What’s a Crypto Investment Bank? A Conversation About Crypto Due Diligence With Crypto Launchpad CEO Adiraj Gupta QuantLayer Follow Aug 1, 2018 · 46 min read

Here’s a transcript of QuantLayer Crypto Podcast #2. In this episode, we talked with Adiraj Gupta of the Crypto Lauchpad, a crypto investment bank. We learned what exactly a crypto investment bank is and how they built 20 million in management in just six months. We also discussed how friendly New Zealand regulators are towards crypto, how family offices are getting into crypto and what the OTC or the over-the-counter market looks like for Bitcoin.

The episode in its entirety can be listened to here:

QuantLayer is a software consultancy based in Brooklyn, New York. All opinions expressed by podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of QuantLayer. The information presented should not be construed as investment advice. Guests may maintain positions in assets mentioned in the podcast.

Vikram: Hey everyone, this is Vikram and Faizaan, also known as the Wizard.

Faizaan: Hey!

Vikram: From Quantlayer, and we’re here with Adiraj Gupta of the Crypto Launchpad. Thanks so much for joining us here Adiraj.

Adiraj: Thank you, thank you Vikram! Thanks for having me and nice to meet you as well.

Vikram: Nice to meet you as well. You’re based out in New Zealand?

Adiraj: Yes. Yes, I’m from New Zealand.

Vikram: What brings you out here in New York?

Adiraj: Basically, there was a big family office conference, so I was here for that. Then consensus came up so I decided to stay a little longer.

Vikram: What was the family office conference about?

Adiraj: It was a finance high net worth individual family office. Basically just a bunch of rich people there want to learn more about crypto space so just came to help out and see how we can.

Vikram: That’s must have been a pretty interesting experience.

Adiraj: Yes! It’s crazy! Because it was like there was about 60 people there and they collectively managed $200 billion.

Vikram: Wow.

Adiraj: Then GDP is $185 billion so, pretty crazy numbers.

Faizaan: Were these like all experienced crypto investors or a lot of people that are just interested in getting into the space?

Adiraj: No, not at all. These are like family officers that have been around in America and in the country for a long, long time. They’re opening their eyes up to crypto now, so they want to see how they can get into space, what the projects look like, what they sort of should be keeping your eyes open so, yes.

Vikram: Yes, awesome. That sounds like a perfect fit for what you guys do.

Adiraj: Yes, absolutely! Definitely a big opportunity to make some connections and see how we get sort of add value to the space. Plus just some pretty amazing people to hang out with.

Vikram: What is Crypto Launchpad, how does it work?

Adiraj: Crypto Launchpad is a cryptocurrency investment bank. We kind of have two main key functions. The first function is due diligence so, we integrate with exchanges and basically what happens is every time a new project comes in the door to an exchange. Wanting to be listed for their ICO or they want to be on the exchange and trading, the exchange redirects them to us.

We do fall into in due diligence on their project so that’s things like security penetration, the smart contract, looking at the legal on the regulatory like what markets is this currency legal, is it a security, is it a utility, is it a hybrid somewhere in between. We sit down with the founders and actually talk to them like, “What is your incentive in doing this project?” Where do you see the company going and sort of in everything in between so like in the marketing, and there type of stuff as well. Once we do that, that is then giving back to the project and it’s provided to the exchange. Based on that exchange, make a decision if they want to list this currency or not.

That’s the first key thing outside of that. Recently we’ve had a lot of companies hit us up because they’re like, “You have everything we need to launch a project. Can you help us?” Initially we said no, for like the first couple of months. We’ve still got some pretty cool projects that we said yes to for this month. It is about four or five projects that we’ve got like in our portfolio right now. Yes, I’m happy to share that as well.

Vikram: Yes. Just so I understand better, that second type of business, what is that?

Adiraj: The second type of business is like the full suite of advisory. We basically utilize that token assist with a framework. I mean, like how to do it actually properly.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: We basically just walk step by step through it, making sure that your project is fully compliant. It’s got everything it needs from a set-up perspective that depending on if you want to do a security utility to make sure it is very clear that it’s a utility or very clear that security and all the way end to end to make you sure you’re listed. Raising multiple rounds of capital in between and sort of the whole spectrum.

Vikram: Okay, awesome. You’re working with like four or five other coins that are going through the ICO process?

Adiraj: Yes. We’ve got about five projects that we ended up saying yes to just for this month alone so, I just have an absolute crazy time. I’m in New York till the 19. I’ll land back in New Zealand on the 21st. Then I have to fly to Korea on the 28th, because one of the biggest K-pop groups over there so, K-pop Conglomerate is a client. There’s a token called Friendship Fandom Token which is going live so, I have to be there for the launch date for like two days and have to fly back. It’s so crazy.

Vikram: I have some experience in traditional iBanking. I was an iBanking analyst for a couple years at UBS in Morgan Stanley. What you’re describing to me sounds very much kind of like a roadshow?

Adiraj: Yes, I mean those guys basically have all of the K-pop artists almost all signed and signed up too already. Basically what the coin does is… In Korea right now you can pay 10 cents a text like vote for your favorite artists to the progressed to the next round or whatever in these competitions to have. This token is priced at 1 cent and anyone in the world can vote now.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: It’s a global fan following and it’s enabling all of those people to vote just like people in Korea could right now. As well as that like if you have enough tokens you can like go on a dinner date with your favorite celebrity through the inside platform. You can take them out for lunch. This special VIP events that are going to be around the world, like shows and things with these fans, so it’s only accessible to our tokens. They’ll be like merchants that type of stuff as well.

See, it’s a very utility based, very sort of [Inaudible] [05:52] around the voting and the adventure.

Vikram: A handful of companies came to you and said that they want to do this, you were saying a no initially, so what’s your kind of internal diligence process for determining whether you want to take a client on?

Adiraj: It depends. This is going to sound bad. Initially it’s just like how cool we think the project is to start off with, but then will do for DD, so like you know who is the team behind the project, like what does the background, is the project any of founders of the team ever being bankrupt, you know what scale is it? Like a lot of these projects are like we have the winners of the Westpac 200 so, like these guys come with a massive brand reputation. They won the “Best Company Award ticket in Australia and then the K-pop group already have a massive following and it just makes sense for that particular token and this few others that I can’t talk about this yet.

Vikram: Yes, sure.

Adiraj: Yes, it’s basically it’s like initially it’s like, “That sounds like a cool project.” And then we’ll do DD on and check everything out make sure like its all good. I mean make sure it’s the right people. Like with K-pop, making sure it’s right like parties that do actually represent artists rather than just some random token that’s like trying to be K-pop.

