How CBDCs Could Change Daily Life

Why revisit CBDCs with Joshua Scigala?

Kevin 0:00 Hi everyone, Kevin here from Wavect, and today I talk with Joshua Scigala, who is CEO of TheStandard.io, and today we will talk about CBDCs. As you might have seen on our podcast list, I talked with Joshua already about CBDCs in the past, I think like one, two years ago, but this time it’s going to be extra exciting because of course a lot of things have changed in crypto.

Kevin 0:26 It’s super fast-paced, so there are a lot of new things that we have discussed, and I also try to be much more critical so that we have kind of like a two-sided discussion around that new trend that we are going to face with central bank digital currencies, short CBDCs. So basically we have talked about regulation, what are CBDCs, what could that mean for us as users, and also how could we react to remove ourselves from that risk when CBDCs are being rolled out to the masses.

Kevin 1:01 So enjoy the episode, please let us know how you liked it, and yeah, thank you for watching Wavect, the Web3 software company that understands what you want. Today we will talk about CBDCs. What are CBDCs for people that have never heard of it and maybe don’t even are that much familiar with crypto itself?

What is a central bank digital currency?

Joshua 1:30 Well, most people need CBDCs like a moose needs a hat rack, like it just doesn’t need it. You know, CBDCs are central bank issued digital currencies. That’s, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s fine when you think, ah, you get real, because how they, they, they spell it out, as they say, well, you get real-time settlement.

Joshua 1:55 Anyone can send any, I can, I can go to the shop and you instantly get my currency. And the big problem there is that they’re being, uh, they’re not being truthful with the public. This is a fundamental change with how money is used, but not only that, how privacy around our use of money is collect, uh, and the data is collected.

Joshua 2:21 So what that means is that right now, when I make a payment to you, my bank says to your bank, oh, I’m going to give you some money at the end of the month. Sorry, at the end of the day. And it calculates all of the, so basically it keeps an IOU list until the end of the day. And then it sends that to the central bank.

Joshua 2:48 So Bank A owes a million dollars to Bank B, which is your bank. And by the way, Bank B’s got a lot of customers also send money to Bank A. So they sent their list to the central bank. So Bank B owes 200 grand, let’s say, to Bank A. So the central bank says, just make one transaction, 800K from Bank A to Bank B, and that’ll settle everything.

Joshua 3:12 And so it’s one transaction out of all the, instead of sending billions of transactions, it’s one transaction. Now, the key here is, isn’t the speed, it’s the fact that the central bank and the government didn’t know what, all of what, that 800K was made up of. Was it somebody’s toothpaste and someone bought a car and someone did this and did that?

Joshua 3:34 All that data is kept from the central banks. As soon as we have a CBD, CBDC, what they say is, ah, every transaction goes to the central bank and we decide whether that goes through or not. Of course, they’ll let it through most of the time, but we saw during COVID that they had really hardcore restrictions.

Joshua 3:57 It’s very, we’re, we’re always on the, on the cusp of tyrannical, you know, takeover, possibly, it could be, you know. I, I always want to say, look, maybe it won’t, maybe we’ll just have top players, but we don’t want to give power-hungry people that option, because if that option’s on the table, they’ll take it.

Joshua 4:17 Or maybe we’ve got the perfect government, and, but next year someone else gets voted in that doesn’t, that isn’t perfect. So it’s really important not to build infrastructure on such a fundamental level that gives so much control to people, um, and that’s kind of the, the deep dive of CBDCs for you.

Kevin 4:41 There’s, uh, there are always multiple sides to it, right? You, you have banks, you have consumers like ourselves, you have companies, you have politicians, like, and of course currency unites them all because everyone needs it, everyone uses it to some extent. Yeah, and what, you know, to understand why all these governments do that research and try to introduce it, what would you say are one of the few main intentions or could be the main intentions of people creating those CBDCs?

What intentions drive CBDC design?

Joshua 5:21 Um, one second, I’m just trying to fix sound here. Um, sorry, could you repeat that last question? Sorry.

5:32 Sure.

