Building a User-Friendly Crypto Ecosystem: Mel Gelderman's Vision for Token.com | S4 E49

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I decided to live a life purely with a Bitcoin wallet.
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I just had a Bitcoin wallet on my Android phone, and I traveled the world with that, trying to survive off Bitcoin, which is very hard.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast.
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My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm really excited to be joined by Mel Gelderman.
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Hello, Mel, how are you?
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What's up, Joeri?
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Hello everyone, I'm really excited to be joined by Mel Helderman.
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Hello Mel, how are you?
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What's up, Joeri?
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Hello everyone, I'm good.
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Thank you, Very good yeah.
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I'm good too, and you know, guys, he pronounced my name in a really Belgian-Flemish-Dutch way because he has some Dutch background.
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Actually, I think you were born in the Netherlands, right, mel?
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Yeah, correct.
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I was born in the Netherlands, but the majority of my life I've now lived abroad, so I don't have the characteristic Dutch accents.
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Which face.
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I hear it a bit, but it's not so present.
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I have the Belgian accent.
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I live now in Lisbon, in Portugal, but only for a few months.
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Right Amazing.
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Yeah, guys, if you're not wondering, who is Joeri talking to, Mel Gelderman.
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He's the CEO of tokencom.
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He's a crypto OG.
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I saw on his LinkedIn profile 10 plus years experience in the crazy market maybe already more by now, at 24,.
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He co-founded I hope I pronounced it in the right way Monolight, the first ever Ethereum integrated Visa debit card.
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He leads a team of brilliant and creative individuals at Tokencom.
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They are making crypto investing snackable, fun, simple and accessible for everyone, so that's a great mission.
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Actually, Mel wants to build products that actually change the world.
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I love that.
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It's a really good description on your LinkedIn, mel.
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I hope I pronounced monolith in the right way.
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I mean, yeah, monolith, oh, monolith.
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Okay, guys.
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It happened.
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I came up with that name with my co-founder, david, after we watched 2001,.
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A Space Odyssey right came up with that name with my co-founder, david, after we watched 2001 a space odyssey right, the stanley kubrick movie from like 1969 or whatever.
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And this is back in 2014, and this is when I was extremely passionate about ethereum, which had, like, just been announced, it was about to go live in the summer of 2015.
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And to us, ethereum was like the monolith in that movie, because in this space movie, the whole plot of the movie is that humanity encounters these big black stones on the surface of one of the moons of Jupiter and on the moon, and, like the apes, like in the stone age, and that every time they'd encounter this monolith, this black stone.
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That's when humanity transcends from one level of technology to the next, one level of cognition to the next, going from the stone age to the modern age, the space age, et cetera.
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And that's basically what our industry is.
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That's what Bitcoin represented to me.
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That's what it specifically represented to me and, yeah, that's why I'm here.
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That's why I'm here 11, 12 years after starting.
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I'm so tired, but, yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself.
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I'll let you actually ask the questions.
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You answered already the first question that I had in mind about monolith what inspired you to start?
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Monoliths, but also tokencom, of course.
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So talk us about the beginning of tokencom.
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Yeah, exactly so, like I said, the moment I discovered Bitcoin in 2013, it was a game changer.
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It was like this is like an anti-establishment technology.
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It truly just like the internet before it, coin, was this technology that we could envision completely overhauling the status quo, right, like we could really completely redo society.
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And, yeah, so, after starting Molleth, many years later, molleth was basically a way for you to.
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It is a way for you to live in the real world using your crypto, right?
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So, because the story is back in 2013, I had my Dutch bank accounts my ABN, anglo and ING bank.
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I canceled both of those and I decided to live a life purely with a Bitcoin wallet.
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I just had a Bitcoin wallet on my Android phone and I decided to live a life purely with a Bitcoin wallet.
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I just had a Bitcoin wallet on my Android phone and I traveled the world with that, trying to survive off Bitcoin, which is very hard, and that's actually how I got into the industry and like meeting really amazing people.
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And out of that came the idea for my first company, mololeth, which was this Visa debit card for the Ethereum ecosystem, right, and this was a product for people like you and me, Joeri, a product for people who are extremely passionate and bought into the industry, into the concept of cryptocurrency, and for allowing us to live a lifestyle, a pure crypto lifestyle.
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However, even after we built it, I realized that we were having real trouble onboarding ordinary people.
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Right, like all my friends and family, they thought it was cool what we'd built, but they weren't that interested in this type of product.
