Real World Cases for Crypto

Kellie Kennedy: Kia ora and welcome everyone. We have Corben Turner joining us today to present a session on real world use cases for crypto and a bit of an intro for Corben. So he provides education, research and consultancy services for organizations looking to get involved with the blockchain space.

And along with empowerment through education and research, one of his core capabilities is product and service ideation with a knowledge on how to create products using Web3 technology. He has provided education and consulting services to accounting and financial advisory firms across New Zealand.

He has presented blockchain content to live audiences at events and has built his own crypto community in Queenstown and has contributed to a number of DAOs in various ways. His mission is to empower users to interact with smart contracts, bringing the current rate of crypto holders interacting with smart contracts from 5 to 50%.

And believes that in the next five to 10 years, every business will have their own crypto and Web3 strategy. So the format for this session we're going to try and keep it interactive and Corben is very happy for anyone to chime in at any point in time to ask questions.

So please feel free to leave your cameras on if you can. This session will be recorded and then following the session, we'll just ask you to complete a short survey at the end which we'll use to develop for future Web3 learning series events. So I'll just hand over to you, Corben and you can kick off the session.

Corben Turner: Thank you. Thanks Kellie. Okay. Can everyone see that screen there?

Kellie Kennedy: Yep. All good.

Corben Turner: Okay, great. Hi. My name is Corben as Kelly mentioned, I'm the founder of Enteropt and I'm here today to talk to you about real world use cases for crypto. And just a little bit on why I want to talk about real world use cases for crypto or why I've chosen that topic. Recently I have seen interactions in the real world. People using cryptocurrency in their day to day lives there's a business in Queenstown, where I live, which is accepting payments through Bitcoin or the Lightning Network, and I found it really exciting, I was hanging out with a friend who's also a crypto guy we were just having a coffee, and he paid for his coffee and his croissant using his crypto directly from his phone, and I thought that was really exciting That same day, I walked out onto the street and saw a sticker someone had stuck on a, like, it was like a street lamp or something like that for the Pest Free NZ token, which also got me kind of excited.

And previously at an event in Christchurch, a friend of mine who is the founder of Hope Earth he was based in New Zealand, an American guy. He's now moved to Europe to focus on that project. Raised like 14 grand on a NFT auction which happened live during the party. And I thought that was really exciting. Like I've spent so much of my time deeply involved in this ecosystem, but mostly anonymously online and I'm, I'm starting to see it making its way into the real world, which really excites me.

So that's, that's one of the reasons that inspired me to host this learning series on real world use cases for crypto. The other sort of thing that I mean when I say real world use cases for crypto and Kellie alluded to this earlier. I was listening to the web series, which was done months ago that the IRD hosted and they mentioned that only about 5 percent of Kiwi crypto holders or at least the ones that are communicating that they're crypto holders to the IRD interacting with smart contracts, or, or they, the way they said it was interacting with defi, but I see that as interacting with smart contracts.

And I, and I just think... As crypto holders or, or users or would be users, if we're not interacting with smart contracts, like why, why are we here? I understand the thought of like hedging our, our investments with alternatives in the crypto space, but really for me, the juice of being in this place is interacting with smart contracts that's where the fun of it is and so I I see interacting with smart contracts as real world use for crypto.

And the other thing that I want to talk about is enterprise use cases for crypto so I'm I believe we're kind of coming to a time or an era where I want to see more adoption, mass adoption. And I think the, the infrastructure is at a point where we are able to create use cases. And I think we're going to see more and more enterprises creating use cases. And so I want to talk about enterprises that are doing that and maybe empower some enterprises, hopefully in New Zealand, to think about how they might want to approach doing that.

Yeah, so in my day to day, I talk about crypto a lot, I'm very passionate about it, and I, and I come across a lot of misunderstandings about what it's actually used for. A lot of people think it's just, you know, this speculative internet magic money. As I say, there's actually use cases for this stuff, and that's what I want to talk about.

Before I get into it, just a disclaimer, I'm not the most technical person. I have a business background and I have, I have published a little bit of code, but that was quite a headache for me. And I sort of had to like self learn through tutorials, which I found on the internet. And I, and I sort of just did it so that I had an idea of what it meant to connect a front end to a back end and, and what the contracts I'm interacting with actually are.

But again, yeah, not, not the most technical. I'm more like a power user, I would say. And so if you, if you are super technical and you're listening to me speak, you might hear some of the things I say and want to go a bit deeper on them or understand it on a much deeper level, which is great. I'm trying to share information to people who, who don't have that technical understanding. So it might come across a little bit low, low brow for you, if you're really deep in the weeds.

I think that positions me well though, to, to communicate this information. I am more of a real world person, as I say, with a business background, did a bunch of sort of marketing work and eventually went into the guiding industry after kind of getting fed up with the corporate world.

So spend a lot of time guiding people through situations they were uncomfortable with. Out in nature not online, but I think there's those skills will be useful in this space. 'cause again, it's, it's guiding people through uncomfortable situations. Not necessarily uncomfortable, hopefully exciting situations, but situations they're not familiar with.

Through the call or the chat I, I might use the words, cryptocurrency, crypto assets, blockchain, distributed ledger technology, or web3. I kind of use these words interchangeably. I, I don't really like the word cryptocurrency because not really many crypto assets are actually currencies, at least not in my perspective and not from the perspective of a lot of regulators. I mean, stablecoins might be considered currencies, but, but otherwise I think mostly what we're dealing with are assets, new forms of assets, so I try to just use the word crypto and when I say crypto, I'm kind of alluding to that crypto assets.

I think crypto is really exciting, I think it is an evolution in how we as society and as individuals and as organizations able to interact with value. And if we look at the internet and how it has revolutionized various technologies from writing and publication used to be books, encyclopedias, libraries.

Now we have Wikipedia, blogs, websites. Universities have their own websites. And at the click of a button, we have access to all of this information, which in the past we had to get ahold of a book or, or get ahold of an expert to figure out this information that we can just communicate seamlessly online.

We used to have to write letters to each other. Now we can send emails or send instant messages. And I, my personal belief is that that technology, the internet or interconnected networks hasn't haven't quite it evolved money and trade and transfer in the same way that it has with other technologies.

