Crypto Zombie interview with Jimmy Hu — Transcript

Recently APEX Network CEO Jimmy Hu got interviewed by Crypto Zombie.

Below we provide a transcript for our community. Bold text represents Crypto Zombie, while non formatted text shows Jimmy Hu’s answers.

Questions overview (concise version)

1. APEX elevator pitch
2. Relationship between APEX & APEX Technologies (Chinapex)
3. Blockchain as a service / Relation with other businesses
4. Comparison to competitiors
5. How do you make blockchain tech accessible to real world enterprises?
6. Token Dynamics
7. Why did APEX decide to move away from NEO and develop its own blockchain?
8. Amount of enterprise clients
9. APEX Network adoption amongst APEX Technologies enterprise clients
10. Node ecosystem
11. Voting system
12. APEXION and KRATOS
13. Data Cloud Nodes
14. More on node incentive programs
15. Date launch main net
16. How heavy is the focus on APEX Network aside from normal business over at APEX Technologies?
17. Things to expect from APEX moving forward?
18. APEX Wallet
19. APEX Fundamentals
20. Liquidity
21. Jimmy’s personal take on the crypto market
22. Future for altcoins

1. For everyone who doesn’t know what APEX is, could you give us the elevator pitch?

Very simply, APEX is a next generation blockchain for consumer applications (B2C applications). There must be a creator of the applications and that’s obviously the enterprises but ultimately the user benefits more. The premise behind APEX is that there are quite a few problems in the B2C ecosystem surrounding consumer data, privacy ownership, lack of engagement within existing applications or even in the general customer experience. That’s just kind of the rough gist of it. To describe it on an entire scope, APEX is really just a blockchain for the enterprise to tackle problems surrounding consumer data, CRM (customer relationship management), customer loyalty and increase interactivity within the customer experiences. That’s the rough elevator pitch I guess.

2. I thought you were Chinapex for a while, so was this a rebrand or an extension of Chinapex or how are you related to each other?

So the company behind apex was always chinapex. The blockchain project was always called APEX. Except the parent company which is a big data and AI company based an headquartered out of Shanghai rebranded itself (to APEX Technologies) to align itself more with a global technology focus as well as to align itself more closely with the blockchain project at the same time because we didn’t want to manage two brands at the same time and get people confused. It’s much easier for both our customers which are mid to large size enterprise companies as well as our community and our investors if they can say that well, APEX Network is the blockchain project and blockchain division of APEX Technologies.

3. So are you offering blockchain as a service or what is your relationship with other businesses?

The blockchain itself, you could understand it as a blockchain as a service or that term is loosely defined actually. It’s more of a platform that you build decentralized applications on top of. The company APEX Technologies (previously Chinapex) has been around for 6 years, has almost got 150 people now, over 350 and almost 400 mid to large size customers that are using our existing technologies (big data and AI technology) so for our customers the blockchain itself is really a use case extension or in a way it’s a capability extension or value extension for what they are already using. So the good thing about that is we can kind of drive adoption pretty easily because they are already within our ecosystem. We have the existing long lasting relationships with these enterprises et cetera. But the blockchain itself is a platform. Now blockchain as a service, I don’t really like to use that term because for different people it means different things. For Microsoft Azure that means they provide the cloud infrastructure that you host a blockchain on and you don’t need to manage the infrastructure yourself but it says nothing about providing any kind of blockchain technology platform so to them it’s empty. Some other companies use this and what they mean is; the blockchain tech I provide myself (and this could be either a private chain solution or a public chain) and then I will also offer certain managed services on top of whatever propietary technology I have such as managed nodes, managed supernodes, masternodes or much more.

4. If I were a business looking to utilize a B2C blockchain, how would you pitch it to me? What are the advantages? What sets you guys apart in your opinion from the alternatives?

