Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Ian Friend. He is associated with the Ferrum Network.
He’s actually the co-founder. And we had this lovely conversation where we discussed a lot about what Ferrum is doing and what is upcoming for them. They have a few really, really interesting updates that they shared with us.
Let me just say two words, wine and yacht parties. So I think that’s going to pique your interest. Let’s deep dive right in.
Hi Ian, how are you doing today? Very good, Tarusha. Thank you for having me. Oh, thank you so much for taking out the time to speak to me and giving our users an insight into what Ferrum is doing.
So just to get started right away, can you tell us a little about your background and how you got into crypto and blockchain? Sure. So I got into crypto like I think a lot of people do, which is just as a retail investor. A friend of mine introduced the Coinbase app to me.
I was living in New York at the time working as a lawyer. And Coinbase, I think, had just opened up to New York residents. And so he showed me the app.
And I had known about Bitcoin, obviously, but it never got my feet wet. And this was like early 2017. OK.
And so I bought some Bitcoin, bought some Ethereum. And then it started to go up. And I thought, wait, there’s something to this.
Let me research a little bit. And so I went down the rabbit hole, got really into distributed ledger technology in general. And in particular, how it could disrupt the industry that I was working at the time, which was law.
And then shortly after, I thought, why not dip my toes in in a professional way? And so I co-founded the blockchain practice team at the firm I was at. And we started to attract some clients and do some advisory work and so on in the legal field. And then a few months later, I went to a conference.
I wish I said a conference, more like a meetup. And I met my now co-founder, who was working at Bloomberg at the time. And we just hit it off.
He was building a cross-chain solution, high-speed cross-chain DEX kind of solution. And it sounded very intriguing, solving a lot of big major problems. Of course, we were very green and knew no one in the industry.
And so we sort of just like foolishly were like, let’s go for it. Not knowing a thing about what it really means to build a business in this industry. But that was three years ago.
And here we are with many, many successful products, many clients, many projects we’ve launched. And so it’s been an incredible journey. But it feels still like the early days for Ferrum, believe it or not.
Yeah, no, no, I totally believe you. Like I’ve been in the crypto space at least, not in a professional sense, but I started dabbling very early in 2012, 2013 with mining rates because we were dealing with hardware. And, you know, we were trying to like put them together.
And even now I still feel like newbie every day because this space is so new, right? There is so much happening. It’s so dynamic. And there’s so many interesting people and so many interesting things that are happening that you learn something new every day.
Oh, absolutely. And that’s one thing I love about this industry, that it feels like anybody with passion, work ethic, it doesn’t matter what background you’re from, whether you’re the most brilliant software engineer or you’re just a community member who wants to dive in and try their hand at marketing or community management. There’s something for everybody in this industry.
And it means you just meet all these incredible people, which is one thing I love about it. Absolutely. This is something that I love as well.
And that is one of the reasons I started this podcast because it gives me an opportunity to talk to all these incredible people. And I end up learning something new with every conversation. So that is absolutely brilliant.
Yeah, it’s exciting. It’s an exciting space to be in. It’s still early days, I think.
You can only imagine where it’s going to be in five, ten years from now. That’s what really gets me excited because we’re all early adopters at the end of the day. Absolutely.
It keeps us right on our toes at all times. So this is a good time to be here early. If you could tell us a little more about what you’re building at Ferrum.
Sure. So Ferrum has evolved into what we call a blockchain as a service project. So we build and offer products and services that are designed to assist particularly early stage projects in their crypto journey.
So whether that means through staking as a service products, cross-chain bridge products, maybe even anti-bot product to protect projects launching their tokens, protecting from bots. But I think has really done very well for us is our incubator. We’ve worked with many amazing projects, helped bring them to market.
We provide our Ferrum community members and holders the opportunity to invest in these projects. And some have done incredibly well and gone on to become very well-known and successful in the industry. And so, yeah, we do a lot, but it really comes down to helping others in this crazy wild west of an industry.
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it’s such a good thing that you guys are doing. You’re providing the building blocks and you hold the hand of these folks who are actually building some incredible solutions, but they might not understand all the ropes of the trade.