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Instead, what they kept asking me time and time again during the bull markets was like what should I buy?
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What crypto should I buy?
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What's the good one?
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Right, because they know I know a lot about this stuff and so they all want to know what they should buy.
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And that's basically the products that we're building with tokencom.
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Right, like the thing is the answer to what products, what token, you should buy like it's the straightforward, simplest answer is to say, oh, you should buy Bitcoin, or like in the past I would have said Ethereum and now I would say Solana or something.
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But the reality is that's like someone asking you what stocks you should buy or what food you should eat, and, yeah, like I can say pizza, or like spaghetti bolognese or whatever.
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But the reality is, you might have very specific tastes and interests.
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For you, it might be a very specific type of sushi, and that's basically going to be the same for tokens, where it's not going to be all about just the top biggest coins right, these are important, but the reality is, for each and every one of us, there will be unique and specific tokens that are very interesting to us, right, and this makes sense in the world that we're going towards, which is where tokens represent almost everything around us in society.
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Right, one day, tokens will represent all the snowboard brands and all the yoga studios and all the space, like lunar exploration companies or whatever, right, and so what you should invest in needs to be is tailored to you, is personalized to you, and that's what Tokencom is.
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It's basically it's like a social media feed.
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It's like literally like TikTok, where all the contents, all the videos, are about tokens, right, and they have the token, the relevant token, tagged on the video at the bottom with a buy and a sell button right next to it, and so it's basically it's like the it's investing tv for tokens.
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Basically, like in the simplest possible way, so that the next time my friends and family, during this bull market, ask what token should I buy, I'm just going to be like just download tokencom, like it learns what you're interested in and recommends tokens related to your interests.
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My cousin, my 21 year old cousin, he loves snowboarding.
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Right, he should be seeing snowboarding tokens.
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He's better at knowing which of those are going to succeed than some super technical layer two that he doesn't understand anything about.
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We should all be investing in our local area of expertise.
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That's what I think is going to make tokens massively succeed in the coming five, six years and that's what we're building.
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Yeah, anyway, there's a long answer.
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No, I like it because it's actually easy.
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Like social media, it sounds like you get to see the things or that are that you yeah, that you're really interested in, but now you make it sound so easy.
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I would say but the crypto?
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If I talk to other people about crypto or Web3, it sounds so complex for them, it's a hurdle, that they need to create a wallet and so on.
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So how do you balance this?
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Simplifying crypto for those people?
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Yeah, well, I think the reality is we live in 2024 now and we live on this particular cutting edge of like, we are now in the early stages of development of this new blockchain technology.
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Right, but in the world around us, we are surrounded by technologies that once were in the same phase.
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Right, like, a hundred years ago, to start a car, you had to push the choke, you had to hand crank it and you had to know what fuel to put in and God knows what.
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Right, like we.
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But today you get in your Tesla and you just drive.
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Right, you don't need to understand all the complexity under the hoods.
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Right, it's the same with the internet.
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Right, like the internet is.
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Like, there are so many technologies that are all coming together so that I can call my girlfriend on WhatsApp.
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Right, like, she just hits the buzzer and I answer, and but like, to make that happen, there's a stack of technology, so there's no difference than any of that.
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Right, like the products that end up winning.
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Right, the reason WhatsApp won in the web sewer is because they made it really simple and really easy.
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My grandma can do it, and so that's essentially the same going to be the same in crypto.
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Right, the products that actually get mass adoption are not the ones that expose all the complexity.
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Like people like us wants, right, like we like feeling, like we can we really understand everything that's going on.
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But the reality is, if we look at the last bull runs as evidence, it wasn't the Web3 wallets, like what we were building with Monolith, that got all the users.
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No, it was printed of com and Coinbase and Binance the most like centralized, like disgusting in our like context platforms, right, but they won.
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They did the marketing.
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Their platform was the easiest.
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They like their onboarding was the easiest.
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Their referral programs.
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This is just the reality of what wins.
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Right, it's in a different context.
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I know nothing about toothpaste, right, I don't know which toothpaste is best.
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I just buy the one that I've seen the advertising from, like the one with the fun colors, right, that's how we go about our lives in all other areas.
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We don't know where somebody who really knows everything about toothpaste rant at me telling me I shouldn't buy this one.
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I should be buying that one which I'd never heard about.
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That's like our industry today where we want to hate on the average user for using the thing they've heard about.
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Right, like, going back to the point, I user for using the thing they've heard about.
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Right, like going back to the point.
