Episode 178- WorkChain.io: Automated Real-time Pay

Welcome to Crypto Knights. Will we help you finally make sense of the trending world of cryptocurrencies? So get your virtual piggy bank and let's get started. Hi everyone. We are very, very excited to have today Ryan five of work chain with us and his join us all the way from Panama and welcome to Crypto Knights podcast. Ryan, good to have you. Thank you. You're excited to

be here. We're very excited to have you. I've been reading up on work chain and couldn't wait for this episode. So very happy to have you. Why don't we kick it off by having you tell us about yourself and maybe your backstory about how things happened and work chains so far? Sure. So I'm Ryan five co founder and CEO at work chain. Work chains mission is

to make earning cryptocurrency possible for essentially any any worker anyone that receives a paycheck. We do that in kind of a unique way, which I can explain. I'm going to be a bit later. Prior to work chain, I spent the last 10 years in Silicon Valley. I was the founder and CEO of a company called Humanity.com. Or you know, we were founded as shift planning and

humanity deals with it's a pseudo workforce management suite, but really predominant or a market leader in employee scheduling. And then around the employee scheduling, there's time and attendance. And we do basically everything, but processing the payroll. So that that's right. So in the last 10 years, humanity grew to 150 people. We raised 12 million of venture capital along the way is used by around 40,000 business

locations. Nike lift, you know, a lot of big names. And what we've seen actually really interesting in humanity in the in the past couple of years. And which really kind of ties into the work chain story is. The big shift in the labor market from, you know, salary workers to on demand or the gig economy. And you know, in San Francisco. You can really order just

about anything on demand. But the actual idea for work chain starts about five years before this. Where with humanity, we get the access to all of the data. For time and attendance. And, you know, even the forecasted data around the employee schedule. And so the idea that I had was really around, you know, doesn't make sense for an individual could be compensated for this two to

three weeks later when, you know, we have a very accurate record of that individual's work. Through an application like ours. And so could there be an opportunity to, you know, either enable essentially real time payroll or to go after the bigger payday lending space, which was very predatory. And so that's something that's sort of the initial seed for this. And then as humanity sort of matured,

the timing was right for me to step down on that side. And then with kind of the rise of the blockchain and blocking technologies really just felt the timing was right now. So, you know, take that idea and put it into practice. So congratulations. And are you located in Panama or are you just visiting there? Yeah. So I'm full time based in Panama now. It's kind

of an interesting story. When I founded my last company, I was here as well. And then for the better part of the last five years, I've spent on an airplane and terminals more than at home. But, you know, it was based at a San Francisco full time. And then we have office. And then we have a lot of businesses in the whole Pakistan as well as

Walgreens, Serbia. So very, you know, my passion is and distributed. You know, distributed environments are working in sort of a global sense. And so that was a unique part of our story early on at humanity. And I guess we're replicating that now. I work chain as well. But, yeah, Panama is my home base. Oh, we shared a lot in common because I have been most of

my businesses as distributed teams as well. People have been flexible times, different countries, different time zones because today with technology, you don't need team in one location. And like you said, with a combination of technology and big economy. Right. Yeah. The world is your oyster. So this is fantastic. So tell us the backstory behind work chain. How did it evolve? What are the use cases? And

what were the before scenario suboptimalities that kind of made you think about this idea? Yep. So again, with humanity, we had all of the data. For time in attendance and scheduling. So we started thinking through, you know, could we become, could we be in a position where we could essentially advance individuals, the funds. With a very accurate picture of, of an employees, you know, essentially like

a real time credits work because you have their historical shift data as well as their time in attendance data. So it's, you know, it's somebody show up on time that they work 10 at a time shifts that they were scheduled for as well as how many shifts are they forecasted for in the future. So we, businesses schedule at least one payroll cycle in advance. So if

you're on, you know, a biweekly schedule, the schedule is generally generated and locked in at least two to three weeks out. And there's actually a lot of the interesting kind of protection laws in place now that are actually forcing businesses and in different jurisdictions to have the schedule locked in and once it's locked in, it can change. And you know, I think that's, you know, fundamentally

fair for individuals to have an accurate picture and for there's just not to be changed at the last moments. And so the way we view about payroll or payments is compensation should essentially happen in the moments, you know, a smaller contract is finished like we all signed maybe a contract that gets us paid on a biweekly or a monthly basis. In the gig economy, you know,

