to decide in any way they want. We are not forcing them one specific thing for them. And that is a big shift.

12:28 It’s a shift where people are part of the creation. People are part of a moment. It’s part of a revolution. And a company has to change even philosophically how they look at the business world, how they approach the market, and all of that. And if this is making that amount of shift, I don’t think what Forward is doing is just impacting the world of blockchain.

12:52 It’s impacting every single business out there. It is changing the future of all those industries. And the only thing that’s stopping it is people being able to access blockchain for their own life and for their own businesses. You know, I had a similar conversation with Sandeep from Polygon a couple years ago, and he came on my show in ’21, I think, and he said what you just said. He said, “This is not a technology.

13:14 It’s a shift in human paradigm. It’s a shift in this whole classic, this whole narrative we have of ownership and what this all means.” And I went deep with many guests on my show, including, I think it was Stani Kulechov of Aave, when I said, “What are your plans for Aave?” He said, “They’re not my plans. It’s the community’s plans, because I don’t own this anymore.”

13:32 And that’s when I first started to have these, like, real open concepts in my mind that blockchain is different. It changes the classic business model. It changes even VC as we know it, right? And so you’re trying to onboard the world into this brand new paradigm shift by doing this. It’s going to change everything.

13:50 Yeah. Because blockchain is a technology. What’s happening here is that this technology has become a bubble. Within this bubble, there are players who are within the space creating solutions for people within the space. That’s great.

14:03 It’s important. You’re creating new infrastructure. You’re trying to create new solutions. But the bigger market is out there. There’s a huge multi-trillion dollar market.

14:13 All these businesses need something that the blockchain delivers. If that accessibility is brought in, that’s huge, because that is where business happens. That’s where GDP is created. If those individuals and that economy and that value being created can move in, or rather adopt blockchain. It shouldn’t be two industries.

14:34 It should be just one, because I keep thinking about this: blockchain is a distributed database. We have MySQL and all the different databases in the traditional world. When a business adopts a database or adopts a technology there, they don’t think, I am entering a new industry. The first and most important thing I see for the blockchain space is to be dissolving itself. It shouldn’t be an industry.

14:57 It is a technology or a philosophy, but not an industry. The moment the walls break, the moment it dissolves into the Web2, you would come to a point of massive growth. Every person has heard about blockchain right now. If someone has access to internet, they heard about it. What they have not heard about is how or what it does to them.

15:19 Where is that use case explained in a common man’s understanding? They all understand this Bitcoin is trading, the price is going up, and ETF is not helping with that. ETF only focuses back on the trading aspect of it. Great. It’s the digital gold.

15:33 You save your money, you make money. That’s great. But real money is not just made on the speculative side. Real money is made on value creation: creating a business, creating an asset. That’s where money is made.

15:46 So why is that focus not given to the audience out there, and that shift is what I’m looking for, and that shift is what I’m really passionate about. Yeah, I can tell. I mean, up until now, you could say the blockchain space, it’s been inward looking, right? Preaching to the choir. And I think you said to me before, you said, I asked people what you do in blockchain.

16:06 No, I trade. You trade the assets, or I build games for people that understand DeFi and GameFi, that aren’t fun, but you get to collect tokens, and it’s like, what are you doing? And the right and the gamers come back and they say, “The game needs to do one thing first. It needs to be fun, and all you guys are wasting time with your little tokens and NFTs.” And like, we’ve heard that criticism, and it’s probably correct.

16:26 And up until now, yeah, okay, you can trade your cryptos, great, but like, where’s the real use case? That’s probably been the biggest criticism, the biggest fair criticism of blockchain is that we’ve been in our own world, and maybe this is how all great, I don’t know, movements, cults maybe they do start inward looking, maybe so. But now it’s time to graduate and grow up and be big boys and girls and to do that it has to create value, right? And incorporate in the rest of the technology.

16:52 So you look at it like MySQL. When someone adopts it, it’s a technology that makes our business better. Same with blockchain, and you believe that Forward Protocol is going to be that kind of gateway drug, that thing that will onboard these all these companies, these Web2 companies, per se. I mean, I don’t believe there should be one person or entity responsible for this, which is why in Forward we don’t want to be the educators. We don’t want to be the creators of ideas and templates.

17:21 We want the community to be the one. So we want the developers to create a product, put it there and educate the users on how to use the product for their business, create that material, create that use case for themselves and market it, because it’s them, their product, their passion. They understand it. Now, if I were to do it, I can hire hundreds of people, but that’s the limit of what I could do. But now if every developer is going out and doing it, that becomes a billion dollar market.

17:51 It’s sizable and it’s scalable to a point where everyone’s passion, interest and their futures aligned with it, and when everything aligns, that is when the growth can happen. It’s not just about products and people. It’s about their passions and their energy and their mind. It has to keep thinking about it. How do I take my supply chain idea that I have right here?

18:13 It’s a product that I created. I put it on Forward Protocol right now. How do I take this and get it to more people? What do I do? What do I educate?

18:21 What are the examples? I should become a content creator to put that information out, because I believe the supply chain is an important part of it. I believe this can change the future of food and energy sector. We need them and their ideas and interest to come to life, and I just want Forward to be that enabling platform that beautiful ground, which is ripe, which is ready for fertile crops right now for people to sow the seeds and reap the rewards out of.

18:50 Now, your token generation event is coming up very soon, but you guys have been doing this since 2018. I mean, you really have been behind the scenes building this. You’ve got a lot of partners. You’re on a lot of chains. You actually have a lot of real income coming through.

19:06 And I wonder if you could talk about that journey, where the product is right now. Is it ready to plug into big businesses and be used? And then the last thing I want to ask you is about the area you’ve had success in so far. I think it’s in real world assets. And does that compare a little bit to, like, Amazon starting with books?

19:22 That was their first revenue. Is that like for you? But in the future it could be anything. So it’s a bunch of questions in one. However you want to start on that.

19:30 Okay. So when we started out, we were trying to bring a specific product to the world of blockchain. So we worked with some research institutes like Cambridge Blockchain Society and many others, and we were trying to figure out the best way to make this work, and then we realized this huge market cap. So when we created Forward, the idea was to make it work for all industries. Something that is industry agnostic, region agnostic, and even product agnostic, just a pure raw infrastructure which is simplified to the core.

20:03 So we went on the journey to build the product. We built version one, version two, and right now we’re in version three. Every single time it was not an upgrade. We put a product out there. We took the feedback.

20:14 We saw what people were doing and what they’re struggling with. How do we simplify it? We used the first principles approach and rebuilt it every single time to the point where right now people are using it and it generates revenue, and in the last 30 days it has generated over 65,000 transactions, over 200 dApps deployed, and to get here it was a cycle of creating, rebuilding, and figuring out the feedback, destroying, and rebuilding once again. It was a beautiful cycle that we had to go through, because from within this, you kind of have assumptions, and only when that hits the ground with reality do you get the facts.

20:54 But you cannot do that ideologically, you cannot do that theoretically. You’ve got to do it practically, and when that moment in time happens, we are able to understand and remodel things in a way it works. So right now, at this point in time, our focus on real world asset is more of a B2B focus. It can work for any industry right now, and the product is live. People are using it.

21:16 There are over 12,500 people, the last I checked, and these businesses and individuals are building things for different sectors. But real world asset captures my interest more from a business standpoint. Any business has to have revenues to sustain. That’s one of the things in the blockchain space we did not have, forgot about, yeah, forgot about, because we were obsessed on just the technology and the token. So sure, you had a token and token made money, you raised funds from investors, but how do you build a sustainable business?