Yes, we do that due diligence and then basically it’s just through the agreements and processes and the lawyers dealing with their lawyers for the contracts and stuff looks like. Yes.

Vikram: Your other side of the business is, so how would you describe that part of the business?

Adiraj: The first part of the business is very much due diligence. That’s due diligence for exchanges, that’s for banks, it’s for regulators and it’s sort of like the end to end. Right now we have the third best hacker in the world on our team, so like from a security penetration point of view is like; if we can’t hack it, it’s a fairly safe fit that project is fairly secure. We do that end to end but, for the due diligence we’re completely independent.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: We don’t take tokens, we won’t take Ethereum. It’s purely cash-based. That way we can stay completely independent. Whereas in the advisory side we have a vested interest. We’ll take tokens, we’ll take some cash to make sure expenses and things are covered. Yes, it’s very different sides of the business here.

Vikram: What’s your background? How did you get involved in the space?

Adiraj: Yes. I actually was the Chief Operating Officer for a cross-border payments company, like utilizing blockchain. It’s a lot of the cost of payment like remittances to Pacific Islands. I was in the space but like for me it was like I remember watching Ethereum go from like $4, like $40 and they’re like a little while later at 40. Like I was literally yelling on my phone and I’m like watching it from $40 to $400 and I was like, “Oh My God.” Like we were joking and like in this company we’re like, “Oh, we’ve got like $20,000 pay just sitting there. We should put that into crypto.” Because if we were like looking at the space right and had we done that I mean that’s over 2.7 million.

Vikram: My gosh.

Adiraj: I was like, “Oh My God.” Again I need funding at that point in time. I did that and then basically we got to as we would have to build core banking infrastructure in the Pacific Islands and so rather than building banking infrastructure we were like, “Okay, we’re going to wrap down this company” but, the mission was to reduce the cost for people involved, right. We figured out there’s a competitor, they had a really good product, they just couldn’t market it so we just helped them market it like hit the mission and then left the company in terms of like going out there.

After that I basically went to India for a month and just like explored the Fintech scene over there. Because that was just after the demonetization, so Fintech just blew up like there’s no tomorrow. I really explored over there. Came back to New Zealand and I got picked up by a global consulting firm called The Strategist.

That was a super interesting role because they were like, “Okay, we want to bring you on board. Where do you want to come in? Where do you see yourself playing?” I was like, “What do you think?” like, “What we can bring you in as a consultant or we can bring you as a manager or like you know with different roles inside that would match you.” I was like because I come from a consulting background and sort of was the president of the consulting… I was like I’m not sure if that’s what I want to do. It just go into a cookie kind of type box. We talked about it and they basically let me create a role.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: I was the first Entrepreneur-In-Residence for the firm which was super cool because basically no one knew what I actually did. One day I’d be having like lunch with the global managing director, the next day I’ll be kept in a team of four doing consulting work for clients. I was like the full spectrum of what could be done. The coolest part of that organization was they were structured in a way where like half the profits went like, the revenue went to the firm itself. Then the other half was divided up equally amongst all the parties involved.

It’s very interesting model of like actually doing consulting and how you kind of take clients. I did that for about, also the best like cherry-on-top was I got to invest a portion of the firm’s revenues in APEC region towards projects that I was passionate about so it just basically got to invest in a whole bunch of stuff. I’m still super tight with the guys and this one deal that we’re still looked into there basically replacing a lot of the EFTPOS terminals in the financial stake in New Zealand.

Until like right now, like normal merchants in New Zealand would pay like $150 for EFTPOS terminal about 150 to $200 for the device that you tap like pizza or like coffee or whatever item.

Then on top of that like 3 and 1/2% for a credit card transaction and then 2% for pay way.

Vikram: Gosh.

Adiraj: Right? Like an average averages like business owner would be paying up with a $500 a month just to accept payments make or break. That’s right.

Vikram: Make or break. That’s absurd.

Adiraj: We basically and I want to hear about one of the three big telcos in the country as well as the one of the four biggest banks in the country to run in the final stages there where we’re bringing in the device which is $50 a month as both the EFTPOS terminal and the POA system and looking at dropping down the margins to sub 2%. Business owner would go for like $500 a month to like sub $800 maybe a lot with the payments first.

Then after that Crypto Launchpad came up. We’re six months old now. We’ve just had crazy growth so I basically lift the consulting firm gradually and there’s still a few things that I’m looped into there but yes it’s my journey.

Vikram: Cool. Yes. We checked out your launch blog post that you posted I guess about six months ago.

Adiraj: Yes, Quite a while ago now. Yes. We’re just not good at social media.

Vikram: No, it’s fine. It’s fine. There was a bit that I read in there that I was thought that was pretty interesting. I’ll read it and love to get your thoughts. You say and I’ll post this in the show notes so, “If you want to invest in cryptocurrencies today your key source of information is the thousands of groups on Facebook, posts on Reddit, and channels on slack and telegram. All these sources pull their information from each other and quite often the real source of the information is unaccountable Twitter post or the like that has been taken out of context.

I thought that was just really interesting you know. We see that kind of market action all the time off these posts that it’s really tough to know where they came from. It’s kind of like a global game of telephone, right?

Adiraj: Yes.

Vikram: I know. What has been your experience seeing that?

Adiraj: It’s just insane right. There’s some tools out there that track sentiment all the way back to the source of where it comes from. The thing is if you have access to these tools. You can see a tweet that originated from China that translates to like a billion dollar movement and market cap in like a very short space of time right. It’s kind of if you have these tools available you as a hedge fund or whatever organization you can make a lot of money on right, but it’s not really fair for the marketplace.

What that particular piece in that blog hands to is the fact that like over time as like we scaled out A the number of companies that we advised and as part of that but over time we don’t have the infrastructure yet. As the companies, we do due diligence on. We’re going to on-board them to basically just a simple announcement platform.

Its super simple in terms like any official announcement or information they want to release, release it through there just so like it removes the need for like the Twitter, like chilling. It’s like you can do all of that but like where we need to get the market to. It’s like people don’t treat that as like the word of like, the company right. Like it could just be one Twitter dude who’s managing the company’s account. They’re like crazy makes movement. Whereas like with an official announcement you can okay like, “On this day at this time we’re expecting an announcement and here is the stuff. It’s kind of formalizing.

Vikram: Yes. That’s awesome. I mean public companies at least in the US have investor relations pages on their sites and I mean that’s the source of truth like you have your annual reports, you have press releases and all that stuff. Is that kind of what you guys are thinking of?