If you look at the solutions out there, there are two types. Furthermore, these may not even be considered solutions, but projects or tools of technology in the blockchain space that tries to tackle a similar thing. So one type are the dApps say BAT (Basic Attention Token) and Datawallet or other similar projects. These are good projects that try to create value in some way but because we come from an enterprise software background myself, my company and the rest of the core management team, we understand how enterprise adoption works. If you provide something like a tool that only solves a small part of the problem or maybe even experimentally tries to tackle the problem so not even solve a small part of the problem, then for an enterprise it’s extremely hard to convince them to start adopting it. This is because of multiple reasons; firstly it’s a technology that they have never used before so they are going to have a barrier. On top of that the value that this technology is delivering is not warranting a switch or adoption. The difference with APEX Blockchain is, we deliver a platform that allows enterprises and developers to build applications or put the blockchain protocol for consumer applications within their existing applications as well as the existing customer touch points. We see every touch point as an application. So for example, when people think of an application they think of a mobile app but also includes websites, e-commerce sites, offline retail and IOT. These are all different types of applications and touch points. The goal for us is not to tell the enterprises to start adopting our new tech for little value. We tell the enterprises they can build applications on top of our platform or use our platform protocols in their existing applications and they tackle the entire set of problems and you can customize it in a way that it is not intrusive to your existing business, your operations, nor your customer experience.

5. It would be like a turn key solution in a way. You are kind of blurring the lines between blockchain (crypto) and what we are already used to right now?

Right, exactly. It provides the baseline technology platform and a set of protocols for enterprises to use in a way that delivers value and that is suitable to them, instead of coming to them with a particular dApp that has fixed application logic that may not be even suitable to them at all or may not even solve any of their problems. So that is the unique thing and what our customers love about APEX Blockchain. Now how that is different from the other public blockchains out there is that a lot of the stuff they are doing right now is cool and very good but one thing that it’s bad at, is driving real world applications by mid to large size enterprises. And the reason is because some people say there is an infrastructure maturity gap but one even larger reason is time-to-value is very long. I love ethereum and I love NEO but the problem with those blockchains is that for real enterprises to start to deliver real applications for a particular business function takes very long, costly and risky. When a company starts thinking about what kind of application she delivers or creates it’s not generalized, she has a specific reason in mind. For general purpose blockchains to assume that the enterprise can use every single type of need on this particular blockchain, I mean it’s possible but that just means it’s just not catered for any particular use case.

6. And you guys are getting closer, you were sort of blurring those lines. I mean, you guys were even talking about getting on track to be listed on Nasdaq in 2020 (US Technology Stock Exchange). So that’s something you don’t really see too many blockchains talking about specifically.

Now I think APEX is very unique project in a way that tries to tackle the project itself and the project’s lifecycle as well. A lot of the projects I think focus a lot on the crypto side of things (and don’t get me wrong that’s quite important) but at the end of the day token dynamics are driven by kind of real world use case value at least if you want to sustain in the long run. So for example, if you have certain crypto characteristics say like mining and stuff like that it helps drive up token value quite easily. There’s a lot of tricks up one’s sleeve for that purpose. For blockchains that are focused on enterprise adoption to really create value, it actually takes some time before the token dynamics really take place. Because you are talking about what is the requirement for a typical enterprise to use the blockchain or build applications on the blockchain. So for APEX they need to stake a minimum number of CPX (which is the native token) of the platform. Now once that gets to a certain size of users then the token dynamics naturally start to take place because that is one type of non circulating supply. There are other things such as the community or our investors or strategic partners that participate in the infrastructure of the project such as the different types of nodes. That may be something interesting as well that you may have seen.

7. We should definitely dive into that for sure. I mean, I know you were saying that you don’t want to focus too much on the crypto tech but I do like talking about that on the channel. So I wanted to discuss a little bit, you guys were on NEO, you were a NEP-5 token but now you are looking to build your own blokchain. Is that correct, you are moving away from them?