Joshua 5:32 I just got [unclear] notifications coming in.

Kevin 5:34 Well, in general, super short, there are multiple sides to CBDC or in general currencies, and why do you think people or all these parties try to introduce CBDCs? What, what could be the main intentions behind all of that?

Joshua 5:52 Yeah, I, I, I’m a bit of a, I’m an optimist, but I’m also a pessimist when it comes to governments. The thing is that most people that want to head into government want control. They want, they believe that they can run your life better than you know how to. There should be, you know, and, and a lot of people go into the government believing that they’re doing good.

Joshua 6:17 I’m not saying that all the evil people head up into the government, but they, they want to do good. But there’s this slight thing of, I want to tell you how to live because you’re not living how I think the world should live. And, you know, through democracy, we vote apparently for the right people and such.

Joshua 6:36 But at the end of the day, a CBDC is being brought through because then you have total control over what can be bought, what can be sold. So if there is another massive financial crisis or there is a deflation or there’s an inflation or something like that, the central bank has far more control.

Joshua 7:04 For instance, let’s say there’s a stagflation. Things are moving very slowly. There’s a bad economy. Well, what can you do? If you have a CBDC, you can say, look, your money, um, what, what your intention is to get velocity moving, to get money moving, to get you spending, because that stimulates the economy, that if you go to the shop and buy things and the shopkeeper needs to get more staff, and you know, velocity of money is important.

Joshua 7:33 So if everyone’s scared and holding, that can cause an economy to crash. So what they could do is say, hmm, your money now has an expiry date, uh, so if you don’t spend it within the next 30 days, you’re going to lose, we’re going to take 5% of the value, um, of, of your savings, and everyone’s like, oh, what?

Joshua 7:55 So, and these things aren’t just fantasy. They’re being tested in certain areas, certain parts of the globe already. Um, it’s programmable money, right? So they could just go in there and do these things. And this is why decentralized finance protocols like what we’re building at The Standard is so important because, and Bitcoin, let’s not forget Bitcoin.

Joshua 8:16 I think that’s the most important side of it is Bitcoin created an exit door and front run the ideas of CBDCs because we were heading in that direction anyway. And the thing about the world is that if you end up, your society ends up in a tyranny, meaning a really hardcore control grid of a society, it’s getting harder and harder to get out of that without some sort of violence.

Joshua 8:48 And no society, no postmodern society wants a violent takeover or disruption. We want to move through peace and have good society to raise children and have a family. So the idea that a society can get a massive control grid means that it’s almost impossible to escape tyrannies in the future because tyrannies become so powerful and all-encompassing, people can’t collect together, they can’t organize because everything’s being surveilled.

Joshua 9:25 And so, you know, it goes to the old joke. I asked my Chinese friend how he feels about living in China and he said, oh, I can’t complain. So, you know, it’s okay.

9:43 Gotcha. Yeah.

Joshua 9:44 You know, and this is the sort of thing that, that we need to make sure that we don’t hand over these tools so, so willingly. For what? What is the reason that governments are giving for, for upgrading to a CBDC? The reason is, well, then you have real-time transfers. Okay, well, we’ve got that pretty much already without a CBDC.

Joshua 10:09 You don’t need all this extra power given to the state or a central bank. The idea that a lot of people will say, well, a central bank, a government could get the information of what my transaction was anyway. Yes, they can. But there’s a whole lot of steps and due diligence and court in between that, which is important for the rule of law.

Joshua 10:31 If that stuff isn’t there and they can just say, hmm, this month we’ve got an obesity epidemic, so no one’s allowed to spend money on chocolate bars, or, hmm, uh, you know, I don’t know, whatever you think of the green thing of climate change and all that, maybe they think, right, um, you’ve already had your ration of, uh, of gas this year, uh, this, this month, you cannot spend it.

Joshua 10:55 Or there’s a new virus, killer virus, and you’re not allowed to spend money outside of your jurisdiction, or we, we need a 15-minute city, or we need, like, the amount of control on your money. And, oh, by the way, you, you, I don’t know, walked on the pavement wrong. We’re going to instantly fine you or freeze your account or whatever.