21:45 Revenues make that work. And how can I capture the most revenue in a way it is not going to disappear? Because Forward charges money and monetizes in two ways. It takes a percentage of the revenue that the developers make, or it makes money from the chain transaction fees, a commission out of the chain fees, which means that I need businesses that are not only deploying but are constantly being used. And we know in the blockchain space the lifespan of a lot of businesses are very, very small.

22:16 So if a business comes in, deploys something, and they disappear in 6 months or an year, it’s not good. But there’s one industry where they come in and they cannot go out. They come in and they stay for long periods of time. And that’s real world assets. If they create their real world asset token on Forward and through Forward right now, they cannot change their mind one fine day and say, “Hey, okay, I have a new business idea.

22:39 I’m going to move on to that.” Well, you have your assets that’s tied to the token legally and technically. You cannot take it out unless you buy back all the tokens or you settle your accounts with all the holders. It is a perpetual business. It’s going to stay there for 5-10 years and beyond.

22:56 And if you can have that kind of clients using Forward right now, I would definitely focus on that. It locks me the revenue for a substantial amount of time, way more time than what most blockchain businesses can even foresee their future with. And if that is said, I can look at all the other verticals and all the businesses patiently as a second step. And the community will take that journey. But real world asset requires education to them and requires that careful help in onboarding them, which is what I’m doing more from a B2B side.

23:27 Whereas the community and the marketing takes care of the B2C normal customer acquisition in small businesses and traditional businesses side. Right? So you’re thinking about this as an entrepreneur because that’s in your DNA since you were 14 years old. And an entrepreneur doesn’t think, oh, let me get a token and see if I can get it to go up in value and to get an exit. An entrepreneur always has to look at the bottom line, and on the top of that bottom line is revenues.

23:50 And so you’re thinking, what can sustain me as this thing scales? Real world assets, not as correlated to bulls and bears, something that’ll stick with you and it can give you the money you need to scale this. I mean, it sounds like a revolutionary idea and it is in blockchain, but it is just good business right now. Quick question on RWA. It’s been talked about for a while.

24:09 We’re going to tokenize real estate. We’re going to tokenize this. We’re going to tokenize a racehorse. Somebody want to tokenize a car. But, a lot of people have said it’s not happened yet and it’s going to take a long time before it does.

24:22 Now, we actually happen to be in Dubai, and I had Dr. Marwan Alzeruni here, and I think every piece of property is actually on the blockchain here. Not necessarily at RWA, but I guess it’s, it is on, it is on the blockchain. Tell me, is that a misconception that RWA is not here yet, and what do you say to people that this will be the future? I was part of real world assets as early as 2017. Wow.

24:45 I know companies that were tokenizing real estate and different other asset classes. They built everything. The platform technology existed, and they even raised money. One of the companies raised $40 million that I helped them with. But then they had to refund everyone.

25:00 The legal side, the regulation side, was not ready. Right now it is. There is this point where traditional companies are starting to have real world asset products for their customers and the regulations around the world have grown to a point where it can work at this point. So right now it is not a question of the legal side. It’s a question of the regulation being in place, and it’s a process for them to go through the regulation.

25:28 So the challenge is presented in a new form: simplicity. So the legal is checked off. Technology was checked off like ages ago. So now both are here. How do you make it simple?

25:39 These guys are not going to install MetaMask. They are not going to go across and figure the tokens and the challenges that come with it, the DeFi aspects. They need a simple app, an app that they open, they see their assets there. I like this. There’s a 12% IRR there.

25:53 I really like this asset. I’m going to buy. They click, oh, I have my credit card here. Here it goes. Or you want to shift bank transfer?

26:00 There it goes. And they’re done with it. Sure, crypto is an option, but that’s not the only option until the legacy systems exist. Most people over the next many years are still going to be used to the legacy systems and processes. It’s not going to go away.

26:14 Especially for people who have lived all their life there. Probably it’s going to be a five or 10 years journey for them to make the shift. If they can do all of this in an app that they understand, which is not innovative, which replicates the existing apps that they’re using in the traditional life, because what we need right now with the world of blockchain and even real world asset is anti-innovation. We want them to copy the same user experience that people are used to.

26:42 Reduce the learning curve. Anti-innovation. Yes, we want them to go back to the same things that they used to, because if something is similar, it’s easy. It’s the same thing. I can do this right now.

26:53 Otherwise, you got to motivate people. You got to get them excited. You want to educate them. That is a process. Education is not easy.

26:59 So, if this is done and that is being done right now, real world asset is here. And I already know businesses that are launching their RWA products in the upcoming weeks and months. Ships being tokenized, helicopters being tokenized, water is being tokenized. Forget real estate. Real estate is the default one we all talk about.

27:18 But there are new asset classes which are different. And these asset classes bring about an opportunity for everyone in the world to be part of something that they could never be. Real estate. They can do that in their own region. They can go out, find some brokers, get a new house, get a new asset class.

27:35 It’s great. But these asset classes are not. It’s really untouchable for most people. They’re regulated. There are a lot of red tapes around them.

27:42 They need to be in a particular country. They need to be accredited. They need to go through a lot of checklists. They’re protected as a class. If everyone in the world can have access to it, it’s huge.

27:52 And that is possible right now. Helicopters and water. Talk to me about both of those assets, because there’s the last I expect you to talk about with RWA. Okay. So, the helicopters are a great asset class because it’s used by an elite number of people.

28:08 It doesn’t matter what’s happening with the recession, the society, the economy. Those who want to fly in helicopters, they have the money to fly in helicopters irrespective of the economy. It’s an evergreen business. You could even say it’s anti-inflationary. And this business makes huge IRR.

28:26 Forget about the 2%, 5% that we make with the banks. This has two-digit IRR per year, and sometimes even three, because it’s in specific markets. It’s limited. People pay insane amount of money to charter it. It can.

28:41 You can really buy a new helicopter every year from the money you make from chartering if you have the right contracts. If this is a business and the business owner can grow this by buying every year and expanding it, if they can have access to new liquidity from the market, people from Nigeria, farmers from there, or an engineer from India or someone from, you know, an accountant from Korea, if these individuals who are not in the field of accredited investors, if they don’t even imagine a helicopter, a couple million dollars, to be something that they can invest, be part. If they can right now buy $10 worth of it and make $10 every year out of it, a huge IRR, they are going to be super happy.

29:30 The amount of money that can flow in will allow the managers to buy more of this service to more regions. It’s about putting the people’s values and their interest together. Someone understands how to make money out of this business. They understand the model. They understand the contracts.

29:44 They understand the nuances of it, but they’re limited by money, and there’s a lot of money sitting on the table. The world is full of money. That’s one thing that’s not in deficit. It’s just not accessible. It’s not connected in the right way for the value to meet for it to grow even more.

30:00 And this is a beautiful opportunity to make that happen. Right? So it democratizes finance in that aspect. I flew helicopters for a long time and I took 40 or 50 hours of lessons in London and it wasn’t cheap. I mean, I was paying 4,500 bucks an hour for that R22 craft that, actually, I think only cost about $120,000 or pounds.

30:19 So, now that I’m doing the math, you’re right. But you would only have the opportunity if you owned a helicopter rental company on that airport in the UK. And like you said, most people probably don’t even know it’s there, don’t have access to it, don’t understand it. Maybe there’s regulatory things as well. So when you tokenize that, all of a sudden you can allow lots of people access and you can help optimize even that own market.

30:42 Maybe there should be double the number of helicopters, or triple. Maybe it should be cheaper, and that’s what you do with the RWA, correct? It helps bring that accessibility to the market, and when you talk about something as simple as water, we don’t think about it as a commodity, but the world has two big problems, food and water. That is a crisis that is just looming on top of us. We don’t realize it as And this real world asset with water is very interesting.