Yes, so the development of the APEX blockchain started in February. I think the decision was made earlier in January because we did actually a couple of dApp protoypes or testruns on NEO as well as on Ethereum and it didn’t really work out for a couple of experimental applications that we were trying to build for some of our customers. The feedback was not very good. We thought it was OK actually but the customers didn’t. So after looking at what they really needed in terms of flexibility, performance and enterprise readiness, no public blockchain out there right now can actually deliver what they really need. And this is an interesting case, because there are some private chains that could possibly meet their particular needs if it were some other type of use case. But in the case of consumer data marketing and CRM, in the long run a private blockchain makes it none scalable because the nature of consumer applications fits very well with public blockchains. Like consumers very easily getting access to their own account system with their public keys and private keys and what not. So, through a very thorough evaluation, I think this was early January, we ultimately decided to build our own blockchain. That was not really a decision that is needed for the project itself to succeed or as for future adoption because we definitely have the internal tech muscle to pull it off. The company has 55 engineers roughly. So right now, 10 of them are on the blockchain project, 5 project managers and some other operational support out of the entire company. So around 20 people on the APEX Blockchain project right now.

8. To get a perspective, that’s actually a lot. To help us understand too, when do you talk about getting feedback from the customers, how many enterprise businesses, what is the size of this right now? How many people are you currently working with?

We currently work with around 360 companies as of end of July 2018 and it’s growing by 5–10 companies per month. But these companies, they typically start off with more traditional products say like Big Data and AI products that was the company’s bread and butter. We are seeing more and more of these companies being interested in blockchain right from the first pitch. Starting from a month ago we started incorporating APEX Blockchain into the sales pitches. We actually have a couple of revenue generating contracts already that also would mean that they would stake a particular amount of CPX to become a qualified enterprise to build applications on the APEX public chain.

9. How have they been reacting to that? I know you have been trying to sort of push that to get the adoption of the blockchain. Are you having pretty positive feedback from them?

I would say 50% of the new customers as well as existing customers have really no interest. That’s the truth and I think they seriously do got more stuff to worry about. Of the remainder about half have some kind of interest but they don’t have the knowledge necessary in order to determine how they can actually leverage this. It actually requires some education on our side from our presales or solutions teams. The other half have their own interesting thoughts how it can be incorporated to very simply increase their bottom line from increasing customer loyalty optimizing, marketing, getting better consumer data while staying compliant say with GDPR and other things within that range. Now the companies that we work with… I know you asked this question. We don’t work with small companies, because the products that was the company’s core both the positioning of the product as well as the cost of the product is just not suitable for the small businesses nor do they have a sophisticated enough need for this type of thing typically.

Our smallest customers start with mid size companies and include for instance a new electric car company like Farady Future that has roughly 1000–2000 people on staff. On the larger side we have companies like Starbucks, Lenovo, Maseratti, pretty much any large consumer brand that you would have heard of.

10. I was checking it out and you guys have like Hilton, McLaren and all of these different companies, so you guys are definitely well spread out. Could we also talk a bit about the nodes? You’re basically looking to construct a whole ecosystem of different kinds of nodes. Could you sort of explain what that is all about?

Yes so, the reason why like any blockchain project would have nodes is it needs to be decentralized and decentralized meaning the operational and governance aspects of blockchain cannot be controlled by the core development which is the core development of the company itself (at least in the long run). In the short run, being more centralized does not really hurt cause it helps to scale things up but the nodes give the community, investors and strategic partners ways of participating in the ecosystem that’s more of long term. To have their interests aligned of course there has to be a financial aspect of it so that was how it was designed as well. Nodes are not uncommon these days, in fact they are quite common like EOS, Vechain, like any prominent public blockchain has nodes. Even some more interesting types of nodes like PIVX if you heard of that project but in the APEX case we have kind of an interesting node structure because the consensus is based of off delegated proof of stake (DPOS) so in that particular consensus there are delegates or sometimes called witnesses depending how you really separate the work but they’re the same thing effectively and then there is all the voters under the delegates which are token holders as well. They probably just have different weight or a different role based on their initial role or weight coming into this project. For example a private sale investor would probably have more stake in the project (given that they are long term as not every private sale investor is long term and a lot these days are very short). In our ecosystem a delegate/witness is a supernode which is a common nomenclature these days as well and they do most of the work in regulating the blockchain and in terms of rewards they reap the most on an individual basis. In terms of requirements it’s also the most strict. So for these people to be running that important type of node on the entire blockchain. You better do that KYC, you better know them well and they better have the competency to actually do it the right way.

