Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Chris or Rusto Piyankov as he is called, who is the Managing Director of FINDAS, a consultancy which specializes in data-driven tokenomics. With extensive experience in the cryptocurrency sector, Chris has contributed to over 300 projects since 2015.
He has seen pretty much everything from the ICO boom to how the market kind of crashed and how that has changed the kind of projects that come out of in this space because of the market conditions and how their services have evolved to cater to these newer needs. So he primarily obviously focuses on sustainable token economy designs, which is something so powerful and so foundational for every project, but it is at times not taken as seriously. He is a tokenomics expert, he is somebody who’s mentoring startups and he is a thought leader in this space.
This is one of the more different conversations that we have done, a little bit different because we’ve never really spoken with somebody who’s providing token design as a service by itself. So a very insightful conversation. I think it’s a must listen for the first-time founders or any other founder who’s in process of designing their tokenomics.
I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in. Hi Chris, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today.
I’m very grateful. How are you doing? I am doing very well, thank you and thank you for having me here. It’s completely my honor.
So for our listeners, can you tell us a little about your background and how you got into Web3? Sure, absolutely. Actually, majority of my background comes from traditional finance. So I have spent a lot of time in working in various banking and financial institutions and this concluded at the end of 2017 after I spent two years in China as analytics director for one of the biggest consumer finance companies there.
After that, I was looking for a change and Web3 seemed like a natural transition for somebody of my skill set where I work a lot with data, a lot with economics, and a lot with finance. So I just transitioned into Web3 and yeah, just started from there. Okay, so primarily your skill set was obviously more suited for something like Web3, but do you remember that particular point where you were introduced to Web3 or you came across this entirely new world? Yes, I believe that it was somewhere around 2014 when one of my friends was telling me that he’s mining Bitcoin and was just interested to see my opinion as a finance professional.
So he introduced me to Bitcoin, he explained how mining works and pretty much we started doing a couple of financial models just to calculate at this point in time whether it was profitable for him to mine Bitcoin. This was my first interaction with the Web3 space and from there my interest only grew. So I started researching other projects, reading on how it works, then Ethereum came along and this was really the catalyst of me moving into Web3 because pretty much the development of Ethereum opened so many doors for people doing economics like me to really apply their skills.
Right, yes absolutely. So this is wonderful, your friend kind of ended up introducing you and he wanted confirmation and you both got into the Web3 space very organically. So now can you tell us a little about what you’re doing currently? I know that you are fantastic with tokenomics and building those micro economies for tokens and projects, but if you could expand a little bit on what you do and what you’re building that’d be wonderful.
Sure, absolutely. So when I got into Web3 I started working with various projects on their token economies and really the thing which became very quickly apparent is that there is a problem and this problem is that too many projects are just copy-pasting their setups, meaning allocations, vesting, stocking utility from other projects. And what I set out to do is to bring this data-driven approach which I have from traditional finance where I wanted to take data, analyze the data and then come up with the best possible setup for the project.
After this initial phase in 2017 there was a lot of demand for what me and my company does, so up to now we have worked with over 300 projects including some of the biggest names in the crypto space and what we do for them is data-driven and sustainable token economy designs as well as token economy simulations. Okay, this is very true. You’re talking about 2017 obviously there was an ICO boom then and your services must have been a lot in demand, but the point that you’ve made is very relevant I think even today that a lot of the tokenomics that we saw earlier as well as now, it is a lot of copy-pasting of other projects.
People did not really spend a lot of time and put in much effort in designing tokenomics which essentially is the very foundation of the project. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you and this trend continues up to date and this is something that me and my team are working on changing because we don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach, so you cannot take a project which is in some specific area and then just copy it’s tokenomics and hope that it would work for your project as well. Right, so what kind of motivated you to focus on a data-driven approach to tokenomics? I think there are other companies that do that and we’ll talk about the USP of Afendas in a moment, but if you could tell me what was your inspiration to take that data-driven approach? To be perfectly honest, it is just based on my experience because as I mentioned, I worked as a data scientist for over 13 years, so really the data approach is what I know best and when I came into Web2Tree, I saw a big niche there so that projects who really want to be sure that their token economy sound from a financial and from data perspective that really want to dot their i’s and cross their t’s with their token economy, those are our clients usually.