Adiraj: Yes, exactly. If companies start doing that already that’s great and we’d hope that crypto companies like I see as in projects start doing that. The thing is right now it doesn’t hit, right. Like this is not about trying to be like the “go-to website” or platform that has it. I feel like all our projects at least you know that there’s some way that you can go is a reliable source.

Vikram: Right, that’s great. There’s something else in the blog post I found pretty interesting so I’ll read that here, “We want this ecosystem to grow, evolve and shape the future of the industry and business. Success for us looks like people investing in projects that they’re passionate about and believe in with comfort and knowing that these projects will do their absolute best to create value and not simply run away with investor money.”

We talked about this kind of stuff before where one of the killer apps in crypto is just capital formation. You can just set up a wallet and have a project and ask for funds as a capital former. Then as a capital contributor you can just send money to a wallet and get your tokens back. That’s really, really interesting. How do you see this whole capital formation idea progress as people become more comfortable with investing and use their due diligence product?

Adiraj: I think we’re there right now it’s like super early days but the markets evolved very, very quickly since last year. If you remember like hitting into December I was like, “Oh there’s another ICO. Let’s check money and everything.” What we’re saying now is like it’s very calculated risk. People actually starting to look at teams and projects.

What I’ve found recently is there’s so many small investor groups emerging and I’m in a few ones that are super interesting. I’d be like a person who’s like works at McDonald’s, to a builder, to another restaurant owner, to like actually investment banker analyst. To me, these random groups and emerging and it’s super interesting to see the people who necessarily are from the industry. Like how much insight they can actually draw from stuff and you know it’s cool to see.

I think over time, like in general in business they’re going to be get smarter and smarter. I think where we need to be like careful about is like what I’m seeing already is because there’s a lot of new people entering the marketplace. People who have been in the space even for six months don’t really want to help anymore. They’re just like there’s too many, like we just want to go do our own thing with our own group. It’s kind of letting their gap again in the space to get bigger and bigger so we have to figure out a way that we can sort of better improve that.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: Over time we’re going to be rolling out a whole bunch of tools that basically just help the marketplace in doing things properly. One of these tools is like so we’re not like… We have to ask the lawyers if we can use this domain or not but we own cryptoworldbank.com

Vikram: Crypto what?

Adiraj: Cryptoworldbank.com.

Vikram: Wow.

Adiraj: Basically like what design is for on that web-page if we’re allowed to use it is just going to be a decentralized legal and regulatory directory.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: Any ICO project can select the countries that they want to operate in and they’ll be able to see what the regulation in those countries. What we’re going to add all the markets that we personally know about and like the information is truthful and quick. We’re looking for people and all of these other countries where we don’t necessarily have the experience like are operating in to add to that and so it just becomes a global Wikipedia or flight informational and regulation each market and someone takes ownership of that country to make sure it’s updated.

Tools like that that would just release the market to make sure that over time it should get easier to see which projects actually trying and doing things correctly versus not because these tools will be readily available, so if you’re not using them this is a popular reason why you’re not using them.

Faizaan: What countries are you operating in right now?

Adiraj: As of right now we’re in New Zealand, Australia, pushing UK, pushing US now, in India and in Korea because of K-pop. From a regulation point of view, our strongest points are surely India.

Faizaan: Are you finding that most of these countries are adopting relatively similar regulatory policies or is there a lot of variation you have to work around that?

Adiraj: It’s quite a lot of variation, yes. Like typically, it seems like a lot of countries like New Zealand for sure is definitely keeping a close eye on what the ACC is doing. Others country’s it’s just like Gibraltar, Malta, islands in the Pacific. They’re just like let’s make it super tax haveny and let’s bring as much money as possible, so you do get a full dynamic mix.

What’s interesting is like quality projects are wanting to push into marketplaces where they are regulated, so like their brain reputations. We get a lot of projects interestingly enough from Japan. They want to do the ICO out of New Zealand because they’re like, though Japanese seems like a tax haven, it’s regulation is actually not the best they actually doing last year. It’s like what if we do it in New Zealand; at least we would have clarity that things are done properly, right. It’s like if you come to New Zealand and you do ICO there at least you know what comfort that project is like actually passed through the regulators and there’s actual input from the regulators and your white paper in your information and so it’s done properly.

We’re seeing a lot of that but again, thankfully for us like New Zealand’s probably the easiest country in the world to do business in. Regulators are super accessible and really good guys. It’s possible like I can’t imagine doing that in the US in terms like just being able to sit down with regulators and say its like, “What do you think it was?”

Vikram: Right. What is the current state of diligence research out there? Do you have a handful competitors or kind of similar stuff?

Adiraj: Yes and no. There’s like different groups that kind of focus on different things. What we’re finding is that like there’s just so much more money to be made in an advisory right now then it makes no sense. I’d like to give you guys an example, like for full due diligence like your smart contracts, security penetration everything we charge $100 thousand.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: Right? To give you a comparison with their like smart contract audits on average right now about 60K. Like if you go with the high Tier firms like watch that and they have some stuff right. Maybe a little bit but like… In general, like the cost of that is like way higher but like you can’t take tokens. We self-regulated in term so we can’t accept tokens right.

On the advisory side it’s like you can charge like this organization, certain large organizations that have hit us up and they’re charging $500 thousand US, plus like 10% of tokens and they’re like, “Can you do the project for us and you charge $150 thousand and you take 5% of tokens.” They’re just like they’re like; “We over charge you.” and we just like, “We’ll charge more we’ll put our brain with you and you guys do the work,” and we obviously charged a lot. It’s crazy because those 10% of tokens like if they were to do the work for themselves for example that’s like half a million dollars plus 10% tokens flow just messing around.

Vikram: That’s mess I guess.

Adiraj: Yes, so the upside is so much more significant because like if you have a project that goes $100 million for example that’s $10 million. Whereas on the due diligence side, it’s only 100K.

Vikram: Right.

Adiraj: Right. There’s just no real incentive for people to actually be operating in due diligence side which is perfect for us because we can do that. We can really like head their brand and their positioning and so we can really formalize agreements for the exchanges. Set what value is on to.

Vikram: How many exchanges are you working with?

Adiraj: As of right now we’re working with two with Cryptopia with our main like public partner.

Vikram: They’re down in New Zealand?

Adiraj: They’re down in New Zealand, yes, yes. We’re working with them for a few things and like outside of just the pure due diligence relationship as well. The biggest problem with us is like Cryptopia right now, it gets like a hundred projects a month right.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: Our current bandwidth is only ten, 15 projects. We can’t bottleneck them. Right now it’s not a level where every single project is coming through us yet but we do need to scale up like four or five times to make sure we can have there been with. It felt like through like different groups it’s like finance right now there’s a thousand projects a month.