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I think the reality is, time and time again, the easiest and funnest products win.
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They're the ones that make it really simple for the user to do what they want to do, which is, in our industry, invest and make money.
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That's like the base use case for 98% of people, right, like in the Western world, and the product that makes that the easiest right, the easiest way to get access to alpha, is going to win.
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Right, and that's what we're trying to build with Togacom.
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Today have to be on Twitter and on Discord and Telegram.
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My friends and family are never going to do that.
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That's what we do to try and get to the good stuff.
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But they just want an app.
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They download it, they watch some stuff, they hit the buy button.
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They see what their friends are investing in, what I'm investing in, what you're investing in, what Andreessen Horowitz is investing in.
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That's what we want, and so I think that's where we're going in the long run.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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The user experience, of course, that's really important.
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And also not use too many, I would say, technical terms, because the technology is not.
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People don't.
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When they, when they use a credit card, they don't want to know what is happening.
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Or they use an Apple, an iPhone, they don't want to know, they just want it to work, and that's actually what you are also building with tokencom.
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Now, there is also a part of, I would say, education, or, for people that are the regular users, like your friends and family, they want to invest, there is a part of education I guess that is needed about blockchain, about tokens.
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Yeah, what strategies actually do you use for that?
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I completely agree.
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I would say this is potentially the biggest problem in the industry.
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It's only the one that I'm most passionate about, because we look at how the industry works today, or even how it's been for the last 15 years All the big crypto platforms, like Coinbase, for example you log in and what do you see?
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You see a list of coins.
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You just see all the top coins ordered by market cap and then some numbers.
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Right, and this is like nominally useful, but the reality is when my friend or my grandmother logs in, she doesn't know what any of these coins are right, like it's like she's Coinbase.
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Here you go, here's the buying experience.
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Figure it out yourself which one to buy.
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They don't.
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People don't know that right and like.
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The process to understand what any of these tokens are is way like you got to read white papers and telegrams and discords.
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It's insane, and so I think this is like this problem is a reason why is one of the reasons we've seen a rise in meme coins because a meme coin is so much easier to understand.
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You don't need to understand the tech and the bullshit, you just need to understand the meme and feel like it's exciting and cool and looks fun right and join the community or whatever.
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That's why these things are succeeding, and so how I think we need to tackle that is by making communication about tokens super easy, and what I think is the easiest way to do it is a short video feed.
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Tiktok right.
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Short video has won.
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This is what gets the most engagement, you can get the most amount of messages and with the easiest communication, but to the widest amount of people.
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Tiktok one.
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It has the highest engagement in the world.
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And if we can do that for token projects where you're consuming content about token projects, whether it's from influencers like yourself or from the project directly, or from whoever, or from media or whatever that if we can make a feed, a video feed, where the content that is the most engaging and by engaging in this context we mean that gets people to buy or sell right If we populate the user's seat with the most like converting, like engaging content, this is the easiest way to understand what the hell's going on.
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So, basically, a few months ago, trump was on stage at Bitcoin 24, where he was like saying, like on day one, we will fire Gary Gensler.
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And, like the whole, everyone in the crowd went yeah, like on that day, if you opened Coinbase, you see basically just the whole page with all like the coins and then Bitcoin goes up 3%.
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But if you open Tokencom, the very first thing is that video with Bitcoin tags a little thing that says, oh, bitcoin's up 5% and this video drove thousands of dollars of investments.
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That's the future.
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That's how my friends and family will understand what's going on like it's engaging.
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And that's just the start.
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That's what our product is today.
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It's going to get so much better.
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There's so much more we can build.
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Yeah, I love that.
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Yeah, that's actually that's a storytelling and the whole story around it.
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It's also, I would say, the marketing, maybe for the crypto and and actually I mentioned it in the beginning you have a brilliant creative team at tokencom.
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Yeah, but how do you guys do that to stay ahead?
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So many things have changed in the industry.
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How do you foster creativity, innovation, in such an environment?
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Yeah, I have.
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I do indeed have an amazing team.
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I don't program, I don't code and I don't design directly, but I am very critical, right From my point of view.
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I think it ultimately comes down to use.
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Right Like I'm extremely, I review all the designs.
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My team knows that we have very high standards.
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Every flow we build need to have something no one has ever done before, and sure, a lot of these experiments fail, but the ones that succeed change the game, and so the big gamble here is what if your Cripso app had a video feed at the heart, rather than the same page we've seen for the last decade?