Whilst it's true that you can use money over the internet I don't think we've actually seen the concept of money being redefined by the internet. And that's what I believe that crypto is. Also we're at a day and age where we're seeing a rise of global economies. We're all interacting cross border. We've got the rise of the BRICS nations as an example of nations banding together for trade alternatives and I think this is a prime time for an Internet of value to to rise in in an alignment with globalization.

On top of that, recent years, there has been a lot of mistrust in incumbent institutions, including central banks and governments, and that might be due to things like inflation. I don't really wanna talk too much about my personal views on that. I think that's. I think it's irrelevant, but what I do think is really exciting about cryptocurrency is that we're using like math and code and cryptographic truth to enforce contracts and trade as opposed to relying on the brands of established institutions.

And I think we have the opportunity to build the future here. And we're kind of on the bleeding edge of history. This is, I wasn't there for, for other times in economic history, but from my understanding or my perspective, this is kind of the most exciting time in economic history. And we're at the front edge of that and we have the opportunity to contribute to that.

And I think that is incredibly exciting. And where I sort of see the crypto industry and where we're at in terms of its development. So we had the, the Byzantine generals fault, which was solved with the creation of Bitcoin and with Ethereum and other layer one blockchains, we have the ability to create programmable smart contracts.

Following on from that, smart contracts weren't really that useful until we had data able to be plugged into smart contracts. And so with the data availability layer, the complexity of the things that we were able to program has increased. And now I think we are moving into the inter operability layer.

So a world where all the blockchains that we are currently using or not using or looking at reading, reading about studying, kind of their own islands. And I think we're coming to a place where we're going to connect all of those islands together. And we're going to be able to create smart contracts on one chain and utilize aspects of other chains and flow our assets from one blockchain to another and the composability of the interoperable layer, I think it's going to unlock a huge amount of use cases in the same way that the data availability layer unlocked huge amount of use cases back in sort of 2020.

And from my understanding, this is kind of like the TCP IP moment that the internet had. So once upon a time, businesses, organizations, governments all had their own intranet, which a lot of them still do. But they were kind of their own islands, like blockchains are their own islands now. And then once we were able to connect all those islands together, that's when the internet really rose to become what it is today.

Quick disclaimer the information provided on this learning series is for informational purposes only, it should not be construed as financial advice, I'm not a financial advisor, I don't have any formal training in financial planning, any opinions, recommendations expressed on this webinar are solely recommendation uh, solely.

There are no recommendations. They're solely opinions. I don't claim to know everything. There's, there's way too much to know, and investing is an incredibly risky thing to do, especially in crypto assets. And when speaking about crypto to anyone, my first piece of advice is please, please don't invest in crypto assets. And. And then it's up to them if they want to go deeper down the rabbit hole. Yeah, I'm just sharing information and my thoughts here. I'm not trying to encourage anyone to make any moves in the space at this point.

Corben Turner: Okay, so a little bit about my background and why am I here? Kellie gave a little bit of information about myself and my company and what it is I am looking to do. But prior to starting Enteropt, I studied business marketing in Australia at Newcastle University, then went on to work in a marketing role for a large retailer in Australia.

I was in my early 20s and wanted to do an overseas experience. So I moved to London and landed a job in a management consulting firm there was like a medium sized firm. We were working with some pretty interesting clients, HSBC, Unilever, the Financial Conduct Authority, and I had a great experience there, learned a lot about the consulting industry, learned a lot about the corporate professionalism.

But I felt something was sort of lacking there for me in terms of excitement in my day to day and actually what I was achieving and around that time I met the founders who were from Finland of a startup which was looking to take waste to energy technology, which is quite prolific in Scandinavia to developing nations. And that really excited me. I thought here's some new technology, something that can be brought into the world. Startup culture was very buzz worthy at the time. So that was exciting to me as well. And I thought we'd be able to solve some, some real problems in the world.

So, we, yeah, we're looking to take waste energy burners into Indonesia initially. I invested my own money into that and spent about a year in Indonesia trying to gather more funding and deal with... creation of a proof of concept over there, which turned out to be incredibly difficult. A lot of regulatory issues. We came up against a lot of corruption, language barriers, all sorts of stuff. There was an earthquake on the island that we were trying to work on, eventually got to a point where the money I had and others had invested sort of ran out and we hadn't really gotten too much of a footing over there.

So I ended up parting ways with that organization, but it was there that I first had my mind turned on to cryptocurrency. So one of the other investors who was there working on the project who is now a great friend had been in crypto for a long time and I I had an interest in investment. That's obviously why I was investing in participating in a startup and he was talking a lot about cryptocurrency and at the time I thought crypto was a scam. I was sort of, of, of that I was sort of, of the school of thought that you, you put 10% of your income into the S&P 500 or something similar and that was the best that investment could be. And he was telling me about Bitcoin and Ethereum and other projects, and I was, I didn't really understand what he was talking about.

That was back in 2017. Mid 2019, he convinced me to finally get some exposure to the industry. So I put a little bit of money into crypto. Didn't really think too much about it. That was just like 5 percent of my investment portfolio and I continued investing in ETFs and stocks and what have you. I had moved back to New Zealand at this point was doing some work with a company in the South Island who produces like facilities for product testing or vehicle product testing.

And At that point I I kind of yeah had decided I wanted out of like corporate world corporate life. Being incredibly professional just wasn't really that suited to my character. And so I got into the guiding industry at that point and I spent a few years taking people into the mountains taking kids overseas and teaching them how to travel had some really great experiences doing that. And again, I think really developed that ability to educate people guide them through unfamiliar environments. Then COVID hit and guiding was dead overnight and I was at home and... financial markets were obviously going crazy. I spent a lot of my, my lockdown time just studying financial markets. I suppose I made a call to a family friend in Australia who does some statistics work on the Australian stock exchange.

He told me like, this is a great time to be involved with investment. So I just, I just went deep. And, and at the same time, that little bit of crypto that I had exposed myself to in 2019 was acting very differently to the returns I was making on the NZX. And I had a few, a few of what I felt were like user experience issues with traditional investing. So starting with, like, buying stocks on the NZX. I was going through ASB and they made it quite difficult, the KYC process. There was a lot of IPOs happening at the time, and I was struggling with the idea that all these like series A and series B funding rounds were taking place and then I was getting access to stocks at the IPO and they were just, you know, like dumping when they hit the market.

And at the same time, I came across another environmental startup in New Zealand, which I thought was really exciting. And that was Geo40. They were trying to extract, or they're still trying to extract lithium from geothermal vents around Taupo and I was like, this is great. I want to get involved with this.