Right, okay, yeah, but that is, it’s very pertinent. I think I cannot overstate how important working on tokenomics is and the kind of work that you’re doing because all founders perhaps, they can’t be economic experts who know how to design tokenomics. I think we all need help there, I’ll beat a few.
So, can you tell me a little about how you differentiate yourself from the other tokenomics consultancy firms in this space? What is the USP for Afendas? Sure, I think that we have two major advantages in Afendas. The first one is that we do only tokenomics and too many companies out there offer a more comprehensive service where they would do the token economy, they would do development, they would do marketing and they would do investor relations. The problem with this approach is that you end up with a lot of conflicts of interest and we have seen too many projects where, for example, the token economy structured in such a way as to be easy to develop by the developers or easy to market by marketing or offers too big advantages to early investors in order to get in the early investors early on.
And really, we avoid this kind of conflict of interest because we work only on the tokenomics and our only goal is to create token economies for the project which are sustainable. This is the first one. The second one is the fact that we have worked with over 300 projects up to date.
I don’t think that there is another company which can show this kind of track record and over these 300 projects, obviously, we have made every possible mistake that there is out there. We have tried every possible setup and things and we very well know which things work and which things don’t. So really, our experience is our second main selling point.
Wow, that’s wonderful. I love how your first USP is primarily just the fact that you guys are focusing on one thing and one thing alone. I think that is very important because there are too many constituencies in the day and age and all of those firms are focusing on way too many things and that kind of obviously dilutes perhaps the efforts.
Can you tell me a little more about the process for a founder to get in touch with you? Do you vet these projects? How does it work? What does the timeline look like? So sure, yeah. With most of the projects, the way that it works is that on our website, there is a very short form, just a couple of questions where any project which wants to work with us, we ask them for some basic information like what are they trying to achieve to share with us the current documents which they have and by when do they need the tokenomics work done. After they submit this form, me and my team reviews this document and we come back to the project with a quote for our services.
Typically, we work with all kinds of projects except for meme coins, I would say, and projects that we believe are outright scams. The reason why we don’t work with meme coins is because we don’t believe that we can add value to those projects because they are not based on data. Instead, they are based on purely the community, the hype around the project and so on.
But apart from those two kinds, we have literally worked with every kind of project out there. Layer 1s, Layer 2s, DESIs, SESIs, and anything, you name it, we have worked with it. Brilliant.
Yes, I think you’re right there. Working with meme coins is pretty pointless, especially on their tokenomics because there is very little data there. It’s all about the noise.
Correct, yes. So pretty much the way that we like to think about it is that, and what I like to say is it’s not that meme coins don’t have value, it’s that we as a company cannot add value to meme coins. And if we cannot add value to a project, we just don’t work with it.
It doesn’t make sense for us. Yes, that is absolutely true. So I would believe that you would have quite an opinion on what is happening in this space right now vis-a-vis platforms, pump.fun, etc.
What are your thoughts there? I feel that what is currently happening with pump.fun and similar projects is that we are seeing again the reiteration of the 2017 ICO boom. So we are seeing a lot of projects and really things which are in pump.fun, it’s really hard to call them projects. It’s usually a person, a single creator who goes out there, creates a token and reaches out to their own community.
And part of this is the fault of the industry itself, I would say, because over the last two or three years, we had so many, I would say, serious projects which launched with huge valuations only for early investors to dump the tokens on retail. And for me, the meme coin mania which we are seeing right now is the retail investors revolting against what is currently happening in the crypto space. I don’t believe that retail wants meme coins.
I believe that retail wants tokens which have a fair distribution and they are just created for the community of the project and not for early investors to make profit quicker. Yes, I totally agree. I think for the space to mature and really find a lot of users and for the masses to understand this, we need to be better.