And for you guys to come in and kind of help out these founders, it’s such an incredible thing and it’s so empowering. So what you’re doing is basically enabling all of these guys to create kick-ass solutions. So that is incredible.
Yeah, I like the way you put that and it’s something I love to do. And it’s funny because we built a lot of these solutions initially to assist Ferrum, but then we realized, wait, this was a valuable product. The staking is an excellent example of this.
This was a product we built in mid-2018, before DeFi was even a word. We built smart contract-based staking that works for any token. Uniswap wasn’t out yet, but it was single asset staking.
And it was designed to really add utility to our token, which was sort of suffering at the time because we had just launched, but there wasn’t much in the way of utility. We launched the staking. It was very successful.
And soon after, projects began to come to us, asking for this product because they also wanted some quick utility as they were building their core products. And so the staking product is really, I think the start of our journey is sort of this blockchain as a service provider because that ultimately even led into our incubator, believe it or not. So that was sort of the start of Ferrum and the success we’ve had.
Right, this kind of reminds me of how we started Uniswap. We kind of wanted to do that. We were just trying to solve a problem for our own token, and we ended up building a product, which a lot of our founders thought was very appealing for their tokenomics and for their token in general.
So again, it’s a staking example. Everybody is so early in this phase that I think there is room for everyone to kind of grow. And that is how we kind of grow the ecosystem together.
Yeah, well, I love what you guys are doing. It’s similar in many ways to what our staking product offers, and it’s been incredibly successful as well. And it just means that you guys have found product market fit.
You’re solving a real problem. And that’s, as a tech startup, that’s really something all you can hope for. It’s not easy to find product market fit after all.
Absolutely, absolutely. Most startups fail after a year or two. So I think it’s great to see what you guys have built for your journey is just beginning as well.
Thank you so much. You guys have been like real pioneers in this space with all of these innovative solutions. So we are adding on.
And as I said, there’s enough for everyone here in this ecosystem because it’s so early. What you guys are building, we’ve always been kind of in awe. So thank you for the kind words.
Now, let’s talk about what is the next big milestone for FedEx that you guys are looking at and you think that this is the one that we have to hit next. Yeah, so I’ve spoken a lot about the staking, but I haven’t really touched on our token bridge, our cross-chain token bridge, which I think is a credibly innovative product that if more people knew about it, it might ultimately become one of the most popular means for swapping tokens across chain. I’ll explain quickly how the version one works and then I’ll explain why I think the version two, which is actually currently is under audit as we speak, could be that catalyst, that next major release for Ferrum.
So the bridge essentially allows you to swap your asset across from Ethereum to DSC to Polygon, and we’ll be adding more chains as we go. We’ve gotten grants from Algorand to build, to migrate the bridge and connect it over there. We’ve gotten a grant from Moon River to do the same and we’re in talks with many other layer ones.
And so I expect this bridge to be one point in the future, have the most connectivity across all the chains. But that’s only one reason why I’m so excited about the product. The second reason is because it really suits itself to our approach of adding value to other projects, of writing a white label solution.
Because of the way it’s designed, the swap itself actually costs the user a small bit of tokens, but it’s paid for in the native token in which it’s being swapped. So say we just signed up a number of projects. The first one that comes to mind is Paid Network.
They were actually the first project to use our bridge on a white label basis. And so every time a user swaps paid from say Ethereum to BSC, maybe they see an arbitrage opportunity or maybe there’s some farm they want to take advantage of, or maybe they just want to trade on a lower cost DEX. And so they want to swap from Ethereum to BSC.
That swap costs a little bit in Paid Network token. And so that means this bridge actually provides utility and generates revenue for every project that uses it. And there’s no other bridge on the market that does that.
Wow. That’s brilliant. That kind of creates another utility as well.
Exactly. And it all goes back to our thesis of how do we add value to projects? How do we assist them further? So that’s the current iteration of the bridge, and there’s probably about 10 or 12 projects that are currently using it. But the second version, which is under audit now, I think is even more exciting.