And I got in touch with their chief financial officer and I was like, hey, I want to invest. He sent me a non disclosure agreement. We went through all the process. And then before I was able to actually transfer them some money, he was like, Hey, just want to check that you're an accredited investor. And I'm like no I'm not an accredited investor.

And he was like, Oh, then you can't participate in it. And, and that was kind of like the penny drop moment for me, where I was like, in crypto ecosystem, I can gain access and I can participate at any level that I want with ease without having to go through KYC processes, dealing with like international companies doing so 24 hours a day. And then, and then I'm trying to exist in this other world of investment where I'm just continually facing barriers, and so I decided to just focus all of my attention into crypto.

I made my first few swaps on Uniswap back in early 2020, and from there I just... I just ran with it essentially. Spent, I've been spending 20 to 30 hours a week researching pretty much ever since. And so I've gone through like quite a process of learning what Bitcoin is, what Ethereum is, what smart contracts are, going through the process of interacting with them online. Going through the process of delving through crypto Twitter and trying to figure out the difference between real information and PsyOps and LARPs and then following organizations getting involved with DAOs.

And keeping up to date with the industry has essentially been a full time job alongside my full time job, which I'm currently working at now as a contractor for a business, which operates here in the South Island, looking to create alternatives to housing, or like the production of housing, so we create straw insulated panels, which is like a newly engineered product in New Zealand. We've worked a lot on the actual engineering facilities of how to create these panels and they're made from locally sourced ingredients environmentally friendly ingredients, straw, clay, lime as opposed to the stuff like gib and all sorts of other materials which go into our housing in New Zealand which create pretty poorly insulated houses as we all know. What we're looking to do is create well insulated low carbon intensive houses to heat. And so again, working in that kind of like an environmental area working on solutions for a better future.

Alongside that, I've just been deep in the crypto ecosystem. And as Kellie mentioned, I've done some work with accounting firms and financial advisors, just helping them with understanding what they're actually dealing with.

Corben Turner: And yeah, with Enteropt what I'm looking to do is create a I'm looking to provide this knowledge that I've spent all this time researching and developing for myself. I just want to share it. I find myself talking to people everywhere I go about crypto and I see there's a lack of knowledge in the space.

And as I said, I think in the next five to 10 years, every business is going to have a crypto or Web3 strategy. And I think anyone who's interacting with value or creating value in any way is going to want to understand crypto at some point. And so I'm just looking to facilitate that and help people and organizations who want to get involved with the space.

I really just want to contribute. Crypto Web3 is all about contribution and... I think the best way I can contribute is through education. I might speed up a little bit. I'm just looking at the time. I might, yeah, try and summarize things a little bit more.

Corben Turner: So just to give some examples of real world integrations that I am seeing so that people are aware that this is, I mean, you guys who are on this call are obviously aware that crypto is a real thing and it's coming to fruition. But maybe people in retrospect will watch this video who are a bit more skeptical as to whether or crypto is real.

So things that I'm seeing in my day to day life and reading about obviously Bitcoin lightning payments, or bitcoin payments in general. As I mentioned my friend bought his croissant with bitcoin the other day. PayPal launched their own stablecoin, you know, PayPal, PayPal being a native internet, like money transfer service, I think that's a pretty big deal. There's various card payment options to use your crypto. I spend I have a card, a wirex card, and I spend my crypto in stores and bought petrol with it, for example.

And then recently I saw that Shopify is integrating crypto settlement options, which I think is great. We've got online merchants taking transactions in, in crypto, which I think is like the, the start of, of crypto entering sort of the mainstream. And it, it's probably gonna do so in a way that's abstracted into the background through our favorite apps like Shopify.

A big one that I've been following for a long time is SWIFT so the Society for Worldwide Interbank, Financial Telecommunication have been working on a proof of concept. SWIFT, by the way, is, is the interbank messaging network. They work with 11, 500 institutions. You might have heard about SWIFT earlier in the year where they were talking about banning SWIFT Russia from interacting with the SWIFT network.

The, the BRICS nation is also talking about using smart contracts to settle their messaging for their currency. But SWIFT just a couple weeks ago at SIBOS, which is the Swift, I always forget what this stands for, the Swift International Banking Operations Seminar announced success of their proof of concept where they have connected private bank chains to public blockchains and they've made transactions between banks and blockchains.

And an example of this which was given was the ANZ bank, which I think is a great example because it's close to home. Obviously they operate in New Zealand. ANZ has got over a trillion dollars in assets and they were able to take New Zealand dollars from the real world, put that onto their private blockchain as an Australian dollar stable coin, and then purchase from a public blockchain carbon credit known as a reef credit.

I think they had a hand in creating a reef credit and they were able to transfer that reef credit back to their private blockchain. And I, I was, I was talking about this with my partner and she was like, well that's great how does it affect me and why does it, why does it matter for me? And I think in this example, it doesn't really matter to her if her bank is using a blockchain or settling her transactions by a blockchain.

But some information given by ANZ's tokenization lead was that for them, when someone gets paid in Australia, 9 percent of that goes to their superannuation and taxes also need to be deducted from that and that whole process of money being paid from an employer, 9 percent being sent to a superannuation fund and then that superannuation fund, crediting the employee's account with whatever investment the superannuation fund has made to, to their sort of name or their, their tax account and pay taxes on that is about a 15 day process.

We're doing that through this like messaging system that SWIFT has created as a proof of concept. It's about, it's about a 10 minute process to settle all that and pay the taxes on it. So I mean, it probably does affect my girlfriend in that she'd be getting 15 days extra interest on her on her superannuation fund, but it also has great effects for the banks who are connecting with these systems.

Obviously, it's just a vast improvement of the infrastructure which existed prior to blockchains. And I think this is incredibly exciting and it's something I don't hear enough about. I don't know why not everyone in the industry is excited about the fact that the inter the global interbank network is running proof of concepts on how to settle their interbank and international transfers on blockchain. That seems like the thing that the industry has been talking about for years is happening right in front of us and it seems to not get a lot of attention, which blows my mind.

The DTCC is part of that same proof of concept. You can see the DTCC will be converting its ISO 20022 corporate action messages to the SWIFT SR2023 version. And that version has that version has that version of Swiss messaging system has implications for settling transactions via blockchain as well.