the contract is literally up the moment that you finish the ride or you deliver the groceries or whatever it is. So why wait two to three weeks for that payments when the business is holding on to those in the meantime. What's funny is as a kid, I grew up in Canada and I used to do a lot of odd jobs starting from when I was eight,

nine years old, shoveling sidewalks, knowing lawns. And generally after the job was done, I was getting paid for my work. You know, I had more financial freedom than the most workers do today, which is kind of an ironic, ironic way to wicked things. Got it, got it. So it's the ability to get paid sooner, you know, because I remember when life and I started our first

venture over two decades ago, this embedded systems, interlews to have this strong arm processor and we would do embedded systems development out of India. And all over clients would be calling it net 30. The first time we had what is net 30, you know, well, after you finish your work, we have 30 days of time before we can pay you. It's 30 days. I remember the

first time thinking, why would you take so much time? You know, so whatever reasons, but largely they wanted to hold on to their money as long as they could before they paid us. It's real reason. So I'm very happy. I wish you were here helping us out two decades ago, but I'm glad you're doing it now. So can you give us a few examples, use cases

where this is applicable and who is your target client? Deal. Sure. So in terms of, you know, what does this look like today? So, you know, especially using or for my background, individuals are getting scheduled on shifts. You know, from the hourly workforce perspective, you're getting scheduled on a shift. When you show up to work, you're clocking in, you clock out. Your hours are approved. And

then those, you know, time sheets are used two weeks later, sort of after the cutoff dates. Maybe it's not net 30, but it might be net seven or something like that. Those hours then go to generate your payroll cycle or sort of your payments. And so really what we're trying to do now is the moment you're, but you know, you still work the same job, you

still clock in, you clock out. So it works still has to get done. So we're going to work on shifts that are verified now. We want to immediately send those records or pull those records from whatever the system of record is. So we've, we've, you know, those as proof of work apps. And once that work is verified, we want to send those to the work chain

and then initiate a real time payment to you to make those funds available for you. And so we'll be working with integration partners predominantly as our go to markets. And one of the things that we're exploring now. So, you know, integrations like humanity or other time in a tent. And then some payroll applications will help drive that. You know, everything really works the same for them.

And they become a very key stakeholder in the work chain platform. So what we're really trying to build, I guess, is like a community or protocol from that sense, where that's the key stakeholders. And so nothing has to change from from that perspective, even from an individual, you know, from the employer perspective, they can still process payroll the same way that they always have long term

review that, you know, the employer itself will benefit from being on the network. And this is a huge value add to their employees, like a social benefit. And so we believe that, you know, over time, they'll also want to adopt there. So there's actually no need to then advance them. The funds, we just are essentially pulling or the smart contracts really, you know, at, yeah, I

work chain as an application actually isn't a money transmitter here. It's really just the smart contracts that are pulling funds after works verified from the employers wallet to them, the employees wallet. And some of the stuff that we're seeing now, we're going to do our first test transaction next week to kind of show what this looks like in real time. And so you can imagine different

scenarios where from the shift worker or let's say contract labor, you know, you can have that accurate verification of time immediately when that shift is verified. And then for other types of, you know, salary employees, for example, it's really just the time based calculation. You know, if you're getting paid at the end of the month and you're on a monthly salary, we can release those funds

every day to you with a lot of certainty because even, you know, the biggest risk I guess would be that your employment is terminated or things like that. Every jurisdiction I've ever worked in, you know, there's generally some type of severance and there's never a situation where I've seen where you're able to retroactively reclaim earnings from an individual. So I think again, it's like this ecosystem

can operate with a very high level of confidence and low default rates. And then lastly, on the way to go to market side, one thing that we're working on now is, you know, when we talk about cryptocurrency payments, a lot of people freak out there like, you know, I would never want to get paid in Bitcoin or Ethereum. Maybe some of like the diehards like us,

the believers, we would be willing to receive that and sort of gamble with our paycheck moving up and down 10% on a daily basis. For I think the average worker that would freak them out. So when we say cryptocurrency, we're talking about stable coins. And if anyone doesn't know what a stable coin is, that's essentially, a token that is paid to Fiat. So you know, one