Joshua 11:15 And we saw tastes of this with the trucker movement during the pandemic, when the truckers wanted to demonstrate against certain aspects of the government’s decision. So all I’m saying is that no matter if you’re on the left or the right, you do not want to give an apparatus so much power. You want to make sure you say, hey, limited power.

Joshua 11:42 Yeah, you might be good. You guys might be good. But the next people that come along might not be. And if that power is in place, it’s really, really hard to dismantle. It would be very, very hard to go back from a CBDC back to what we had now.

Kevin 11:55 Quick intermission. If I could ask you for one single favor, it would be that you hit subscribe onto this channel because it helps our channel more than you can imagine. And you know, the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests get. So thank you very much for watching and let’s continue with the episode.

Kevin 12:12 Uh, you said a couple of interesting things, and I’m not a fan of them myself, I’m just playing a role now. Yeah, but one could argue CBDCs just make it more efficient, because with USDC, USDT and all these other stablecoins, or in general tokens where most often some kind of organization stands behind of that, or with banks themselves, we already have that possibility, right?

Kevin 12:43 They already have that. They just would need to enforce it much harder, and it’s less efficient to enforce it and more difficult. Yeah, so the question is, is that really, of course, of course, when you think about certain, uh, economies around the world, it is actually really reasonable that this is going to be, it’s going to happen, right?

Kevin 13:10 I think it would be naive to, to say that it won’t happen, but the question is, especially in the Western world, as long, of course, as we have democracy, democracy, is there even a way that a central bank, even with current legislations, could do that in a reasonable fashion? Of course, it’s more efficient from a technical perspective, but still from a legal perspective, as long as you don’t have dictatorship or something like that, it’s actually not really possible.

Can law and democracy limit CBDC control?

Kevin 13:45 What’s your take on that? I know you’re not a lawyer and these kind of things, but just curious about your point of view.

Joshua 13:54 You know, the thing about dictatorships and tyrannies is that they’re extremely efficient. Like the trains to Auschwitz were on time, you know, because if you’re not on time, that’s the thing. So efficiency isn’t everything. I think we should, as a society, look at how important freedom is and what we wish now, what we allow now, our children have to deal with.

Joshua 14:27 So think about what your children will have to put up with. And it’s very, and the problem with, the problem with freedom and having it over a long period, um, of generations is that you forget as a society how, um, how bad a, a bad structure can be. And when you’re a tech, like a very advanced civilization with a lot of technology that has a lot of surveillance, it’s almost impossible to get out of that state.

Joshua 15:07 So yes, efficiency is great, but let the private sector figure out the efficiencies. The private sector is the best way to figure out efficiency. Um, government organizations and structures are the least efficient, mostly. You know, in Germany, during, uh, when the East and West Berlin was in existence and the wall was up, if you wanted to buy a Trabant, which was the only car in the East, you had to basically order the car when your child was born because it took 16 years to make.

Joshua 15:47 So government, and this was all created by government companies, so governments are just notoriously inefficient. So if we do truly want efficiency, we want competition. And that is what cryptocurrency gives us. It gives ultimate competition. Now, we’ve got a long way to go in crypto UX-wise. It’s, it’s terrible.

Joshua 16:06 Um, UI-wise, it’s getting better. But specifically the scams and everything like that, which are, by the way, only going to get worse with a lot of this AI that’s being released to the public, where you can really trick people very easily, which is, or be tricked, and it’s very scary, specifically for elder generations.

Joshua 16:32 And, and you know, one good thing about a CBDC, to take the devil’s advocate approach, would be, well, there’s somebody to call if something goes wrong. But, you know, there’s also strides in that, where different projects are building wallets that are, they, they are smart contract wallets.

Joshua 16:59 So rather than having a wallet where you have to hold all the private keys, you build a smart contract that is a wallet, and you could log in with and pay for gas fees in different ways. There’s all sorts of ways to hide the complexities that early adopters are dealing with in crypto and make that more efficient and better without going, hey, government, central bank, here, have all the power you need to absolutely decimate freedom.