I think, as you said, that it is partly industry’s fault as well. So I do think that we cannot be really taken seriously as an industry when projects like this, as you said, maybe they are not even projects, they are just the tokens themselves. It’s hard to take the industry seriously with such meme coins doing so well and with platforms like Pump.fun. No offense to them, they’ve made something, but I don’t know if I agree with the premise at all, because I truly feel that if more people need to come to the space and be a part of Web3, adopt this technology, we need to start taking ourselves a little more seriously.
Absolutely, and I think that the biggest winner of Pump.fun is Pump.fun itself. I believe they have made something like 150 million in revenue over 8 months, which is just insane. And I was reading a statistic somewhere that pretty much less than 5% of the traders on Pump.fun make any kind of profit.
Everyone else is losing money there. So again, it is not something which democratizes crypto or exposes people to the best in crypto. I think that it sometimes exposes people to the worst in crypto.
Yes, I completely agree. And it is, you know, because it is popular and it’s being covered in mainstream media and otherwise, that becomes the face of the space. And the perception associated with something like that, I feel, is going to tarnish the image of the industry in the long term.
Yep, I completely agree with you on this one. If we want to be taken seriously, we need to do the respective things to be taken seriously. So yeah, it is okay to have fun, but let’s not overdo it.
Let’s go back to serious projects with really data-driven utility tokens or security tokens where we can prove the value for the end user and just go away from this. Just pumping hundreds if not thousands of new meme coins daily. Yeah, absolutely.
Now, can you tell me a little more about your team and the team behind Fender? Sure. So right now, we are a rather small team. So it is just me and my partner working on the tokenomics.
Obviously, we have more people working with us on other aspects like marketing, the company, technical, IT, and so on. However, we are just two people doing tokenomics. We used to be six people around 2021 because of the huge demand that we had for our services.
But unfortunately, it turns out that it’s very hard to train people in token economics. So me and my partner, we made the conscious decision to reduce the team so that we can make sure that every project that we work with gets the best possible token economy. This means that when you come to us, you are not handed over to somebody else to work with.
You always work with me. You always work with my partner, no exceptions. So pretty much, you always know that you’re in the best possible hands for your token economy.
That’s wonderful to hear. I think it’s very important that some things remain founder-focused. And as you mentioned, it’s very difficult to train people in something as niche as tokenomics.
So can you tell us perhaps a little about the projects that you’ve worked with? Can you give us some names? Or would that be perhaps a breach of trust in some way? So yeah, with most of the projects that we work with, we are under NDA. But obviously, I can mention a few projects. We have worked with Lithia AI, which was one of the biggest ever NST auctions on OpenSea, which were creating their AI-powered NST avatars.
We have worked with Cornucopias, which is a big game on Cardano and on several other chains, which is, again, quite popular. And currently, we are working with the Cardano team on one of their new projects, where I cannot share a lot of details because it is still ongoing. All right.
Okay. Wonderful. So can you perhaps tell us, because you’ve worked with so many projects and you have such vast experience, you can perhaps tell us about the challenges that founders usually face when designing tokenomics? You see, there are quite a lot.
So let’s see what are the major ones. Usually, when you create a token economy, you need to make sure that there is some value attached to the token. And one of the biggest issues is that when you have a company, and if you have a Web2 company, which is looking to launch into Web3, there is an expectation from your shareholders that the Web2 company would receive value as well.
And when you have a situation where you need to split the value between the Web2 and the Web3 company and the Web3 token, this can become quite complicated for projects to handle with their existing shareholders. This is problem number one. Problem number two is that the crypto space is very much driven by narratives, which means that even if certain things are best done for your project in a certain way, you cannot do them because maybe the crypto space will not accept this.
One example which I can give right off the bat is, for example, token inflation. We all know that pretty much everyone in the crypto space wants to have a deflationary token or a fixed supply token, while for certain tokens it would actually be better if they were inflationary, and there was an inflation for the token itself. In a similar fashion, the crypto space expects certain kind of allocations, certain kind of distributions, certain vestings, and really the good thing for the project might be something different.