token, what do you call one US dollar or one euro? And so there, you know, those tokens aren't fluctuating at all. And there's a lot of big players in the space. The one that we're looking at adopting initially is called true USD. That got a really unique model for, you know, doing the verification of funds and the audits to ensure that the tokens are actually backed

by the dollar. Unlike tether, we're a little bit scared. The shenanigans that they're up to. So I think, so that's again, the situation on that side. But you can imagine through our system. Literally anything can pass through it. And so just last week, we saw in the news that Binance is actually paying 90% of their staff in Binance tokens. And so that's again kind of a

fantastic use case for us. Like, could we on our way to go to market in the traditional sense? Could we become maybe the de facto payroll provider for crypto companies that are paying their staff in the future? In their own cryptocurrency? So that's something interesting for us to explore. And then the other thing that we're really actively exploring are going to be partnerships with the on

demand types of companies. Some of the bigger ones like Uber have actually built out their own flexible payment solutions for businesses. It's our belief that, you know, the next 99 on demand companies aren't going to build their own solution and would love to have a technology partner like ours. And ultimately, you know, from what I've seen in that space. And so that's what I think is

the biggest thing that I've seen in the market is that a lot of times workers are picking up extra shifts, driving extra hours because they really need those funds now. And so that'll become a very, you know, that'll become a competitive advantage or just something that the economy expects. As sort of like a standard in the non-suit distance future. Yeah. And there are variations of that

that you can get into down the road, which is. And then instantly on the same day, and you collect from an Uber later on when they pay. And whenever that is, and maybe you collect a 1% or something, which people might be willing to pay. So I love the idea, generally speaking. And I like the fact that you are essentially a two token system. You have

what is that's what you call it. Right. What is your token? What kind of access or application token want? Yeah. What could they do in that of power? That's that's what I I let it out. And I loved it. So what is your token? And which I presume is a way to get into your ecosystem and do a bunch of things. In addition to having your

smart chains work on verifying that you have certain number of watts and do certain kinds of things. But the actual payroll is happening in the form of stable coins through USD as you recommended. But I don't think there is, you're not, are you tied into them or is it possible that you could any time switch to any other stable coin of choice down the road or

add on. Yeah. In theory, the, you know, word, our smart contracts will essentially be agnostic to that. It's really just that agreement that happens between the employee and the employer. Those funds are then living in their wallets and just moving between them. And so that's the really unique thing about this. From that perspective. And then the other part is. You know, it's like through a shapeshift

and other things. It's very easy to convert that into other things immediately. Which is exciting for us because we really want to do a show that there's a real world utility in this immediately today. And so for example, if there's not there, there's not today true USD backed crypto credit card or bank card that you can use right now. That's something that we're actively exploring. But

there's a lot of them up there that supports for example Bitcoin or Ethereum. So if you did want to spend your cash today with today's existing technology and infrastructure, you know, you could convert those funds from true USD into the coin and then immediately send those to coin or pull them out at a Bitcoin ATM for example. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I'm

looking at it as multiple layers. So they're all if I am a worker, first of all, I'm imagining I have some kind of a time tracking system. And that is plugged into. Maybe I'm with the 10 pages in the middle. Maybe I'm with Upwork. Maybe I'm working with indirectly through humanity. It doesn't matter. So you are tied into these so called. You did not use the

word aggregator. What did you use? We call them proof of work applications. They're validators. I guess in that sense, maybe in a more correct term. Yeah. So you have, but from a business angle, you're looking at multiple of these aggregators of quote unquote workers, which are giving you access to, okay, this is the time and this is dollars per time. And then this is what they

need to get paid except you're now able to pay them much more frequently. Like you said, I finished the override. I've paid him. I got out. It's over. The game is over. There is nothing pending. And which is the way it should be perhaps at least in the future economy that you're envisioning. So what is the benefit to the payer? I understand that as a worker,

I'm benefiting. From getting paid faster, sooner, blah, blah, blah, blah. But as a company, what are the benefits? Yeah. It's a great question. So I think like you mentioned earlier on the interview, the there is a lot of reasons why businesses still want to hold on to these funds. Maybe it's to do with the timing of their expenses, their payments. It takes them time to like

process or other things in a traditional sense. I think the biggest benefit that we're going to see is sort of the social impact or the social benefit that in the future. And employees are going to start demanding this more and just expecting it as a baseline thing. Or they'll start again choosing the employer that offers this as a service or dozens. And you can take this.