Joshua 17:35 Money is, like you said at the beginning of this, money is the kingpin of control. Money is the thing that holds everything together. And so disrupting money in such a fundamental way, and just simply calling it a slight upgrade is surreptitious, and we shouldn’t just easily put up with it. Hey guys, Joshua Scigala here from The Standard.

Joshua 18:03 I just want to remind you that we are building the ultimate borrowing platform, decentralized borrowing platform, where you can borrow against your crypto for 0% interest without giving up your private keys. And you can instantly take those stablecoins that you mint for 0% interest with only 110% collateral and put that into a yield account where you start to buy up cryptos like ARB, like LINK, like Bitcoin for 10, basically 10% under market price.

Joshua 18:30 It’s a really great opportunity. Also, just if you’re checking it out, we’d love your feedback and love to hear from you in our community. Thanks, back to you, Kevin.

Kevin 18:40 I think it was Ray Dalio, uh, I hope I’m not wrong now by citing him: governments have two things. They have currency and they have weapons. If we take away the currency, they only have the weapons.

18:55 And yeah, it, well, that’s absolutely it, that, that’s the crazy part.

Kevin 19:02 We see this, a similar fight with, uh, how’s it called in English, the major currency worldwide, which is the US dollar right now, right? Every, you know, you have the BRICS, uh, countries, uh, up in Asia and so on and so forth that try to replace the US dollar as the major currency for trade. And I think it’s the same fight governments are fighting here, right?

Kevin 19:27 Um, just instead of fighting against governments, against other countries, it’s more kind of let’s fight about, uh, against technology. So that’s the, the major issue I think blockchain is facing in general, right? You have a piece of technology that tries to remove control from the government or from central parties, and of course these central parties are now in control of all that infrastructure and don’t want to give it away, and that’s one of the major issues, right?

Kevin 20:02 And I’m just wondering when, because all that infrastructure is always still in place, right, and they won’t just give it away. How, since crypto is something like an exit door, as you mentioned, is that, is it really an exit door? Because if Austria, the US, China, and so on and so forth say, if you use crypto, you go to prison, or you can’t withdraw it to your traditional CBDC anymore, uh, then crypto is still somewhat going to be worthless because people cannot or don’t want to accept it.

Is crypto really an exit from CBDCs?

Kevin 20:49 Like, what’s, of course, it’s unlikely in democracies, but what’s your take on that? You know, that intersection between those financial systems?

Joshua 21:04 Well, it’s fascinating. We’re at a really fascinating time where these ETFs have come along and it’s taken long enough, but they’re now here. Well, at least the Americans have greenlit them, which means that other countries will soon come online as well. Now, there’s two things at play that, that happen with these ETFs, is that in one way, it means that large players that have a lot of control of the, of the people that are in the corridors of power, um, don’t want to lose money.

Joshua 21:41 So the people like Elizabeth Warren and such in, in the US that were always very anti-crypto, which is weird because she was the one standing up at the Occupy Wall Street, you know, it’s really strange, but she’s been really anti-Bitcoin and, and cryptocurrency. And the thing is, since the ETF launch, there’s been a noted change in her, in her vocal, uh, at least her volume.

Joshua 22:07 So she’s very much toned down her anti-crypto rhetoric or Bitcoin rhetoric, uh, there now. So that’s one thing. Once you get these large players, that protects you from the existential threat of, hey, we’re going to shut it down, we only have two things, guns and currency. Uh, you know, so this alleviates that.

Joshua 22:30 Saying that, when you get laws like MiCA or regulations like MiCA out of the European Union coming out where they’re stating that every transaction needs to have KYC attached to it, you start to split the entire system into two. One is the ETF world, where that’s where you buy a Bitcoin. If you want to store a value, that’s where you go.

Joshua 22:56 And the Wild West world where, hey, if you want to actually play, you have to be under the radar and use Monero and stuff like that. And then the third one, so there’s three, sorry. The third one is, well, if you want to use it, you have to like KYC, I don’t know, look into a Worldcoin orb, I don’t know.