11. Yes, I was going to ask, how do they actually get voted in? How does that system go about? Is that like an autonomous type of thing or is that actually people casting votes?

Initially, what we decided is that it’s best if it’s a kind of two way or two stage like system. So the first wave is determined by a committee that is both the core development of the project (which is us) as well as key investors (like strategic investors and strategic partners which sometimes are key investors as well). The committee basically approves or disapproves like an application. Why that is necessary at least in the beginning is, we need to have mechanisms to filter out clear bad actors for the ecosystem in the long run. Now if you don’t have that particular phase, the voters under that supernode, if you were to only do like a voting system, a very democratic voting system, you never know if the person or the party can manipulate say for example the payout system or the payout ratio et cetera to benefit the voters. But really you know clearly that that particular supernode holder is not healthy or even malicious for the ecosystem in the long run so we do have that first tier of filtering. Then, after that, it’s basically pure voting.

12. You guys have also special nodes too. I saw you guys have APEXION and KRATOS. What does that entail?

Let me describe the two of em. Other than the supernodes themselves I think it doesn’t make sense that other types of nodes do not have incentives because they are voters or just regular node holders (for instance in NEO that would be everyone that installs the desktop version of the NEO Core wallet and keeps downloading the blockchain data). So those, if they are aligned with the ecosystem and they hold a certain amount of CPX for periods of time or for the long run then they should be able to reap the rewards that the supernodes get as well. The idea is, the supernodes cut anywhere from 30–50% of their own profits to the voternodes under them. Now are all voternodes created equal? No. Some that only have a couple thousand worth VS tens of thousands should be a different incentive structure. Once the profit gets passed down to the voternodes, the voternodes have different weights, they have different weight per CPX for dividend distribution or for reward redemption. So each CPX is weighted differently for their ultimate reward payout.

13. So you make it a little bit fair for the little guy too because not everyone can afford realistically to own that much CPX.

Interestingly, we have one more type of node that is very different from purely staking CPX for the use case at hand. one of the things about the project is we want consumer data to be decentralized but also owned by the consumer at the same time. The question is, how do you decentralize it as well as having the consumer or the user retaining control. That’s a very interesting questions so we came up with a solution that is called the data cloud which is another set of decentralized nodes that the main purpose is to store consumer data but the data stored on those nodes are encrypted and the node holder doesn’t have access to this data whatsoever because it’s encrypted via a private key. But you can be one of these nodes and for data storage and transactions it uses your device’s computation power. And the network naturally has fees for any kind of data related transaction so these kind of fees actually go to the data node holders. These type of nodes have the least requirements (which is probably around 500 usd worth of CPX).

14. Well at least it’s providing incentive for the community members though, which is the important part.

And the interesting thing is, it’s doing that and it’s creating utility. For a lot of blockchains, yes being a supernode or a voternode it does have utility on a consensus and a blockchain governance point of view but it has no utility from an application or use case value point of view. Now that is extending the application and use case value to the node ecosystem as well as the greater community so that’s something quite interesting about that. To finish that part you mentioned APEXION and KRATOS right.

What those are is special node programs and are basically rewards for speeding up the accumulation of nodes as well as early adopters. So in reality, for any particular blockchain that claims to have either a masternode or supernodes system but the rewards cannot take place until mainnet launches. And even when mainnet launches the amount of transactions on the blockchain VS the payouts from these transactions can be very low and be very meager in the beginning. Not enough to incentivize the original “promise” that was given to the node holders or large holders of the token.

This also depends on how the incentive structure is designed, so for us there are three parts. First there is the network transaction fees so that’s all the different transaction fees that a blockchain should have and it really depends on the size of the ecosystem as well as the real utility of the user base. We also have another part which is fixed and guaranteed reward pools and that really comes from a part of the token structure. As well as when main net launches there is a 0.5% inflation every year or additional tokens being released just for these initial two years for giving the node holders a satisfactory reward. Now, the special node programs is even for before main net launches so the idea is for people to start staking and actually see the rewards flow in say three quarters or one year, that could be a long time actually.