31:10 It is basically tokenizing the water wells, water sources. So PwC comes in and says there’s 100 million gallons of water coming from the source, and then they mint 100 million tokens. So a user, if I have thousand tokens with me, I am able to access 1,000 L of water every year for 150 years. That’s perpetual access to water. Every year I can claim and have access to that water for free because I bought the token once.

31:40 It’s making sure that water is accessible to the whole world by having water wells across the world and giving the best quality based on the right metrics, access to it, and if water can be free that way. Imagine places like UAE, if we all can have, because we all buy water every day. Sure, if it’s Europe, you can tap, you use a tap water, you’re happy, but that’s not the case with most part of the world, at least most part where the population is heavy.

32:02 It is not. Water is a commodity you buy every day. It’s not easy. This is beautiful concept because this comes both from a social and also economic perspective, being able to buy it once and being able to use it for rest of your life. It’s beautiful.

32:18 People can predict what it’s going to cost them. People can use this asset. If they don’t want to use the water, they can sell that year’s supply of water on the country market. They have an ROI. Now they can invest on the water source as an asset to own if they believe there’s a water issue that’s coming in the future.

32:34 If not, no problem, use it for your own consumption. But if you believe water scarcity is up and coming, own these tokens, which will allow you to sell the water in the future when it becomes more pricey. This is fascinating. So when I started my career I worked on Wall Street in the 90s, and I worked in derivatives trading. One of the things I had to run was a swap book.

32:54 It was a way of customizing financing to anything anybody wanted across any maturity. So instead of coming in and saying, “Oh, you can only buy a 5-year government bond,” you might need a specific instrument that it’s customized to an asset you have. Maybe you’re building a dam and you need 40-year financing. Well, there’s only a 30-year government bond. What do we do?

33:13 My job was to give you the custom fixed floating rate, you know, fixed rate, floating rate where you want it, etc. And by providing that liquidity, the capital markets boosted all sorts of innovation around the world. You’re going to do something similar. I mean, this is literally potentially an explosion of that, that will just raise the bar for everybody when you provide this, because there’s so many inefficiencies in the world that water isn’t being priced correctly because of all the lack of information, lack of access.

33:42 And as soon as you do that, we’ll see countless amounts of innovation and countless, probably, new business models. Even when you do that, with something as simple as water or a helicopter, or let alone something else. Yeah. Just think about this. The ideas that we’re discussing right here, these ideas are simple for a common man to understand.

34:01 And the number of business owners who are able to get this in their mind, the ideas that will come from there are going to be plentiful. And just right today, in the morning, I was having a beautiful discussion with a gentleman who is part of private equity space, and they create private loan books, and they are able to issue bonds from there which is pertaining to a set of businesses, and they are able to give them 15% IRR, and they’re using this only for private customers. So it’s a private bond available in complete, in private.

34:33 What if the general public need not put the money in the bank, but they can have access to the same loans they’re able to lend the money here and gain probably not 15%. Maybe it is, you come to a middle point, 10% 12%. And these businesses get money at a lower cost, and the users are making more money out of their idle cash. Both are making money, and the money currently is being lost in the middle that nobody gets at. You don’t know where it’s going.

35:01 It’s just not going to the customer, nor to the vendor, somewhere in the middle, to a system, to the middleman, and blockchain removes that, and Forward Protocol creates these templates and systems with the power of a developer community, bringing all of these tools in the hand of a business owner who can just click, customize, and deploy it. And now they can try this out. They don’t have to believe blockchain works. That’s fine. Maybe it doesn’t work for them.

35:25 But why not give it a try? Especially if it probably cost you nothing or an insignificant amount of time and money. It’s just the fees that you’re going to pay to the developer, the template creators, product. Maybe they charge you $50 or $100. Click, pay that, try it out.

35:42 It is worth a multi-million dollar opportunity in your own world of business. What do you think will be the next real world asset? And then what do you think will be the next product? I mean, you’re looking out now 6 months, a year, two years, three years, 5 years. Obviously, you don’t know, and you’re trying to provide a platform so you can be educated, because the market will decide.

36:01 But what do you see coming down the line? I can see almost every kind of real world asset coming on there. I don’t think it’s what is next. I’m thinking about it in terms of trends, because we know in the world of marketing and in the world of business, it’s a matter of trend narrative. The AI narrative comes up and then you have a million AI businesses popping out of nowhere in a day.

36:23 And that’s the same thing. Real world assets are being taken as a narrative at this point in time. People across the world, across governments, across industries are excited about the possibility of real world assets. And when this happens, it’s not going to be one. It’s going to be way more than we can count and way more combinations than what we can imagine.

36:43 And that brings a new opportunity. DeFi with real world assets. Now, forest, for example, I have people who own forest lands. You cannot easily get loans out of it. It’s not liquid asset.

36:57 But irrespective of what happens, even if there’s a world war, the land value of forest lands does not go down substantially. They are way more stable. It doesn’t go up much, it doesn’t go down much. It’s a beautiful asset class, and people tend to have huge liquidity there. Sure, with this, they can take the money out with the power of DeFi.

37:19 They can take a part of it, put it on there. Okay, here is my tokens that’s sitting right now in this particular smart contract. I can borrow money against it, and if I default, they know there’s a real world asset that this entity can take. So there is that beautiful market of DeFi that connects the real world, and it’s evolving, and RWA is the starting point of that. Every individual in the world can own any asset, and all those assets are still liquid for them with blockchain.

37:47 Okay. Now, for fast-forward past RWA, what else do you see coming down the line? What else will people use Forward Protocol for? Business use cases. Okay.

37:57 So when you looked at the traditional Web2 world, businesses did not go to blockchain. So businesses did not go to the internet era. They didn’t move their core business there, and industry, manufacturing business. They did not automate their whole businesses and move their supply chain onto their Web2 online systems. They moved their accounting system on.

38:16 They moved their document signing, probably, or their appointment setting. They moved all the ancillary areas to technology because moving a core business is a big choice. It’s a board to do that. But moving ancillary things, probably an IT guy can choose, or maybe the marketing and sales team can choose. It was an easy choice.

38:38 So now I’m imagining the whole spectrum of the Web2 or the traditional world, from a point not from an, who is an early adopter to the late responder, but more from what is the easiest choice to make, what is the lowest barrier of entry, and to go to the more complex one, which requires more choices and more difficulties. So anywhere, any part of the business that they can just move to blockchain right away without having to think too much that will move on first, and that means developers will start creating, like, bass, like SaaS, software as a service. They’ll start creating blockchain as a service products which are easy, which are serving a lot of people, non-innovative products, replicatable, every company in the world needs a copy of this.

39:21 Nobody wants to innovate, that it’s just something that you need every single real time. And if you can have more of those products on there, businesses find it easy. Okay, I’m a business. How do I get in blockchain? I can see three, four products here.

39:35 Great. I’m going to deploy all of these products for my own use case. And an enterprise comes and says, okay, I’m an enterprise. I don’t want to be using a public blockchain. I don’t want my data sitting on there.

39:44 That’s fine. I’m just going to go to Forward Protocol. I’m going to deploy my own blockchain. It’s just a fork of something. And I don’t want it to be decentralized with a million nodes.

39:53 It’s just for my own business. I’ll probably just hire two nodes from the validator marketplace. Validators that are sitting inside Forward who will validate this blockchain for me. I’ll pay them monthly fee, like hosting on a server. I’ll just hire two of them.