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I highly doubt in 2030, that's the experience that's going to get people had a video feed at the heart, rather than the same page we've seen for the last decade.
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Right, like, I highly doubt in 2030, that's the experience that's going to get people like our industry to a billion users.
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But something like this could and yeah, toot my own horn, but I definitely imagine like Steve Jobs is the archetypal designer right In tech and he upheld incredibly high standards, trying to keep things extremely simple, and that's what made the iPhone one of the greatest products of all time.
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That's what we need in crypto as well, and we don't follow convention.
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We want to be the opposite.
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Yeah, that's, and we dabble, right, like you could follow the data, but if you ask the user what they want, they wouldn't have said our product today, right, and it's a.
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There's a.
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There needs to be a vision to drive it and iterating until she get it right and that's what we're doing.
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Yeah, it's never a straight line entrepreneurship and you have already been in the field for so many years in the crypto space.
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And then I'm now wondering you mentioned lots of things are now happening in the crypto space.
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And I'm now wondering you mentioned lots of things are now happening in the crypto space with the ballroom that seems to be starting or maybe is already going on, with Trump elected and so on.
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What is now the thing you are most excited about in the market of?
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Maybe things going on at tokencom?
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Yeah, we live, joeri, in the most exciting time imaginable, right, like the amount of technologies like releasing in the last years that will start maturing in the coming decade is incredible, and our industry is going to play a critical part in this hyper digitization, this accelerating technology right, this exponential curve that we're on, and I think the most important role that it can play is in giving capitalism a new breath of fresh air, because we do live in a capitalist world today, but we live in a capitalism for the few kind of situation where it's like those who are well connected, there's a little bit of silicon valley.
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They are able to invest in open ai and in spacex or whatever, but, like all of us losers, right, all we could invest in was bitcoin.
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Right, that was like one of the first technologies that, right from the ground floor, you know, and that's what tokens can do for for all of society.
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I think where we're going here is a world where you know, like most of us, in the end, will earn our money not from working physically but actually from investing in things that we believe in, and that's what.
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That's the world that tokens can enable.
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Right, that's the infrastructure that makes that happen, and it's just like how, 200 years ago, 98% of people works in agriculture, right, and then only 1% works in the factories.
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And then the factories came and everyone worked in the factories, and now everyone works in offices.
00:20:05.678 --> 00:20:11.893
We're going to a world where most jobs can be automated, and that's a good thing, and instead we're just going to be.
00:20:11.893 --> 00:20:21.316
We're going to become the investor class as humans, with a fleet of ai and robotics doing all the fucking hard work, and tokens are the infrastructure for that.
00:20:21.316 --> 00:20:22.618
Tokens are the infrastructure.
00:20:23.160 --> 00:20:31.518
And what's so exciting now is, up until a month ago, it up until basically this?
00:20:31.518 --> 00:20:40.537
U right, it looks like the US was not going to lead in crypto, right, like they've been extremely hostile.
00:20:40.537 --> 00:20:48.560
Europe, sure, we've come out with Mika, but as someone that's applying for a Mika license, I know it's a freaking disaster.
00:20:48.560 --> 00:20:52.176
Right Like Europe is highly over-regulated.
00:20:52.176 --> 00:20:55.954
Nothing really visionary will ever come out of the EU.
00:20:55.954 --> 00:20:57.038
That's just the reality.
00:20:57.038 --> 00:21:02.233
And so, like, where would the mass tokenization begin?
00:21:02.233 --> 00:21:05.442
Right, like it would be like in Argentina or El Salvador.
00:21:05.442 --> 00:21:10.232
Maybe in China, because they're super like, they understand the potential technology.
00:21:10.232 --> 00:21:12.795
But do we really want it to happen in China first?
00:21:12.795 --> 00:21:18.961
You know, all of a sudden, the US like, for all its flaws.
00:21:18.961 --> 00:21:23.065
Their political system at least their political system can do a 180.
00:21:23.065 --> 00:21:36.431
Can't happen in most of Europe, right, it doesn't work like that.
00:21:36.431 --> 00:21:37.272
Experienced the 180.
00:21:37.292 --> 00:21:40.818
And this new government seems to be extremely focused on technology as a way to make America and the world great again.
00:21:40.818 --> 00:21:54.061
That's the reality and the fact that most of the administration, the new administration at the highest level, is excited and super invested in Bitcoin and understands this stuff at least a lot better than the outgoing administration.
00:21:54.061 --> 00:21:56.739
This is very hopeful for the world and for our industry.