In crypto that’s an eternity.

For a long term investor or a hodler or whatever, you should be able to wait. But we have to be realistic here. These are rewards that are based on early staking, even before main net, before the tokenswap. The rewards get distributed out from a smaller pool. Now, the good thing about that is it starts growing that node ecosystem regardless of its supernodes, voternodes, data cloud nodes et cetera long before main net actually arrives. And when it launches, things are a lot better.

15. When is your main net going live roughly?

So test net is set to be next quarter and main net is set to be the quarter after.

16. One thing I want to know is obviously APEX Technologies, that is your parent company. What is actually weird, I saw you guys made the top 50 private companies in China. I actually talked about this on my news the other day. But some people might be worried that APEX Network is just like a side project. How much effort are you guys actually putting into APEX Network in relationship to APEX Technologies?

Quite a lot because based on the company’s technology strategy the blockchain is going to be a very key factor of differentiation. We are already seeing a lot of competition on the data and the AI front. As the top 50 price was determined through what differentiated you as a company and the value add you could provide that is different from your incumbent competitors, blockchain definitely was one of our advantages. So that is one very key aspect of it and also it’s purely for financial reasons, there’s two departments in the company for the long term financial and strategy part of it and they are trying to race in say which one is more profitable, and has a higher market cap in the future. Well for APEX Technologies, that’s not possible right now because it’s not public yet but eventually that’s going to be a question. So for both core competency as well as for long term financial gains I think it’s nothing short of very important. In general the status of the blockchain department is that first of all it’s growing very fast, a month or two ago we only had 10 to 12 people and by the end of the year we expect to have 35 people in this particular blockchain team within the company. Right now it’s an interesting dynamic because for our existing business the blockchain part is a very unique differentiator. So it’s a value add to our existing business. And on the other hand the existing business, the existing enterprise ecosystem is very much a value add to the blockchain project itself because of those companies that are ready to adopt as well as the use case being very solid and us being very close to understanding what exactly they need so how to tackle certain problems with blockchain et cetera. So as of now, it’s more of a hand in hand kind of a thing which I think is great.

17. You guys have onboarded I think over a 100 different new brands and stuff like that and I notice you guys have been cranking it out with the partnerships; you guys had that APEX show in Korea and then you did Shanghai Data Exchange as well so you want to talk a bit about these upcoming partnerships? And honestly just in general, what can we expect from APEX Network moving forward?

There’s going to be quite some stuff to expect from APEX Network going forward. First is delivery of products and technology. So there were people that were having doubts of whether APEX can deliver or not at the timelines but when the wallet came out last week, I think those doubts have very much been washed away. On the wallet side, it’s a wallet, it’s not the blockchain but it acts as a catalyst for the ecosystem because on consumer adoption as well as enterprise ecosystem blockchain project partnerships a lot can be done by the wallet and with the wallet to facilitate the growth in all these different regards. So the delivery of the blockchain will be Q4 maybe very soon, I mean test net plus blockchain explorer.

The stuff that is more interesting and some people are more interested in is the partnership aspect of things as well as things that would cause a shift in the token price et cetera in different points of time. So for partnerships, there are a lot of them that we haven’t actually released yet. To put it simply, there are a lot of goodies but the reason why they are not being released is sometimes these things take timing and they require approval for these partners to be able for us to release that particular news because you have to understand that a lot of these partners, they come from “real industries”. They have more conservative views on anything that can relate to “crypto”. Now they all like “blockchain” but they don’t want the connotations that get associated with “crypto”. So those you will be hearing more of but we’re doing that step by step in order to make sure that nothing goes wrong in the process. In terms of the types of partnerships, there will be more government type of partnerships but in my opinion, these government type of partnerships are not very useful because they tend to be very kind of general like strategic cooperation with this particular area economic but it does not really describe the specifics of how you are partnering with this company or leveraging its technology.