40:06 I’m happy with it. It’s my own private blockchain. It’s just going to sit for me, and I just want these four dApps deployed on that chain from Forward, and I can have all of that in the next 30 minutes, and hover, and I’m spending an insignificant amount of money on that. That’s amazing. My own blockchain with my own two validators providing my service, my four dApps for my company, for my employees.

40:29 I don’t care about decentralization. There are business owners who don’t decentralization is something that we are passionate about. I cannot expect everyone to be passionate about the same things that we are, but I need to be sure everybody gets a use that they want out of what we are creating in the world of blockchain, and that’s what Forward enables everyone to benefit in their own way, in the way that works for them and for their business, within their limitations of money, time, energy, and brain resource.

40:55 Let me ask you a question. There’s a lot of Web2 businesses now that dominate because of their centralization. Maybe a Google or a Facebook or an Amazon or something like that. Are they going to naturally be resistant to any type of blockchain business, because it potentially takes away their edge, their dominance, their lack of transparency, their lack of providing ownership, their opportunity to, you know, censor in many ways, shapes, and forms or will they find other uses for the blockchain technology?

41:24 How do you see? Because that’s potentially, I don’t know, some friction coming up in the future. You’ve thought about this obviously. It for sure is a friction. Yeah, we finally made the government change.

41:35 We finally made the banks change. I don’t think these corporations are hard for us. The industry took its time, more than 10 years. But the governments and banks gave in. So corporations or people who are, they’re looking at growing their business, making more money.

41:51 When they see an opportunity, they would launch something that is complementary to it. They would, because let’s say Google and Facebook, it’s not just their social business out there. Google has their cloud business. In fact, Google Cloud has also given a grant for Forward Protocol, because they want businesses who are deploying their dApps on Forward, the front-end applications, to be hosted on Google Cloud. Amazon has given a grant because they do want us to bring those customers to them.

42:19 They identify this as a new emerging market for them to profit from. So it’s not just their core, one of their businesses, but they have other businesses that can profit from this journey. So, I would see them adopting. Sure, they’ll fight on certain areas, because that’s how it works. You’re used to something, you don’t want to change because you’re comfortable there.

42:37 You’re making billions of dollars there. It’s better for you not to change because something is working until it’s not working. So that point for it not to work comes because there’s a better blockchain product which challenges the status quo. So you’re going to see a point where all the blockchain entrepreneurs and innovators, they create better solutions, which probably the traditional companies will acquire at a later point. Okay, these guys have done something better.

43:04 I cannot compete with this, and many of them are tried. You know, examples of Google creating a lot of different products competing with some player, and what worked for them is to acquire. It’s the same case with a lot of other businesses as well, because this comes crypto-native. A crypto-native product is outperforming someone trying from outside the space to do this. And this is something that you can easily find.

43:25 You speak with business owners in the crypto space who hire traditional consultants, traditional bigger consulting agencies, and they fail, and they realize that they don’t understand it natively, because, as I said, blockchain is not a technology, it’s a philosophy. You need to feel the philosophy. You need to know from the core of who you are what it represents. What is a vision? What are we building here?

43:48 It is not a distributed ledger. It is much more. What more is it? How would you explain it? To me, the moment I think about it, we are creating a place where people have that freedom of choice.

44:04 They’re creating something which can be of any combination. It’s open or closed, and it can be: data is visible, data is not visible. You have like all those different ways to structure something. And the users and individuals can go ahead and use a product that makes sense for them. And more importantly, a business in the past made all the choice.

44:24 They created what they wanted to create, and they expected the customers to use it. Right now, your customers are part of the decision-making process. There is some, this whole DAO, decentralized autonomous organization. The customers are probably part of it, and they have a right to vote on something that matters to them, and they’re part of creation process. You always had to hire your team members.

44:46 You had to hire your sales team. Now you can empower your community. They are your team. They are not just your customers. They are doing your job for you.

44:56 Can you bring them on as part of your team? And if they all can contribute to it, it changes how the business works. Business is no longer who you are and who your team is. Business is everyone. Just think about this.

45:07 This has to lead to a new concept of this micro-job economy. So for a moment, imagine a person waking up in the morning. I’m up and I’m opening my blinders. Now that blinder motor agency knows when you wake up, because the moment you wake up, you open your blinders and the sunlight comes in. That is data that they monetize, and you get a reward for using that and being part of that, because you’re sharing the time you wake up.

45:33 If you choose to share that, you make money there. Okay. Now you put on your shoes and you start running. Running the app. It’s a community of runners, and that data, how much you run, what is your cadence, what is your age, what is your all the data that you bring, that is a monetizable data that a lot of healthcare companies want and you’re able to basically monetize your running.

45:52 You run for your own benefit because you want to be healthy. But now you make money by running. You make money even by waking up. And now you start going for your job. You’re ready.

46:01 You’re ready for the day. You’re all energetic. You’re driving in your car. There’s some traffic there. And you do want to go faster, you pay other cars.

46:10 The cars speak among themselves on chain. You pay them. So you get a prioritized route, and people who are not in a hurry, they pay, they receive your money, and give you the way. So now you go faster, and someone makes money by just driving off out to their work. You go to a new place.

46:27 You have your mobile phone right now. Your network, how is the network in the region? Share the data about the network availability in the particular region, and the mobile network agency, the protocol that governs it, and the protocol that services the mobile network agency pays you for that data. Data is money. Data is very powerful.

46:45 We all know that, we all agree for that. And blockchain is the way to democratize the data, to make sure it is going to the right people in the right way with zero-knowledge proof. It is not leaked. The data is going to the right in the right process without your private information being shared. You make money, and you get that money coming to your phone.

47:05 You come down, end of the day, to your home. You watch your TV. You chill, and you have done 20 micro jobs in the day after your day job. You made money passively. This is my vision of universal basic income, and blockchain is making it happen right now.

47:19 Huh, that’s a crazy future world. But that is our future world. I always used to say that every minute of our day in the future will involve a blockchain transaction. So this is kind of what you’re describing. Everything will be out there, monetized, monitored on blockchain, and there’ll be earners in all sorts of ways we never imagined.

47:37 How does a capitalist in the old school way look forward to the future where this is distributed and now there’s voting power, and, you know, how do these companies change? Because, like you said, it’s a whole new change in philosophy. Is that going to be possible, or are some people gonna have to die out and let that old school way of doing things, you know, go away? I mean, Steve Jobs used to say, my customers know what they want when I tell them, you know, that’s not very blockchain or Web3.

48:06 So, will that future change? I don’t think so, because it changes how the system is operating. But this system supports everyone. It can support a capitalist and a socialist. can support everyone because it is flexible.

48:20 In the past, a business owner had to create a business and operate within the structure of that economy, the country where they are right now. A business is a package. You are the government. You are the Fed. You create your own monetary system.

48:35 You are the business owner, and you decide your society, your economy. That is a powerful responsibility. With freedom comes more responsibility. So when this is there, they’re free to choose any form of governance, any form of structuring economy that works for their business. In the end, it’s up to the user to choose if they like that or not.

48:56 So if your users don’t like that, there’s a problem with what you’re doing. If your users like it, that’s amazing. So it’s free for experimentation. It’s free to figure out. So the world is just giving more options.

49:06 We have already come to that point in time. So if you look back 20 years before, 10 years before, you didn’t have so many choices. I don’t know if choice is good or bad. It depends on the individual, but right now it can be both good or bad because there is this paralysis of choice. You have way too many choices to make, way too many things to do, and it’s just hard, but choice is what we all wanted.

49:27 It’s the freedom that we wanted, and it’s being provided right now. So I don’t think anybody would be out of business because of this. Only those who do not want to change or even adopt the technology might be in trouble. But if they do adopt the technology, that’s fine. they can still do the things that they always did in the blockchain in their own way as long as they can meet with the competitor who are doing it differently.