Okay. Because right now, the version one requires that the project itself deposit liquidity, provide liquidity for the bridge on both, you know, say on both chains. That’s what facilitates the swap.
The second version, which again is under audit now, draws that liquidity from the DEXs themselves. Wow. So whether UD swap or Pancake swap or what have you.
Right. And so that means our bridge can now or soon allow you to swap major assets across chain. Because before, the liquidity had to come from the project themselves.
That means the project had to be fully on board with this. They had to sign up for it. They have to be aware of it.
It wasn’t permissionless. It’s not currently permissionless, you could say, right? Right. But this future version is permissionless.
So you could, so we can have, you know, so the bridge can now allow you to swap USDC across, BNB across, Ethereum across, you know, projects that would never, you know, they wouldn’t sign up for the bridge. You know, who are we? The Ethereum Foundation. But we can tap into that liquidity on the DEXs, and then the user can themselves can swap it across.
And the really cool thing too about that from a Ferrum utility standpoint is that that swap will actually cost a bit of the Ferrum token. And so, you know, if this bridge takes off like I think it can, it can be a massive, massive catalyst for the FRM token. Wow.
That sounds like a wonderful plan. And, you know, as you said, it kind of takes care of a lot of pain points that are there with the existing solutions. So, you know, it’s innovative and it kind of touches base on all of these points, which makes it all the more exciting.
So when do you guys intend to launch this? So it’s under audit by now by an auditor named Zokio, who we really like, a very well respected industry. They, you know, they may come back with some comments or, you know, bugs they found that need to be resolved, and then we’ll need to resolve them. So I think it is still a month or two away from actual launch.
Okay. But we have a lot of awesome things in the pipeline that are going to be announced before that. We’re not just like waiting around for this product to launch.
You know, at FRM, we believe in being active, engaged in the community almost at all times, always have something for the token holders to do with their tokens. And so, of course, we have all these presales coming up that we always do. But we’re actually, we’re about to announce something that I think should be announced by the time this interview comes out so I can talk about it.
And that is a new, it’s a new initiative that is near and dear to my heart because it involves two things that I love. It involves wine and traveling and hanging out with people, hanging out with people with crypto, believe it or not. So I can explain how all those things are tied together.
This probably sounds a little wacky. But basically, what happened was a governance committee member of ours reached out and said, hey, I have a winery in Portugal. And I’d love to donate some of the wine that I’ve made to FRM, to the FRM community.
But of course, we want to do it in a way that, you know, benefits the token holders, you know, showcases our products and gets other things involved. And so we said, you know, this is amazing. He’s going to donate, I think, 300 or something bottles of wine to FRM.
What we’re going to do with this is this is going to be the catalyst, the start of a series of what we’re calling real world events. Right. So funnily enough, when he reached out and mentioned this, we had just signed up.
FRM, the company had just signed up for a booth at this conference in Miami called the Central, which is happening in November 30th to December 1st in Miami. And we thought, hmm, why not combine all these things together? And we’ll have this wine, you know, we will send wine to FRM holders. And I’ll explain how they’ll actually get wine in a minute.
- We can also have a contest where certain community members can actually win a trip to Miami to join us, the FRM team, stay at the hotel we’re staying at, get FRM VIP tickets to the conference, you know, get FRM merch, really ingratiate themselves with the FRM team and the FRM experience, FRM community with an all expense paid trip to Miami. So we said, let’s combine all these things together.
Yeah, yeah. I’m really, you can tell I’m really excited about this one because, you know, for me, I, you know, I really relish in the people in this space, getting to know them, getting to understand them, befriending them. In many cases, a lot of FRM team members actually even came from the community first and we then brought them on because of the relationship we developed.
So I love this side of the business. And so I’m super excited about this Miami trip and the wine. And I also love wine, by the way.
And we’re going to do more of these too. Like every, we want to do one every quarter or so. We’ll do it different trips somewhere, maybe Portugal, maybe do a different conference, wherever in the world that people are able to go.
Of course, to qualify, you need to, you know, you need to hold a pretty significant amount of FRM. We have a leaderboard that’s going to basically determine how you qualify for this. You’re gonna have to stake some FRM as well.