We dealt with this a little bit at humanity where if an individual employee, for example, wants to come up with a house deposit, are you willing to lend them those funds in advance and deduct it from payroll? That's another example more on the micro lending side. And so I think in I'm hearing that a lot actually in Panama locally, there is like a local mandate that

allows businesses to do this, essentially this micro lending. They need to have a small, a small license with the government, something that most businesses can afford, a sort of like a deposit. And then they can go after this as well, which is like a really interesting thing to think about. Longer term, though, you know, when we say real time payroll on the blockchain, we're not actually

talking about having the like, you know, meat and bones or the middle part of payroll processing or calculations on the blockchain. We're really, you know, interested in getting the inputs, which is your net payments. And then we want to deal with the output and just moving the funds between those parties in terms of, you know, allowing me to spend those are with problems, your bank account,

etc. Longer term, though, I do think we will see more transparency in the actual calculation components. And network like humanity or sorry, like, work chain would have the opportunity to actually display maybe traditional payroll with a system that is a lot more efficient, something that's real time. Something that could even be free for the employer to operate because the network effects or the benefits of the

network for having them there will make up for the traditional, you know, SaaS recurring revenues that they would generally receive. So that's sort of an interesting thing to think about down the road. But again, that's not a near term focus for us. We want to really interoperate with the existing system. We'll take this to market because payroll is incredibly complex and primarily just because it's so

fragmented. Like if you only had to deal with, California rules, which I know fairly well, if you only had to deal with those, and that was the same globally, that would be fine. They're complex, but you deal with them once, but really every jurisdiction has their own unique rules. So it becomes a very complex problem to solve the first time. And then also stay on top

of them because the regulations are always changing minimum wage over time, all this type of stuff. I understand. Yeah, so that's what makes it interesting. And exciting as well. So in other words, what you're saying is that writing is on the wall, guys, whether you like it or not, the giga, economies here and people expect to get paid sooner. And if you're going to get out

of the bandwagon, at least people will see you as a benign payer and you'll get a strategic differentiation there. Hopefully people will like you more. So that seems to be the argument. And I can take that. I can accept that. So technology wise, so tell me a little bit about you being around for about a year now, I believe. So where is the team located, who

has funded it so far? And how are you planning to take this forward? I'm not talking about the inside view of the business of work chain. Yeah. So the business started, while the year started, I guess, five or six years ago, the actual business in terms of building a team and funding stuff started about a year ago. I initially kind of co-founded that. And it was

like an investment of mine. I was still full-time working at humanity at the time. And then it was just about three months ago or two months ago that I announced that I'll be stepping down as the CEO of humanity and then moving over here to join the project work chain. So we've been working on it for a year. We focused, again, really on bringing the product

to market or showing that we could build product in that there was a real tangible idea here, which I guess is sort of like anti-ICO or anti-crypto in that sense. So the first project that we've launched is called Work ID. That's an immutable CV. So imagine your LinkedIn profile backed by the blockchain. And by that, I mean we're storing hashes of work records on the blockchain,

which gives sort of an interesting view into the changes that people make on the blockchain. So as a recruiter, for example, you could look at an individual's profile and know that they're start dating end dates or different things changed along the way. And this we view as a proof of concept to show that there's real world utility in the blockchain today. That this isn't a fully

decentralized application, but there's a way to make these, you know, we call it a hybrid application to just leverage what's needed about the blockchain. So today I look online and I see it like a thousand new blockchain projects that are trying to decentralize everything. I really don't believe everything needs to be decentralized. And so what are the good things about the blockchain? How can they interoperate

with systems that are available today? And so that's the approach we took with Work ID. Now the cool thing with Work ID is it really sets the foundations for our core product work pay. So this is the blockchain based payroll that we've needed. We've been talking about and Work pay is built on top of Work ID as a foundation. So these work records that we're talking

about, they come in and they get fed into your Work ID or within your Work ID is Work records that we then execute a payment out on top of out. So we launched Work ID a few months ago. We've had 40,000 users sign up for one since then. So we're very proud of that. And then we're just working now on getting our first kind of test