The DTCC and Euroclear are, like, if you're investing in stocks, of any kind in the United States, the DTCC is basically the governments like clearing house, settling house for stock transactions. They they settled over 2, last year they settled 2.4 quadrillion dollars in value and Euroclear is also looking at using the same messaging standard and I also heard that the Swiss Stock Exchange is using or looking at using the same messaging standard.

So essentially, the largest incumbent financial institutions in the world are talking about moving their operations on blockchain rails and that's happening now. Something I didn't mention off the side slide was Citibank. Citibank recently announced that they are looking to tokenize or they have tokenized a large amount of their customers deposits and assets onto a private blockchain.

And that is gonna be interoperable with other private and public blockchains. And so essentially the world we're, we're coming to, which goes back to that interoperability layer that I was sort of alluding to earlier. I believe, and what I'm hearing from these institutions is that blockchains are ledgers, as we all know, and I think like every bank is going to have its own ledger or its own blockchain, and those blockchains are going to be interoperable with all other blockchains or majority of other blockchains.

Just some... Scary information for us all here. The Bank of International Settlements recently published a paper on their research for central bank digital currencies in which of 86 central banks they surveyed, they said 93 percent of those are at least doing some research on the central bank digital currencies.

I'm not going to spend too much time on that one. I don't think we're all going to be using central bank digital currencies or at least not only central central bank digital currencies, but that's conversation for another time. Some brands, so I'm hearing a lot of information regarding brands adopting crypto like we do every day when we log online and see what's happening in the ecosystem.

One that I think is really exciting is Nike with their .swoosh digital collectibles platform. A cool innovation that I'm seeing from these guys is... like user users have the opportunity to buy an NFT, which they then have a brand item as an NFT, which is great. But they're also allowing their, like consumers or their users to contribute to the creation of these NFTs.

And I think this kind of points to the, the future of how organizations or what, like DAOs and cryptocurrency in, in this world of like collaboration and contribution might lead to, is users and buyers and consumers creating the products that they, that they love, that they consume, contributing to the brands in the same way that we contribute to DAOs, consumers are going to be contributing to the brands that they love. And they're going to have the opportunity to profit from contributing to the things and creating the things that they love in conjunction with the brands, which I think it's super exciting.

The Starbucks Odyssey is an improvement upon past loyalty programs and using NFTs to give consumers verified like stamps on the coffee card, essentially. Which then with their NFTs, they're able to get access to like token gated events and like special discounts and all that sort of stuff.

And then Reddit has, has launched avatars using Polygon and you can see some, some numbers here that I've posted. These, this was a screenshot I took of the data back in August, so these numbers are probably a little outdated, but they've made about 40 million dollars in sales volume. And obviously the owners of those NFTs get to profit off of that as well.

Which I think I guess sort of points to the world today where individuals in this creative economy have their own brands and identities online. And if we're able to create those brands and identities behind NFTs, then the intangible value of our brands can then be on transferred or rented for example. And we see that in all sorts of NFT projects.

Corben Turner: A few barriers to adoption. I think things that are, that are slowing the rate of adoption down. I've posted a graph here, this is a cumulative Ethereum wallets in the last few years, we can see that this is growing at a rate of about 20%, which is faster than the rate of adoption of the Internet and mobile phones.

And this industry is coming and it's coming fast. We're just on that sort of early side of the adoption curve and obviously 20% that is gonna get bigger and bigger over, over the coming years. Like 20 percent as a portion of a bigger number is gonna grow. It's like a compound interest type formula.

Custody is difficult. There's lots of options for custody. This is something that I helped a financial advisor on. He called me and he was like, hey crypto is awesome, and I'm exposed to it, but I feel weird about just storing it on my phone, and I was like, what do you mean you just? What do you mean you're storing it on your phone like you get a hardware wallet. But also multi sigs, there's options coming for custody and I think we'll have one click log ons and we'll also have trusted institutions offering custody, or we already have that but we'll see more and more of that and again that'll probably be abstracted way into the back end of your favorite banking app.

Something I really hope people are aware of by now is the difference between self custody and centralized custodians, e. g. FTX. There's the technical complexity of understanding these systems and interacting with them is still, like, very difficult, I would say, and it's not something you can...I could expect my grandma or even my dad to do. This is something that I want to provide knowledge on. This is something I want to solve for with Enteropt. It's organizations, or individuals who want to get involved with these systems or need a hand with understanding how to actually do it. That's something I want to be able to help people with.

Infamy. Crypto is obviously known as like a scammy industry. And to be fair, 95 percent at least as an estimation of the industry are scams and figuring out what is and what isn't a scam is often quite difficult. A good example of that was UST Luna offering a 20 percent return on UST staking. I looked at that and I thought like 20 percent that's it's amazing, like I can outperform inflation, but I was like where is this 20 percent coming from? And it didn't take long to figure out that they were just printing more UST without any like revenue coming into the protocol to be able to afford to print more USTs. So I avoided that one and I'm, I'm glad that I did. But obviously you've got examples of like Ethereum where the staking has actual, like economic income backing the stake that's being returned to like stakers.

Regulatory issues obviously a, a big problem. I'm hoping that we see more and more clarity over that, well with that over time, especially in the United States. But regulatory around the world is kind of a gray area and something that's sort of difficult to work with. Hopefully things are starting to lighten up with these ETF applications. Maybe we'll see more clarity around the right for institutions to offer crypto, at least in the United States. We've got like the, the MiCA guidelines and rules that have come out in Europe, which have made things a lot more clear. Other countries like the UK are a bit more progressive than the US. I think, hopefully once the US sort of makes a bit of progress there, the whole industry will have an opportunity to benefit from the growth available from that.

And then, yeah, traditional finance gatekeeping, I think it's, in my experience, again, I was banking with ASB and I was trying to buy crypto off of a centralized exchange. I was trying to on ramp onto Binance at the time. I use EasyCrypto now, which is much better. Yeah, ASB blocked my, my transactions onto Binance. I had to call them and get them to allow my transactions to go through.

And. Yeah, I think a lot of the information, well, this is a personal opinion, might be counterculture, but I think most of us involved with crypto are kind of counterculture. I think a lot of the like fear and uncertainty and doubt that we see in the mainstream media is probably perpetuated by traditional finance institutions who are probably looking to slow adoption by retail before they are able to gain exposure. But again, a conversation for another time, and that's just my own opinion and speculation. I don't have any proof of that.