49:50 So it’s an open space of competition. Are you better? Are you providing a better experience to your customers? Are you saying the right story that resonates with them? Because that’s the culture that you’re in right now.

50:00 You buy a product, you don’t buy the product anymore. You’re buying the brand story. You’re buying the brand narrative. You want to know what it is that you’re part of. It just could be a jacket.

50:11 It could be a car. It’s no longer a car for you to travel from point A to point B. What is the story? Is it a green renewable energy car? Is it a car that’s meant for modern angsters?

50:22 Is it a car that shows that I’m successful? There’s a story that every brand carries. With blockchain, the story is quadrupled. Now, just think about a supply chain system on blockchain. Here, a car is being made.

50:37 There are hundreds of parts that’s coming from different places. Every part that is being sourced is an NFT. Everything is identified. Like, you have barcodes to identify a product, a small part. Now you have the NFTs to identify.

50:49 It carries that together. And now you merge those NFTs as a meta NFT, and your car is being made. And now, in the factory, this is a premium car. As the car is being assembled, it is recorded in a video. You know the people involved.

51:02 You know the process it went in making that particular car work. And that is appended to your NFT. When you receive your car, sure, you can drive, you can take your friends around. You scan this NFT. You know the part has come from 30 different countries.

51:15 The people who made it came from five different countries. And you know how they did it. Oh wow. The time it took. It took them 26 hours to make this car.

51:25 The car that I own right now. The story is more right now. It’s an experience. And you as a customer are part of that entire journey. You see it, you feel it.

51:35 And that’s what the value is attained to. It’s interesting because the higher-end luxury brands are already doing this, sometimes off blockchain. So I know someone that just bought one of the top Rolls-Royces, and so he got it delivered from the factory. I think he got to tour the factory, and it had all these little details in there as far as the number of it and who did this and who did that. So like they do that.

51:58 They understand the power of that, but I guess it’s usually only scalable for maybe those higher-end products. Imagine everybody having that. The other thing you just made me think of is Yat Siu from Animoca Brands, who’s become a good friend. He says culture is one of the biggest industries in the world. And if you really think about culture and how big it is, it’s bigger than games.

52:16 It’s bigger than movies. It’s bigger than all this stuff, because we all make choices. What you’re wearing today, what I’m wearing today, they’re all the way we express ourselves through culture. And it’s actually the biggest export out there. But we don’t always think about it.

52:27 So what car do you choose? That’s a story. What shirt do you choose? That’s a story. Where do you live?

52:31 What? All these things are the way you express culture. So, this is big. This is powerful. I want to ask you, it’s early ’24.

52:39 You’re looking into the future now. Bitcoin ETF has just been approved. Most people in blockchain would say we’re at the beginning of a bull market that’s going to be big and wide and deep. You’re about to generate a token alongside of a lot of other companies that are. How do you feel right now?

52:55 You’re coming to a part in this six-year journey with Forward Protocol. What do you expect from this year in the market, in the narrative, in the competition, and how crazy is this going to get for the next couple years in blockchain space? It’s attracting a lot of attention, and lot of businesses are coming in, and some of the traditional businesses that are coming in, they know their game, they know how things are done, and they’ll bring that value to the world of blockchain.

53:22 So the competition might be intense, but something for something like Forward, most of the people who have been with us in the journey in these years, they are the product users. I’m not talking about community there, because in the blockchain space you have two parts. People think you have a great community, your business is successful. Community is different from customers. Community is there as part of your token, as part of your business narrative in the world of blockchain.

53:48 Who are your champions? You need to keep them happy. They’ll go to any length to make your business work. But are they the customers? They are not.

53:58 What makes the business sustain is the revenue. So you need both the community and the customers. And with Forward, the investors are all customers. They’ve been with us on the journey, and we asked them how they want this to be built. We were in conversation with them, asking for their feedback, trying to use this as a litmus test for them to see if this even makes sense for them.

54:21 If it doesn’t make sense for them, irrespective of how much sense it makes for me, it’s of no use, because they are the users, and they were part of the building journey, and making customers as part of building journey is a crucial aspect of any user experience testing and creation. So that’s what we did, and we have that backing of real businesses, and every one of those guys, they run a distinct business in a distinct part of the world in a complete different way, and they all see Forward as their way to the world of blockchain, and many of them are building, and they’re processing it right now as one of the recent ones is $250 million of real world assets tokenized through Forward right now. And when all of these things are happening, the competition, it starts to shift, because the question they always ask is how do you not compete, but how do you work together, because blockchain, that’s a major difference.

55:15 It doesn’t matter who it is they collaborate quite a lot in this industry. Something like, let’s say, use an example of, why did they make their code open source? Now everybody is copying them. Everybody is trying to take them to new markets. They’re trying to just copy deploy it, and now they have a version of that up and running, which is not good for a, but it is being good for a more validation, more people’s eyeballs, more security tests, more of effort going in to optimize something.

55:46 It’s, end of the day, making a stronger one. It’s the same with any instance here. It’s a collaborative solution, otherwise everybody would go back to being closed. Okay, I’m not going to show my code, I’m going to hide something, it’s my intellectual property, I’m going to keep this secure. But blockchain has a different ethos.

56:02 It’s a more collaborative ethos. You work with your competitors. You co-create something. Before Forward came into existence. There were few players in the industry who were providing tools for developers to make their development process easier.

56:14 And when we came in, one of the things that we did is to go to them and make them our partners. Now developers creating templates in Forward for the customers. They can use those developer tools who people thought were competition. They’re using them to fast-track their time to put the tools on Forward, and Forward uses it. Now those competitors are happy because they don’t serve the market that we serve, and we’re happy for the same reason.

56:40 Now everybody wins. The competition is insignificant here because the pie is very large. We are not fighting for the same pie. The pie is growing by the day. It’s growing way more faster than we all can compete and try to consume it.

56:53 There’s a bigger market than anybody of us can fight for. There’s no fight here. This is bigger market. Do you think competition will become like an anachronism? You know, we look back in the days when we used to compete with each other and fight over these things, and it will all be about cooperation going forward.

57:09 Well, I wouldn’t say all of it be that way, but right now, at least for the next few years, with the way the market is, I definitely believe that’s the case, because it’s just so ineffective to recreate the same thing over and over and over again. If you have something done by smart people, why not just reuse it? Which is where, you know, it’s templated, it’s usable, put it on Forward, deploy it. Why recreate something? It takes more time for every business to recreate the same thing over and over.

57:37 Just think about an example in the hotel industry, the booking system for hotels or the menu system in the restaurants. Everybody said, “I’m the best hotel in the restaurant in the town. I’m going to have my own system.” They coded it. They developed a software.

57:51 They had it up and running. Super laggy, super buggy, and they had high IT costs. But they were proud. It’s my system. I’m the first in the space.

57:59 And then everybody thought they were the first in the space. Everybody developed their own system, spending millions and millions of dollars creating all of that. And then what happened? Everybody had a complex system. Someone going to a restaurant, they didn’t understand how to use it.

58:13 Someone going to book something, they didn’t understand it. It was complex. It was different everywhere. Can you just make this simple? It’s such a simple thing.

58:20 Can you make it simple for me as a user? And then came a time when a company who were not part of the systems of hotels or restaurants, they were outside they said, ah, they’re inconsistent, they’re clunky, they’re hard to understand, I’ll create a product which is easy, and then they went to all the hotels and said, why not use mine? You pay a subscription fee or you pay a transaction fee. Use mine. It’s simple.