transfer. And then the goal is to be able to execute sort of our first pilot's Work pay transactions before the end of the year. How did you get 40,000 users on Work ID? Because it's really not a fully functional product yet, right? Today's working world is fast paced on demand and in real time. But slow payroll cycles continue to leave employees unpunished. So today's work is

going to be a lot of work to do with the work. Work chain.io is an innovative automated payroll solution that uses blockchain technology to give you access to your earnings the moment you clock out. Not weeks later. Work chain.io apt tokens power the platform enabling instant real time cryptocurrency payouts. Soon, Work chain.io apt tokens will be in the hands of millions of employees through integrations with

humanity and work pulse with more integration partners on the way. We spent decades building market leading technologies that already empower millions of employees. And now we're creating the future of payroll. Work chain.io. Why wait to get paid? So Work ID is a fully functional product. Anyone listening can go to our website and find out for that today. Work ID is really built around the premise of,

you know, you import your LinkedIn profile as a proof of concept. Work is a very easy to get set up and going. You can log in with Facebook or a number of other social providers, for example. And the way we got users was really through the crypto community. I think the crypto community is very fantastic. It's a very, I'm having to rethink so many of the

things on how I think through marketing or even just how I think through product implementation. Because the blockchain is very different. The crypto community is very different. So we have a number of user incentivization programs going on. And so that's an example of how we can get the money. Where individuals can earn what tokens through actions on our platform. And that'll be a big part of

our go-to market as well, both on the user side. So individual employees, you know, set up your work ID and you can gain free what tokens. Which are our our user membership to access our platform. And then on the business side, especially for companies or for employers or sorry through integration partners, can we incentivize them to join also by leveraging our tokens so that they can

immediately have access to the platform with incentives to be there to provide that benefit to their ecosystem as well. So I think that's, you know, if we think through what happened in in the broader crypto space, it's pretty phenomenal. And like I wouldn't have ever imagined this was going to be the case a few years ago, where you're kind of creating these tokens and through yet

of the air. And then you can go ahead and leverage them in different ways to help kind of jump start of business that would traditionally take. You know, I think that's pretty phenomenal. I've had several years to do in a much faster way. And I heard this on one of your last shows as well, where you were talking about, you know, the amount of funds needed

to build this thing. And the timelines are just super compressed where, you know, what would have taken five years is now taking 12 months or less. That's very interesting times on the credit to be a part of this space. It's a highly connected space. Many people are not getting the fact that blockchain is not a technology construct. It is a community construct. That's right. So it's,

you're right. We have really rethink the laws of marketing as we do it. That's why I always ask the question. So did you guys do a combination of a drop plus telegram or what did you guys do? Yeah, we call it our user incentivization program, which enables us to track different users activities. And the reason, you know, we didn't do a traditional air drop in the

sense or even some of the bouncy programs are pretty interesting. You know, we're kind of build the future of technology and yet, bouncy programs are managed by individual tools and spreadsheets. It's like, you know, two things don't add up here. So we, you know, that's another part of the product that we built. And one of the core reasons why we invested a lot of time in

building the product itself was because, again, we view this not as, you know, generate hype now. I'm sure it helps drive user growth today. But really for tomorrow and for the long term success of our business, we want to be able to incentivize users to do things that are actually beneficial to actual utility of the platform. And so, you know, maybe today it's sign up to

show us your work ID. But tomorrow it'll be, you know, sign up and then refer one of your co-workers to the products or, you know, find your business onto the product or, you know, connect your bank accounts or, you know, generate your first, like payment transaction. So those are the types of things that, you know, we're super excited to have, you know, that program under our

belt. Because we think it'll be, it'll help us not just in this phase of the project, but also for the long term success. Okay, I like that. So you said, you're pretty close to releasing work pay now. When is that going to happen? So we're gearing up to do our first test transaction next week. Wow. That's pretty exciting for us. And the idea with, with, with

what we're going to do is really show a demonstration of how this thing can work with today's technology. And really show people that this is in a pipe dream. This isn't, you know, a 10 years out thing because that's really the response we get from a lot of people we talk to. They're like, you know what, it's a cool idea, but we just don't see it