Corben Turner: Okay, so moving on to the meat of this presentation was I need to move quicker.

So, data, I think that data is probably the most interesting concept in crypto, at least to me personally. We talk about data being the new oil. I think, like, cryptocurrencies are the pipelines for that oil. Data being available on blockchains is what allows for us to create more complex smart contracts.

So that was in 2020, we saw price feeds coming available on blockchains, which allowed for the creation of DeFi, essentially. We weren't able to make swaps until we had decentralized price feed data. A really cool example of a new use case for data being published on chain that I am seeing and excited by is CPI data. So if you've interacted with or seen Truflation you can see that we have decentralized CPI data being published on chain immutably, and that quite often contradicts the data that the US or the UK government, which is the only places that Truflation operates at the moment put out to their people.

And personally, in my day to day life, I see prices at the petrol pump, the grocery store, and my rent up a lot more than 7%, which is a reported inflation rate in New Zealand, so I'd be really interested to see, again I would be interested to see what, what actual rates of inflation in New Zealand are. This is again using math and, and verifiable data to provide information as opposed to relying, relying on trusted institutions. So I think Truflation is a very good project.

Decentralized price feed, again, allowed for defi swaps, derivatives, other forms of markets. All of this stuff is composable. So what if we can start using this inflation data in composable ways? What kind of derivatives can we make off of that? What other data can be published on blockchains?

For example, I'm seeing use cases where weather data is being published on blockchains. And we think about... contracts and businesses and organizations who interact with value, they need data to be able to create the contracts. And so the more data that is published onto blockchains, the more complex and varied contracts we're going to start seeing.

And I think there's a huge opportunity in the market at the moment for people who hold data to publish that onto blockchains. So another cool example of data I've seen being shared on a blockchain, which is through a data marketplace, decentralized Data Marketplace, was a Swiss car manufacturer who had compiled a lot of images of stop signs, road markings, pedestrians, etc that they were using to train their AI models, which were training their self driving cars. And so they published all of these photos, these training photos, onto a data marketplace. And they're able to sell that to their competitors. And I go back to, I used to work for a company which created facilities for car companies to test their products.

And we had so many companies coming in and doing the exact same sorts of testing to find the exact same sorts of data, but they were doing it like privately and holding that information to themselves. And if we can add value to data and publish that in a way that we can then trade and create derivatives off of our data. We're creating an entire new industry and as I said, data is the new oil over the last 10, 20 years. We've been seeing companies like Facebook and Google profiting massively off of our data and We're coming into an age where we're going to be owning our own data and organizations that have valuable data will be able to publish that data. And if you've got data or organizations have data, which might be valuable for the creation of contracts, we can think about publishing that onto blockchains to create entire new industries of contracts and new wherever our imagination can take us with the composable nature of writing contracts.

I also think a, a pretty interesting concept is like AI compute. So we look at chatGPT the founders of that launched World Coin, which is supposedly a proof of humanity project and we're coming into a world where AI is producing so much content that how do we actually know what is produced by real humans and what is produced by AI? I think it's interesting that world coin has been created by chatGPT. I think later down the line, we might possibly see a world where content published online, be it by authorities like governments or like your favorite actor or musician or whatever, to verify that that content is real and produced by a human as opposed to produced by AI, we could be using the likes of private keys without publications to verify that that was our work.

And I've also heard work from Eric Schmidt who's a former CEO of Google. He now runs Schmidt Ventures. He works with the White House. He's very focused on AI at the moment talking about using private keys to limit the ability of AI to make great decisions. So as a high example, high level example, the, the nuclear launch codes could be held in a way that a multi SIG of the president and their 15 most trusted people, as well as delegates from the UN all need to sign from their private keys to confirm that we want to launch a nuclear missile. Just, just as an example, hope that never happens, but, but as a way to keep AI from launching the nukes, we could be using private keys to do that.

Corben Turner: So defi, I imagine we all know a bit about defi, so I'll probably brief, breeze through this one, but defi is really what got me hooked into crypto as I mentioned. The basics of defi are swaps, trading, lending, borrowing. I was really amazed back in 2020 that I was able to lend money or like borrow money from one of these decentralized protocols in a matter of about two minutes. And at the time I was living with a mortgage broker and I told her about that process and she was like totally blown away. She was like, I would have to go through so many interviews with a person, I would have to check all their IDs. I would have to check their bank accounts and their income and all that sort of stuff. Whereas I was able to log onto Aave, deposit some funds, borrow money against it, done.

And I think that obviously has used cases around the world for various things, including the unbanked people in developing nations who might not have access to these like sort of banks and institutions and as well, because I just, I don't really want to go to a, to a bank to borrow money. No offense if there's any bankers listening to the chat. I would prefer to go through Defi rails. I would prefer to have control over over my money. I would prefer to be able to see where and how they're utilizing the funds that I'm giving them. So when I lend money to money Market Fund in Defi, I can see the interest that they're earning on my money. Whereas if I lend money to the bank, I, I know they're probably earning 20 percent interest on it and giving me 1 percent of that, which just, I don't know, a world of verifiable truth, truth, I think is very, very appealing to me.

A growing trend that I'm seeing is tokenized real world assets. So T bills, bonds are coming on chain and there's also a gold tradeable on chain, which is backed by verifiable proof of reserves. And I think we'll see more and more commodities and other forms of derivatives coming on chain. I think eventually we're going to see real estate, car warrants, and we're going to see, probably because these are smart contracts, when I go to work and I make a deal with my boss that I'm going to work for this amount of time, for this amount of money, that's probably going to become a smart contract as well.

So I really think that defi is the basis for the evolution of how we interact with value. And that's going to touch probably all forms of value aside from perhaps car boot sales or people like growing veggies in the yard and swapping it with the neighbors for the fruit that they've grown in their yard.

BlackRock is obviously looking at launching an ETF along with every other ETF provider in the US. So I think we're seeing more and more institutional demand. Insurance contracts on chain are a really exciting thing, so as I mentioned earlier, weather data being provided on chain allows for insurance contracts to be created for crop farmers.

In the West it's easy to get, well it's not easy to get, but you can get insurance against your crops if there is a flood or a drought you can get a payout against what you would have grown. In developing nations they don't have access to that but I've seen cases of weather data being published on chain verifiably proving that there was in fact a drought in this part of Africa in this season and so farmers in that country via their mobile phone were able to take out insurance policies against their crops and have that paid out instantly without having to make a claim against crops or to the insurance agency, the, the smart contract just knows that there was a drought and it, and it pays out those farmers, which is super exciting.

