Adam Carlton of Pink Panda On The 5 Things That Can Be Done To Improve and Reform The Cryptocurrency Industry

Encourage Responsible Growth and Adoption: We should be looking at ways to intelligently stimulate, encourage, sponsor innovation, and responsible growth. We have a lot of wild, speculative, irresponsible activity happening, which isn’t innovative at all. The crypto industry as a whole is largely responsible for this. When you have people expecting 5,10, or 100x multiples in days (or even hours), clearly, this is out of control. On every trade (and every scam), there’s a winner and a loser, and there are a lot more people losing than winning.

As part of my series about the “5 Things That Can Be Done To Improve and Reform The Cryptocurrency Industry” I had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Carlton.

Adam Carlton, founder and CEO of PinkPanda, believes in the profound and unifying power of community, innovation, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance. Mr. Carlton has been at the cutting-edge of technology and business for over 20 years in a variety of consulting, executive, and entrepreneurial roles. Working to solve many of the industry’s issues with a “customer and community first” mentality, a deep dedication to simplifying superior investment opportunities, and a relentless drive towards product innovation, Mr. Carlton is a driving force behind $PINKPANDA rapidly rising to the forefront of the cryptocurrency industry.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”?

Sure can! I grew up in Colorado, did a lot of skiing on the weekends in the winter, camping, fishing and all the great outdoor activities Colorado has to offer. My parents were divorced when I was 15 and I moved to Illinois with my mother. I had a pretty normal life; school, marriage, had my first child. Then, my best friend was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma when I was 30. He made it a little over a year. That was my first experience with cancer and it had a profound impact on my life.

I guess that’s when I started living with more of a sense of urgency and purpose. Fast forward almost 20 years– I live in Chicago and have 4 wonderful children. I have experienced divorce myself and lost my mother to cancer in 2019. That last experience really set me in motion; I was determined to “put the pieces together” in some way to tie my life experiences and talents together. I didn’t know it at the time, but that loss was the genesis of Pink Panda. I felt like all my experiences, both personal and professional, had put me at the ready to do something real, impactful, and significant, driven by technology, innovation, and community. I’ve spent most of my career enriching corporations through business and technology, and I want to change that model and everyone on my team feels the exact same way.

Can you tell us the story of how you got first involved in blockchain and the cryptocurrency industry?

Well, I’ve always had curiosity about new technologies since I was a child. If there was a gadget, I was interested in it. I even went to a “computer camp” one summer in the 1980’s. Who does that? I built my own computers and was the “go-to” person for everyone’s tech problems (especially my mom). I just always had a good grasp about how technology, real life, and business intersect.

My first experience with cryptocurrency stemmed from when I had heard about Bitcoin in 2011. I was fascinated by the concept, more as an alternative digital currency than a store of value. Like most people, I also had a lot of doubts about it. Would the government ban it? Would it be adopted? I had 330 of them, but I ended up selling them for about $1,200 while I was going through some tough, personal, and financial times. I had been laid off, I was going through a divorce, and my home was underwater. The 2008 financial crisis caught up with me. So, there’s my bitcoin pizza story. I don’t even remember what I spent it on!

Fast forward to about 2 years ago, the whole economic climate started changing. Institutions were now building crypto trading desks. Bitcoin and alt-coins have been through a few cycles, and I decided to get much more involved. It started with research and trading and I ended up in a chat room through an acquaintance, who is the CEO of a top 100 token. I met a brilliant young developer, and we came up with the concept of Pink Panda.

Can you share a story of a time when things went south for you? What kept you going and helped you to overcome those times?

In the crypto and startup world, “things going south” is a fairly regular occurrence. When something goes wrong, I usually say something like, “another Tuesday in crypto.” I recently had a key member of the marketing community quit with short notice. He had basically leveraged our brand in order to build his own promotion business and quit while I was in an airport in Helsinki, with virtually no notice. Needless to say, I wasn’t pleased, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. But it was “Saturday in Crypto” and time to solve a problem. I rarely claim to be the smartest person in the room, but I’m usually the most persistent.

In my opinion, community-based marketing is critical in crypto. I’m a problem solver and I believe in empowering people and empowering the community. So, my response was to immediately reach out to key members of the community, let them know what had happened and formulate a plan. The one thing I know and trust is that what a community appreciates more than anything is transparency and accountability. I’m not the head or leader of this community, I’m a part of it. I have a responsibility to stay intimately connected to this community and engage them in all the decision-making processes. When that person left, it allowed others to step up. For us, we could revise our processes and grow closer together as a community, ultimately creating deeper resilience.