I can actually give a very good anecdote of something which happened very recently, where one of the projects that we have worked with for a long time, we created their token economy and we were sitting with them on a call with a venture capital investment company. And this VC company just looked at the tokenomics and said, you know what, this tokenomics sucks. And obviously, I was on the call and was quite unhappy to hear this because we have put a lot of work into this tokenomics, but the reason why the VC thought that the tokenomics was not good enough was because we had put long vesting schedules for VC allocations, there were lockups, and the price was, you know, it was better than the public price, but not better by a lot.
And really, for them to invest, they wanted to have a huge upside, which was not good for the project, but was good for the VC. And at this point in time, we are in a situation where should we create the tokenomics so that the project is sustainable and can last for a long time, or should we create a tokenomics where the project can easily raise funds? And those are the kind of issues which a lot of founders face as they come into the web space. I think I totally agree with you.
There are a lot of different folks involved in a project, and everybody has their own interests at play. And you have to sort of keep that in mind as well. And it can be quite a balancing act, trying to keep everybody happy.
I think the best way is to make sure that nobody is too happy while designing your tokenomics, because if you’re just going to be trying to please your investors, or your retail users, or the founders, or any other stakeholder, the project suffers. So you need to keep that in mind, and especially while designing your tokenomics, because like I mentioned, that becomes the very foundation of your project. Absolutely, I completely agree with you.
It is a complex balancing act. And really, this is where experience comes into play. So creating a location or a vesting for a project is not that hard, but making sure that it can work for both the project, the community, the investors, and everyone else, this is the complex part of the tokenomics.
Agreed. So now, I know this is a very macro answer. And obviously, one solution cannot fit every project.
But if you had to perhaps define the perfect tokenomics, what are the kind of components do you think go into that? As I said, this particular question is very macro, and it’s broad strokes. But if you had to perhaps describe three or five elements that are always a part of good tokenomics for any project, what would they be? Yeah, to answer this adequately, I would really have to go on a very macro level. So really, the components which are absolutely there is first, you need to have a demand driver, meaning if you are creating a token, and if you’re selling a token, then somebody needs to be willing to buy this token.
Too many projects come to us and they say, look, we are going to give away tokens as a loyalty for staking or for whatever. But there is really no use case for the nobody willing to buy the token itself. The second thing is a value driver.
And sometimes demand drivers and value drivers overlap. But quite often, purely the demand driver is not enough. Then for value driver we can look at things like for example token burning, token locking and different monetary and fiscal policies by which we transfer the demand driver into real value for the token itself. This is point number two.
And then point number three is going back to things like your allocations and distribution schedules and making sure that they align with the growth of the project and those demand and value drivers. Because if you you might have great demand and value drivers but if you have a testing which is too fast and releases tokens way before the value and demand drivers can kick in for the project, you get a situation where the token can very quickly go to zero and recovering from there is extremely hard. I think these are very good pointers that you know a demand driver or value driver as well as the distribution schedule being aligned with the growth of the company and the two aforementioned elements.
I think if somebody is starting off on this tokenomics journey and if they really truly want to design solid tokenomics for their project, this is how they should start thinking. I think these questions or at least these elements will help you not just direct to tokenomics but perhaps a good project as well. I would say if you are just starting to create your project and create your token, ask yourself two questions.
The first biggest question is always do I actually need a token because there are too many projects which have a token but actually do not need one and if you don’t need a token consider not launching the token. The second question is when I have a token who will buy it and again if you cannot find somebody who is willing to buy the token for something other than speculative purposes then again you might not have a strong use case for a token and obviously if you cannot figure out those you can come to us, we can help you figure them out but you should at least have a notion of the answers to those questions. Absolutely, I think those are very good questions to ask.
I think this is something that I’ve asked so many founders when I’ve heard pitches over the years that do you really need a token because there can be good projects without the need for their own token to be there and I strongly feel that at times eliminating that aspect is only going to help your project because just running the token is like a full-time job in itself once your token hits the market. Yeah, absolutely and I think you bring up a very good point and a lot of projects also kind of underestimate that. Usually when we develop the tokenomics we end our tokenomics with a very strong recommendation that as soon as the project is being developed and the token is being launched and even shortly before that every project should onboard a full-time token economy specialist to work with them.