You know, so it’s not, it’s not just anybody can get in. You have to be a real committed community member, but yeah, I don’t think there’s any project doing anything quite like this. And I, and I, and I hope the community ends up loving it as much as I do.
No, I think this is a wonderful idea. And, you know, now I’m just going to start staking some FRM tokens, just stake them, et cetera, to be eligible for one of these. Well, we’d love to have you.
I mean, I hope, I hope you are able to make it out to the Miami conference, or maybe at least a future conference that we’ll all be at together. Cause it would be great to meet. But yeah, I mean, I, I think it’s really cool.
You know, to win the wine, by the way, is not that difficult. Basically how we’ve structured that side of the contest is, so anyone who wants the wine will, will, will send us 500 USDT before that you’ll win, you’ll win the wine and you’ll also win a VIP, a spot in one of our VIP staking pools, where you’ll be able to stake FRM and you’ll be, and you’ll earn, you know, nice APY. So it’s not like you just spent, you didn’t just spend $500 on a bottle of FRM branded wine.
You spent $500 on a bottle of FRM wine and you got, you know, and you got APY out of it as well. So it’s, it’s not like you just, you know, we were thinking about it’s like, how many people will spend $500 on a bottle of wine? Like we need something a little bit more for those people, but we think the staking is going to, going to work nice. And you don’t need to hold that much FRM even to qualify for that.
I think we’re going to open it up to anyone holds a thousand FRM or more. So it’s not something hard to qualify for. Should you want to participate in that and get yourself sent a nice bottle of FRM branded wine from Portugal? Organic wine, actually, I’m sure it’s going to be delicious.
Wow. You know, this is sounding wonderful. I know I really want to, you know, get my FRM token and put them to work so that I can be in one of those.
It’ll be wonderful. I’m glad you say that, you know, we haven’t, we haven’t really told anybody outside the team about this and it is quite unusual. And you said, we’re not really sure how people react, but it’s great to hear that you’re, you know, you sound excited about it.
Very excited. Like, you know, just an opportunity to sort of meet like-minded individuals and, you know, bring some good wine in an exotic location. I think all of us need that at this moment after all, you know, all of this pandemic and lockdowns.
That’s so true, isn’t it? Yeah. You know, the only issue that we’re facing now is actually because of COVID, it’s sort of difficult for a lot of people to travel to the United States we’re finding. But we think we’ll find at least 10 or 15 people that will want to, you know, an all expense trip paid to Miami, go to this VIP conference, you know, there’s these yacht parties going on afterward.
It’s going to be pretty awesome. I think we’ll manage to find 10 or 15 people. Absolutely.
I am telling you that you will find more. This is sounding like a great party. So no, this is wonderful.
This is so much fun. It’s like nice when, you know, these kinds of fun elements are added, you know, to a rather like serious space or at least on the face of it, it seems like a serious space when, because we, you know, talk about creating a parallel economy and the creator’s economy and, you know, it’s like, it’s against the traditional financial system. We are trying to do something, you know, you’re trying to disrupt it.
So it’s good that, you know, these fun elements are added and, you know, it kind of gives people an opportunity to actually interact with the thought leaders of the space. And that just means more ideas, right? More solutions. That’s it.
I, you know, I think the best things happen in this industry when people come together, they meet, they brainstorm, they have a little bit of fun. That’s where innovation thrives. So we’re really looking forward to the conference and these real world events we’re doing.
And if this one’s a success, we’ll definitely continue to continue to do that. So I hope to see you at one of them. Absolutely.
Absolutely. I’m telling you, I’m just getting to work right off of this. Get your Ferrum and it’s not going to be difficult.
You’ll basically, you’ll be sent an email, asking whether you want to participate in all this. And then, you know, you send your 500. Oh, by the way, I forgot to add one very important part of all this.
We’re not just taking the USDT and pocketing it, right? We’re taking it. We’re buying back Ferrum and then we’ll be adding it. And there’ll be adding that Ferrum to we, one of our partner DEXs of Bancor.