Prediction markets are kind of interesting, kind of fun to play with. But really I think imagination is the limit when it comes to defi, 'cause of the composable nature of, of all of these money Legos and smart contracts. We're just gonna see more and more complex use cases touching every aspect of what we can imagine in terms of how we interact with the value.

Corben Turner: Okay, I'm going to speed up a little more. I think it's pretty easy to see the move toward creative content in recent years. Like we've got all these Instagram, and Facebook, and Tik Tok influencers. Other platforms such as, like, Twitch where creators can be paid directly by their fans... I think this industry has obviously been, or going to be, taken over by cryptocurrency, or is going to evolve into a crypto crypto based industry.

Cool examples of this that I have seen recently are FriendTech, if I'm sure most people have heard about that by now. It's essentially just a token gated chat room, but I think creators are already innovating on how they can provide value in that space. And I think this is just like the first look at an example use case, which I think will come to the forum and be very exciting in the world where creators can offer their fans, their customers, their consumers, like verifiable say NFTs.

If I was like a musician and I I had created an NFT and I sold it to 500 people as an example. And I said, those 500 people get to listen to my, my new album early, or they get to come to a special meet and greet with me. And at the door, my security can check their NFT and verifiably they have that NFT. So then verifiably one of my top 500 fans as an example. So they get to come to them, the meet and greet. That's just one example I can think of of how the creative economy is going to be revolutionized by cryptocurrency.

Ticketing, I think, is another really cool space for NFTs. I have gone to a really cool event the last few years and the way they do the ticketing, because it's a small event, only 500 people can attend, they say the first load of tickets are available for people who attended the event last year because they're trying to create this community that that runs through the event and they sell as many as they can to people who were there last year. And then after that they open the next round of tickets to people who have ever been to the event ever and then after that they open the ticketing to anyone. And I know the person who throws the event and she spends a lot of time going through people's applications for tickets and she has to individually approve that like, oh, yes this person was at the event last year and I can see that based on last year's ticket sales data. If you hadn't done that on an NFT and you could write a smart contract that says if applicant has NFT from last year, allow purchase, and that could all be done just automatically through smart contracts, which it would be a huge improvement on my friend's life.

I think she, she gets a bit of a kick out of doing it, but there's also the possibility that holding these, these tickets from past events gives us access to, again, like token gated communities online and allows the, the collection of NFTs allows for us to sort of create communities around products and ideas and events. And and we see that with, you know, profile picture projects or like generative art projects, the people who hold these NFTs are excited and involved with the community. And I think this is, again, like where we're seeing economies go is community based contribution, like micro economies, and that is sort of easily done through, through token gating.

On chain credentials, I think, is another really exciting thing. For example, I went to university in Australia. If I'm applying for a job, I have to, like, find my photocopied version of my transcript from my degree or get in touch with the university and pass that on to the employer. If I had, like, a wallet which held my credentials and I could give that... wallet address to a prospective employer, they'd be able to click on my wallet, scroll through and see that I got grade X in this class and grade Y in that class, which I think again, is just an improvement on past technologies. Oh, something I was going to add, probably fits under creator content and NFTs is intellectual property. So as, as we're publishing things on chain, we have like verifiability that we were the ones that published it. And this was the date and time that we published it. And we can verify that on chain. And I think intellectual property is going to benefit largely from, from this innovation.

Corben Turner: Environmental initiatives. So there's a few ways in which cryptocurrency is being used to create environmental initiatives. A friend of mine is creating a carbon accountancy project. You've got KlimaDAO, obviously, my friend's one is Hope Earth. Leanne, who was on here recently with Tres Cool Labs. And again, talking about ANZ's proof of concept where they bought the carbon credit on a public blockchain and transferred it to a private blockchain. I see this as a pretty great use case for cryptocurrency.

Apparently, I've never had to buy carbon credits before, but apparently it's a very old and clunky sort of form of trade where bankers are literally calling people over the phone and saying, I want to buy some carbon credits. If we can fractionalize carbon credits, put them on chain, that makes their trade a lot easier and perhaps incentivizes a greener future in, in the way we interact in, in finance or in, in any other form of like value exchange. I'm not, I'm not like a, a energy or a power man so I might butcher some of this, but I, I understand that bitcoin mining can be used for grid stabilization or buyer of, of last, buyer of last resort.

I heard a case recently of a wind farm in the US that was, just turning the wind farm off, even if there was wind, which was able to produce power and it was doing so in a green way, when there was no demand for it on the grid. But they put a Bitcoin miner at the base of the power of the wind generation farm, so that while the grid was maxed out with energy from other sources and there was no one to buy their power, they were able to mine Bitcoin and continue to earn an income off of off of the energy, which was in a green way, being generated at that side, same thing can be done with hydro.

And I'm seeing some really cool, a really cool project, which is verifying where power is being generated from. So for example, if I'm going to charge my electric car, but I don't want to do that in hours where coal is being used to create power for the grid cause there's high demand on the grid at the time I can use a block chain network to, look at where power is being sent onto the grid from and verify that during these times demand is low. I'm able to purchase green energy and I would love to see a world where we have like smart meterage in the house where I might want to like run my dryer but again, it's high demand on power and I don't want to burn coal to run my dryer and I can set my meter to say once once the grid is being fed by green energy, turn the dryer on, as an example.

Corben Turner: Governance, hopefully we all are a little bit aware of how crypto is working to try and improve governance. I don't think we're quite there yet, but... going in various ways, we might not be quite there yet, but at least these are experiments in new ways of how we can govern things.

So Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, as I'm sure you all know, are a very cool innovation in the way that we can collaborate and contribute on projects. Some cool examples of DAOs, I think, are LynxDAO, which they like sold, I believe they sold NFTs, I haven't actually followed it that closely, but there was some form of token gating to get into the LynxDAO, and they used the funds generated from that to purchase a golf course, and then they're now hosting like private events for their DAO community at the golf course.

Another example is cabin DAO. They did a similar concept with buying some land and they, they built a relatively sustainable commune, commune I guess on this land. And then people who are holders of however they've decided token gate, whether that's with a token or within an NFT, which essentially same thing. People are able to go and live there and work and contribute and the funds that have been generated through that community are used to pay for community goods such as power and gas and food and that sort of thing.