58:42 People understand it. Number of people are using it. Just compare both of this. What is easy for yourself, use it. And now everybody uses one product.

58:51 Literally go in Dubai, anywhere, go to any restaurant, look at the menu, scan the QR code. You can see in the bottom, it’s all coming from a single software company. You can see the UI it’s coming from a single company. Why struggle so much to just destroy your system and then go back to one solution that works, why don’t you start with that? You don’t have to make the same mistake twice or thrice.

59:16 Your whole Web2 journey, from how you move from paper to the Web2 to understand, now just deploy that in Web 3. Find the best provider whose business is to make that work and use it, because that’s not your business. Using it is not your business. You’re using it to make your job easier for your customers. You have a token that’s about to be generated in the next few weeks.

59:38 How do you feel? Are you nervous? Are you excited? I am excited. A lot of founders will go through that this year.

59:45 So I’m really curious what you say about it, because this has been a journey for you and it’s about to happen. I’m super excited about it. End of the day, I believe a token should signify a value of a business. It is a means for business and its economy to participate and partake in the process. If it is a token which has no use case, it’s a meme.

1:00:06 And in that particular instance, you should be nervous for sure, because you don’t know if it’s going up or down, or what’s going to happen with it, because it’s a speculation. In this instance, I have my numbers with me. I know that it is a pure business utility. The market can speculate. It can react in whatever form it is.

1:00:25 But a business owner who needs a fuel for his car, they will buy Forward tokens for their particular application, because without Forward tokens, that application is redundant. And if people want to get their apps up and running, they’re going to buy the tokens in the market sooner or later. And there is an inherent demand that the business creates. So when you have a business and the business has a product and the money is made from the product, you don’t have anything to worry about.

1:00:56 And from a token perspective, this is not my first launch. I have been running the marketing agency in the space. We have been the oldest in the industry since 2013, and we have done launches for hundreds of businesses. I’ve been on that day-zero launch moment, waiting and looking at it and doing everything ready and making sure that the launch goes good so many times. I think I don’t get the butterflies anymore.

1:01:23 I’m used to this. Not at all. But I’m excited. Okay. I’m excited for what this represents.

1:01:30 I’m excited because of what Forward brings to the world of blockchain. I’m excited for the vision, because the blockchain’s vision is great. It’s a noble cause, but it is not a practical cause. Until and unless Forward makes it happen. And that’s what I’m excited about, that vision coming into reality.

1:01:48 Not mine, but the whole industry of blockchain, everything making it practically possible in a simplest form with Forward Protocol. So you know it has utility. So you know ballpark what the value is. Speculators might push it up or put it down, but you feel comfortable as an entrepreneur that this thing has utility for for entrepreneurs out there. Do you have any advice for, you know, generating tokens?

1:02:13 Is it what you just said? Is it makes sure there’s utility, because you said it does show inherent value of a business. So it is important. Yeah, what do you have? I would just say beyond the bells and whistles of the blockchain space, let’s just revisit some boring aspects of business, the fundamentals of business from a very Web2 or traditional startup scene.

1:02:35 We kind of ignore the traditional startup scene. We don’t hear the word product-market fit in the crypto space. We don’t hear customer surveys. We don’t hear things that are fundamental to many businesses out there to build into a reliable proper business. Let’s bring some of those boring lessons.

1:02:53 It’s not the most exciting things to do, like an airdrop or, you know, interesting campaign out there, but let’s bring what worked and try to incorporate that to improvise what we have, because if it’s the right product with the right customers and things match, it works. It doesn’t mean they all have to follow suit in the same way, like you said from your discussion with Yat, there’s a culture, and culture represented in tokens. Like, some of the meme tokens have fine, they have their own customers, their own market, their own emotions, and the product that’s good, that’s their product, that’s their market, that’s fine.

1:03:27 We are not against anything, one specific thing, and so on, but if you are a business, get your fundamentals right, and if you do that, then it’s parallel. If your product adoption is there, your token adoption will be there, as long as your token is tied to the product. That’s one of the other things that happened in the crypto space: businesses had a token, but then they went out of the token to have other means of revenue generation, and then the token had no use.

1:03:52 It became a governance voting token, which kind of killed it, right? Which is not good. It’s a reflection of your business. So make sure that it’s aligned. If it’s not aligned, don’t even start with it.

1:04:02 Don’t even bring the token into your business. Be a blockchain business with equity as a traditional company. Why have a token? And if you do have it, make sure it’s useful. And end of the day, it’s about the best efforts with the best intentions, and again, the philosophy behind why you’re doing what you’re doing.

1:04:20 If you have a token, you’re trying to bring the community with you. You’re saying that you’re not enough. You want your community to be with you to make it enough. You want to co-create something with them. You want to involve them.

1:04:32 The good and bad that comes with it. You want to bring their ideas in. You want to bring their efforts in. You want to expand yourself a gazillion times with the power of people around. And you are the leader.

1:04:45 You say a story. As a leader, you bring the interest of the people around you. You excite them with your vision, and they align with your vision, and they want to travel with you. You lead the way. You work with them in the journey, and over a period of time, probably they have a better idea than you, and it can expand.

1:05:03 But right now it started with you, and you got to lead it. And when you lead that with the right technicals, right fundamentals, you don’t have to be worried about your token. Your token will perform as long as your business performs. And your business will perform as long as you put in the right efforts to build a right solution for the right problem that you identify. Go back to the start, the first principles.

1:05:28 And what happens in the next few years with Forward Protocol? What happens with also your incubator, your marketing businesses? I know you’ve had a lot of businesses you created that I think you’re still involved with. Is there an exit scenario for Forward Protocol? And what else do you think you’re going to be doing in the next few years?

1:05:44 Okay. I like to see myself as a parallel and perpetual entrepreneur. We all talk about serial entrepreneurs. It’s a buzz of the now of the last decade, right? Which means you do one, you exit, you do one, you exit.

1:05:56 Correct. And you prove that you’ve done it successfully. So you call yourself a serial entrepreneur. Okay. And what I like to do is build businesses that are perpetually living, that make money, that have revenues, and it grows, and the next business adds value to each other, and they become easier and bigger.

1:06:13 So having series of businesses that build on top of each other, you create an ecosystem which is powerful, and you do that parallelly. It’s not about one after another. Sometimes you have parallel businesses. My first company, Key Difference Media, started off when I was 14 years old. I just quit, I finished my 10th grade and I quit my education.

1:06:34 I said, no more of this. I knew computer programming languages from the time I was in my seventh grade. I put that to use to start that company. It’s still there. Every one of my businesses that I started off years ago, they are alive.

1:06:48 They’re up, they’re running, and they’re going out there. And that added so much value to what we’re doing right now. When we started Forward, it was not the same startup story. We already had the people that we needed. It was more of a choice.

1:07:02 The best team players from within the team, we bring them to Forward. It was moving people in. It was not about finding, hiring people, or be compatible. No, it’s a wrong hire. All those challenges were gone because it was an ecosystem that was tried and tested.

1:07:15 So the journey became easier and effective because of what it existed. So all this businesses work in tandem. And think about it from a bigger vision. Forward is making it easy for all businesses as an infrastructure. That’s great.

1:07:31 Some people will come and use it. But these real world asset businesses, they don’t understand it. How do I teach them about it? Now, the incubator, our accelerator can bring them on, handhold them. They need six months of time to slowly learn about it.

1:07:47 That’s fine. We will educate them, help them. When they’re ready, we onboard them to Forward. It’s a process, and the businesses take care of each aspect of it. And when they want to go to the market, that’s great.