happening. Or it's going to take five years, 10 years, whatnot. And so we really want to kind of break that myth, if you will, and show people that this can work today with today's technology. And then through future developments of, you know, our product and the ecosystem. It's only just going to keep getting better and better. Wow. Okay. Got it. So what about future funding? How

are you going to, because this, this is going to get bigger and it's going to consume more cash before it can generate cash. So two questions. Maybe one is fundraising. Second is, how do you make money with this? Sure. Yeah. Great question. So from the fundraising perspective, I think I mentioned we've been bootstrapped up until now. And that's something that we're very proud of in terms

of not going down the traditional path, even though the market conditions for raising funds in the traditional ICO sense, we're a lot more favorable six months, 12 months ago. So maybe in hindsight, we should have raised them. But no, so I think, you know, we're happy to be where we are with real product to show. And we believe that the market will be ready for us.

So we are going to go out and look for outside capital soon. Will we do a public ICO? We haven't made any announcement yet. Again, we're really interested in attracting the types of investors that believe in this as a long term viability and not, you know, a quick pop and return from that perspective. So we're not looking at, you know, people that are trading at all

were a utility token. We really want to use fundraising to kickstart our ecosystem. And so there's a few things that we need to accomplish that are going to be, you know, inherently expensive, especially if we start going down more the traditional payroll path or the lending path. There's a lot of, you know, bank licenses or lending type stuff that will need to apply for or, you

know, to be able to invest or integrate and partner with with established players in the space. That's really how we're thinking through funding now. And, you know, kind of, I guess, where funding would be to pull out and to avoid revenue. So as a blockchain company, you know, we're really focused on the ecosystem itself. The things that we're thinking through. And I think you mentioned this

is there's a lot of opportunities to make sort of like micro transaction fees as payments are moving through the platform, especially if you're ever lending money. So for example, you know, payday loans are extremely predatory. It might be 15% or 10%. But when you annualize that for a two to three week period, it's an opportunity. So if we can offer an alternative, that's a few percentage

and then share in that revenue with the lender. Lenders on our platform are, you know, another party on the ecosystem. It doesn't necessarily have to be working as an entity or a member of the platform that's actually lending those funds. So that's kind of a really innovative parts. There's almost like a peer to peer aspect of it where you could be receiving your salary in real

time and lending it out literally on the platforms, your co-worker, who maybe needs that advance. Or an expected expense or different things like that. And so there's opportunities there. And then one of the opportunities we're really excited about is every time an individual consumer spends cash, or sorry, not spend cash spends, you know, money at a store on a credit card or a debit card, there's

a transaction fee that the merchants pay. Generally, it's between one and two percent. And that's the is to cover things like chargebacks or processing and different things like that. And so as a private card issuer or an issuing partner, which is our hope down the road, you know, even fractions of a percent of that's merchant fee. That's fractions on top of the entire amount that an

individual consumer is spending. And so it doesn't take very long for that to become, you know, a very sizable revenue stream. And so that's, again, something that we're very excited about sort of like this, these off-platform transactions. And it's really a hidden cost. Like when we say, you know, to an employee, we're not going to charge you anything to pay you in real time. They're not

even going to know that we're generating these because that's a fee again. Like when you go to the store and something costs $10, you pay $10. You don't know that there's, you know, that 2% coming off from the business itself. Yeah, that was a lawsuit with the credit card companies long ago. And the way the credit card companies came out of it was what was magical.

They said, include the credit card price and call that the normal price. And if you don't, that's discounted. So that was a stroke of genius, which is really why we have what we have today. So when you're paying $10 for something, that's the normal price, you know, and not too many companies do that, not too many retailers do that, but predominantly in Dallas, if I go

to an Indian restaurant, they will tell you that $10 is a price, but if you pay with cash, we give up a percent discount. And that's when you realize that, okay, this is a genius of credit card companies. That's made them omnipresent, but also omnipotent. So yeah, you're absolutely right. So that's a hidden cost. And nobody even knows that you're taking that small percentage. But that

also brings up the challenge of the transaction fee that we have seen. Crypto Kitties as an example. And it is no laughing matter because the Ethereum transactions during cryptocurrencies, the hype was incredibly ridiculously high. Which was totally anti to the reasons why we got into crypto, right? So what is your take on that? How are you handling that? What technology are you planning to use? Yeah.