Voting, it's still a grey area with crypto. I think we're trying to improve voting, but there's obviously a lot of civil attacking going on in DAOs and voting on various things in crypto. But I at least see that this is again, like trying to make innovations in a way that we can, we can vote on things and governance DAOs and various forms of governance. Again, innovations or experimentations in community management, token gated communities, as I spoken to a little bit earlier, I think are very cool examples of use cases, which are immediate within sort of a space.

And, and maybe the technology, if we can solve the decentralized identification, one day can mean that well, the election's on at the moment, and I'm going to vote for whoever I'm going to vote for. And at the end of the day, I have to trust that those votes were counted correctly by humans. Well, maybe one day I can just rely on, on cryptographic truth or like math to enforce the fact that I voted for who I voted for. But again, I think that's a long way off but not something that's impossible.

Corben Turner: So this is kind of my last slide. It's just how can we facilitate adoption? So as individuals, brands and organizations, what can we be doing to build toward a future where we're all empowered by blockchain? And so my stance on this is that I think the people who are interested in crypto are going to get into crypto on their own accord, and probably a lot of those people are already there, or at least have already dabbled. And so, I think if we want to see mass adoption, and we want to see the world empowered by this, as organizations, we need to be building incentives for people to use, to use crypto. So if I'm a brand or I'm a creator or I'm like some sort of other institution, if I can be creating products which improve the lives or, or give some novel improvement or excitement to my consumers, that is going to onboard people.

That's. Yeah, I think we're at a point where all the people who want an alternative to fiat currency or all the people who want to invest in alternative assets are probably here. This is where I see brands like Nike giving their consumers the opportunity to create their own brand items or brands like Starbucks doing their loyalty programs via NFTs or like Friendtech giving people the ability to connect with in a token gated way their, their favorite influencers or like another example I heard was the Kings of Leon released an album, which was an NFT and individuals who bought that NFT would get lifetime tickets to their concerts.

I think we're at a place where we, we have enough of the architecture ready to build out user products and that's, I think, is what's going to onboard the next billion people, and that's what I want to kind of work on, I guess. And that is kind of my spiel. Thank you. Thank you for listening.

Kellie Kennedy: Nice. Thanks, Corbyn. You're a wealth of knowledge, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of use cases, actually. It would be great to get some, of the links of the projects you are referring to so we can... Oh, totally, yep. I actually have a slide with the links on it which I can share somewhere. Yeah, great. I'll, I'll post them into the community after this, but yeah, does anyone have any questions about any other interesting use cases?

Jeff Nijsse: Hi Corbyn. How you going?

Corben Turner: Yeah, good thanks. How are you?.

Jeff Nijsse: Great. Yeah. Good to hear from someone that I have not met before. Do you work with, you know, Rob Clarkson down there in Queenstown?

Corben Turner: I have had some interactions with Rob, yeah.

Jeff Nijsse: Okay, he wasn't the person you were referring to before because he's doing, like, Bitcoin meetups down there? Is that right?

Corben Turner: No, yeah, so he does Bitcoin meetups, I do kind of crypto general meetups. But he came along to one of my meetups and we hosted it at a venue where his Lightning Payment Infrastructure is being adopted. And it was another friend of mine who paid for some stuff using Rob's network. Yeah.

Jeff Nijsse: Good to know. And if I end up in Queenstown one day, I'll look you up.

Corben Turner: Cool.

Jeff Nijsse:

I'll let Nathan ask his question

Nathan: Yeah, thanks so much for your time. A great presentation. I've been sort of ranting in the chat. Hope it's useful. Yeah, I'm you know, I, I was in New York for 15 years and now I'm in New Zealand.

And what, what's your general thought on the New Zealand regulatory environment considering Daset's recent news and like kind of given the Cryptopia history as well.

Corben Turner: Yeah. I did actually write something about regulation in New Zealand, but yeah, again, it's a grey area. I watched a good learning series, which was posted by or posted in this knowledge hub was one of the first ones I think that was done, which was regulation in New Zealand. And obviously it's, it's difficult. You don't want to just open the doors to anyone and everyone because you probably going to open the doors for a lot of scammers and a lot of like rugpulls and, and anything else that people can get away with.

But at the same time, I don't think you want to like kneecap innovation. I mean, it really, it really is a tough one. I mean, I would, I would hope that the way this I mean, partially don't hope, but would hope that the way that this technology is built is in such a way that anyone who's interacting with these systems has probably had to go through a KYC process somewhere if you're onboarding funds onto Easy Crypto or Binance or whatever, someone has your information and if you're a scammer and you're using Tornado Cash to wash your funds, then that's being watched as well.

I don't really, I don't really have the answer. I, I don't think it's a great idea to, yeah, just let, I don't know. Like I, I want to see innovation. I want to see people try things. I want to see people build things. At the same time I don't want to see people losing money. I don't want to see people getting scammed.

I think this is at its current state really a matter of like, there are incredible risks with interacting with these systems. And, I mean, something like Daset or FTX maybe would have been a little harder to, to see or predict. Personally, I didn't have any funds on either of those exchanges just because I, in my research and, and learning about getting involved with these blockchains, systems or what have you had it kind of like put in my head that you shouldn't you shouldn't trust a centralized authority. That's kind of why we're using cryptocurrency. We should self custody our own assets and for that reason I wasn't exposed to any of these centralized exchange collapses, but I feel very sorry for anyone who was. And I don't necessarily think it was their own fault.

I yeah. I mean at this point, I think it's a matter of only, only play with funds that people are willing to lose. It's almost a little bit like gambling, like. It's not, but it, you know, you get, if you would ever go to a casino or even invest in stocks, like you would be willing to lose that money, I would hope and, and I think if we can educate people not to be exposed to centralized organizations, such as FTX or Daset hopefully that will inhibit more people losing money in that way. And maybe it will take, like, trusted institutions which are backed by insurances such as banks to be able to fill that.. that role of centralized custodians? I'm.. I'm... i really don't.. have the solution for that.

Andy Higgs: Yeah, it's a really Andy Higgs here. It's a really important issue. Something that really worries, worries me deeply. We knew both companies really well. I mean, the Cryptopia situation was incompetence. They put all the keys on an Excel spreadsheet and it was an inside job and hacked. The Daset appears to be criminal. And insufficient oversight in the CEO by, by the board, but, you know, that's you know, let, let's see what, what happens there.