They have a, you know, they have basically single asset kind of staking or single asset of liquidity. So we’re going to add that to the liquidity of Bancor. They’re going to promote that.
They’re going to add some rewards as well. So it is ultimately all going back to the benefit of the community at the end of the day. But this was just the simplest.
We were thinking, you know, how do we get people to qualify? Should they send Ferrum, USDT? It gets a little bit complex. So we thought, let’s just have them send USDT. We’ll buy back the Ferrum.
They’ll be invited to the staking pool. So they earn APY. And then we’ll use that bought back Ferrum to add it to the Bancor DEX where people can earn even more rewards.
This is great. You know, it’s like, so, you know, you ideally want to just create a circular economy and you’ve done that. So, you know, more power to your team and you that, you know, you’ve come up with such an innovative solution and added, as I said, a fun element to this entire thing.
So yeah, all the best for that. I’m really looking forward. This is wonderful.
Actually, this is really very good. So now, you know, kind of talking about trends, let’s like kind of steer away towards that because, you know, we are talking about this creator’s economy and there’s a lot of noise these days around NFTs and, you know, the metaverse. So I would love to know, you know, I know that Ferrum did take part in, they were a big participant in the Polycon even that, Polyrose even that had happened, the Polycon.
So, you know, what is your take personally on NFTs on metaverse and where do you think this is going? Yeah, well, I, I, for one, love the trends, particularly, particularly the metaverse trend. I think we’re very early days with it. The reality is we, yeah, we did participate in that, in the Polygon event, which was really, really cool.
But, but the technology isn’t quite, I mean, it’s fun, it’s usable, but it’s, it’s not quite, I don’t think it’s quite ready for mass adoption. Let’s put it that way. That’s okay.
You know, the technology needs to start somewhere. And I think we’re, I think we’re early days with respect to metaverse, metaverses in general, but you know, it’s one of those use cases that I think is just perfect for blockchain technology because you can now basically create mediums of exchange within those metaverses on, on chain, you know, fully decentralized permissionless, not censorable. Because what I think likely is going to happen realistically is the major tech companies and Facebook’s already talking about this.
They’re going to build their own centralized metaverses. You know, you’ll be subject to all the whims of Mark Zuckerberg or what have you. And I don’t, I don’t know if that’s going to create the best user experience.
So the permissionless blockchain based version of metaverses, that’s the future, but we’re early days, early day. A lot of these metaverse projects, you know, they have great trailers, they have great demos, but I have not played, played any one of them that I feel is quite ready for mass adoption. That’s okay.
It’s got to start somewhere. It’s going to get there. Yeah.
Like, yeah, you know, it’s early days, right? It’s like, oh, when email came out and people thought, okay, this is not for everybody. Right. And now you cannot really, now people have actually evolved even from email.
Now it is like, it has reached mass adoption. So I think that inflection points come later. We are still very, very early there, but it’s very exciting.
And I think the potential that it kind of has to engage as we, you know, kind of going back to the point that we had made earlier that, you know, there are all kinds of people that, that, you know, can be a part of this new economy that, and this new world that is being created with blockchain and crypto, I think, you know, a metaverse and NFTs, they kind of bring in, you know, the other side as well. So I find it very encouraging. Yeah.
I’m, I’m really excited for it. And, you know, in terms of NFTs thing, look, there’s parts of it that I’m not, I’m not thrilled about. I mean, there’s the, you know, part of that industry is, is very speculative.
And I do worry a little bit about, you know, when an asset has no intrinsic value and it’s just purely subjective as to what it’s worth, what happens when, you know, the market turns bearish and there’s no buyers for that. And you’re left holding quote the bag, which is an NFT that you may have paid tons of money for. So I do worry about that side of it.
But I think long-term NFTs as a fundamental technology can change and disrupt for the better many, many industries, you know, from ticketing, real estate, even obviously we’ve seen what we’re going to do for art and artists. So I think we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to that technology disrupting other, other, other industries. But right now where it’s at, you know, speculating on JPEGs that look like apes, I don’t know.