In your experience, what are the top strategies that blockchain companies should consider to have a stronger competitive edge?

I essentially view blockchain as a new form of a database, and I’m not unique in that viewpoint. In the commercial database industry, there’s a very large number of competitors out there — some large, some small, some specialized, some generalized. There’s a bit of a “one blockchain to rule them all” mentality out there, that, in my opinion, is a bit short-sighted.

If you want to be more competitive, delight your customers. I don’t think every blockchain necessarily has a customer in mind. This is a deeply technical industry, and so it is dominated primarily by engineers. No offense to the brilliant engineers out there, but sometimes they get lost in the details and forget, “who is my customer, and how can I better delight them.” The “triple constraint war” doesn’t mean anything to your average customer. This, for example, is where I think Ethereum falls flat. It might be the superior decentralized technology and blockchain leader, but what do I care if gas fees are $100? In my mind, if cryptocurrency is just creating an alternative elitist financial system, then it’s not any better than the existing systems that already exclude the average person. This is quite simply the problem I want to solve — to create real access for your average person to this new and exploding ecosystem.

What are the 3 things that most excite you about the blockchain industry in general? Why?

1. I believe that this is an incredibly resilient and innovative industry. “That which does not kill it makes it stronger”. Anyone who remembers MTGox — we’ve come a long, long way since then. Web3 is changing everything and both human and monetary capital is pouring in. Real use cases are being built and executed on and this will further perpetuate the cycle.
2. I think the potential for growth is phenomenal, especially in Decentralized Finance. If you don’t believe me, go look at the Total Value Locked (TVL) graph for 2021. We started the year at about $20B. This number is over $200B as I write this on October 10th, 2021. Compare that to the world equities market at over 90 trillion. The world bond market is $120 trillion. DeFi is a grain of sand on a very large beach, and it is in its infancy.
3. I’ll double-down on my excitement for Decentralized Finance. I truly believe that this is the first time in history where we have a real opportunity to systematically change access to returns on investment and creation of wealth. We are talking about the ability to give access to the 99% of the world returns that have been reserved for the 1% up to this point. Most of my core team and advisors come from the financial industry and are so in alignment with this. They believe it is achievable because it’s already happening.

What are the 3 things that worry you about the blockchain industry? Why?

1. I’m concerned about the extreme presence of scammers & bad actors, “rugs”, and a certain billionaire that seems to take glee in creating chaos with “hype” tokens with absolutely no utility. While part of this can be cleaned up by better regulations and enforcement, this is a pervasive issue that isn’t exclusive to cryptocurrency. It’s really about the ease with which anonymity on the internet allows someone to conduct a scam, vanish, and reappear to do it again. Many of the technology companies out there don’t seem to care, and some I believe actively and knowingly enable it. This must change.
2. I’m concerned about regulation going the wrong direction — becoming overbearing, stifling innovation, crushing investment opportunities, and being hijacked by traditional financial institution lobbyists. Big financial institutions have to be very scared of DeFi, and I imagine they are pulling the lobbying levers to tilt things in their favor.
3. I’m concerned about the overall tone of industry. From hyper-aggressive “maxis” battling it out with each other on social media to the mocking, taunting and childish behavior taking place. It’s funny — there is already a formation of “old money” in crypto. A few months ago, I was networking and looking for a specific developer resource. I got introduced to someone, scheduled a meeting, and moments before, he cancelled the meeting and said “Oh, I don’t work with anyone on the Binance Smart Chain”. That was a pivotal moment for me; recognizing that with as much innovation there is, there’s also a lack of innovation in a number of ways, and a whole lot of ego. Someone turning me down is always a great motivator for me.

Ok, thank you for all of that. Here is the main question of our interview. Can you please share “5 Things That Can Be Done To Improve and Reform The Cryptocurrency Industry”? If you can please share a story or example for each.