But the, the, the regulatory situation in New Zealand is actually pretty good. I mean, obviously you need enforcement and that's where, where the regulators are going. But, but our current laws are pretty good. I just put something in the chat, the chat, which was the recommendations to the crypto select committee inquiry from Jeremy Muir and and Alex.

And I, the only final point I'd just make, while I've got you. Is this is a really serious barrier to adoption here in New Zealand, and what I'd like to see is a really good custody solution. I've talked to Easy Crypto, to Janine about it, and their view is, this is why self custody is the only option because you can't trust humans.

But you know, I'd like to see a really trusted institution step into that gap because the, the wealth managers, the asset managers in this country, the funds managers won't touch crypto. And they're all potential custodians, you know, a lot of our you know, we rely on global players to, to, to protect us, but but it'd be great to have a really good local custody solution, which wasn't self custody. So that's probably the opportunity for, for people here.

Nathan: Yeah, we use, we use BitGo to custody and they're, they're US based and they're, they're insured up to, I think, two and 50. 250 million. So I mean, you know just speaking from my personal experience, like coming, coming here, it's such a shame that the two main centralized exchanges are just completely full of holes.

Andy Higgs: Oh no, it's embarrassing and it's put the industry back probably three to five years here. It's really, really a real shame and you know, we tried, tried to help, but it's sometimes it's hard because it's individuals, right? And New Zealand is too small and you've got, you know, as I said, incompetence and other, other issues with people who really shouldn't, shouldn't have ever been in that position.

So that was probably the issue, but you know, the law will, will play out on them, really.

Nathan: Yeah. I mean, so for, for what it's worth, like if people are looking to custody, there are great custodians in the U S and in Europe.

Andy Higgs: It is not... the point is there's the great solutions in the U S right. We, we rely on them too, but it'd be great to have one here. That was my point.

Nathan: Oh yeah, of course. I mean, if you could, if you could have a local, I mean, you know, it should integrate with Xero, which is another big New Zealand accounting software, you know.

Andy Higgs: Yeah, the biggest issue is that when you talk to like the, you know, the financial high street here in Auckland, without naming names, they're all like, You know, we don't need crypto. We're very focused on New Zealand and Australian investments. You know, it's a bit of a closed shop and it's a real barrier to growing the economy that they don't embrace these things because of, you know, the cultural thing. And they blame the law that the law is not clear enough and they're not allowed to touch crypto, but the issue is actually custody.

And we've got these two terrible examples here that are really holding the country back in a big way. But yeah, I think it's fixable, but yeah, it's, it is a shame what's happened.

Nathan: Are there, what are the lobbying groups like here locally?

Andy Higgs: Well, I mean the, the industry here is really small. I'm, I'm at Futureverse and we, we kind of

Nathan: Yeah, I, I know, I know Brian there. He he's been super.

Andy Higgs: Yeah. Well, brian, yeah. Yeah. Brian is, is the, and the best Minter's work, work, one of the better law firms in town. Jeremy Muir's pretty good and we are, everyone knows everyone and everyone's pretty organized in terms of trying to lobby that select committee inquiry was good. It was a good process and but it's you can't, you can't be everywhere right?

And when you get a couple of high profile collapses like we have with Cryptopia and Daset it's not not not great for the ...yeah, and it's hard working in crypto here because everyone is, you're tainted by those, those case studies.

Corben Turner: A Just quickly thoughts on what you guys have just said. One, that's a huge opportunity possibly. I mean, maybe they're not too caught up on the regulatory red tape. Maybe it's not possible to create a great custody solution at this point, but I have wondered what like great custody solution would look like in terms of storing private keys or having, having various ways of storing.

Andy Higgs: It's not a technical issue. It's a, it's an institution and organizational issue. And it can't be solved by government. Yeah. It's gotta be solved by the people that do it now. Yeah, well, the kind of, you know, the legacy institutions.

Nathan: Are there, are there other digital asset trust companies here locally?

Andy Higgs: There's a couple of small ones, but they haven't got any traction and they're not credible. So that's the issue. We need the top end of town to get involved, really.

Corben Turner: New Zealand's banking landscape is largely Australian bank subsidiaries, right? And It seems to me like Australian banks, ANZ, Commonwealth and Westpac. I think Westpac recently stopped their crypto custody. But the Australian banks are moving forward with custody solutions.

Nathan: Oh yeah, take a look. Yeah, ANZ did a big one with Chainlink. I'll post the link here. Yeah.

Andy Higgs: Yeah. That's a good example. No Corben I was actually more referring to, you know, entities like Perpetual Guardian, you know, Guardian Trust, which is a supervisor or, you know, suspect, call them out, Jardins, Craigs, Forsyth Barr. But they're just not ready to embrace it, you know, because they provide custodial services for, you know, investors and fund managers who don't have the required accreditation.

So, you know, they're the ones that need to do it because they're doing it now. They know how to do it. They're experts in it. Our banks are really just you know subsidiaries of the Australians, as you, as you point out, and KiwiBank's not really equipped to take these kinds of risks. So it's really more about the investment banks.

Nathan: Do, do the investment banks even have a mandate to, to, they don't have a mandate because...

Andy Higgs: They're not even allowed to own crypto, you know, their, their husbands or their wives aren't even allowed to own crypto that, that, that, that it's a real no, no, because they, they really. If you look at the way they launch a you know, list companies here, it's, it's a closed shop, you know, the, it's an inside job and you see that that's why the NZX is so screwed, you know, and they need to open their eyes, but yeah, I mean, we're working on it.

A lot of my, my friends are in these companies, but it's, it's hard. And, you know, it's, it's hard to make headway when we've got such spectacular failures here, like Cryptopia and Daset because it's easy for them to shoot you down, you know? Yeah.

Kellie Kennedy: Awesome. Were there any other questions for Corben before we head off?

Nathan: That was great, Corbyn. Thank you so much for your time.

Kellie Kennedy: Awesome. We'll wrap it up there then. Yeah, thanks everyone for attending. Thank you so much, Corben that was an awesome presentation. And yeah, we'll see you at the next one.

Corben Turner: Great. Thank you. And thank you Callaghan for creating this space for us to be able to do this work.

Kellie Kennedy: Yeah. Amazing. Glad you're enjoying it. Thank you.

Andy Higgs: Awesome. Thanks everyone. Thank you.