So we are more interested in real use case brand partnerships. So there will be quite a few more coming up soon. And what we’ll see more of as well is, this may sound funny, “crypto world partnerships” but it’s just mainly cross-chain stuff with other blockchains. We are actually looking into a particular type of node reward system that will also cross-reward tokens or assets from other blockchains or other projects. That is something that is quite interesting.

So imagine holding a particular tiered node or being qualified for that at this point in time before main net launch and when you get the reward payout it’s not just CPX but also some other ERC-20 token et cetera.

18. Is your wallet just focussed on CPX or do you have ERC-20 capability? What is the full functionality of the wallet?

The wallet right now holds any NEP-5 token and of course NEO. That includes CPX, Ontology, Red Pulse, … you name it. There are round 40–50 different NEP-5 tokens. Also the main net swap for APEX will happen directly in the wallet in the easiest way possible. End of August 2018 we expect ERC-20 support. Once ERC-20 support kicks in we are going to focus more on unique features to APEX. Regarding NEP-5 + ERC-20, there’s not a lot of good mobile wallets that can actually support both of these coins. It may actually drive quite a bit of community growth once that comes around as well as APEX (CPX) the entire project and the entire products and technology behind it. When I referred to the wallet being one of the catalysts, we can see it in its first form right there. Interestingly, there’s also another thing that we’re working on is, so you know how wallets have 12 phrase or 24 phrase systems as well as keystores but typically that’s only for one address (or in the case for metamask there’s multiple addresses) but we’re looking into actually to developing a cross-blockchain and cross-wallet address master keystore system. So basically the idea is you have one keystore file and then say you lost your device but you backed-up your keystore file right, you paste it onto your new device and then it basically unlocks all your NEP-5 wallet addresses as well as ERC-20.

That reminds me, it’s kind of like with the Ledger, it’s a hardware wallet but it’s the same kind of concept. You don’t have to go through the pain of entering everything manually which takes forever.

Definitely

19. We could honestly talk about APEX Network forever. We are only talking about APEX Network and forget about APEX Technologies. You guys have a clearly robust ecosystem that you are trying to create here. And I have to say there was always this kind of vibe that I got from APEX. You guys always had this very professional business kind of feel about you guys. For a while I was wondering so is APEX a crypto because you are always focusing on the real world business. Crypto is real world as well but that’s the whole thing, we are trying to get it out there.

Is there anything before we go that you want to leave my viewers with? Something really important that you think we should know?

There’s 2 things in the long run that fundamentally drive value. And one thing is product and technology fundamentals. And that actually goes hand in hand with how it really tackles real world problems and adoption. The other very crucial thing is token economics and is probably one of the most important things. Token economics is basically, to put it simply, the amount of real circulating supply that really combined with the utility, that’s kind of a killer mix for long term value. I have to agree with some of our community is that we are lacking quite a bit of liquidity right now in secondary markets and we are looking to tackle that soon so that is a very realistic crypto problem.

20. What do you mean, like liquidity with exchanges? Or within the network itself or?

It’s really a harder problem to gage than most people can simplify to. It’s not a matter of let’s say, oh I get listed on Huobi or Binance, then I’m going to have a couple of million USD of liquidity per day or so. That will definitely help but I think how do you sustain that with particularly a growing community as well as continuous engagement within the community combined with say for example better liquidity channels (what that really means, platforms that people like to trade on or have a good experience of trading on et cetera). There has been some criticism within the community and true, I think there is a coin liquidity problem but that is not necessarily the main factor in driving down the token value within these two months. I think a lot of people are oversimplifying this, like oh you’re going to list on Binance and you’re going to moon. It is not necessarily that way, you really have to look into the token holder level. So for example you get onto Binance, there may be an initial pump before but if you know for sure that you have a couple of investors that are not aligned with the project and that are going to dump their holdings, it actually provides more liquidity for them to dump at a lower price. So that is something that I’m trying to work on right now; community, marketing and liquidity. Because I feel like, I focused a lot of energy on trying to deliver real value out of the project and looking at it from a technology product and adoption from real world enterprise point of view. But, certain short term crypto stuff, I guess it’s important as well. So that is something that both the team and me are working on.