00:21:56.739 --> 00:22:04.238
So, all of a sudden, we are able to compress the timeline in which our industry can succeed.
00:22:04.238 --> 00:22:12.055
Right, like tokens, if they are truly embraced for what they are, which is a better way to do money and assets, that's all they are.
00:22:12.055 --> 00:22:13.184
Right, like it's just digital assets, that's all they are.
00:22:13.184 --> 00:22:16.459
Right, like it's just digital assets, but in the internet realm.
00:22:16.459 --> 00:22:20.590
Right, with all the benefits and if they are truly embraced.
00:22:20.590 --> 00:22:29.723
We are looking at potentially a tremendous new economic boom for the world, right, and the US is going to lead it, which is very exciting.
00:22:29.723 --> 00:22:33.713
Right, because if the US succeeds in it, the rest of the world will follow inevitably.
00:22:34.494 --> 00:22:35.076
I've never.
00:22:35.076 --> 00:22:45.011
I've been in this industry 11 or so years now, I have never been as bullish about the industry as I am today, and that's very good, because the last three years were pretty tough.
00:22:45.011 --> 00:22:47.678
Like that's the ex-disaster, right.
00:22:47.678 --> 00:22:50.853
The whole industry looked super bad to the world out there.
00:22:50.853 --> 00:22:53.865
That's about to change, right, and that's about to change right.
00:22:53.865 --> 00:23:06.622
And if we succeed as an industry, if we succeed, ultimately what happens what I really visualize is that gen z right are like cousins and children and like the next generation.
00:23:06.622 --> 00:23:15.511
They go from feeling like they're the poorest generation to ever exist, right in context, to potentially being one of the rich.
00:23:15.511 --> 00:23:23.640
Right like where any ideas they come up with can be tokenized and then robotics and ai can like execute them and they all fund it together.
00:23:23.640 --> 00:23:26.087
Financial means right.
00:23:26.087 --> 00:23:31.990
Like excited, really weird and exciting stuff's about to happen, but like potentially so much well can be created.
00:23:31.990 --> 00:23:33.696
And that's why I'm still here.
00:23:33.696 --> 00:23:37.200
That's why we're building an app that makes it so freaking easy for everyone.
00:23:37.421 --> 00:23:39.135
Yeah, I love it, mal.
00:23:39.135 --> 00:23:44.670
I think it's a really good, positive, inspiring message at the end of this podcast episode.
00:23:44.670 --> 00:23:53.618
If people want to know more about you, if they want to find out more about tokencom, maybe it's an obvious question, but where would you like me to send them?
00:23:54.099 --> 00:24:01.740
Yeah, yeah, like tokencom, it's an app, right, so it's in the app store, but you can go to the website and hit the link.
00:24:01.740 --> 00:24:06.461
It's available in almost all of Europe, latin America and most of Asia.
00:24:06.461 --> 00:24:09.298
It's coming to more jurisdictions worldwide.
00:24:09.298 --> 00:24:15.416
As we speak, we are launching a token pretty soon as well, which is going to be really exciting.
00:24:15.416 --> 00:24:23.097
And, yeah, if you want to follow me personally, I'm on Twitter, on X right, just at Mel Gelberman, and you'll find me.
00:24:23.097 --> 00:24:23.598
Yeah.
00:24:24.801 --> 00:24:26.432
Amazing Guys.
00:24:26.432 --> 00:24:29.060
What an amazing episode again.
00:24:29.060 --> 00:24:33.493
I think this episode can really be useful for people around you.
00:24:33.493 --> 00:24:37.415
As Mel said, be sure to share it with friends and family.
00:24:37.415 --> 00:24:40.383
Mel, it was a pleasure to have you on the show.
00:24:41.390 --> 00:24:43.695
Thank you, Joeri, it was a really good, Joeri.
00:24:44.278 --> 00:24:46.102
I always said it in English.
00:24:46.102 --> 00:24:49.538
Actually, my name can be pronounced in really different ways.
00:24:49.538 --> 00:24:51.362
Guys, I said an amazing episode.
00:24:51.362 --> 00:24:52.693
Be sure to share it.
00:24:52.693 --> 00:24:56.397
Be sure to follow the show if you aren't already following it.
00:24:56.397 --> 00:24:58.257
I think this is a really good moment to do this.
00:24:58.257 --> 00:25:07.744
If you haven't given me a review yet, this would help me even reach a bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time.
00:25:07.744 --> 00:25:08.428
Take care.