Vikram: Wow.

Adiraj: To cross the scale into there’s just a massive pipeline of projects, yes.

Vikram: What are your plans to scale, is it sort of one-to-one email or can you add ten projects per person you add on or how would you think about scaling?

Adiraj: No, it’s hard. Because it’s like there’s so many things that I had to scale inside us. We have really strong partners and I won’t name them.

Vikram: Sure. That’s fine.

Adiraj: Because I’m not sure how public they want to be. These organizations are one of the big four for example, so they can scale parts of the work that we do in legal firms. They can tell scale parts of the firm like work that we need to do for things like security penetration, smart contracts, stuff which we do ourselves we scale the team select. As well as like the financial modeling in the top economic side of things.

What we’ve done is like we’ve actually set it up, so we’re in the process of hiring a whole bunch of like executives and staff, from PWC and staff because those guys are good at this. Just bring them over. Help them understand how this stuff works. They’re already good at like actual audit part and like doing that work, so it’s just like telling it and so that after you go to do that yes.

In the process is like bringing quite a few like we already have a few [Inaudible] [22:57] you got to see at the norm like we’re bringing across a few more people. It’s kind of like yes basically that’s there’s a scaling problem but it’s more about systems and processes so like right now, we’re like fairly disorganized in terms of like every project that comes in, we’ll assign the project managers to them and then that person our case resources.

What we don’t yet have is like the core infrastructure that say, “Okay, here’s the project that comes in. Here is all of the needs that their project has and here’s a timeline stand like automatically does that stuff.” We have to manually do it so it takes a lot longer. Next couple weeks, months, we should be able to fully automate like the streamlining of processes and so it’s a lot more efficient because people can just churn them out rather than like waiting around and then having a whole bunch of work and then waiting around again.

Vikram: Thinking about good actors versus bad actors, what are some key factors you think say a retail investor or say a nascent institutional investor, what are the kind of key factors that help separate good and bad actors you think people should pay attention to?

Adiraj: In terms of projects themselves or…

Vikram: Yes, if you want to analyze the token project, say someone who’s already ICOed that hasn’t gone through it any kind of diligence. It’s hard to know exactly how legitimate is this project. I can see they have a website. You can look at your Etherscan link. There’s a handful of things you can do. Fundamentally if there’s no one to speak to, no one to communicate with you, it’s really hard to know if this is a legitimate project or not. Are there some kind of key factors involved in analyzing an ICO?

Adiraj: Yes. One of the most important ones for us is actually like and this is again one of those scaling problems but actually seeing the team.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: One of the projects we didn’t saw the team and like visually looking they were like we were like not sure like how like how strong the project was. The biggest thing for us I think is like in Asian markets typically and this is big listeners is like the user experience is so different to like New Zealand and Australia. We were like used to like the Google within the Facebook. Whereas over there, it’s just like ads everywhere and stuff right there, right? We went over there being super ensure in terms like, “Was this project even legit?” They have 80 guys working around the clock.

Vikram: Wow.

Faizaan: Wow.

Adiraj: On just like making sure that watch that channel for every single country that they are in is like fully like constantly updated. The teams are like working around the clock so there’s like different clocks that like people come in and out depending on what time of the day and stuff. This was like, “Okay, like this project is good.” Like and so like it’s that sort of thing that gives comfort but, that’s the type of thing that like isn’t is in public isn’t you know…

Vikram: Right. Only professionals are going to be able to do that.

Adiraj: Yes, exactly. It’s like our job really is that like over time, those projects that we do that for due diligence for we can say, “Look, like we have done this due diligence for this project and we were comfortable

with where this project proceed.” And like depending on like how there’s a few parties involved in terms of like partners. They’re comfortable sharing like they’re like inputs into the report, the actual project itself being able to like comfortable sharing the input since report but like if all those parties we were comfortable, then those reports that we do, sharing that publicly will go a long way for us projects.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: It’s just that just the like types of people like organizations we have; they don’t have yet have the risk exposure to like yes. It’s great for exchanges and anyone under whose disclosure but like it just can’t be public yet at this point. Where we want to get to is like if for example like this imagine a future for a second where we are like

hypothetically for every single exchange that wants to get listed, any project that’s not good quality in this like scare me out there, they probably won’t come through us anyway. Because you know you’re going to get rejected right? Like you know you’re not going to pass this assessment and like that we’re more than comfortable doing that. If you’re not good, you’re not good.

Vikram: Right. I mean I can imagine a future too where there’s a tier-one like yourself diligence services investment banks and then tier three or tier four because you see that in public markets too where you have Morgan Stanley-Goldman Sachs, and then a lot smaller firms that maybe help smaller IPO teams go public.

Adiraj: Yes, and then that’s completely fine. As long as like intrinsically, the space is getting better like I’m more than comfortable with that. Where like I worry is like when you have a whole bunch of ratings agencies that pop up.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: I’ve seen so many where they’re like pay us two Bitcoin and will give you the perfect review. You define the defeat the purpose of what you’re trying to do, right?

Vikram: Right. You’re just extracting rent…

Adiraj: Yes!

Vikram: In this market that exists.

Adiraj: Exactly. That’s when it kind of worries me like even I see a binge like I personally like I see a binge but there’s so many advisers on there where I’ve seen like because of these projects I get over excited, that’s right. I’ve seen these guys to be like, “You pay us in Bitcoin and will give you good writing.” But the sheer number of volume of writings they’re doing, the sheer number of money that they’re making just of writing stuff, they have really, really high ratings on the rankings.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: They treat it is as like really great people but actually it’s like trading money for projects here, actually.

Vikram: Quite self-serving.

Adiraj: Yes. Recently like what I’ve not enjoyed, but like what’s been good as the ACC actually taking action against companies. I would like to see the action being taken against individuals as well as basically doing this stuff. It’s like insider trading and it’s not good for the investors because you’re just pumping things up. You’re giving them information they’re like, “Hey, this is a good project. We give it five out of five ratings, but you’re not backing it up.”

Vikram: Right. Yes. It’ll be interesting to see how all that stuff plays out. There’s obvious egregious things that they see you should go towards and then other things that are a little hazier.

Faizaan: The New Zealand equivalent of the SEC, what’s that?

Adiraj: We have the FMA financial markets story.

Vikram: Okay, got you.