21. Well if you’re focusing mostly on establishing the tech, establishing the value and providing real world use cases. I mean personally I would think that promotion and getting your name out there is the easy part. You could go on Twitter and come on channels like mine on Youtube and talk about the project and things like that but as long as you have the product. That to me is the difficult part, I would hate to be the guy that is giving all these promises to my community and then I can’t deliver. I think that’s a lot worse. What is your take on it? Overall in crypto, what do you think of the space? The volatility of the market? The recent bear trend?

My take on it is, this particular bear or the upcoming bull, it’s going to be very different from the previous bears and bulls. Bitcoin is really cash in this particular space at this point in time. So I think cash or gold I suppose if you want to take it the commodity route. If there is a bull coming up, you’ll see that the altcoins are affected less by the bull and I think it has to do with a particular market cycle, a stage in the particular market as well as nearing the end of what we call the hype cycle. So if you look at all the altcoins out there right now, there is really no way to measure real value or sustainable value. Or lets say for example you a particular value right here but you ask what is the real value. It’s very hard to gage and it’s always off at this particular point in time so I think there is going to be waves of market adjustment. People are going to become more rational, they are going to go back more to bitcoin. Bitcoin is definitely bullish (not financial advice) but once it becomes better for altcoins both in terms of how a particular bull would affect it as well as the liquidity, then the dynamics could be very different and it could be more rational at that point in time. So market adjustment towards more rational thinking would occur as quickly as Q4 this year, I could be wrong but I have been speaking to a lot of market experts and I am definitely not an expert in suposedly the crypto market.

22. I’m not an expert either so anyone watching don’t think that you know, I’m just a guy with a show on Youtube. That’s the problem, sometimes everybody, you talk about projects and everybody automatically assumes that that’s where we’ve got to throw our money at and it’s basically just like gambling at that point. When the volatility happens and people are like well, you know, you said to buy this coin. Well nobody said to buy anything, we were just talking to a project, we are talking about tech. The thing is, right now, nobody knows where the space is going and like you said, it’s kind of underwhelming compared to what has been promised and I think the real value is going to re-establish itself and I don’t know if it’s going to be like you said Q4. But I think we’re really going to have to re-evaluate why this is a top 10 coin, what is it providing, what does it do, how do we use it, I mean do you use any dApps on Ethereum? We have to really start asking ourselves what are these worth. And like you said, a lot of people are realizing that bitcoin is still number one, is really the most used and has the most liquidity and it has like the history, the security, et cetera. I think we’re going to have to really re-evaluate where we position these altcoins moving forward. That’s why I think it’s cool to see you guys actually having those real world ties and actually realizing that, you know it’s not just all fun and games on coinmarketcap. We actually have to get this in the hands of the enterprises, convince them the use case of it and then on top of it provide them an actual pleasurable experience. It’s a lot to tackle.

One last thing to add on to that. An interesting thing I’ve seen is, there’s two types of projects that eventually become kind of prominent. One is the particular way that the token structure was set up as well as the amount of money that they raised that allows the market making and et cetera. It’s a purely market driven thing. You see a lot of coins being pumped quite quickly like one month after listing and they stay at a couple of hundred million market cap. There’s some others that are the ones that I think are really have the capability to deliver as well as persevere and eventually gain adoption as well as utility as well as mass market recognition at that particular point in time which is probably not right now because people are still very speculative and they are in for the cash grabs et cetera. But interestingly, a lot of projects that didn’t get the initial pump and just went down, they don’t have the ability nor the perseverance to deliver towards that end goal. So I think it’s really funny how most of the people approach investment in this particular space but I guess it’s very normal at this point in time.

Well it’s normal for us but not really normal though in a way. We have become accustomed to it. Alright Jimmy it’s been a great interview man, thanks for coming on. I learned a lot today, I really appreciate you as well. I know you are a super busy guy so thank you for taking time out of your day to come on the channel and I really appreciate it.

Thank you