So currently we are going to be built kind of natively on Ethereum. We're exploring a number of side scaling solutions. One of my friends founded a company called Loom Network, which is a side scaling solution for Ethereum. And so, you know what the way we view this is your right. So today, you know, transactions on Ethereum are not as efficient as they need to be. But

like it or not, Ethereum is still the number one platform for decentralized applications based on, you know, lion share of attention, developers, all of that. Like the ecosystem itself is the most mature. And so, it's not going to be ideal today. But this is again, where I mentioned earlier, where it's just going to keep getting better. And, you know, we're going to be laser focused on

building our payments product because we believe there's a lot of very, very smart people working on solving. That view here learned that a lot of backlash is limiting our relationship to accounting. So it's essential to not beingbaum about, you know, you have 18 teachers. And so flute excel, we've been looking for to use both And so that's not cheaper free in terms of like what we

really want to offer long term to consumers. But again, if you compare that to the fees that people are paying now, it's still a fraction of the cost. For example, we have an individual employee in Australia and he was talking through the cost that it takes him to, you know, convert the bank fees from the US dollar that we're paying out into Australian dollars. And, you

know, he's paying approximately 10% on his overall salary each month just to make that happen. And so that's again where if you compare the fees now for getting paid or these 30 cent transaction fees that all of a sudden still becomes incredibly competitive or if you compare it against payday lending, it's again extremely competitive. So it's not, we don't view those as barriers or blockers at

this point. And it'll just keep getting better at the as, you know, economies of scale start working on our side in terms of like, you know, being maybe that providing more of the end to end solution as well as as the ecosystem that turns and gets more efficient itself. Yeah, that makes sense. And are you going to be a US based company? Where are you going

to be domiciled as a company? We are proudly based in the Cayman Islands. Okay. One more, one more distributed node. So yeah, I think you asked this question earlier. Our team is about 20 today. More than half of that engineering and we are essentially completely distributed. So I guess the way I'm I'm describing this, we're trying to be decentralized as a team in the same way

that the technology or value product providing. Yeah, but are you going to be operating in US with US companies? We will. So the US will definitely be one of the first markets that we target. And so a lot of that comes back to my history with humanity where, you know, approximately 80% of our customers were based in the US. So it's still a big market from

that perspective. But it's not again. So from I think maybe your next question will be, you know, how are you going to operate there with the regulations and different things. So don't want to pull back to your mouth. Sorry. Going to be money servicing business in US then. Yeah. So for short term, we're not planning to be, you know, long term. We might be the market

depending on kind of how to go to market works or what we see as appetite in the market for partnerships and different things. I think we talked about this briefly. Our technology is really decentralized from that standpoint, like the work pay will be a truly decentralized application where it's smart contracts moving the funds around or the value around from the employer to the employee or from

the lender to the employee and then recouping it from the employer, et cetera. And so that all operates independently of us. It happens on the blockchain. The same way that the coin transactions or Ethereum transactions do. And so there really is no centralized money transmitter or anything there. So that's, you know, the unique part about the model longer term shorter term, though, there will be, I

think, the need to work with, you know, individual businesses that have already these licenses and different things in place. So again, they're leveraging our technology. They're the actual money transmitter and not work chain itself. Yeah. I think one of your initial bowling pins or beach heads might be the being an anti predatory lending type of a platform. I remember years ago when I was, I don't

remember, I made a business trip to the Philippines a couple of times. And predatory lending is very high in the Philippines, for example. So you might also find interesting pockets depending upon your research of where your initial traction is likely to be the highest. And that might be surprising if you did that kind of analysis is given that blockchain is so incredibly global. It defies reason,

you know, what seemed normal before for business is nothing is anything but, you know, so just just a thought there. So I think that's the way to do it. Have you guys looked into that already or do you plan to? Yeah, we have. And so I think, you know, one of the kind of fundamental questions with any crypto like project that has, or as you know

blockchain based or has its own token is, you know, why blockchain? And so one of the really interesting things is some of some of the some of the reasons we talked about already, you know, the financial security that you're actually going to get paid for the work that you delivered. That's a big part of it. There's also some really interesting things that people might not expect

right away. And for some of that is, you know, this idea of like cross-border payments are all of that and now seamless from that perspective, especially if you can go ahead and spend in your local or convert in a much more appealing way or low cost way. So then what you know, the bank rates are, if you can convert between, you know, two stable coins on,