Joshua 23:17 You have to do something crazy to basically move currency to do what’s actual fundamentally a human right, which is me privately exchanging something with you without some sort of middleman, a megalomaniac obsessed with controlling and making sure that that’s a thing that’s, um, you know, okay to do.

Joshua 23:42 And while there is illegal transactions and illegal things that shouldn’t be done, and I agree we need a rule of law, I’m not going to say we don’t, you know, we want to stop things that are terrible like child abuse or like extreme drug pushing and stuff like that, but to just do it through the control of money is the wrong way about it.

Joshua 24:05 We’ve done it for thousands of years by having good old-fashioned police work. And yes, that’s harder to do, but we secure the sanctuary of freedom. And so not to jump directly to the easiest thing, which is, hey, let’s just lock down money and control every aspect of every cent going through a wallet.

Joshua 24:29 So, yeah, what I meant to say with that is I feel that we could be heading towards like a tri-economy where we have, well, four actually, quad. We have the CBDCs. We have in the crypto space get split into three. The, you know, underground where people are like, no, no, I just want to deal with Monero.

Joshua 24:53 And then the MiCA, I’m going to put [unclear], you know, I can’t use a self-custody wallet without it having all sorts of, you know, private information about me that has to get sent with every transaction. Um, and then of course the ETFs, which are just like, um, yeah, GovCoin.

Kevin 25:14 Well, try, of course, what we can’t do now anyway is try to show, uh, your local financial institutions or your tax advisor a Monero wallet, right? They will freak out because it’s, where does the money come from, and all these kind of things. So I think we’re already maybe at that stage, right, where you on one hand can’t really use these privacy coins, because as a person you then either have to fully KYC all, all the transactions anyway.

Kevin 25:55 And on the other hand, if you just use blockchain, it’s also even more transparent for a very long time or even forever, like what you have done and paid for, because at some point it will re-enter the fiat system. So again, it actually, and that, that’s the main pain point somewhat, in my humble opinion, it’s makes it just more efficient, right?

Kevin 26:29 It’s, it’s already here. I think blockchain is already being misused for that, I would say. And I can’t blame them for some extent as well, because the, the understanding is not here maybe still, despite all the experts talking with them.

Kevin 26:57 And the thing just is, what will you do? What do you think you’re going to do? You, you are in crypto for a much, much longer time than myself. Like, what are you going, or you think you’re going to do? I know there’s this rule, never tell anyone what you’re doing with your money, but what are your tendencies?

How was Joshua positioning his savings and investments?

Kevin 27:22 Like, I don’t think you’re all in in crypto because you usually can’t be, but what’s your strategy?

Joshua 27:29 Well, don’t have, uh, only have what you can afford to lose in a bank. You know, they used to say that about crypto, but, um, we’re, we’re heading into a time now where there’s a lot of cover-ups. I mean, just look through the whole COVID time. During the COVID time, we had grounded airplanes across the world, yet airline stocks were skyrocketing up.

Joshua 28:02 If this doesn’t say to everybody that the stock market isn’t some sort of facade, then I don’t know what is. That’s not to say that they can constantly control the stock market. Obviously, there’s a lot of capital at play. It can move. Things can happen. It’s not totally controlled, but there is a control vector there.

Joshua 28:31 When it comes to what I’m doing personally is that I think, first of all, you want to try to think about what will happen in the future in terms of jobs, in terms of security. You don’t want to go full prepper. But I think just thinking about where to place money is important.

Joshua 28:58 Now, no matter what technology is being used as money, property and being somewhere where you can live is always going to be valuable. Of course, it depends where, because if you’re in a country where property rights aren’t very strong or, you know, and this happens actually a lot in, in more developing countries where, I don’t know, the president’s brother is in charge of the database of who owns what, and all of a sudden he changed, you know, logs in and goes, oh, you, you don’t own that anymore.

Joshua 29:34 So you have to, to make sure you’re living in a place that does take property rights correctly. Uh, but if you live in a place that does, uh, has good property rights track record, then buying land or a house or somewhere to live is always good, because there’s always people that want to, that everyone has to live somewhere.