1:08:00 Now we have a business that has brought in, we incubated them, they’re ready, and they have been tokenized using let’s say Forward Protocol. The infrastructure is done. So education is a tick, the process is a tick, and you have their infrastructure as a tick. Now they need to be marketed. They need someone to help them with it, because one thing wrong or one thing missing can kill a business.

1:08:21 If you have the whole life cycle and you got them over a period of time for right reasons, not because, okay, I need this gap filled, and I’m going to start a business. No, it happened over a long period of time, and there’s a story to it. Now the pieces fall in place. There’s a life cycle of a customer life cycle that matches with our ecosystem. They have the right things in the right time available for them, and that makes it easy for businesses to survive, to build, and not just abandon.

1:08:48 We have the same problem with a lot of chains right now. The chains give grants. They bring businesses. The businesses come because they get the grants, and then they put a product out there because that’s what the milestones were for. And now that’s it.

1:09:01 Nobody uses it. Why? Because there is no support behind those businesses. There is no marketing behind those businesses. It was done because the chain wanted an application there.

1:09:09 The incentives are not aligned. But when you align the incentives of the entrepreneur, of your business, and of all the entities that are collaborating in the ecosystem together, you’re building that thriving, sustainable model. So with Forward Protocol, 5 years from now, we see a point where businesses come, they use the existing blockchain or their own blockchain, one click, they go live with it, they get their dApps up and running, they like it, they don’t like it, they switch over to what they want.

1:09:38 They want to move from one blockchain to another seamlessly. Everything is so simple that businesses just think Forward, click, like you when you wanted to put your own website up, you thought WordPress, you didn’t think PHP, I’m going to go learn PHP, I’m going to hire a developer. You thought WordPress. It was and it is a stable household name for anyone to get their websites up, and Forward is that for the world of blockchain, any chain. Right now Forward works with 800 chains.

1:10:05 I didn’t know there were 800 chains. You know, I didn’t know that until we came to a point there with Forward, because Forward doesn’t integrate chain by chain. That’s a game in the crypto space. People say, “Okay, I’m going to take your grant and I’m going to integrate you.” We don’t do that.

1:10:18 We integrated the language from a compiler’s level, and any chain that comes into existence in the market, it automatically works. When chains come to us and ask us, okay, we have this launch, this new chain, can you integrate our chain so that your users can use us? I’m wait a moment. Why don’t you just go and check? Your chain would automatically be working 99.9% of the cases if you use the standard wallets and etc.

1:10:41 It’s already working. You don’t need to talk to us. It’s there. Go ahead and use it. And that came because we looked at it fundamentally in a different way.

1:10:48 We were not looking, like many companies in the crypto space do, that as a business grant as a business. I get a grant from every company. I do something. I integrate them, and that makes them money. That’s the revenue that they see.

1:10:59 Well, if you can eliminate all that nonsense, if you can focus on the fundamental aspect, if every chain can work here, the chains market us, the chains promote us, the chains support us, because we help them get more customers, not because they’re doing a favor to us, but because we enable them to have customers. How do you align everyone’s interest in a way they do something for themselves but that benefits you? And that was the customer journey that we thought about from a business side, from a chain side, from a protocol side, from an oracle side, from an investor side, from a user side.

1:11:29 Everyone’s angles were aligned, and it all came to one point, and that’s Forward. Sounds like Forward’s going to be massively successful. I mentioned Sandeep earlier from Polygon, another very successful company coming from India. How come we haven’t seen more successful blockchain companies coming from India, and is that going to change? I think the story, I can go back to what my journey was there.

1:11:52 When I started off in 2007, the word entrepreneurship did not exist in the country. Even, you didn’t have any of the social media we had, or, right, there’s no way I could reach anybody back then. It was not possible for me to learn things that easily. And when I was working on the computer, people thought I was fooling them around, because they didn’t know you can make money from an online business working from a computer, on the internet, just right from your room.

1:12:18 It was not something that was in their practical consumption. It was not in their idea that something like that is even possible. There’s zero support. And I come from a non-business background. My family, my dad was working.

1:12:32 We didn’t have a business background. And internet businesses did not exist. So I had to learn things the hard way. I had to figure things my own way. It was a harsh situation.

1:12:42 It’s a harsh environment, and it was an alien, alienating environment. I couldn’t even have friends. I didn’t have friends in my childhood because I couldn’t talk about this to anybody. It was two different worlds. There’s no common language.

1:12:56 There’s no common interest. When things were so vividly different, my mind was going towards ideas on business. How do you, I was learning about money the first time. They didn’t teach me in school what is money and how to use it. They didn’t teach me about saving or investing the money.

1:13:11 How do I put my money in, how do I make money, how do I negotiate something with clients, what does it mean for me to register my business? Oh, I cannot register, I’m under 18 years old, what do I do right now? Who is there to help me? How do I communicate to people outside, because there’s nobody buying the service in my industry here. How do I reach people in other parts of the world?

1:13:35 Oh, they speak in a different way. Their language is different. Their slang and accent is different. How do I get my message across and my ideas across? Because they don’t understand the things the same way as I do.

1:13:46 I had to go through all of those learnings and progress from there. And the situation has changed a lot right now around the world, but it’s still, to some extent, the same, not because of not having access to networks and so, things out there, tools and resources exist right now, but the mindsets of people that’s still the same. Cause when I think India, I think great business people, great entrepreneurs, but I’m not, that’s not necessarily the case for the mass, mass of the population.

1:14:15 It’s slowly changing, is what you’re saying? It is very slowly changing. There’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there. But you’re talking about a minor percentage. You’re not even talking about 1% of the economy.

1:14:26 You’re talking about a small, minuscule amount of people who are entrepreneurs. The majority are working, and they don’t see it the same way. They see entrepreneurship as a risk. They see the challenges with it. They like stability as a culture.

1:14:38 They like to have that stability with the family, which is not wrong. I mean, I love my family, and I love stability as well. But then I had to learn to take the risks, calculated risks. I’m not a speculator. Even today I don’t trade.

1:14:50 I’m not a trader. I don’t understand trading. I believe in building value and monetizing that value as a business and growing that. And people have to find their own way. I don’t think, like, you talk to so many people around the world, and I don’t believe two stories are alike, and you need to always find your own path, your own interpretation, your own lessons, and adapt it to your life in a way it works, and that’s what people have to do in all those countries, and the more they do it, the more they experiment, it comes to the question of failures.

1:15:24 The first thing people ask, okay, you’re quitting your job you’re starting on something and you’re going to fail, what do you do then? The best thing I had was the training of failures. When I was 14 years old, the name of the game: you wake up and you fail. The more you fail in the day, the better I’m performing. That’s my KPI, because the more I fail, the more I know something is not working, the more I learn.

1:15:47 I don’t go to programming school to learn programming. I learned programming when I was in my seventh grade. I didn’t have a place to go and learn it. I write a code, it throws an error, I read the error, I try to find what that error is. I try to fix it.

1:16:00 And the moment I fix it, it works. And then the next error in the second line pops up. I fix that. I had to go do this for the next 100 lines of the code, if I had it. The first website I made, it took me 3 months.

1:16:13 Everything broke every time I made it. And then after a few months, it took me 15 minutes. 3 months for a website to 15 minutes. And that process, would you call it as failures, or would you call it as a learning cycle until you succeed? I believe this mindset should go to everyone out there.

1:16:33 It’s, they should not even see failure. It should not even be in their mind. It should not even be interpreted or perceived as a failure. If they see that, okay, I did something, it did not work. That’s great.

1:16:45 I’m doing the next thing, and let’s see if that works, until the point they win. something did not work to something that works. It’s not a matter of failure and success. Failure and success come with it, a baggage in society. And if people can change their perceptions, which is what we learn in NLP, it’s, it starts with your belief reflects on your behavior and your actions.