Our job is to help the project through this very early phase where they need to define the tokenomics and get through the hard part getting the initial setup and the initial projections working but then when you have your business as usual you should have somebody who can be your CFO if he understands tokenomics or a dedicated tokenomics person sitting on business meetings and thinking how this will affect how the business direction of the company might affect the token. So it is very important to have ongoing support after the launch as well. Ongoing support is a very good point I think that is something that I feel most projects don’t have it apart from very few and it is very important to have an expert that can really explain to the founder as well as all the stakeholders why certain decisions vis-a-vis the tokens or the goals of the company might have an impact and vice versa because they are the experts and you know kind of not seeking their help at a critical stage when your token is already in the market is very foolhardy I feel.
Yeah and I think that this is due to a misunderstanding and a lot of projects think that you set up your tokenomics once and then there are no changes to be done forever but this is not the case. You set up the initial setup but you need to adapt to market conditions you need to adapt to both market conditions and company performance and really what is what is happening in the crypto space as a whole. So there is definitely a need for ongoing monitoring and adjustments.
Yes absolutely. Can you tell us a few projects your personal opinion perhaps which according to you have really solid tokenomics or are doing well in the tokenomics aspect or vis-a-vis their project? So here we really need to differentiate between standalone blockchains and projects which are deployed on an existing chain because usually the tokenomics implications are quite different. When I look at the solid layer one blockchain tokenomics I always think I think that they’re doing a great job especially with changes like EIP 1559, the introduction of token burning, the dynamic pricing, the 50% block fullness target and the way that this creates some adaptive pricing and the way that this ensures that network congestions are handled gracefully.
I think that this was definitely a huge step in the right directions and shows a very in-depth thinking of the tokenomics. This is when it comes to a layer one. When it comes to a project deployed on top of a chain, a project which always comes to mind is Aave and Curve.
I think that those two projects show in a very good way how a token can be integrated. What I really like in Aave is that they have a project which can work without a token but the token adds value on top of the project. There is the Aave security module where you can stake Aave, you can then participate in part of the protocol profits while guaranteeing that in case of a black swan event the project will remain solvent.
For me this is a great use case of a token and is very beautifully implemented within Aave. Then on the flip side where we have Curve, I think that a lot of the innovations which Curve brought to the token economy design space are still widely used like escrowed tokens, the situation where when you stake your tokens for a longer duration you get more benefits, they are locked so it is a win-win for both you and the protocol. Again a multiplier based on the liquidity which you have provided and things like the glitches and the way that you can support various protocols which are deploying their liquidity on top of Curve.
I would say that the issue with Curve is usually that it’s a little bit more complex to economics, it is aimed at Web3 natives but once you understand it it’s a very elegant and well thought out token economy design. Okay all right I think those are very good examples and thank you so much for sharing your opinion there. Now I have a bit of an interesting question and I’ve been thinking about it a lot myself.
With the advent of AI, how do you see it having an impact on how tokenomics is designed? Do you feel that it’ll have an impact on the process? Do you think it will make it more efficient or less efficient? What is your take there? So I come from a very specific perspective because as I mentioned before moving into crypto I was working as a data scientist so I was working on precisely creating machine learning and AI models for various banking institutions. So I feel that the current iteration of AI cannot really help with tokenomics. The reason for this is that AI is still at the level of being the so-called stochastic parrot where it just tries to aggregate information from various sources and come up with the most probable outcome.
So really in terms of modeling, in terms of creating sustainable tokenomics designs, AI is just not there yet. I have no doubt that over the next five to ten years this will probably change as AI models evolve, as AI models improve, but right now I’m still not seeing AI taking a major part of the token economy design. One application where AI models are applicable, this is for Monte Carlo like simulations.
So this is where you build a token economy design and you run a lot of random variables against the token economy simulation and you look at the different outcomes and based on that try to find black swan events for the tokenomics. So this is a situation where AI can help but I really wouldn’t even call this AI. This is a machine learning modeling approach and it’s not related to the current AI agents like Anthropic or ChubGPT which we are seeing at the moment.