Adiraj: We very much fall under their jurisdiction in terms of being able to do stuff.

Vikram: Got you. Have you met with them and work them?

Adiraj: We meet with them very regularly.

Vikram: That’s huge.

Adiraj: The good part is and this what I was alluding to before is like the relationship that we have with the FMA unfortunately is like we can actually comfortably like share white papers with them and we can organize a meeting to follow up. Sit down like, what did you think of those white papers, how would you treat it, what if this was change, how does that impact us?

It’s like it’s doing two things where; A, it’s like booting out their knowledge and portfolio of like the different types of white papers that are there, and B, it’s helping us because we know exactly what from their perspective what I will trade it.

Vikram: What will I trade it?

Adiraj: Exactly.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: That should be useful. Again that’s not going to scale so we need to fit our solutions to it.

Vikram: That’s awesome. It sounds like they’re really progressive there with respect to…

Adiraj: Yes, absolutely. If I may IRD which is Inland Revenue Department. It’s super open and like they release information about cryptocurrencies and things and like how to trade it. They’ve had a pretty interesting Facebook campaign recently which is like, “If did you buy a cryptocurrencies make sure you pay your tax.” It’s like that. No. Super, super accessible and super good guys here.

Vikram: Yes. Then as far as risk to your business from a legal standpoint what kind of risk do you take on by doing the diligence and eventually putting out the reports?

Adiraj: This is one of the reasons we don’t put out the reports yet. Just because we can’t be seen to be retail like our reports can’t be treated like investment documented. Everyone is bound by NDAs and a very strong contract that like this is purely for your analysis purpose or for your listing purpose.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: We do want to get to a space where we can be a lot more public about in sharing that. Right now with like basically like indemnity insurance for companies like us being non-existent in the crypto space, that’s extremely hard to do. Our solution is like we have bought it strong. We have DLA Piper globally as sort of our legal partner and so it’s like we have really good place right now. That’s how we deal with it.

Vikram: Sure.

Adiraj: I think that’s what most projects has to do right now. Maybe that’s a crypto thing to do…

Faizaan: Crypto insurance for that…

Adiraj: That whole insurance all I get.

Vikram: Crypto indemnity insurance. They don’t want to…

Adiraj: I would buy that and I’d put off like… Because like I haven’t actually come across any crypto project that has indemnity insurance yet.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: In my opinion that’s a massive problem.

Vikram: Yes. As far as your diligence goes, how much of it is kind of structural and market versus technical? You do a smart cut right stuff diligence and then also do you look at like what market the coin plays in and who its competitors are?

Adiraj: We come in as before they list on exchanges. We didn’t know market data available for us. It’s very much the technical side of things and the legal and the business strategy and the type of stuff, so it’s very much like you had the fundamentals and you think it’s okay, it’s secure. At least people don’t know lose their money or your wallet being hacked or anything like that, and then focusing on where is this project getting to and what should we expect at what point in time. Rather than like, here’s the mind. We don’t try to go back in losses in that particular context. We do like it market systems of which markets those people operating in like is your project Australia, India, which market are you actually doing stuff.

Vikram: On the technical and smart contracts. I mean that’s an area that’s very different from public markets and that’s totally new, so it’s interesting just hearing about you know what the diligence process for smart contracts is?

Adiraj: When you can like pull out tokens? I actually don’t get to spend a lot of time coding, so I did create my own token just to prove a point one time. People like, “Oh. It’s so difficult to memorize that. It’s really not hard to make it watching.”

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: I created the Awesome Adi Token on the Ethereum Ropsten Network just to prove a point. It’s like live and it functions correctly, but the point is like you can write a smart contract pretty freaking easily. The thing is like you do have to look for like, is there like some backdoor type stuff, is there a way you can you know change wallet balances. Again, I personally don’t do the smart contract. I haven’t thought to it today.

Vikram: Sure.

Adiraj: Yes. I can’t provide you more information on.

Vikram: Yes, that’s fine. Just curious I mean we come across all kinds of… The platform we’re building and we chatted about it briefly last week. It’s basically you know imagine a feed of news and alerts on interesting stuff that’s going on in the crypto space so different RSS feeds, all the medium and coin blog sites. Every time there’s a news article, it’ll pop up on the feed. We’re always interested in figuring out like what are the extra kind of things we can add to that platform especially on the technical side?

Faizaan: Technical side like analyzing it from a technical perspective and some automated way.

Adiraj: Yes, let me think about that. There’s probably ways to a fairly sort of a quick and dirty smart contract order of vision, which is like there’s a high level analysis because I mean a lot of people just use templates now anyway. It’s like if you know how template model works there’s generally nothing wrong with it.

Where things get interesting is like for us is like, smart contractors are okay. We can do it fairly quickly, but it’s actually a security penetration side of things again interesting. Because it’s like the blockchain itself is safe, but the way the platform, the way the infrastructure around it that’s where you often get the breaches.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: For one of the projects, we were able to basically hack the hectare wallet. We knew exactly how much tokens a person had, we knew what their physical address was, we knew what types of identities they had uploaded, and what the username was and what the email was. With their mother information, you can do a lot because you turn up a person’s house and they like give me your like whatever cryptocurrency. That itself was the bigger problem rather than the unchain like smart contract myself. The token infrastructure works fine.

Vikram: Right.

Faizaan: Yes. Another thing we saw looking at the GitHub is not so much the chain but the applications built on top of it is when looking for good versus bad actors. A lot of these projects are entirely open source and you can very quickly see. If you look at it white paper and you look at a timeline and the team and you go to the GitHub and there’s no activity, it very quickly surfaces that did they just raise money and now they’re sitting on a beach somewhere or are they going to be able to execute technically on their road map. Because there’s some they think that are well intentioned and you’ll see the work they’re putting out and you can very clearly identify a substandard team that way.

Adiraj: This some interesting track is I don’t know if the top of my head but there is one which tracks the most amounts of updates in real term code change in a GitHub for all these projects. Basically, it tracks like it’s not like if you just deleted a bunch and then copy pasted and all of a sudden your codes is like here was a code before and here’s a code now and some real term active change on that code. The top projects with the most amount of development and I think it’s like generally like what’s been happening in the last couple of weeks are these types of projects are like right up the top in terms of like the amount of change in the code.

There’s also coin-munity which I really like in terms of gauging I just like that something similar to you guys as well. All it does super simple just tracks like your increasing community for a project so like how much increase in telegram.

Vikram: I’ve seen that. It’s a mobile app.

Adiraj: Yes.

Faizaan: Yes.