1. Make Fraud the highest priority: I’ll start very broad and say that the fraud, scams, cons, rugs — whatever you want to call it in crypto — is insane. It is rampant, predatory, and it is brazened. It is technologically automated and we literally have the technology to stop it: the blockchain. There are certainly privacy issues to be worked out, but I believe that when someone can create a fake account across multiple platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, etc.), create a fake website to harvest recovery phrases or other cons, and it takes weeks for them to come down, and then it happens again with absolutely no recourse, we have an incredibly serious problem. That’s just one example of many. I have had real world examples of direct fraudulent activity taken more than once against Pink Panda and there is very little that can be done. We could do an entire article on just this subject.
2. Provide Broad Education: I spend a lot of my time talking to friends and family about blockchains and cryptocurrency. Almost everyone is interested, but very few have even a rudimentary understanding of it. The industry isn’t doing anything to help this. It seems as though the industry revels in the fact that a lot of people have made vast wealth and have quickly taken on an elitist attitude. One first-hand example is one of my team was new to crypto and I had him write a buyer’s guide on how to buy the Pink Panda token. It took him days to figure it out, far longer than to actually create the guide.
3. Encourage Responsible Regulations: We are getting to the point where there is a clamor for clarity around regulations. I can tell you that I’m incredibly well advised on regulations from a compliance and regulatory perspective, and there are a variety of opinions, even amongst full-time, professional, legal counsel. Is it a commodity? Is it an unregistered security? Is it something else? I think we are seeing steps in the right direction. I’m a bit of a regulatory geek but our Senior Compliance Advisor, Gene Truono (former CCO for PayPal, 30 years fintech/crypto regulatory and compliance experience), has forgotten more about this than I will ever know. We take regulatory compliance very seriously and frankly, see it as a competitive advantage when the inevitable regulations come.
   For an example of our commitment, Pink Panda recently joined the Global Digital Asset and Cryptocurrency Association, which is a self-regulatory association to help shape the future of the digital asset and cryptocurrency industry and create a transparent, accountable infrastructure that promotes integrity in all aspects of the market.
4. Encourage Responsible Growth and Adoption: We should be looking at ways to intelligently stimulate, encourage, sponsor innovation, and responsible growth. We have a lot of wild, speculative, irresponsible activity happening, which isn’t innovative at all. The crypto industry as a whole is largely responsible for this. When you have people expecting 5,10, or 100x multiples in days (or even hours), clearly, this is out of control. On every trade (and every scam), there’s a winner and a loser, and there are a lot more people losing than winning.
5. Encourage and Embrace Diversity: Crypto is a microcosm of both tech and finance, which are already two very low diversity industries. We know that this is a challenge that not only requires systematic change, but also personal introspection and real change. Gender is probably the strongest factor. I don’t have statistics, but I can tell you from our community and other crypto communities, it seems to be about 90% male.
   
   Pink Panda actively encourages our community to embrace inclusion and we are truly multinational. We have them primarily based on geography and language and have probably 12 different communities now. We work very hard to ensure diversity in both our communities as well as in our organization. While we can always do better, we have a fair amount of diversity on our advisory board, and our recent community marketing lead is a woman of color.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?

I hope I’m just getting started at this, as this is a huge driver for the mission of Pink Panda. Our small startup has already donated three times to cancer charities. The first was .4 Ethereum ($1,000 at the time) to the American Cancer Society, the second was 2 Ethereum ($4,800 at the time) to the Go2 Foundation for Lung Cancer, and we just completed a $4,000 USDC donation to Breast Cancer Action, whose motto is “Think Before You Pink”. My vision is that these donations will scale with Pink Panda’s success.

Outside of the charitable donations, I truly believe that my bringing decentralized finance in an easily accessible, user-friendly way can absolutely and directly change lives. Everyone has a cell phone but very few have access to decentralized finance. A person in India could take $10 and with a solid investment make life changing money. A person who lives in an unstable country could secure their assets in stablecoins. A young person could start dollar cost averaging and create real wealth over the long term. The potential is unreal. DeFi is absolutely in its infancy, but the value proposition is already proven.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My dear friend (and mentor) and I were having a conversation about whatever-my-latest-life-challenge was at that moment (which I totally forget), and I said something along the lines of “I feel accepted by this person.”

He said to me, “Adam, forget ‘acceptance’. You don’t want to settle for those who “accept” you in your life. You want to surround yourself with those who celebrate you.” I think as a society we are conditioned to look for acceptance, to look to “fit in”, and to not be judged. I spent much of my life doing just that. It was a pivotal moment for me and changed where I focused my time and energy, both in work and personal life. I spend less time and energy on those who seem to be more transactional and “going through the motions” and much more time engaging with those who want to be engaged. Unsurprisingly, those relationships are so much more rich and rewarding, because I want to celebrate them in return.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can find more information about us, our social media links, etc at https://pinkpanda.finance as well as see regular updates on our medium at https://medium.com/@PinkPandaFinance

Thank you so much for this. This was very enlightening!