You know, I think we can do better. I think we can do better as an industry. But hey, it’s what the people want, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah. You just go with the flow here.
I think that is what like, it’s like speaking people’s interest right now. So I’m thinking of it like, you know, stepping stone towards the long journey towards mass adoption, that at least people are getting intrigued enough to get in and look into the space. So that’s a good thing.
And I agree with you. I concur with your point regarding, you know, the speculative nature, because some of it doesn’t make sense to me either. I think that, you know, there are some good use cases to be made out of NFTs, but we’re not there yet.
Like, you know, identity can be a good case now, you know, use case. And Twitter is now, I think, going to be using NFTs for, you know, that blue verification tick that they give to profiles. And that is like a use case, but the other side of it, where, as you said, the inherent in your intrinsic value is not very clear.
That makes me a little iffy as well. Yeah. And that’s okay.
I think, you know, the market needs time to mature, but I think you hit on a really excellent point, which is it feels like NFTs, for whatever reason, were more interesting or intriguing to I don’t want to say normal people, to non-crypto native, to people who are just like, you know, maybe interested, but it feels like NFTs has spurred a lot more interest in crypto in general from what people that were otherwise not interested in Bitcoin or, or Ethereum or DeFi, because I guess NFTs are, they’re a little more tangible in a sense. Yeah. You know, they’re visual.
They’re not intimidating that, you know, when you think about, when I’m just talking like a third party, from that perspective, somebody is just starting off, say like, okay, for my, for example, say, you know, if my parents are looking at crypto, they would find it inherently complex, right? Like, you know, they would struggle with trying to understand there is a huge learning curve there. But with NFTs, that is not really the case, especially, you know, and they tend to be more interesting. So more people sort of jump on the bandwagon.
Exactly. And I think, look, everyone in the industry should be rooting for mass adoption at the end of the day, right? You want more people interested in crypto, using crypto, engaging with it. And so if it means they came in through NFTs, or they came in through Bitcoin, they came in through DeFi, I’m happy no matter what, right? You know, you just hope that you don’t want a situation where the people who did come in recently get burned and lose a lot of money and then, you know, are left with a bad taste in their mouth.
That’s what you don’t want. But I think overall, look, we’re early days, and I think all these trends are very good for the industry long term. Yep, yep.
You and me both. I think this is like, it’s like, you know, a stepping stone. Obviously, maturity will come at a later age.
So this is fine. But yeah, you know, you should do your own research before you start, like, putting in your hard-earned money there. Just understand.
And I think that goes for any kind of investment, you know, not just in crypto and NFTs. But it’s just good advice, because people kind of approach crypto at times, like a get-rich-quick sort of a thing. And that is like, that is not safe.
And that’s not a good thing to do. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that side of the industry will probably always exist because people hear the stories of the guy who invested in Bitcoin in, you know, 2013, and now is rolling up. So they’re like, oh, that can be me.
So you’ll always have that to some degree. But I think, you know, now the industry is maturing. I hope that the next bear market is a little milder.
Yeah, you and me both. We recover a little quicker. Like, you just don’t want to see too many people who bought the top and then get burned and sell the bottom, which does happen in these cycles.
I think as we mature and, you know, more institutional money comes in, they maybe approve this, SEC approves this Bitcoin ETF, market caps grow. It’s going to become a little bit more of a stable market and hopefully more, you know, more people will be able to find success in it rather than, you know, getting burned. Yeah, absolutely.
You kind of summed it up in a very good way. Okay, so now, you know, we have to, we’re running short on time. So I’ll ask you the last two questions that I have here.
Would you like to recommend any thought leaders, any resources for people who are just getting into this space? Well, you know, I don’t spend a lot of time. I’m too busy to keep track of the newest, you know, influencers or resources, but one influencer who has been derided in the past, but actually I think he’s a really good guy. The Ferrum team is close and we’ve worked with him and he is one of the premier sort of thought leaders in the space when it comes to newer people, retail, is BitBoy, to be perfectly honest with you.