Joshua 29:57 Um, the only time that gets truly decimated is during war. So if you did want to, if you’re thinking that you are closer to somewhere that could be exposed to that, then maybe think about moving somewhere more peaceful. In terms of crypto, I think we are right now in the perfect storm. We’re heading toward a halving.

Joshua 30:23 BlackRock itself, the ETF, there’s nine ETFs out of the US, I think, or 11 or something like that. BlackRock is one of them, just one, buys on average about 10,000 Bitcoin a day. Now every day, the miners release about 900 Bitcoin, only 900. And after the halving, which is about 50 days time, that’s going down to 450.

Joshua 30:56 These large ETFs will find it very, very difficult to find new Bitcoin for sale. What I believe will happen, and maybe I’ll be quoted on this, but one of these big ETFs, the boss will be breathing down his neck, I need 10,000 Bitcoin now. And the guy is like trying to source these.

Joshua 31:23 Where do I find these 10,000 Bitcoin? Like, I can’t find it, but Coinbase doesn’t have it, no one’s selling. And, and they’ll, they’ll start to go to sketchier and sketchier parts of the internet to try and get this, and then they’ll be scammed. One of these big ETFs will be scammed. And what will happen then is that they, they’ll cover all this up, just like banks get, banks get scammed all the time, banks get hacked all the time.

Joshua 31:45 They just, you never hear about it because they cover it up. They don’t want that public. They’ve got a very structured PR. But so what will happen? You won’t hear about it, but they will get scammed out of billions of dollars because they’ll try to get Bitcoin that they couldn’t get. So then they’ll head back to only using Coinbase and stuff like that.

Joshua 32:05 So what happens then to release diamond hand Bitcoins, meaning Bitcoins that are just, no one’s letting go of those. They’re just going to have to offer more and more and more money for them. And so people don’t quite understand how rare Bitcoin is. 21 million. It’s 21 million divided by everything.

Joshua 32:28 And so hold on to those Bitcoin, because after this halving, um, it’s going, it’s going places. And, you know, El Salvador jumped the gun, because now it, where Bitcoin, you know, normal technology usually has an uptake from the up to the down. So meaning, usually the VCs find some clever people in Silicon Valley, they’ll invest in them.

Joshua 32:55 And then their friends will invest, and they’ll see that that’s doing really well, invest. And the big family offices will invest. And then it’ll get publicly listed where the investment banks can also have a go. And eventually the plebs will get to buy a few shares. Bitcoin was the very, very first technology where it was the other way around.

Joshua 33:13 The crazy anarchist types, oh, what’s this Bitcoin thing? And then the libertarians and the technocrats, and then eventually the moon boys, and then, you know, the lawyers. And then the VCs came along, and then the family offices, and then the investment bankers. And now we’re at the ETF stage. And after that comes the countries.

Joshua 33:37 So it’s the other way around. And, you know, El Salvador jumped the gun, beating the ETFs. But next up is the countries, because what will happen is El Salvador will be able to easily pay off all its IMF debts and everything else. And other countries would go, wow, that was a good idea, I might do the same.

Joshua 33:57 And we’ll have a crash before then. And, but, you know, so it’s the constant boom and bust cycles. But yeah, um, I don’t know. I know I’m not really answering your question there, but, uh, it’s a crazy, crazy world that we’re currently working through and living through. And, um, you add to that the job losses that are coming due to AI.

Joshua 34:24 And even if it’s not just job losses, maybe there’s new jobs gained, but, uh, the shift, I should say, in the economic, in the economy is going to be huge. So we need to, um, you need to think very, very carefully about what to do with your savings and how you structure your family’s plan for the financial future.

34:47 That’s, that was a, uh, I think a great ending.

Kevin 34:57 Really, um, all I can say is like, it’s definitely crazy where we are going, where we are heading, right?

35:05 And I think that’s, no, I have nothing to add, let’s put it that way.