1:17:08 If you change the core of it, and that doesn’t help with the society, irrespective of where you are, America or India, it doesn’t change people around you. The masses are always on the other side, because the most successful people in the world, like 5% of them succeed, or 1% of them succeed even more. But who are the people around you? The 95%. If you’re among the people who are on the other side, who are not on the successful side based on the metrics that you personally choose for yourself, why are you being influenced by them?

1:17:42 One lucky thing that happened to me. I was in the wrong time in the wrong place when I started my business. I was not in Silicon Valley. I was in a place where I couldn’t talk to anybody. So I had shut ears.

1:17:56 I could just do what I wanted to do. Nobody fed me wrong ideas. Nobody told me the wrong things. I could just do what I wanted to do, figure out. I was not being persuaded the other way around.

1:18:06 But if I did that in an economy where they understood entrepreneurship, they understood all of these things, they would have probably told me that I’m doing something wrong with it. They would have tried to brainwash me to get a job. So it’s a benefit. Why’d you move to Dubai? And how important was that decision?

1:18:24 Well, I’ve been following the journey of the crypto community for many, many years, and Dubai was becoming the hub of all entrepreneurs in the crypto space coming and crypto space, and the people were moving towards regulation, and Dubai had that progressive regulatory ideas, and this place was becoming that open ecosystem for crypto community and anyone in the cutting edge space to co-create. So I saw that many years ago, and I said, okay, I was waiting, applying right during the whole COVID situation. I was applying and I couldn’t get anywhere because of the flights cancellation and all of that.

1:19:04 The moment the first time it was possible I was here, and I came here for a week to just check around, and then I just called back home and said, I’m not coming, but you’re coming. Who are you talking to? Family, co-workers, my parents? Yes. Okay.

1:19:19 So I was talking to my family, and within 3 months I brought them all here and made this my home. And what’s it been like? It’s been fantastic. It’s been beautiful because from here I didn’t have to travel the world. The world traveled to me.

1:19:32 This is the middle point of the world. People are always moving around. They have to touch some place of Middle East to go to any part of the world. So people come here. Anybody, everybody.

1:19:41 I just have to ask them, when are you in Dubai? Let’s meet. I didn’t have to ask them, where are you? How do we meet? I know they are going to be here.

1:19:50 It’s a vibrant system. You can reach anybody, talk to anybody. It’s easy. It works, and everything is so accessible. So, I’ve been liking this place.

1:19:58 Is the culture also good for an entrepreneur? Because, as you said, when you grew up, you weren’t surrounded by that entrepreneurism. Is that pervasive here? And does that help you as an entrepreneur? Does it validate you, give you more ideas, give you inspiration?

1:20:10 I think there are a lot of innovators and creative people and entrepreneurs here. So, it’s easy to get access to them. But in all honesty, I like to just sit in my room, lock my doors, close my ears, focus on what I need to create, because I find myself more productive when I’m focused at creation and management of something rather than being out there all the time. So I do go out to speak in various places around the world, and even in Dubai, I speak pretty frequently, and I do meet people during those times, and I like to find out when I inspire them with my ideas and thoughts.

1:20:42 I like to learn how they perceive it and their ideas that come by. I like to hear some of the smartest minds in the world assembled here speak and share their insights, and all of that is a great mental stimulation. I really like that. How are you an introverted creator, coder, but also an extroverted speaker, because you clearly communicate really well? You speak around the industry a lot.

1:21:03 I mean, you have, you know, an incubator and a marketing agency. So clearly you’re very good at communication. That’s a very rare dual skill, right? I think it’s something that you learn. So when I started off, I was born as an introvert, and I had to be that way.

1:21:18 But the moment I came out to the world and I started seeing things, there is only one thing: I wake up every day and I fail at what to communicate to people, to network to people, in being able to get a message across in a way they understand. I start my journey of trying to fix it. How do I improvise something to a point where I can be good at it? I don’t have to be the best at it. I have to be good at it, because if I’m not good at it, it affects my business.

1:21:45 It affects my ability to take my vision out there, put it in the world where people can see it. And I went head-on on it. I said, I’m going to speak in every conference out there. I’m going to take every opportunity to speak, every place I am going to network. I’m going to be the first person in, the last person out until I’m going to become good at networking.

1:22:04 I’m going to go all in. And I did that for 1.5 years. Every conference, every event, first person in, last person out. Spoke to everybody out there. I introduced myself, spoke.

1:22:16 No shame, no holding back. If I have to do it, I got to do it. And I learned the art of it. I absorbed what other people are doing. Obviously, people are better than me at it.

1:22:26 So, what is the best thing to do? To reinvent the wheel or to learn from the masters? I looked at them, asked them, “How do you do it? You’re so magical at it. You are just so perfect.

1:22:35 You go make friends with anybody, everybody out there. How is it even possible?” I did use digital science. I learned it. So I went ahead to learn every aspect of it.

1:22:44 And I believe most skills in the world are learnable if you put in enough time and effort towards it. And the moment I learned it, I try to create systems around it. If I like doing something, I do it. If not, I create systems and let other people in our team take over, so they do it better. But when I do it, I learn it inside out.

1:23:02 In my company right now, across all these hundreds of people that are working, I know the job of every person I have done what they did, whether it be design, development, marketing, sales, operations, whether they are organizing something, even doesn’t matter what job that they are into, I know how they do it, because I have done it, and I believe that is important before you delegate something to someone, you need to know what it is that you’re delegating. Sure, you can delegate without knowing that, you can work with people out. But it’s more fun when it is intrinsic to you.

1:23:35 You know it, they know it. And you, you understand, you know, the challenges they face. You empathize with them. You can help them grow to the full potential that they have not even realized. You improve the people around you when you have that as an essence of who you are.

1:23:52 Wow. How can people participate and start using Forward Protocol? How can people take part of the token sale? What are steps that people can take if they’re kind of excited by the message, and how couldn’t they be and want to either work with you or be a part of this community or own part of the company? What are next steps for all those different types?

1:24:12 The first step, they head on to forwardprotocol.io. They can read about it. They can see what is in there, and they have an option to start building, sign up. That goes to forwardfactory.net, which is our factory. We call it a factory where people build things, and they can just try deploying something that have templates that are everything out there for people to learn.

1:24:31 There’s a beautiful community that can help them with it. But if they do want to get part of the token sale and what’s happening in the upcoming time, they can just stay tuned on our social media, subscribe. We are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, any channel that they imagine, we are there and we communicate excessively. So it’s all there. They just need to stay tuned.

1:24:51 They’ll hear more about it, and they can follow the steps that’s outlined there in the coming days. Wow. This is going to be a pretty incredible year. I’m sure you’re pretty excited about everything that’s going to happen here. Anybody can go on right now to forwardprotocol.io, and they can start playing.

1:25:05 They can start creating and being a part of this whole thing. You’re going to be doing this for years and years to come, because you want this company to really change the whole space, right? To completely change all businesses, not just blockchain only. And you seem like a pretty determined guy, to say the least. Karnika, thank you so much for coming on.

1:25:24 Really appreciate that. I’m really excited. I’m excited about the space. I’m excited about Forward Protocol, and yeah, I’m also really motivated because you are pretty good communicator, and to do that from scratch is really impressive as well. And I’m glad we can be part of the adventure with London Real Ventures.

1:25:39 So thanks for what you’re doing. I’m really excited for this year, really excited for Forward Protocol, and let’s do this again and see how we’re doing in the future. Let’s move forward together. I’m super excited. Thank you so much.

1:26:00 Thank you, man. Appreciate you.