I think he puts out great contents, well-produced, well-thought-out. He’s very professional and he cares deeply about his community. He’s got it wrong sometimes, right? I know he’s recommending projects that have rug pulled and so on, but if you’ve been in this industry long enough, you’re going to have some mud on your face and it’s impossible to avoid it, right? Overall, I think he’s a good guy, good information.
He’s a good resource and he also works closely with Ferrum. So you can, you know, watch some of his Ferrum videos as well. And then, look, I think at the end of the day, the best thing to do is just, you know, get a wallet, get Coinbase, get a MetaMask, buy a little bit of Bitcoin or Ethereum or what have you.
Having the asset will naturally pique your curiosity. And that will allow you to go, you know, you’ll then be sort of more incentivized to go down the rabbit hole, so to speak, because that’s where you really need to ultimately go down the rabbit hole. You can’t just, oh, you know, I only read this one piece of information or only watch this one YouTube video.
You’ve got to dedicate, I think, a number of hours to it. And I think the more, the better. I think everyone will find that this industry is completely fascinating.
It’s just incredible. And I think everyone’s, you know, you take a deep dive, you’re going to find something you love about it, but you just got to start somewhere and just getting that first little bit of Bitcoin or Ethereum, that’s the best thing. Yeah, you know, that kind of, you’ve segwayed away into my last question.
That is what I usually ask everyone who comes in the show. That, you know, if somebody is, again, well, you know, it’s sort of looking in, peering in from the outside, and they are too afraid or intimidated to get into the space of blockchain and crypto, what would be your two cents? So would you like to sum that up as well? Because I think you kind of did convey that you have to get your hands dirty. Yeah, I mean, well, just to add on to it, I mean, it’s just, I would say, don’t be too intimidated.
It’s actually less complicated than you might imagine. Yeah. You simply need to dip your toes, you know, do a couple hours of research as to what a wallet is, the concepts behind Bitcoin, you know, the economy behind Bitcoin, download a wallet, buy a little bit, and then sort of go down the rabbit hole and, you know, go on that journey for yourself.
But just dive in. It’s not as complicated or scary as you might imagine. And I’m sure you’ll find things that you love about it.
Yep. Yep. I think that is like the best way to go forward.
Like, you know, when people ask me, how do you get started? I just say that if you just start, you know, and that, that is it. Once you do start, I think, you know, it’s like such a slippery slope. You’ll be, there’ll be so much information coming and being thrown your way.
The more you learn, the more curious you’ll become. And, you know, the better you will get at being in this space. Because nobody here is an expert.
And, you know, it’s like you learn something or like a few things new every day. Oh, absolutely. And the other thing too is don’t be afraid of losing money.
You really have to, you have to lose money and you will lose money. At a certain point, you know, you’ll, you’ll make mistakes trading or investing, or maybe you’ll get scammed. A lot of people, you know, one point gets scammed.
I know I have been scammed. Not, not, not, not ashamed to say it, you know, so half is the best of us. So you’re going to lose money, but if you stick to it, I mean, you, you could look at the people who are most successful in this industry.
It’s just folks who stuck to it the longest. Yeah. Right.
And I only got it in 2017 and now it feels like I’m, I’m like a veteran. It’s only four years, you know? So anyone can, can get in this industry, succeed and succeed. Just stick to it.
Don’t be dissuaded when you lose money, it’s okay. You’ll lose some money, but you’ll, but if you stick to it and you stay disciplined, you’ll, you’ll make far more than, than you’ll lose. Yeah, absolutely.
I couldn’t have said it better. So thank you so much Ian for taking out the time again to speak to me, to speak to Alice. Any parting thoughts before we wrap this up? No, I just want to remind people that if you’re interested in Ferrum, you can find us on Twitter at Ferrum network on our Telegram channel, where a lot of activity happens.
You can find me on Telegram or Twitter at ifriends05. I’m very accessible, happy to answer any questions. So yeah, looking forward to meeting some folks who come, come out of this, this interview here.
Lovely. That’s great. I’m sure a lot of people would be DMing you and getting in touch because this has been such a lovely conversation.
Thank you once again. My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Tricia.