Asiraj: It’s like super basic but it’s interesting just to see which projects because like if you can see a community being built or hundred number on their thing and just like as you see it tracking up, you can generally call it right there to the price and see how that increases it.

Faizaan: Yes. For us we’ve got a lot of the raw data. We’re pulling in the GitHub of a number of projects and we recently hooked up telegram so we can basically pull in telegram feeds of whatever project, but it’s now figuring out like on that raw data how much automated sort of… Like manually, you can go look and see all this team is clearly really good or like this is clearly they just copied some other codebase, put out a big marketing push, and they’re gone doing that in automated way on the raw data is were a lot of interesting problems lie.

Adiraj: One of my good friends, Aaron, he’s got a one of his projects is called “Coin School”, which I’ll connect you guys with, but its super cool. It basically like does pull in all this raw data across a whole bunch of places, and then you can do like graphical sentiment analysis and things on it.

Vikram: Super cool to see.

Adiraj: Like where we are right now, we’re very much like deep in this tunnel of what does like a full stack do deals like this look like and yours things reassess. Overtime, what we do want to come to is like these tools. I dotted around the outside of that, like though we can’t share the actual core stuff yet. There’s maybe ways to pull out some of their data and share different platforms. We have to figure out how we do that. It’s a little while away but like as projects you’ll develop, be interesting to see how we can work together and save that up.

Faizaan: Yes. Because even going back to your point earlier about having a single platform where your companies can publish… One of the most one of the things that we see is a lot of times admins will just say something in telegram and that’s the first time it’s ever been mentioned anywhere. Then you go look at the price move and it’s the Wild West in terms of like disclosure and how information travels.

Adiraj: Yes.

Vikram: Yes. I think we saw a coin admin say something like. “Hey guys, just a heads up. We’re going to miss our deadline.” Then you know it takes a bit of time for that to hit the market and hit Reddit and all these places.

Adiraj: I think it’s so important to have like fairly defined times for announcements because people need sleep.

Faizaan: Yes.

Vikram: Right.

Adiraj: If you were in a community, they’re just like because they’re constantly on. Like it’s actually not good for you. If we can have every single day, X amount of time, different tokens or like you define in your white paper. We are going to do announcement once a week and that is the time we do announcement. Anything outside of that don’t take that as official like confirmable.

Faizaan: Yes. What else is interesting sometimes is just correlating the announcement or what they’re saying with what’s actually happening because again GitHub is public.

We had one ICO that we were following because we thought their product was interesting and they had a very clear roadmap timeline. They had a, “This is the day our beta is going to release.” They didn’t give a time. Then we’ve been watching their GitHub for a while and then like, there’s no way that they’re going to hit this beta. That day they’re like, “Oh, it’s definitely coming out today.” Everyone, the 20 thousand people in a telegram. Everyone’s like, “Well what time?” “We can’t tell you the time, but it’ll be done by midnight Hong Kong time.” Then midnight Hong Kong time comes and I think it became midnight US time. Then they basically launched late and have subsequently missed all their deadlines. What they’re saying in telegram does not line up with that reality, so it’s nice having two separate data sources to go to see like…

Adiraj: Absolutely. GitHub is super useful, but then you get the interesting arguments like, “Oh, no. We only push changes once in a blue moon.”

Vikram: Or we can go on private work and just push it publicly.

Faizaan: Yes. It’s interesting to see some very obvious just lying in some of this programs.

Vikram: There was a crazy one. I think that what they were doing is faking activity. Another coin we’re looking at and their GitHub. They’re basically updating their read.me, with like a period, taking it out adding it back. It looked like there were like 50 commits in a week. [Inaudible] [39:39] the people in the chat were…

It’s sad because a lot of people don’t… You might not know about GitHub, how it works and that’s fine, right? Not everyone needs to know everything about coding. Just saying, “Oh. It had 50 commits this week.” Bitcoins only had 10. Therefore, they’re more active than Bitcoin? That’s insane. There’s a lot of market education that needs to happen.

Adiraj: That’s why I like toll’s day. Basically do that like pull the data and actually compare how much real term code change there is so valuable right because there’s like you know when someone’s a bit like bullshitting. You want to know what they’re actually doing. Yes, it’s crazy. Like I always say, it’s still basically days here. Like we’re in day one now, but like we’re still pretty years.

Vikram: Yes. I’m curious you know how do you think the… Again, we’re talking about the future here but how do you think the diligent process will change as these schemes get more sophisticated?

Adiraj: Yes, I mean it’s very dynamic right now in terms like it does change quite often because like one of the things we wanted to do is like when we’re comfortable with it like actually share that publicly with the market of like what the process looks like, so it’s like all right here or like all the things that we assess, here is exactly how we assess for those things. Then, here is like the general outcomes that we recommend. People can go and do their themselves but it’s just that’s a little while away in terms it’s changing so quickly that like we can’t say like this is the regulation and what it looks like. Because they don’t know there’s changed now, we have to do it this way. It’s kind of its done here. Hopefully so we are involved in the committee for the ISO 307.

Vikram: Okay, what’s that?

Adiraj: Which is the Global Standards Authority. Basically, standardized things right? It’s like a seatbelt thing. Like how a seatbelt works standardized for example. With that committee there’s like eight different segments, so it’s like blockchain security, blockchain exits. Like Security utility, other that type of stuff. It’s like working with supercool people around the world that are in the space and basically figuring out like what those standardization looks like.

If that goes through and like all the countries are involved. Like New Zealand has a voting right as a country and sort of running the committee there. US has a voting right as a country and there’s a committee there. If like globally they can be consensus around like what the standardized framework looks like, things should hopefully get easier because then we can put more rigid things into the model.

Vikram: Is that similar to what Ryan Selkis at Messari is doing, is that?

Adiraj: This is like ISO and standards authorities like the global…

Vikram: Its global standards.

Adiraj: If you just google ISO it will come quick.

Vikram: Yes, okay.

Adiraj: Like countries participate in there and you basically select in the local market where with the right people ought to do today.

Vikram: A standard like that how would that look? What are the key kind of categories of things that would go into a standard like that?

Adiraj: I haven’t actually done like a project to it Standards Authority or like ISO standards before, so like I’m very much learning. To me it’s a lot of regulation here and I’m not a lawyer. I feel like I’d know quite a bit now but it’s still like a mess of like brain sync for me to try and figure out how it works. It’s very much like defining terms like terminologies.

Now that we understand what these terminologies are, here are some of the things that we can do in using those terminologies and what that looks like. It’s like what does a, we say security, but like inside security. What are the different branches? We say utility; well what are the different utility use cases. That talk, we’re of fleshing it out in a minute.