But do you feel that perhaps AI agents could be created and models could be created that would really help in designing tokenomics at some point? At some point definitely. I think that even now they can be useful for research. So one thing that you can use AI models at the moment, you can use them to understand how current token economies are working for various projects.
They can provide very concise information. Just remember to always double check it because you know that AI agents can hallucinate sometimes. But apart from that you can use them for research and based on this research you can pick and match different token economy components to create your own.
So this I would say definitely works even now. Okay yeah absolutely. I think for research AI can be really helpful but as you said do double check because AI tends to hallucinate at times.
Now I want to talk a little about compliance. When it comes to Web3 and crypto it is very varied across geographies. There are some places that have like a structure in place and there are the geographies where you know no such structure exists.
Do you have to keep the compliance aspect in mind when you’re designing tokenomics or is this something that you know you leave the onus on to the founder? So when it comes to compliance we always work with the project in order to figure out what is the best possible economic setup when it comes to compliance. Now how does this work? I need to mention that we are not lawyers. We cannot provide a legal opinion on the tokens.
However given that we have worked with many lawyers and we have worked across multiple multiple jurisdictions we know roughly what works and what doesn’t in specific places. This means that when a project comes to us and tells us that they are going to launch in the US or they are going to launch in Europe or somewhere else we know roughly what we can and what we cannot include in the token economy. After we define the token economy we always recommend that this goes to the project lawyer who should review this and provide a legal opinion.
If the legal opinion of the project lawyer is different from what the project wants to achieve then we work with the said lawyer in order to modify the token economy until it reaches a point where it satisfies both economic principles and compliance and legal principles. Okay good. I think it’s good like I’ve mentioned and I think I’ll reiterate it’s good to take the opinion of experts because we are not all of us cannot be experts at everything.
So working hand in hand I think that is support enough that we provide the founders. Now for Findas what is the next big thing that you know you guys are looking forward to or personally or professionally you can tell me about the venture or personally for you what is the next big milestone that you are hoping to achieve? Yes for us it is always about improving our models, improving the way that we provide token valuations, the way that we do simulations and so on. One of the biggest next milestones which is coming up is that we are going to be participants in one of the first master’s degrees in crypto economics which we will be leading in a university here in Bulgaria which hopefully will then also have an international program.
So we really want to continue contributing to the crypto economics space both in academia and in business and continue to improve our models, our valuation metrics and the way that we serve our clients. Awesome, this is really wonderful. Can you tell me a little more about the course please because this is something I’m sure that would interest a lot of our listeners.
Is this a virtual course or is this a on-site course and can you perhaps recommend some other courses as well if somebody cannot really attend something that is on-site in Bulgaria? So just to mention it is not a course it is a full master’s degree in economics with focus on tokenomics and initially it would be done just on-site and in Bulgarian but over the next year we expect that it should have a remote possibility to take this master’s degree and also be held in English. This year would be actually not this year next year 2025 would be the pilot of the program and if it is successful we are definitely looking to rolling this out in more languages and accessible via more ways. But at the end of the day after you complete this you get a master’s degree in crypto economics.
Wonderful, can you perhaps recommend some courses or some books or any kind of resources that can help a person who’s perhaps looking to further their understanding of tokenomics? Sure, so to be perfectly honest I have not seen a lot of courses which are exhaustive on the subject but there are many people who write on the subject of tokenomics and with the risk of sounding our own thorn I would say visit our website. We post a lot of things on methodology on how tokenomics should be developed so we have a lot and a lot of materials on things like valuations, structuring, token economies and so on. Also we have a lot of research on other papers which have been posted and different developments in the crypto space which again you can access through our website which is findus.org. Apart from that things which come to mind is the tokenomics kitchen team.
They have a book on tokenomics which is very solid. Also Roderick McKinley, you can find his course on YouTube. I know him personally and he does quite good job in explaining tokenomics principles so all of this can be very good resources for anyone looking to get into tokenomics.
Wonderful, thank you so much for those recommendations. I’ll sure to link it up in the description once this episode is live. Now I want to touch upon, we’ve talked a lot about tokenomics and your venture.