Joshua 35:10 Well, I mean, I, I, I do want to tell people a little bit about The Standard, just because we’re, we’re just about to relaunch that. And, uh, for those that don’t know, we’ve been building, um, a stablecoin protocol and borrowing protocol. Basically, we’ve been building a protocol that lets people borrow at 0% interest without giving up your private keys.

Joshua 35:30 So you’re not trusting a third party like Celsius or BlockFi or FTX. You can lock up crypto in a smart contract that you control the private keys to. And then you can issue yourself debt for 0% interest. And we’re releasing these yield accounts. So when you lock up, you can already do this in DeFi, right?

Joshua 35:51 You can lock up and borrow. But what we do specifically differently is that you can lock up an entire portfolio into one smart contract wallet. And if you feel like, oh, this coin is going to do well or that coin is not going to do well, you can continually trade your locked collateral, even though you’ve borrowed against it.

Joshua 36:12 And every time there’s a trading fee that happens, that gets put into a pool, and anybody staking in the yield accounts, the EUROs or the TST, or, and the TST, they can buy, they automatically buy all of the crypto at 9.91% under spot, under market value. So there’ll be Bitcoin, there’ll be Ethereum, there’ll be Link, there’ll be Arbitrum.

Joshua 36:38 All of this stuff will automatically be bought at 9.91, basically 10% under market value. And you can then claim that and go and sell it for that bonus, for that arbitrage. And so this is going to be absolutely massive because what we’re doing now is we’re taking away power from the banks where we can say, look, we don’t need your interest-bearing accounts.

Joshua 37:01 Why? Like, I, I don’t actually have a problem with interest. For instance, if I lend you money, Kevin, there’s an opportunity cost for me. I could be doing something else with that money. I could be building a house. I could do something else. So I think morally speaking, there’s nothing wrong with interest.

Joshua 37:19 If I have some currency and I lend it to you. Where I have a problem with is with central banks creating money out of nowhere and charging interest for it. Or protocols in DeFi that like MakerDAO or any sort of DeFi where they’re generating, minting new stable coins and then charging you a stability fee or interest fee for it.

Joshua 37:47 I think that’s just, it’s not right. So we’ve really focused on 0% interest, 110% collateral, and that’s an actual collateral. If you go to Liquity or something like that, they say it’s 110%, but they have these automated redemption things that can just redeem you. Even though you’ve got 180% collateral, if the peg happens too quickly, they can just redeem you.

Joshua 38:11 So this isn’t good. So we’re really structuring. We’re about to relaunch where probably next week we’re going to do all of this. So come and check us out. We’re also, if you go on to, because there was a slight depeg in the EUROs while we’ve been fixing some stuff up, we haven’t bothered fixing it yet because, hey, you can pay off your debt cheaper if it’s depegged for now.

Joshua 38:37 And so right now you can go and pick yourself up some EUROs that’s just under a euro, and wait for the repeg, which should happen next week. So it’s very, very exciting. And we’re releasing these yield pools, which would be fantastic because of the opportunity that I mentioned before. Of course, this is all very advanced stuff.

What should crypto beginners consider?

Joshua 39:00 So if you’re just getting into crypto, don’t do any of this stuff. Ignore everything I just said. Go and buy yourself some Bitcoin, maybe, uh, not financial advice, but, you know, if you’re new to this, stick with Bitcoin, stick with Ethereum, and that’s all. Don’t buy anything else. Um, if you’re more advanced and you like some of the DeFi stuff that’s happening, uh, definitely check out TheStandard.io.

39:21 Love it.

Kevin 39:21 Yeah, uh, awesome. Hey, thanks very much, mate. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Joshua 39:30 Yeah, thanks a lot, Kevin. It’s really, it’s my pleasure to be on the show.

Kevin 39:37 I hope you liked the episode, and [unclear] was like shocked about the things Joshua said during the interview, so I’m really grateful to had him on a second time. And yeah, please, as always, leave your feedback below, and if you could, please hit subscribe to this channel. It really helps us. And, and yeah, thank you for watching Wavect, the Web3 software company that understands what you want.