Vikram: We talked a little bit about your customers. Right now, we have exchanges. How else do you see your business progressing? Is there kind of like a third or fourth area that you’re thinking about now?

Adiraj: Yes. There’s a couple of things right, so because of the tokens and that’s it so we received. We’ve never raised capital being cash flow positive from day one.

Vikram: That’s huge. Congrats.

Adiraj: Now, we’re at a point we’re like we can start liquidating some of those positions. Once we do that it’s like we probably are the biggest hit crypto in this bank in the country, but like forget that. We will be the biggest VC in New Zealand in the next six months.

Vikram: Okay. Yes.

Adiraj: To give you an example, the current largest VC in the country, their typical investments in the year are about five, six million. We have today like a 20 million asset valuation.

Vikram: Wow.

Asiraj: That’s like liquid stuff that we can liquidate to do stuff. It’s a no-brainer for us to go down that track. Other things that we’re doing is we’re pushing courses of smart contracts and both training into universities in the country. We’re sponsoring all the meet-ups in the country, so it’s like wherever you go you’re going to have a free like not Crypto Launchpad Focus but just like free learning and interactive stuff. We’ve set-up Entrepreneurship Center in Wellington the city that I’m from.

Basically it’s like over the next couple of weeks and months, we’re going to try a few things like we will say, we will find every single blockchain project in the country for example. It may not be a big amount maybe a thousand dollars, maybe it’s hundred thousand dollars if we really like your project but the whole ecosystem, we’ll just blow it up because we have all the capabilities to do everything in the space. The projects that are doing well, we can pick them and provide them other support services.

It’s like that kind of… Plus the VC thing is interesting because New Zealand as a country really, really amazing entrepreneurs. Super creative people just extremely small the liquid pool of capital and we don’t execute well on global commence license. We’ll do great in New Zealand, but pushing you out of New Zealand is hard for us. Whereas like that’s where I come from. Those projects, we’ll push them out across subjects. We already have Investment Banking and hedge fund partnerships, so we can fund projects quickly. Like we can send that deal for around our partners and organizations on those projects and it just accelerates a loophole.

That’s some things that were doing. Another thing that we’re doing is like we’re actually building our own blockchain right now for some of the biggest crowd-funding platforms around the world and we have some early sort of agreements with them. If that goes through we’ve got some IP built up and some of our partners have some really cool tech that allows for processing into the financial systems. Basically like, if you can imagine in the near future any project that comes through us, we have the ability to allow that token to clear into the financiers.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: Let’s say you create, I don’t know, NYC token for example. NYC token is trading at $5. We can basically, we can do this in New Zealand right now but there’s some things happening in the financial space which will allow us to do it globally, and so it’s like that token at $5 we’ll be able to like flicked into whatever the local currencies or USDD or in NZDD or whatever the market. It’s not like the current USDD but like a digital version of the usual and clear into the financial system. Then on our back end where we like clear that through the infrastructure.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: Some of our partners and you know groups that we work with they’re buying banks and they’re sitting up organizations around the place. There’s some interesting place they were involved in. I can’t disclose too much because there’s like a… Basically, we want to open source it. Just the type of ticket is it super risky because if we open sourced it’s going to get copied and taken away, so we have a patent application pending for it. We’re going to patent it and then like open source every time.

Vikram: That’s awesome.

Adiraj: There it’s going to be super cool because like… To give you a hint, like let’s take a charity for example. A charity will be able to deposit some money that will be picked up by a blockchain that then can be invested to a charity in a public context. When they spin that money in like a physical transaction in a shop or bank to bank transfer, that will be public on our budget.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: It’s super interesting use case just for charities but there’s a whole spectrum of other organizations. That’s the last thing that we work on. Plus there’s like being set-off like an investment bank is super interesting because we just get the craziest deal flow. Yesterday, I had like two meetings. One was like a diamond ICO that they want to do in Canada. The other was like this is a super profitable private jet company. We think about doing an ICO and like commoditizing how that works something. It’s kind of cool.

As well as like providing market-making in liquidity to exchanges like bringing in parties there. I’ve been in New York for like two weeks and I’ve already connected like three people moving $800 million of Bitcoin and they really know what’s Bitcoin. $100 million worth of Bitcoin, $400 million of Bitcoin. We’re not an OTC but like we’ve made connections that would directly make a profit.

Vikram: That’s huge.

Adiraj: It’s interesting to just like, yes.

Vikram: What do you take on the OTC market? How big is it compared to public to public market?

Adiraj: Much, much bigger volume wise. I was saying like that’s my last two weeks. A couple of guys I’ve been meeting here they’ve been doing a lot bigger transactions as well. Some of the biggest families, they’re buying big amounts of Bitcoin and big amounts of Cryptos.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: Mainly Bitcoin but yes, like they are taking up positions and because it’s OTC. People are like, “See that?”

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: They don’t see their own exchanges really like, “I’ll win the institutional money’s in.” Like it’s been in for a while. They’re just increasing their positions and so it will be interesting to see how that goes.

Vikram: Right. That is pretty interesting.

Adiraj: It kind of makes me feel like I should buy some Bitcoins.

Vikram: Are there any other projects you think are pretty interesting right now that you recommend looking into?

Adiraj: I’ve looked into our projects, the Friendship. It’s Friendship.world. I think that’s a super cool idea. If you’re into a Korean pop or that type music, I think it will be interesting. For us it’s really interesting as well because like we’ll do this one and like if that goes well, then it’s like who knows? Maybe we’ll do an American Idol coin. We can specialize in that.

Vikram: Great, great.

Adiraj: Plus like there’s private jet ones that’s popped up was quite interesting because I’ve never had opportunity to fly in the private jet but like maybe if we did their token, we’ll get to like.. I think check out that one. There’s a few other ones that come up as well but I feel like I have to be blockchain agnostic, so I shouldn’t just be like settling projects for…

Vikram: These could just be interesting projects. Not necessarily, “Hey, you should buy this token.”

Adiraj: Yes.

Vikram: Just kind of interesting projects you think people should look into.

Adiraj: Yes, I mean, there’s been a lot of talk about a delegated proof of stake and proof of stake. In my opinion, Ark is one of the really few projects that really do a good job of delegate proof of stake. Check the Ark to those listening I guess. This is again bad notion. One of my biggest holdings is in deal.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: I really like that particular project and it’s really interesting to see how they’ve done it. I mean it’s almost centralized in the way that they sort of manage their proof of stake consensus stuff. Anything their technique in China is doing a good job for me. It’s like a lot of potential.