You are also a mentor for startups in various accelerators and other programs. What is the top three pieces of advice that you end up giving web3 founders? You’re correct, I’m participating in several accelerators. Usually the advice which I end up giving we already covered a little bit and it is think about whether you need a token and if you have decided that you want to have a token who is going to be your customer.
This is the biggest advice which I always start with with all of the founders and trying to figure out where does the demand and where does the value for the token come from. Okay, wonderful. I think that is very sound advice like I said before.
Now you know Chris this has been such a wonderful conversation. I feel like I can talk about this forever with you because your insights and your experience speaks for itself. But I would ask you the last two questions before we wrap this up.
One is a little philosophical, a little macro and your own personal opinion about just how the space is evolving. You’ve been around for a while. What do you think has changed in the last few years and where do you think web3 is heading? I think that the changes which we have seen in web3 over the last five years are astronomical to say at least.
Meaning we started with the wild wild west of ICOs in 2017 and we are arriving at the place where some of the biggest financial institutions in the world like BlackRock, like iShares and so on are issuing ETFs on top of crypto assets. They are looking for to deploy. They have already deployed Bitcoin and Ethereum.
We are talking about the Solana ETF. This is really a huge acknowledgement from the traditional finance industry that crypto is here to stay and this is not an isolated case. This is happening across all major traditional finance companies.
On top of that we are seeing legislation being passed. You know that there is MECA in Europe. We are expecting to see legislation in the US as well and this is really again another confirmation that governments and countries understand that crypto is not a scam.
It is not something which will be here today and would be gone tomorrow but people want crypto. They want to use crypto in a way which is safe, in a way which prevents scams and really lets them hold as an asset on their portfolio. So for me the path that we have walked over the last several years is really enormous and to be perfectly honest I never imagined it would happen so fast, all of this.
Where I see crypto going is I see that we are going to struggle with regulation a bit. I think that this is an unavoidable path where now the various countries will come. They will probably over regulate at the beginning and after that we would need to find something which is more of a middle ground, something which can work for crypto without stifling its growth and the other major thing which I’m seeing and which is already happening is tokenization of real world assets.
We are seeing more and more traditional assets like real estate, like bonds, like stocks being tokenized on-chain and we are hearing from various companies like Franklin Templeton and other big companies how much fees it saves for them and how much more efficient for them is to tokenize those kind of assets on-chain. It literally saves them millions so I am expecting that we will see more and more of that. So those are the major directions which I’m seeing at the moment.
I think that’s very interesting and gives me something to think about and ponder upon and I’m sure that’s the case of our listeners as well. Chris, this has been a wonderful conversation and my last question to you is the question that I ask everybody who comes on the show. You were somebody who worked in traditional finance and you made quite a leap and you switched and moved to Web3 and now you are full-time in Web3.
Obviously some particular reasons must have caused you and motivated you to take that leap. If you had to give suggestions to somebody who’s perhaps sitting on a similar dilemma and they are not able to make up their mind whether they should deep dive into Web3, what would be your suggestions for them to start living on blockchain? Now looking with hindsight on everything which happens, I think it’s one of the best decisions which I’ve made. I need to make a disclaimer here.
When I first came into crypto, it was just at the end of the 2017 bull market. I barely had any clients. It was extremely rough so I was questioning my decisions to move into crypto quite a lot.
But you know, a year or two passed by, I started finding various clients, I started getting more involved and now I can say with 100% certainty that I don’t regret this decision even for a second. So for anyone looking to make the jump, it would be hard at first. Don’t kid yourself about this.
But after you get some traction, after you get some experience, believe me, it is all worth it. I think that is one of the most practical pieces of advice that we’ve heard on this show. That it will be hard initially but if you keep going and persevere, it’s going to be worth it.
It is often repeated, this particular advice in different words, but the way you put it very succinctly. Thank you so much and thank you so much once again for taking out the time to speak to me. This has been a very insightful conversation.
Any last thoughts before we wrap this up? The last thought is thank you for having me. I have enjoyed this thoroughly. So yeah, thanks a lot.