on an online exchange, a crypto exchange, those rates will be significantly lower than the bank rates. So that's something we're really motivated about. From a roll-out perspective, one of our advisors is very well connected and has a lot of experience working in the Caribbean. And that's, you know, an exciting opportunity for us where, you know, these islands unfortunately had a very hard time to last few

years with hurricanes. And some of what their governments are actively trying to set up is, you know, adopting new technologies and becoming hubs for things like blockchain in a much more aggressive way than, you know, the US or other jurisdictions are. So we talk about it like, could it be possible to have a work pay island where the entire island is paid in real time and

cryptocurrency, for example, where, you know, the barrier's entry in the appetite to adopt a solution like this is much, much higher. And there you sort of have to double win fall of, you know, the need to deploy capital in a faster way also because of some of the devastation that have happened recently. So that's motivating for us. And then another element is this idea of the

unbanked. From the last things that I've read, there's approximately two billion people in the world that are still unbanked. And generally, if we look throughout history, what we've seen is, you know, there's an opportunity when you don't have any solutions to actually leapfrog the best of what was in place yesterday. So in Africa, for example, there's a lot of really cool use cases where individuals are

moving to, you know, mobile banking first before they would set up a traditional bank account or they have other ways of like moving value around which are like, you know, foreign to us in North America, for example. And so that's a big opportunity, I think, as well. Like could individuals that don't have any bank account today, could they just have essentially financial services being provided through

crypto from day one with, with kind of skippling the whole Seattle system and the traditional banking system altogether? Yeah. I see similarities. The fun thing about what you guys are doing is, it is a for profit business, but it has a social angle to it. Many of the things that you're talking about being in favor of workers, them getting paid sooner, being more pro worker pro,

you know, gig economy, also this anti-prudatory lending. So there are a lot of angles to it that are socially oriented, right? Typically done by nonprofit organizations, etc. So, so that might be a marketing angle to you guys. For instance, you might say that you charge transaction fees to this class of organizations, but if you're supporting United, you know, you know, you're not going to be able

to do that. Nations relief organize efforts in the Caribbean, for instance, operating in. You might pay them and not charge the transaction fee, maybe. And thereby get some good will, promotional type of, I don't know, I'm just thinking aloud here. And you know, I think it's a great idea. One of the things actually, and that I'm really proud of that we implemented at humanity was we

would give away our software to free foreign on profits or anytime there was a relief effort. So humanity software was deployed, right across several times. We were part of the earthquake relief effort in New Zealand situations like that. And so I think you're right. It's an opportunity to give back. Maybe these organizations might not have the funding to adopt the software on their own, but they're

the ones that desperately need it the most. To coordinate. And then of course, there's the business benefit as well. You don't guess what these volunteers also have day jobs. And if they haven't benefited in using our software for one thing, they're probably going to enjoy it in the other. But again, it's, you know, always fantastic to think of ways to give back. And I think, you

know, the whole rise of blockchain and the initial vision behind the coin was really about, you know, libertarian movement. And I think that's what's so fantastic about the community is. It feels like the seedless set. And now, you know, despite all the regulations or other hurdles, it's, it's not going away. And so if you give individuals the option, you're going to be in sort of similar

service or same service. One that's decentralized, transparent and fair. And one that isn't. I think we're going to see more and more people opting for the decentralized version. Wow. Ryan, I could keep going on and on. There's been such a fascinating. Absolutely. Last half an hour, 40 minutes, whatever we have been talking. Are there other things that you wanted to communicate to the audience? You want

to also direct them to some website where they can. I'm sure. So I think people are excited about this episode and they would want to get more information. So. Yeah, I appreciate that. And thank you so much for having me on the show. Maybe just closing words would be our application is like today. Individuals that are registered for work ID today will be first in line

for our next product work pace or getting paid in real time. Something that is exciting for you would encourage you to check out our first application work ID. Again, that'll make you first in line for the next. Well, we wish you all the best. We were so happy to have you here. And all of your listeners, if you like this episode, head over to your iTunes

or Google Play and the Brators, five stars. And please share this with your friends. Good luck. Thanks for listening to the crypto nights. Never miss an episode. Subscribe now at www dot crypto knives dot IO.