Vikram: Great, great, great.

Adiraj: There is that. Other projects, I really like the Quantum Resistant Ledger Guys. I was hanging out with them.

Vikram: That’s the name of the project?

Adiraj: Yes. It’s a QRL. IT’s a Quantum Ledger. Those guys seem pretty cool. They’ve just got, so they started off with the SE 20 and then now go they’re going into like actually like the actual Quantum Resistant Ledger. That’s quite an interesting project. I think EOS, which had a lot of hype recently. I really like their distribution method and there’s something they don’t be quite keen to try out with one of our projects to see how that goes. Maybe tweak it slightly.

Vikram: By distribution method there, what do you mean?

Adiraj: They basically had a year-long ICO.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: Where the way it was designed and divided was like you put in however much Ether you want to. Every single day for example, I’m not sure the exact amount but I think it was like a hundred thousand tokens or 100 million tokens were sold every single day. Let’s say the first day, only 100 ETH was put in. Each person got 1 million tokens. Whereas the next day if only ten ETH was put in, each person got ten million tokens.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: It was the price on the day of the token on the actual project of the ICO was defined completely by the amount of people that putting money in. It’s kind of this addicting thing about like, “Let’s put in some money every single day for a year and let’s see if we can pick up some big positions hopefully.” To me that’s pretty cool. I’m not sure how like the ACC would deal with it but to me it’s pretty cool just to see their like distribution mechanism.

Vikram: Yes.

Faizaan: Or from a tax perspective I can’t imagine.

Adiraj: Yes. I mean tax perspective but also it’s like is it kind of gambling like, just like you know, let’s put some money and…

Faizaan: Capital gains, capital winnings so let’s…

Adiraj: I guess it’s kind of not gambling because like you are always getting something. It’s not like you’re not receiving it.

Vikram: You just don’t know how much you’re getting.

Adiraj: Just like cash volatility is a way to… Also, I think they were already on exchanges even while this was happening. Like the ICO thing was happening so that was quite interesting to me because it was like you had the exchange price of what the token was trading at but then you still had this ICO going on the background and people putting money into a consensus.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: I just thought it was interesting. Cool distribution like way of doing it just like something different to do. What other projects, there’s just so many floating there.

Vikram: There’s so many. Yes.

Adiraj: Yes. I was quite interested in Nano.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: It’s a tech savvy and that was quite interesting just because like… The group that I was talking about right, that one of the Facebook groups which is just a random as people like someone with McDonald’s. Those guys actually found that project.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: Like, “Ah, that’s kind of cool!” Then but they found it when it was like 20 cents or whatever right, and then they were just pound on, and then it went like $20. I’d put it like 200 POS with it. Great, I’ll go ahead, so I lost that. That was unfortunate. That particular project was super interesting because outside of everything that, that team did the biggest pump in that project was like there was this gift that was created showing like Bitcoin flow, Ethereum flow, Lite coin flowing and then comparing that tech savvy.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: If you look at the flow, it’s just number of transactions represented in like a visual format. I feel like the price of that project like if you look at like win that gift was greater than when it’s pushed out that was what made that blow out.

Vikram: It’s totally ridiculous. This is a meme driven market.

Adiraj: Absolutely. There’s another project. It was similar to I can’t like visualize it, but I can’t remember the name. Anyway, it was like basically a lot coin version with just like a few tweaks to make it better. There’s a comparison done and it was a classic like Bitcoin doesn’t have this; a lot of coin doesn’t have this. It’s like green text everywhere and that project showed for us.

Vikram: Of course. Of course.

Adiraj: It’s almost like some people can just like, not even some people. It doesn’t have to be big people, you have this big massive group trying like 50,000 people public Facebook pages, and so like you just make one of these like cartoony things and put in why this project is good. The group admins will always approve because it’s good thing for the project and then it just blows up out of proportion.

Vikram: I think I’ve seen bounties for that kind of stuff too.

Adiraj: Yes. It will be a surprise.

Vikram: Yes, we’ll pay this many of our tokens to make an infographic that looks like this except for us.

Adiraj: Yes, yes. It’s quite interesting and I think NEM is quite an interesting project. It doesn’t get a lot of attention but it’s been around for a while. What I like about is the community fund.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: The fact that like people can upload a project and the community gets to vote to see if they like the project and how it helps the ecosystem. Then that allows you to get funding without having to do an ICO. Then as you hit your master, it’s like to master and based. If you do decide to do your ICO or you know you make money, just pay them back.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: The fund keeps going but you get to do your project without having trying to do ICO r any part of it. It fits me, it’s quite interesting.

Vikram: Cool. Yes. I think we’re coming up on time here. We do want to thank you for joining us.

Adiraj: Thanks for having me.

Vikram: Yes. This is a super interesting discussion. How can people learn more about you and maybe get in touch?

Adiraj: I am actually… Probably we are going to bring on someone for social media because we’re just really bad at social media life.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: The thing is like everyone, like even people who are good at social media in the company; they just have so much work to do. It’s not social media that it just doesn’t become a part of it. I think we have like 24 likes on our Facebook page and like 36 Twitter followers or something. We will bring someone on-bored soon and be a bit more public and try and do this sort of stuff. Yes, the best way is probably just to message us on our website or something.

Vikram: Okay.

Adiraj: It’s like the real question is like, what would we do for you kind of thing.

Vikram: Sure.

Adiraj: Unless you have a project that won’t steady done or you want us to look at your stuff for advisory. It’s like there’s probably a bit of people that can help right now because we’re just not retail based. We will have social media people helping out and doing that sort of stuff but right now, we’re like 14 people.

Vikram: Yes.

Adiraj: That team will double, quadruple in size in the next few weeks, months. It’s just like we’re more than happy to help but we just don’t know if we have the bandwidths to…

Vikram: Cool. Awesome! Thanks a lot!

Adiraj: Amazing! Thank you so much. Thanks guys.

Show Notes:

What the Family Office Conference is all about

What Crypto Launchpad is and how it works

Their internal diligent process when taking a client on

His background and how he got involved in the space

Where he sees the whole capital formation idea heading

Countries they are operating in right now

Their current state of diligence research

Exchanges they are working with

Challenges they are currently experiencing

What their scaling plans are

Key factors involved when analysing an ICO (initial coin offering)

Risks they are taking on from a legal standpoint

How much is structural versus technical in terms of diligence

How he thinks the diligent process will change as schemes get more sophisticated

How he sees his business progressing

His thoughts on the OTC (over-the-counter) market

Other projects he’s looking into

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